LINKDING

quote: There are seven hundred aliens hidden in Miko’s backpack, and the Galactic Security Agent currently studying her passport (hopefully) has no clue. The agent is an alien themselves, some tentacular species with assistive devices hooked into its uniform to mist its soft skin every few seconds. A puff of evaporated solution exits from one of the devices by its neck as it draws her passport closer to its pitted eyes. ➤ a scifi short story set in space, about a smuggler who left her sister behind when she left the shitty planet she grew up on ➤ but her latest mission has her returning to that planet to deliver the goods ➤ (the goods are hundreds of teeny tiny sentient bioluminescent jellyfish fleeing civil war) ➤ I enjoyed the worldbuilding, and the difficult emotions about family, and how the things that felt world-endingly true at 17 don't need to be true forever ➤ 7k words in length

Quote: Outside the viewport, light and shadow stitched a tapestry across the surface of Himalia. The shuttle ticked the countdown, thrusters firing to control descent to the docking cradle at Base Camp. I videoed everything, but the footage looked like a million other landings on a million other rocky airless surfaces. What made this different? Well, it was me, and this was home. ➤ Scifi novelette about growing up somewhere you always know you're going to have to leave eventually, because it was never intended to be permanent ➤ and leaving your best friend behind, who wants to never leave, because it's home ➤ it's really good!! I had a lot of feelings about the characters, and the way Niri is drawn in Jenny's life through her absence in this day of her return ➤ also it's set in space, on one of the satellites of Jupiter! ➤ wistful vibes ➤ 8k words in length

quote: Dad says Auntie was beautiful when she was young, with a bright-eyed gaze, pure yet alluring, and a slender, curving waist. When happy, her face was like springtime. When sorrowful, she was like a thin willow bending in the wind. Sometimes I try to imagine my aunt’s youthful beauty, and I end up thinking of those fox demon women in Zhiyi novels, eyes flickering like stars. With a slight twist of the demon’s waist, your soul is hers. But Auntie was the type who’s a thousand miles removed—aloof, full of rebuffs. Every boy who saw her back then suffered pangs of desire, yet they shunned her. Before Deng Baolin met her husband, she scratched the faces of thirteen boys. She was a prickly beauty, a thorny rose. In short, she was completely unlike the person before my eyes. ➤ scifi short story translated from chinese; originally published in 2021 ➤ it's a fascinating outside-outside pov, a nephew telling the story of his aunt, whose story is that of her famous physicist-astronaut husband ➤ the multiple layers of abstraction work well for this story -- and the narrative loops around itself in how it's told too, wandering forwards and backwards in time to circle around the heart of things ➤ which is really a story about family and about place and about how you decide what to prioritise in your life ➤ it's lovely and thoughtful and wistful. I really liked it! ➤ 7k words in length

summary: <blockquote>“If you died,” Huaisang started, not knowing quite where he was going with this. “I mean, you did die, da-ge, but if someone had killed you… what would you want to happen next?” / In the wake of Nie Mingjue’s death, Nie Huaisang realises how much he’s been left in ignorance. How could the artsy little brother be left to run their ancestral asteroid-mining clan? What other secrets are hidden in his san-ge’s past? And how should he get revenge? Maybe having da-ge’s personality backed up on a server was supposed to help with all this. Maybe.</blockquote> ➤ mdzs space au about nie huaisang and his years-long project in avenging his da-ge ➤ a repeated theme throughout the fic is nhs visiting and talking to back-ups that had been taken of nmj's personality before death, and the way that this makes literal how HAUNTED nhs is by his brother's absence is just sooooooo good ➤ the worldbuilding is great, the things that are changed from canon due to this different context are great, the anguish and monofocus of nhs are great ➤ I AM ALL EMOTIONS ;_; ➤ 8k words in length

summary: <blockquote>“Tell you what,” said Yushi Huang. “I’ll make you a deal, Ling Wen Zhen Jun.” Almost no one used her title at all, even fewer with respect. She couldn’t quite read Yushi Huang’s tone. “If you can tell me exactly what this is,” she nodded to the creature curled in the corner, "and what it does, I will turn it in the moment we get back for tagging and proper categorization." Ling Wen raised an eyebrow. So the enigmatic Rain Master already knew the creature's properties. "And if I don't?" Yushi Huang smiled, infuriatingly gentle. "Admitting defeat so soon? How unlike you." Ling Wen drew herself up and inclined her head, knowing herself to be rising to bait but seeing no real reason to resist. "I accept your terms."</blockquote> ➤ tgcf space au featuring ling wen/yushi huang, HELLO ➤ yushi huang's deliberate mysteriousness, and the way she uses it to flirt and get the upper hand with ling wen! ➤ ling wen enjoying having something to research that's for FUN instead of for work! ➤ the interesting development of the setting, and ways the characters and backstories have been tweaked to fit! ➤ LOVED IT. ➤ 4k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>“You really do a nice bird,” said Hua from her stepstool above Chimalus. He noticed a strand of black hair sticking to her cheek. She brushed it with the back of her hand which left a brown streak matching the branch she worked on. “It’s tough to get the tailfeathers right,” Chimalus said. “My name means Bluebird. Did you know that?” “How appropriate.” Hua leaned back and studied his work. “It’s American Indian, right? Do you know what tribe?” She braced her elbow against the unpainted wall below her tree then added a detail. The mural so far stretched along the hallway to their right until it curved up out of sight. To their left, unpainted metal, punctuated by doors and a corridor curved up too. Chimalus never shook the feeling he rested at a wheel’s bottom, like the bottom of a hamster wheel. A chatting couple strolled toward them, but neither glanced at the painting as they passed.</blockquote> ➤ about a stowaway on a generation ship ➤ also about art and being part of a community of amateur artists whose work is worthwhile ➤ I loved the details about the problems with microbial growth in a closed system full of humans who are constantly shedding skin particles, and that the main character sees it as an important job to be part of the clean-up ➤ the future is unknown but worth being a part of ➤ 7k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>Past the sparrow-dark dust fields of Far Euniply, at the edge of the Joined Cultures’ galactic borders, within the section of space they call the Emptiness, the Station floats. The Station waits. The Station prepares itself for the inevitability of another explorer’s arrival. no I can’t, I won’t, never again— STOP Station has lost a millisecond. It searches its databanks but cannot find any data recording or logs for that specific moment in time.</blockquote> ➤ I'm not quite sure I follow everything but at its heart it's about an intense platonic relationship between a sentient ship and its human and I'm so here for that

<blockquote>After the stresses of being Hutt Space's biggest holostar for a couple octaries, Blorbo the Hutt contemplates retiring to a quiet life of sarlacc bonsai. Set around the same time period as The Mandalorian.</blockquote>

<blockquote>This is not the damsel in distress rescue you are looking for. It's something else entirely. Allura had designed him business cards as a joke once: "Keith Kogane - I don't do assassinations. Anything else, we'll talk," with the contact number for his business comm pad. The joke was on her, though. He'd ordered 500. He was really sick as heck of people wasting his time because there was some loser they wanted dead. It had upped the weirdness quotient of calls he got from people who didn't know where else to turn, but he didn't mind.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The technical term is “generation ship cascade failure.” Cryogenic collapse. Millennium drive breakdown. Failed ship-in-a-bottle revolution against the corpostate hegemony. I call all the outcomes whalefalls, though. Because that’s what they are: the carcasses of something that used to be alive, floating slowly down through the black. I guess that makes me one of those blind fish that flit around in the dark. Those pale monstrous things with teeth like needles. Me in my nullsuit, carrying my ripper as I clank around on the outside of the hull. This is one of the smaller generation ships we’ve tapped. The size of a station, maybe. I wonder how big whales are.</blockquote>

<blockquote>She took the coffee-hot chocolate mix, grinned at the misshapen white marshmallow lump that Doris had fabricated for her coffee, and came to a stand next to the forward window to look out upon the expanse of Venusian clouds that roiled pleasingly in front of the blimp lab, aglow with the sunset that would deepen over the next few weeks. She used to stand here with Jorn, her husband. What was it now … six … seven months ago? He’d made it all of three weeks after Earth went silent, the poor emotional, beautiful wreck of a man, weeping nonstop for days.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The mouse floated in the air in the middle of its cage. It was an ordinary lab mouse, with white fur, beady red eyes, and an adorable little pink nose. The left ear was tattooed with a constellation of dots that identified it uniquely from all its siblings and cousins. A small nick in its tail showed where I’d taken a tissue sample soon after it had been born. The fact that it was alive today, a fully grown thirty-one-gram adult, showed that it had passed that test: it carried a modification in CHRNB2, the cholinergic receptor nicotinic beta 2 subunit gene, which we hoped would positively affect its ability to socialize with and learn from its peers. The mouse looked at me. I looked back. It clutched a shiny blue marble in its front paws.</blockquote> ➤ the one with the experimental mice who help patch a leak on a space station

<blockquote>The anchorage appeared on my radar screen as a blip, a blotch, one bit of detritus among many. The accompanying message was gentle but persistent, an invitation repeated on loop for anyone who might pick it up: visit if you like. The politest distress call in the universe. Visit if you like, and please bring food, printer fuel, next gen wires, conversation… I forwarded the signal to Captain Rousseau. This action revealed impatience on my part, excitement, an inability to wait until after breakfast. But I couldn’t help it. Novelty. Newness. I craved it like a subterranean lizardman craved phosphor. I craved it like Captain Rousseau craved silence. Over the past year, my crew (yes, my crew, my crew, the word still sounded the way I imagine liquor tastes, warming and biting and frightening and loud)—my crew made medical deliveries to a dozen colonies. We saw titanium waterfalls and genetically enhanced caribou. We walked through bone-lined catacombs. We rode air trams through toxic jungles. We stopped a necrotic worm outbreak and vaccinated three thousand children against belly rot.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ekta’s Dadi could tell the future. She didn’t read the tea leaves, or make horoscope charts, or lay bets on the cricket. But she booked the photographer the week before the news came of Purnima Didi’s engagement. She told the panditji to get his blood pressure checked before he told anyone he was short of breath. The day before the Human Spaceflight Programme was suspended, she called Ekta in Sriharikota and said she should come home. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Sion sent a drunk text to Grant Hendryx at four in the morning, whipping off her hoodie and bra, snapping a pic and writing a sexy caption before hitting send. Except she aimed the camera the wrong way, and she picked the wrong entry in her address book, so Grant Donaldson, senior project manager at Aerodox Ventures, was surprised to receive a blurry photo of a pair of parking meters with a message that read, ‘LICK MY LEFT ONE.’ The next day, Sion had an invitation to go to outer space.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Mara took us down into the caves because we were bored, and because she was the oldest so it was her job to figure out what to do when me and Kay were bored. No one had found a new hiding place for Hide and Seek in three years, and all the board games in the game room were either for grown-ups or babies, and we weren’t allowed to play Hiding From The Martians anymore after the time when we burst out of the storage locker screaming, “Aaaaaaaah, it’s the Martians!” at Dr. Hatae and made her drop her geological samples all over the floor, which took her three hours to sort out.</blockquote>

<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>Gilgamesh, legendary space general and ruler of Uruk Prime, has an unexpected encounter with a pirate.</blockquote>

<blockquote>For the first couple of months, Nyle would get up every day before sunrise and run the spinal corridor. It’s recommended for all observation personnel to get plenty of exercise. Helps with the linkup, apparently. After a while, though, it was every other day, then only the ones that start with T. Now it’s just Sundays, and he has to stop three times to catch his breath. Nyle’s never had a problem with linkup anyway. Back at the academy, they told him his brain has a certain pliability. It doesn’t push back. Neither did Nyle, either. Not when it mattered.</blockquote> ➤ not a happy ending

<blockquote>"Even if I had the creds for a cloning unit… If I could ever have gotten the boys to make more than a partial stim download, it would be ten years at least before Mahlon and Kilion's clones would be adults and capable of," Naomi made a little gesture with her fingers, which was such pure Naomi that it made Ruth's heart ache. "It's just a thing we have to live with. Our boys are gone." Orpah started crying again. She'd barely stopped since Mahlon and Kilion died. She and Kilion had only been married two cycles and had just begun trying for a baby.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Jeeves feels insecure about his cyborg status, Bertie must take drastic action to teach him his true value.</blockquote>

<blockquote> [life lesson: if some dumb-dumb actually tags you in a callout post on tumblr and says shitty, baseless things about you, don’t engage them.  write petty fic about otabek and yuri as grandpas who live on mars instead!!  you’re welcome.]</blockquote>

<blockquote>He's shivering as he emerges from the pod. No surprise, he was frozen for like a billion years. I do all the stuff on the script, all the "Fear Not! You are a welcomed citizen of our Utopia!" stuff while I'm toweling him off. Apparently he's about as good as I am with awkward silence 'cause it's not three seconds before he starts making small talk. "So, how'd you get to be a. . ." He waves his hand. "A Tour Guide To The Future?!" "Yeah." The guy smiles gratefully at me. "I imagine you had a lot of training. . . ?" "None whatsoever!" I chirp. He looks confused. "Allocator chose me because I incidentally have the exact skills and qualifications necessary for this task, and because I had one of the highest enthusiasm scores!"</blockquote> ➤ this story is weird and incredible and I was very surprised to be having feelings by the end given how much I was giggling through most of the story. I love it.

<blockquote>On the first day of Sara's appointment as Magistra Descendant to the Assembly of Terravine, Public Works decided they needed grassroots support for the plant. "I mean, I agree in principle," Sara had tried telling him, as he gestured at his hand-annotated wallcharts. "But for one thing, I'm supposed to be neutral, and for another thing, people might be eating!"</blockquote> ➤ aww yeah sentient spaceships are the best

<blockquote>Often, human settlements contain layers of habitation, one built on top of the other. One site can have many unseen features hidden beneath it. People are the same.</blockquote> ➤ an archeologist from space is on a team to investigate sites on Earth, along with an earth-born cultural attache. Yay for intercultural communication and space and science and stuff!

<blockquote>Being an incomplete and entirely subjective account of the last voyage of the HMSS Antelope.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Letters from Mars to Earth, between early colonists and their loved ones.</blockquote>

<blockquote>This, Javier Navarro thought in disgust as he stared up at the tower he was supposed to fix, was not exactly the heroic and exciting thing he had imagined when he’d seen the NASA recruiting posters and, on a whim, submitted an application.</blockquote> ➤ a nice look at a day in the life of people on mars

<blockquote>Kent was going to be the first person to die on Venus. He knew it with iron certainty the moment the railing gave way and he slipped into the acidic mist. The only question was whether he would be baked or crushed. Moments earlier he had been inspecting the floating habitat's walkway, looking for acid damage to repair. He'd let his mind wander for just a moment, replaying the morning's argument with the old man. He'd leaned against the railing and it had broken free, sending him tumbling backward into the void.</blockquote>

P31 ➤ The one with the portal to mars in the writer's cellar