Nonfiction
Book Review: The Lost Reliquary by Lyndsay Ely
Chris Kluwe recommends The Lost Reliquary if you like intriguing world-building, well-plotted storylines, and complex character growth with a dash of detective story.
Chris Kluwe recommends The Lost Reliquary if you like intriguing world-building, well-plotted storylines, and complex character growth with a dash of detective story.
I keep carnivorous plants, including a Nepenthes I’ve had for many years. I used to post photos of my Nepenthes online, but a subset of men would compare the pitchers to genitalia. Which configuration of genitalia changed each time, but there were always comments, and I began to resent sharing my plant at all.
I had a lot of scraps of ideas that hadn’t coalesced into a story yet, and after a long enough period of agitating in my head, they all clumped together. For example, I had this idea of a tidal-locked water world whose only surface liquid water was on the side locked to its star. I liked the idea but couldn’t really get a plot to adhere to it.
Book reviewer Arley Sorg has another fun anthology to recommend: Signos: A Fiction Anthology of Filipino Supernatural.
Looking for a new series to sink your teeth into? Melissa A. Watkins recommends All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu, the first in a new SF thriller series with a realistic tech near-future and a hopeful, but honest commentary on our current world.
There’s an established trope that magic can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I thought, what if I really push that? What if someone without the proper training is a live wire, shocking everything and everyone around them? In that case, you don’t want these kids to know magic until they are emotionally ready to control it.
Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month’s great content.
Space is such a fertile ground for interesting world-building, and I thought this idea of characters living in asteroids to be a fascinating and also somewhat plausible world-building tool. I didn’t think so much of where to place them, so much as I knew where they would be based on the kind of people they are. I always think character first, and everything is in service to that.
I wrote the bulk of the first draft while I was on a cruise ship and experiencing the deep ennui that comes from being on a cruise ship. So that’s intrinsically buried deep in the DNA of this narrative in many mysterious and arcane ways. The second piece of inspiration is that a couple of years ago, on social media, I had seen an image of a mermaid in a bathtub with a bunch of tally marks written on the wall, and that painting really struck me. It’s always fun to take things seriously, and I started thinking about the sequence of events that might lead a person to keep a mermaid in a bathtub against its will, and the logistical challenges of essentially having both some guy in your house, and also a big goldfish.
If you immediately understand this phrase, and you get it on an emotional level, then these stories will probably speak to you in ways that they might not otherwise.