Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:44 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The English-language rulebook and supplements for Broken Tales, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of upside-down fairy tales from Italian game publisher The World Anvil Publishing.

Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales

Clarke Award Finalists 2003

Jun. 30th, 2025 10:28 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2003: PM Blair embraces hilariously transparent lies to justify the invasion of Iraq, two million Britons reveal the power of public outrage when they protest the Iraq War to no effect, and the Coalition of the Billing (UK included) faces an occupation of Iraq that will no doubt be entirely without unforeseen challenges or consequences.

Poll #33305 Clarke Award Finalists 2003
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60


Which 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Separation by Christopher Priest
10 (16.7%)

Kiln People by David Brin
18 (30.0%)

Light by M. John Harrison
16 (26.7%)

The Scar by China Miéville
26 (43.3%)

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
30 (50.0%)

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
32 (53.3%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Separation by Christopher Priest
Kiln People by David Brin
Light by M. John Harrison
The Scar by China Miéville
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

June 2025 in review

Jun. 30th, 2025 09:06 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


I survived another dance season. Go me.

21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%),1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).

More details at the other end of the link.
Tags:

Survived another dance season

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:43 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Final show: a 5.5 hour bhangra show that was only 6.5 hours long.

Among my final achievements this season, discovering as I hoisted the last of many garbage bags into the dumpster that the bag was leaking coffee. My last achievement was ducking to the men's to wash my hands, discovering someone had plugged the sinks and turned on the taps, and stopping the flood in time.

To Walk The Night by William Sloane

Jun. 29th, 2025 09:03 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Jerry's romance with the brilliant, beautiful, eccentric Selena is book-ended with death: first, Selena's husband's, then Jerry's.

To Walk The Night by William Sloane

Books Received, June 21 — June 27

Jun. 28th, 2025 10:14 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Three books new to me, all fantasy (Although the Stross is an edge case), and only one is clearly part of a series.

Books Received, June 21 — June 27


Poll #33298 Books Received, June 21 — June 27
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Until the Clock Strikes Midnight by Alechia Dow (February 2026)
18 (32.1%)

The Regicide Report by Charles Stross (January 2026)
34 (60.7%)

The Beasts We Raise by D. L. Taylor (March 2026)
5 (8.9%)

Some other option (see comments)
3 (5.4%)

Cats!
36 (64.3%)

[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A schoolgirl abandons the UK's post-Brexit educational system for the comparative safety and comfort of a magical school designed to turn out magical soldiers in the war on eldritch horrors.

Vanya and the Wild Hunt (Vanya, volume 1) by Sangu Mandanna

Hrm.

Jun. 26th, 2025 11:33 pm
kiya: (bone)
[personal profile] kiya
Not sure how this one came out but it's there at least.

Iron



It turns out
I used to
Do
Blood
Wrong

And it left
My eyes
Bruised
And tired;

I don’t know
what being a man
Actually
Is

But now
I look at my face
Without wondering
What
Hit
Me

And that
Will do.

Five SFF Stories About Making Amends

Jun. 26th, 2025 10:20 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


People adopt very different strategies when it comes to making up for mistakes.

Five SFF Stories About Making Amends

Trade show! in! spaaaaaace!

Jun. 26th, 2025 09:07 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

New story out today in Lightspeed magazine: All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Visit the space gift shop trade convention and learn who's most likely to try to ruin things for all of us (hint: it's Earth people, UGH).

Don't miss the Author Spotlight discussing the story afterwards!

Golem100 by Alfred Bester

Jun. 26th, 2025 08:50 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


What could possibly go wrong with a little harmless Satanism between friends?

Golem100 by Alfred Bester

Bundle of Holding: His Majesty the Worm

Jun. 25th, 2025 03:43 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


His Majesty the Worm, a megadungeon-crawling fantasy roleplaying game from Josh McCrowell at Rise Up Comus.

Bundle of Holding: His Majesty the Worm
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Each would-be pet owner gets three simple rules for taking care of the exotic animals Count D supplies. How hard could it possibly be to follow three simple rules?

Pet Shop of Horrors, volume 1 by Matsuri Akino

and ... done?

Jun. 24th, 2025 05:13 pm
jazzfish: A cartoon guy with his hands in the air saying "Woot." (Woot.)
[personal profile] jazzfish
I ... I guess that's that.

My group members stepped up at the last minute and helped out with the paper, so I turned that in on Thursday. I also explicitly abdicated all responsibility for putting together the five-minutes-each video recordings for the group presentation. I recorded that last night, realised this morning that it was actually under five minutes but also how to fix it, re-recorded it, and sent it off. And just now I hit Submit Quiz on the final.

I'm ... done? Grades will be out at some point to confirm that I did in fact pass, both "sufficient unto graduation" and "sufficient unto my own arbitrary standard". (Pretty sure I did, but grades for this class have been Not Terribly Forthcoming, so there's the possibility of an unpleasant surprise. Not at all likely, but possible.)

Onward. After credential: chop wood, carry water. Time to get (more) serious about ye jobhunt.

You cannot know what happens next.
Tags:

New collection: The Atlas of Anywhere!

Jun. 24th, 2025 01:36 pm
swan_tower: (*writing)
[personal profile] swan_tower
cover art for THE ATLAS OF ANYWHERE, showing a cool, misty river valley with waterfalls pouring down its slopes

Well over a decade ago, I first had the idea of reprinting my short fiction in little collections themed around subgenres. When I sat down to sort through my existing stories, I found they fell fairly neatly into six buckets, each at or approaching roughly the cumulative size of a novella: secondary-world fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, stories based on folktales and myths, stories based on folksongs, and stories set in the Nine Lands.

Five of those six collections have been published so far: Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, Down a Street That Wasn't There, A Breviary of Fire, and The Nine Lands. The sixth is coming out in September, but it's not surprising, given the balance of what I write, that secondary-world fantasy has lapped the rest of the pack -- more than once, actually, since The Nine Lands is also of that type (just all in a single world), and also my Driftwood stories hived off to become their own book.

So yes: as the title and the cover design suggest, The Atlas of Anywhere is a follow-on to Maps to Nowhere! Being short fiction collections, they need not be read in publication order; although a few settings repeat (both of them have a Lady Trent story inside, for example), none of the stories are direct sequels that require you to have read what came before. At the moment it's only out in ebook; that is for the completely shameless reason that replacing the cover for the print edition later on would cost me money, and I have my fingers crossed that in about two months it will say "Hugo Award-winning poem" rather than just "Hugo Award-nominated." ("A War of Words" is reprinted in here: my first instance of putting poetry into one of these collections!) But you can get it from the publisher, Book View Cafe; from Apple Books; from Barnes & Noble; from Google Play; from Kobo; from Indigo; or, if you must, from Amazon in the UK or in the US (that last is an affiliate link, but I value sending readers to other retailers more than I do the tiny commission I get).

Now, to write more stories, so I can put out another collection later!
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Silverside Station attracts the rich, the famous, and the bizarre, as well as two Allowed Burglars bent on flamboyant larceny.

House of Shards (Drake Maijstral, volume 2) by Walter Jon Williams

Bundle of Holding: Cawood Monsters

Jun. 23rd, 2025 01:57 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Bestiaries and DM sourcebooks from Andrew Cawood at Cawood Publishing for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (2014) and compatible tabletop roleplaying games.

Bundle of Holding: Cawood Monsters
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 03:58 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios