lists and monuments
Kindest of readers,
I'm back in Michigan after several weeks in the Pacific Northwest. The days are longer, but I've had to restart the process of coaxing myself outside amidst the ice. I have a bunch of year-end favorite book lists to tell you about, as well as a sci-fi con appearance and some possible future reading.
Before I dive in, here's a giant pile of polyhedra from one of my Seattle adventures:
convention
If you're in striking distance of Detroit, come see me at Monumental ConFusion on Saturday the 25th? I have a full day with readings and signings and panels on poetry and rpgs.
books I liked
I was invited to contribute to a couple of year-end favorite book lists. I wrote about Dragonfly Gambit for Ancillary Review of Books and Lady Eve's Last Con for Frivolous Comma. (ARB cruelly made me pick just one book, but if you read French, I strongly recommend reading Dragonfly Gambit side by side with Denis Colombi's novella Au cœur des Méchas! It's interesting to watch radicalizing lesbian engineers in different contexts.)
shout-outs to North Continent Ribbon
- North Continent Ribbon gets an honorable mention in Abigail Nussbaum's best books of 2024. She calls it "a sort of stealth cyberpunk story, with issues such as extreme social stratification, the right of AIs, and the enslavement of uploaded personalities cropping up in unexpected, but deeply affecting, configurations."
- In his Favourite Books of 2024, Eddie Clark says North Continent Ribbon is "a startlingly real depiction of a society that does not exist."
- Multiple Strange Horizons reviewers liked North Continent Ribbon! It's in Part One and Part Three of their yearly roundup.
future words
- My poem "your regular college-town climate elegy" will be in a future issue of Asimov's.
- Caitlin Starling's novella The Oblivion Bride comes out in a couple of days. My first stab at a blurb was:
Disco Elysium with a gorgeously severe War Alchemist and a grief-stricken office worker. All the creepiness of depression and fertility treatments and texting dead people, shot through with stubborn hope. I inhaled it in less than twenty-four hours.
- I reviewed Nghi Vo's forthcoming Great Gatsby novella, Don't Sleep With the Dead--like all of Vo's work, it's deliciously atmospheric.
Here is a present cat, who appreciates that I'm back with my computer:
Yours very sincerely,
Ursula.