30 May, 2025
Doing the WFC's Homework
2025’s The Floating World is the first volume in Axie Oh’s Floating World secondary universe duology.
Ren and her adopted family (Auntie, Big Uncle, and Little Uncle) comprise a dance troupe that travels from village to village, performing. It’s a good life until a demon attacks Gorye village.
29 May, 2025
Special Requests
Ada Palmer’s 2025 Inventing the Renaissance is a popular history book.
The title seems clear… until you ask in what sense “inventing” is intended. Are we talking the late Medieval Italians? or historians who create the frameworks we use to discuss history? But the game is given away by the subtitle: The Myth of a Golden Age.
Myths are created by outsiders at a later date. This book is as much historiography as history.
But first, a digression.
28 May, 2025
Translation
2023’s Kindergarten Wars, Volume One is the first tankōbon of You Chiba’s ongoing comedic manga series, Yōchien Wars (the original Japanese title). The manga has been serialized on the Shōnen Jump+ site since 2022. Christine Dashiell’s translation was released in 2025.
Poor Rita! She yearns for a boyfriend. Rita has much to offer a beau, yet love escapes her. Her seemingly unpromising workplace — a kindergarten — offers many potential meet-cutes with hunky young men.
If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head.
27 May, 2025
The Realized World
The Crown Jewels is the first volume of Walter Jon Williams’ SF comedy-of-manners Drake Maijstral1 series (according to the ISFDB and various booksellers) or Williams’ Divertimenti (the collective name originally applied to this series). Guess which one I prefer?
Drake Maijstral is a respectable gentleman. Drake Maijstral is a known thief. How can those two facts be reconciled? Thank humanity’s conquerors, the Khosali.
25 May, 2025
The Little Lies
2002’s Night Watch is the 29th work in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series1. It is the sixth Discworld novel2 to focus on Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch.
Thirty years to the day after the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reluctantly leaves his pregnant wife Lady Sibyl to pursue the cheerfully homicidal psychopath, Carcer. Vimes’ intention is to arrest Carcer without losing more members of the Watch to the knife-wielding madman. Thanks to a bolt of magical lightning, both Carcer and Vimes vanish.
Slightly more than thirty years previous, two strangers suddenly appear in an Ankh-Morpork on the precipice of revolution.
23 May, 2025
Doing the WFC's Homework
Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s 2025 Aunt Tigress is a stand-alone modern fantasy.
Classmates might see Tam Lin as a timid student. Potential girlfriends might note Tam’s shyness and touch aversion. Current maybe-girlfriend Janet knows Tam’s secret. Tam can see supernatural beings.
Or rather, Janet knows a very small part of Tam’s secret, which is that Tam is not exactly human.
22 May, 2025
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s The Judas Contract is a superhero graphic novel, collecting The New Teen Titans #39 & #40, Tales Of The Teen Titans #41 – 44, and The New Teen Titans Annual #3.
The New Teen Titans! Very much like the Teen Titans… BUT NEW!
As far as all but one of the New Teen Titans are concerned, their primary concern is Brother Blood, a cult leader whose manifestly malevolent ambitions are curiously impossible for the American press and the American government to see. The lone dissenter is unlikely to clear up her teammates’ confusion, as she is the real threat.
21 May, 2025
Translation
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Ryoko Kui’s 2011 Ryuu no Gakkou wa Yama no Ue Kui Ryouko Works ( The School of Dragons is on the Mountain — Ryoko Kui Works) is a collection of ten short spec-fic stories, some which are connected by the question “what follows a successful quest?”
20 May, 2025
What's The Worst That Could Happen?
Eric James Stone’s 2010 That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made is a Nebula-Award-winning novelette.
For most of humanity, Sol Central Station figures as the waystation to the stars. For Harry Malan, it is where he presides over a small Mormon ward. Malan’s congregation may be small, but it is noteworthy because most of the members are aliens, plasma beings that humans call swales.
To Malan’s distress, not only is station-mate Dr. Juanita Merced a Gentile (so she can be no solution to Malan’s celibate solitude), she is a godless Gentile who opposes Malan’s good works.
18 May, 2025
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel.
Fireman Guy Montag and his wife Millie live comfortable, middle-class lives. Millie finds purpose in an endless stream of television entertainment. Guy burns books.