Teine-e'igin

[ART] Night of the Red Sands, The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett. A gorgeous, dramatic painting as described in the novel. Can be appreciated canon-blind!

You're Gonna Need A Softer World, Jaws, A Softer World remixes. Every one of these is hilarious and absolutely spot-on.

Do Automatons Dream of Albino Eels?, Sunless Sea/Citizen Sleeper, gen, 6k. A zee-captain finds a mechanical stowaway and must decide what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the Citizen Sleeper, but the crossover character fits really naturally into the Fallen London universe. Great atmosphere all the way through, so many deliciously horrible little bits of worldbuilding flavor, and a satisfying arc of the stowaway automaton and the crew learning to care for one another.

fix it (how can you fix it?), BtVS, Spike/Buffy, 3k. Buffy's soulmark signifies that her soulmate died before she was even born. I really enjoyed the extra details of soulmate worldbuilding this added, and if Spike and Buffy were soulmates, I could definitely see it going exactly like this. <3

The Beat Goes On, At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie, 6.6k, gen. The scandal at Bertram's Hotel is a major news story—apparently too major for Beatrice to be trusted with it according to her editors, even though she's always been the one to cover stories about Lady Sedgewick. A very cool timestamp featuring an OC I loved immediately, a female reporter trying to make it in a man's world, and doing whatever she needs to to get the story, including going back home to visit little old Miss Marple. IMO you don't need to remember the novel to enjoy this (because I did not remember it, lol).

All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells. A humanoid cyborg created to do wet work jobs finds itself giving a shit about a human research team it's supposed to be protecting on an alien planet.

I can see why people love Murderbot itself; it's a big old angst bucket desperately trying to pretend it isn't one. I've seen people characterize this type as an iron woobie, and it's fandom catnip.

However, I did not connect with any other part of this novella. It's so damn insubstantial. There are other characters, but they're mostly indistinguishable. There's a strong whiff of claustrophobic found family that made me DNF the one Becky Chambers book I tried, with the same element of "the one character who doesn't buy in without question is treated as an antagonist." There's some worldbuilding, but extremely thinly drawn. The prose is conversational, which can work great in a lot of cases but here just feels like one more missed opportunity to give me anything I might be interested in.

I've read a lot of pro SFF novellas over the years, and I genuinely can't think of one that felt less deserving of its length than this one. You can pack a lot of thoughts and ideas into a novella! But this didn't even try. If it'd been a third of the wordcount, I probably would have liked it pretty well.

I've heard the second and third in the series are the best, and I might try them at some point, but tbh I think I'd have better luck with the show, which at least has real actors to lend some weight and complexity to the characters.

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The Tainted Cup (2024) and A Drop of Corruption (2025) by Robert Jackson Bennett. The first two books of his Shadow of the Leviathan series, a Sherlock and Holmes riff (or possibly a Nero Wolfe and Archie riff) about an idiosyncratic middle-aged(?) female savant and her long-suffering young gay assistant solving murders in a fantasy world where basically all technology is organic in some way.

These were great fun. Bennett seems really into both cosmic horror (the "leviathans" of the series are mountain-sized monsters that crawl out of the sea and wreak havoc every wet season) and body horror (more terrible plant-related things happening to bodies than you can shake a stick at). Even when this world is running the way everyone wants, it's still so damn weird (complimentary). Augmentations that turn your skin purple and gray! Immortality treatments that stop aging and cause you to just grow forever, like an iguana! The augurs in the second book who pattern-match to such a degree that they can't handle spoken communication: A++, and they reminded me a bit of parts of Anathem.

Ana Dolabra, the foul-mouthed savant detective is far and away the best part. Her assistant Din Kol, from whose perspective the stories are written, is a real sad sack, both due to circumstances and apparently innate temperament, and sometimes that can be a bit of a drag. I also felt like his renewal of purpose in A Drop of Corruption came way too easily; it almost felt like it happened off screen.

Overall, though, these are just a great time. It sounds like Bennett is on a roll, and I can't wait for the next one.