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So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void – a dimension beyond our world. The Scholomance is also an extremely dangerous place – three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation – but it is much safer than life on the outside.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/29/hobbeswarts/#the-chosen-one
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IV. Tsalmoth by #StevenBrust
Longrunning Brust hero Vlad Taltos has been convinced to recount the story of how he and Cawti came to fall in love, and how they planned their marriage. This is quite an adventure – it plays out against the backdrop of a gang-war within the Jhereg organization, with Vlad in severe mortal peril that he can only avoid by uncovering an intricate criminal caper of crosses, double-crosses, smuggling and sorcery.
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But while Vlad is dodging throwing knives and lethal spells (or not!), what's *really* going on is that he and Cawti are falling deeply, profoundly, irrevocably in love. The romance that plays out among the blades and magic is more magical still, a grand passion that expresses itself through Nick-and-Nora wordplay and Three Musketeers swordplay.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/mannerpunk/#ask-anyone
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V. Hopeland by #IanMcDonald
Seriously what the *fuck* is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the *hell* do you research – much less *write* – a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment? The stars of *Hopeland* are members of two ancient, secret societies.
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There's Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical "family," that's one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils). Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people – preferably just one person – that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace
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VI. The World Wasn't Ready For You by #JustinCKey
These are horror stories, though some of are sf too, and more to the point, they're Black horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early.
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"Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers – and now, Key – the stories are horror in which Blackness is a fact, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015
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VII. Liberty's Daughter by @naomikritzer
There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would *suuuck*. But it would, and in *Liberty's Daughter*, we get a peek inside the nightmare.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent
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NONFICTION
I. The Once and Future Sex by #EleanorJaneaga
A history of gender and sex in the medieval age, describing the weird and horny ways of medieval Europeans, which are far gnarlier and more complicated than the story we get from "traditionalists" who want us to believe that their ideas about gender roles reflect a fixed part of human nature, and that modern attitudes are an attempt to rewrite history:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval
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II. Pirate Enlightenment by #DavidGraeber
In the early 18th century, the Zana-Malata people – a new culture created jointly by pirates from around the world and Malagasy – came to dominate the island. They brought with them the democratic practices of pirate ships (where captains were elected and served at the pleasure of their crews) and the matriarchal traditions of some Malagasy, creating a feminist, anarchist "Libertalia."
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Graeber retrieves and orders the history of this Libertalia from oral tradition, primary source documents, and records from around the world. Taken together, it's a tale that is rollicking and romantic, but also hilarious and eminently satisfying.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia
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