Snow Days / Snow Daze [status, work]

Feb. 23rd, 2026 09:43 am
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[personal profile] rebeccmeister
Since we are 150 miles north of Manhattan, we are not getting impacted by the current blizzard to the same extent as the city. Nonetheless, we're seeing a fair amount of snow and blustery wind, and this time at least my institution decided to cancel all classes up through noon. They issued the cancellation message last night at 9 pm, which made for a pretty quick pivot for me. In turn, I canceled my plans to try and go to rowing practice this morning, and instead got up early to start making Even More Lecture Videos for Animal Physiology.

The problems are, videos are large files, and my home upload speed is pretty throttled, so it has taken almost an hour to upload the first, shorter video (~1 Gb file; 15 minute recording). I have downsampled the video quality for the second, longer video accordingly (30 minute recording), but I am barely going to have it uploaded ahead of the scheduled start time for the class. In many respects that doesn't matter, because when classes are canceled technically we cannot hold a scheduled class session. But on a more practical level, that means I really can't go anywhere until the video finishes uploading.

Snow day life

So far it looks like the plows have hit the primary roads (emergency vehicle access for fire fighting and hospitals), but not yet the secondary or tertiary roads; I can see one of each road type from my windows at home.

...and as the morning progresses, I'm also noticing that unmistakable throat lymph node sensation suggesting I'm fighting off illness. Quick, to the medicine cabinet! That also means it's probably most prudent to just plan on staying home and recording and uploading yet another lecture video to replace my afternoon bicycling class meeting.

...and now there's another long wait for that one to upload, too.

Here's hoping that people actually watch them and find them useful. It's not an ideal method but still far better than nothing!

There are a lot of things these days reiterating the points that doing things like reading real books and going to class in person work better and have more benefits than over-reliance on digital learning tools. To many of us, this is not a surprise. I treat the digital learning tools as accessory to learning, and that seems to be a reasonable approach, based on my learning assessments.

That educational privilege meme thing

Feb. 23rd, 2026 06:16 pm
oursin: Drawing of hedgehog in a cave, writing in a book with a quill pen (Writing hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

And I'm not at all sure it's culture-neutral, hmmmm?

Okay, I had parents who had books in the house and read to me and once I could read took me to the local library to get tickets for the children's department.

No children's museums that I recall but visiting the rather dull local one attached to the public library, and visits to local sites of historical interest.

My primary school was not, I think, particularly distinguished - suspect that the year there were a whole four of us passed the 11+ was Memorable - but there were some good teachers.

I don't know how one calibrates into all this my mother knowing the teacher of Infants 1 and asking her about whether I could go to school once I had turned 5 (having an autumn birthday) and her saying, oh, send her along, on account of my mother thinking I was entirely ready.

And then the Head saying I should do the 11+ technically a year early - (which was not a given, people did get kept back)

Going to a fairly academically-intense girls' grammar school, where I did get the odd spot of class-hassle, I realise in retrospect (including from horrid Mrs B of the really weird ideas about sex), where I was marked out as university material and my parents exhorted to keep me on the sixth form -

Which they were entirely happy to do.

So yes, I was I suppose supported on my academic journey. But some of that was external factors, like the existence of that extinct phoenix, full student grants.

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Posted by Lori Dorn

Economics and data editor Ed Conway of Sky News was given incredibly rare access to the famous gold vaults beneath the Bank of England in London. These vaults are the largest in Europe and second largest gold reserve in the world.

It’s the second largest gold reserves in the world, with around 400,000 bars now worth close to £600 billion. The vast majority is held on behalf of the UK Government and central banks from across the globe. That includes Venezuela’s reserves, which has been tied up in a long-running legal battle.

While Conway’s camera team was allowed inside the vaults, they weren’t allowed to film the path they took to get there.

So it’s no phones and no cash because we’ve also got note storage down here. …Can we can we film the security process or do we have to put cameras down? No, I don’t think we’ll have camera. I don’t think they’ll be keen on having cameras. … Well, I can’t tell you how we got here, cuz that is not allowed.

Conway also found an interesting connection between these vaults and the Central Line in the London Underground.

So, the reason I think that the central line has a quite a curve on its platform is it’s coming around our building.

Actor ldris Elba Tours the Gold Vaults in 2025

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Oh Come ON!

Feb. 23rd, 2026 01:21 pm
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[personal profile] lb_lee
We’re sick again. :( Third time since Day of the Dead. This is getting really old, guys.
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Posted by Rafael Alanis

2 Min Read

Curiosity Studies Nodules on Boxwork Formations

These bumpy nodules were formed by minerals left behind as groundwater was drying out on Mars billions of years ago. NASA’s Curiosity rover captured images of these pea-size features while exploring geologic formations called boxwork on Aug. 21, 2025.
PIA26697
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Description

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover discovered these bumpy, pea-sized nodules while exploring a region filled with boxwork formations — low ridges standing roughly 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) tall with sandy hollows in-between. This mosaic is made up of 50 individual images taken by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on Aug. 21, 2025, the 4,636th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Ten images at different focus settings were taken at each of five locations to produce a sharp mosaic. The images were stitched together after being sent back to Earth.

Figure A is the PIA26697 image with a small scale bar added to the right-hand side.
Figure A

Figure A is the same image with a small scale bar added to the right-hand side.

Nodules like these have been seen many times before on the Red Planet, including by Curiosity. They were made by minerals left behind as water dried billions of years ago. Crisscrossing the surface for miles, the boxwork formations suggest ancient groundwater flowed on this part of the Red Planet later than expected, raising new questions about how long microbial life could have survived on Mars billions of years ago, before rivers and lakes dried up.

The boxwork ridgetops often include a dark line the team refers to as “central fractures,” where groundwater originally seeped through a rock crack, allowing minerals to concentrate. Surprisingly, the mission did not find nodules near these central fractures. Instead, they were found along the walls of the ridges and in the hollows between them. The wavy ridges between the groups of nodules are mineral veins made of calcium sulfate, also deposited by groundwater.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. MAHLI was built by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

The post Curiosity Studies Nodules on Boxwork Formations appeared first on NASA Science.

Curiosity Surveys the Boxwork Region

Feb. 23rd, 2026 05:34 pm
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Posted by Rafael Alanis

1 Min Read

Curiosity Surveys the Boxwork Region

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of boxwork formations — the low ridges seen here with hollows in between them — using its Mastcam on Sept. 26, 2025.
PIA26693
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Description

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of boxwork formations — the low ridges seen here with hollows in between them — using its Mastcam on Sept. 26, 2025, the 4,671st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. These boxwork formations were created billions of years ago when water leaked through rock cracks. Minerals carried into the cracks later hardened; after eons of windblown sand eroding away the softer rock, the hardened ridges were left exposed.

The panorama is made up of 179 individual images that were stitched together after being sent back to Earth. This natural color view is approximately how the scene would appear to an average person if they were on Mars. 

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.

For more about Curiosity, visit:

science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

The post Curiosity Surveys the Boxwork Region appeared first on NASA Science.

Birdfeeding

Feb. 23rd, 2026 11:38 am
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a flock of sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.




.
 
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Posted by Elizabeth Bush-Peel

The novel begins with crickets. Becky Chambers’s 2021 solarpunk novel, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, follows Dex, a tea monk who longs to hear the mostly extinct cricket, on a pilgrimage through the wilderness of a post-industrial society in the very far future, or the very far away. Outside

the walls of their City, Dex crosses paths with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot on a quest to find “what humans need.” Humankind, after all, is no longer reliant on robotic labor: Two centuries before, robots developed consciousness and left their factories for the forest (Chambers 6). The journey that follows is not only a meeting of human and synthetic minds, but a “rewilding” of human purpose for Dex, which drives them toward the text’s central invocation: to “find the strength to do both” (Chambers 10).

Chambers’s rich descriptions of comfortable objects—hot food, crisp sheets, a calming cup of tea—reinforce the novella’s frequent categorization as a “cozy” text (Harris 2025). Yet this emphasis on comfort adds to the eremitic rigor of the book by illustrating Dex’s devotion to Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, and is embedded in Dex’s function as “three parts therapist, one part confessor, and two parts bartender” (Ladd 2021). Criticism has inadequately considered the text’s urgency around negotiating human purpose as part of Dex’s monastic role. Instead, it attempts to historicize the text’s discussion of the relationship between technologized human comfort and the harsh realities of the wilderness within an industrial context that can feel anachronistic to monastic work (Arianne 2025). Yet by staging a conversation between a robot and a human with a vested interest in committed purpose, Chambers offers fruitful speculations on the relationship between function and purpose.

The companions’ dialogue revises human flourishing as a rewilding process, led by a commitment to fluidities between technology and nature. This rewilding is reconstitutive, suggesting reconciliations between humans, our technology, and the natural world through messy, sometimes injurious balance. Critically, this process is modelled through programmed and nonhuman actors, whose nonhuman priorities are also centered. In this discussion I will first consider Dex’s “rewilding” as an ecosystemic process resulting from engagement with the external world, rather than monastic contemplation. Mosscap’s role in this rewilding will then be considered as a model of neither a nostalgic and impractical virtue ethics nor a rationalist optimization but a more ecosystemic, and perhaps more plausible, way of being. 

In Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle describes intelligence—broadly defined here as the ability of a creature to take in information, process it, and apply it to behaviors or perceptions—as one of many “ways of being”: “it is an interface to [the material world]; it makes the world manifest” (Bridle 52). He furthermore suggests that “all intelligence is ecological,” only knowable from some sort of inter- or intra-action (Bridle 57). Bridle asks:

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean—to us and for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? (Bridle 11)

Bridle’s discussion of these alternative ways of being, from mycelia to moss, emphasizes the possible misapplication of anthropocentric characteristics in our relationship to technology. It is worthwhile to integrate ecological methods into analyses of literary portrayals of alternative ways of being, not least because the collision between extrapolative futures and the somewhat less optimistic present can help us decipher how we might respond to what is coming before it gets here. After all, SF has its characteristic prescience; consider the depiction of rocket-propelled space travel in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657). A Psalm for the Wild-Built exists in dialogue with a longer tradition of “rewilding” through admission of technology into ecologies in SF. 

The positioning of technology as a route to rewilding is not specific to solarpunk, nor did it originate with the genre. Solarpunk is almost hallucinogenic in its optimism, although it has in some cases started to become more realistic. There is an infectious quality, and perhaps an unsettling idealism, in a genre that allows the reader to imagine a world in which we need not place our bets on coal or plutonium but instead on the clean comfort of sunlight. Yet similar, less idealized technological mediators and models can be found in the ecosystemically-minded generation ship of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famously pessimistic Aurora (2015), or even in the tenuously symbiotic relationship between Le Guin’s technologized Cities and Archives of Wakwaha in Always Coming Home (1985). Mosscap’s modeling of an alternative way of being is characteristic of these ecological thinkers, especially in the robot’s emphasis on decay, disposal, and disassembly. Yet A Psalm for the Wild-Built does represent the central impulse of solarpunk, which Konstantinou describes as a more imperative “ought” rather than a “could be.” This reflects an increased attention to SF’s particular responsibility in its interlocutory relationship with tech, as described by Yeliz Figen Döker and Zoya Yasmine in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence last year. Mosscap dramatises a rewilded disposition toward nature for Dex and for the reader, but it also emphasizes the importance of this rewilding for future productive and responsible engagements between people, our tech, and the natural world. By reading these texts together, we can consider what we might learn from our own technologies, in developing our own ways of being in our ecosystem.

Dex’s travel is initially reminiscent of an offline millennial van-lifer setting off in a vintage campervan to find the coastal eddies of Point Reyes, but their quest for meaning immediately implicates the external world, not just the internal, through its environmental implications around balance and fluidity:

Oh, there were plenty of bugs–butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. (Chambers 6)

Dex’s emphasis on “ancestors” identifies their dissatisfaction as a historical issue, with adaptation to the orderly structure of the City, itself a “healthy place, a thriving place” accompanied by the disappearance of singing in its resident creatures (Chambers 6). A straightforward reading of these “happy little synanthropes” suggests a subtly sinister dimension to the City, in spite of the apparent health of its ecosystem. Yet the tension of this moment lies in the siloing “border walls”—reminiscent of Le Guin’s Wall of Anarres in The Dispossessed—upon whose conservationist function the continued function of the City and the “chaotic fields” are predicated. 

This tension is underscored by Dex’s choice of the term “synanthropes,” which emphasizes the balance between closeness and otherness: While the butterflies, spiders, and beetles are neighbors, they are not kin. The echoing call of this chirping, singing wilderness foregrounds the contrasting eerie silence of the City’s bugs. The emphasis on song in this moment evokes an oral tradition in the natural world and in doing so rewilds personal and historical expression from human actors into the broader ecosystem. The text, and ecological thinkers like Bridle, do not suggest that through this rewilding humans are discovered to be fundamentally less complex than we believe, but that our environment is capable of greater complexity than we anticipate.

The development Dex undergoes in the “chaotic fields” and the dense forest beyond is initially unsatisfying; the text ends on a wobble. Dex is unable to resolve the felt necessity of their calling with the sinking feeling that their work is unsatisfying, and ultimately decides to put aside their work in order to continue accompanying Mosscap on its quest. Readings of Dex’s surprising nonanswer to the question of human purpose have varied from an optimistic nihilism in the face of purposelessness to an alternative resolution to the works/faith line. Yet the text’s refusal is its resolution; after a harrowing journey through the wilderness, a sudden revelation of very human purpose would undercut Dex’s reassimilation into the often incomprehensible ecosystem they are now a part of. Much of the text emphasizes the distinction between healthy environments that are navigable by humans (as in the City with its “happy little synanthropes”) and the total wilderness: “[a cave] was craggy and dark, uncomfortably angled. A stagnant smell emanated from nowhere in particular… A fragile rib cage of something extremely dead lay without ceremony on the floor, a few tufts of limp fur scattered around, unwanted by whatever had crunched the bones clean” (Chambers 117). 

This emphasis on discomfort in Dex’s wilderness, which is “uncomfortably angled” and “without ceremony,” unsettles the almost excessive emphasis on comfort, ritual, and definition that pervades the novella. The text suggests that it is important, even in a utopian future where we have become reconciled to our environment, for there to be an unsettling “nowhere in particular” in which bad smells, “fragile rib cage[s]” of dead creatures, and things that “crunch bones clean” live without human structure or observation. This nonanswer becomes an ecological resolution: that it is not in nature for us to find clear and defined purpose, and that the desperate human desire for this definition is anomalous, rather than the norm. As Gautam Bhatia’s Strange Horizons review of the novel observed, the text is ateleological as part of its ecological commitments. For Dex to remain uncertain about their purpose, yet to continue onward, enacts the text’s central invocation to “find the strength to do both.” Dex is still a participant in an ecosystem, but their role shifts: from purpose-built to wild-built, from ends to means. 

This shift in Dex’s identity is catalyzed by an assertion made by Mosscap. Embedded in a love for, and wonder at, the environment more broadly, and a joy at their participation in it, Mosscap’s assessment of Dex’s dilemma returns Dex to the ecosystem without reducing their complexity. Mosscap says:

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it… You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. (Chambers, pp. 138-9)

Mosscap’s argument locates both Dex and itself squarely alongside the rest of their ecosystem, and, more subtly, it asserts Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” Mosscap’s assertion that Dex is only an animal is not a denial of the particularities of humanity so much as it is an invitation for humans to recognize their existing participation in a larger system. Dex’s failure to reach a clear definition of purpose1 constitutes a rewilding, facilitated by Mosscap’s intervention as an equally authoritative interlocutor within the same ecosystem. By asserting that “it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it,” Mosscap reframes Dex’s purposelessness into a subtle call to action—or, perhaps, a call to attention: to “marvel.” The claim that marveling is a necessary ecological function recalls Bridle’s framing of the purpose of intelligence as one ecological interface amongst many. In an echo of early American naturalist thinkers,2 Chambers asserts that to marvel is a necessary part of human flourishing, a mandatory part of responsible human participation in our environment. To be a responsible ecological citizen, Dex must recognize that as an animal, they have “no purpose.” Dex’s shift across the course of the text is a reversion from a purpose-led synanthrope to a more expressive, attentive partaker in their ecosystem, following in Mosscap’s footsteps.

The success of Dex’s realization depends on Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” By putting substantial definitional power in the hands of a robot, Chambers confirms that the “wild-built” robots of the text are not only members of, but advocates for, the natural world.

Much of Mosscap’s ecological authority rests on its status as a “construct.” The monastic scholar whose reflective introduction contextualizes the novella asserts that robots were originally made as “constructs that could build other constructs” (Chambers 1). The term “construct” evokes a synthetic, potentially artificial quality, particularly when it comes to questions of reproduction or species continuance, maintaining in its periphery the possibility of deconstruction or even spontaneous collapse. Chambers emphasizes the anomalous, fragile, and potentially transitional nature of constructs: “we struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around” (Chambers 110). Mosscap and its robot kin could theoretically live forever if they maintained themselves indefinitely, but robots in the novella refuse the potentially empowering permanence and adaptability of immortality. Instead, robots in A Psalm for the Wild-Built reproduce by scavenging the functional parts of their deceased kin. Once no more robots function, the species will come to an end, having run the natural course of its component parts. 

Constructs must be reconstructed, recycled, and repurposed. By developing these new and yet more conventionally natural forms of reproduction, the robots imagine an effective way of participating in an ecosystem which is inspired by the time-limitedness and inevitable decomposition of its other members. Mosscap asserts that by remaining immortal, rather than recycling, the robots would be “behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand” (Chambers 94). These recycling practices position the robots as not just responsible actors within their ecosystem, but also as its historians, echoing Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (Haraway 103). 

Robotic history in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not transmitted through oral storytelling, nor through formal robot history texts, but through the passing-on of “remnants.” Describing remnants, Mosscap says: “I have a remnant of chairs, but I have never sat in one” (Chambers 56). Remnants lie between instinct and memory, and are transmitted through robotic component parts. In a human analogy, Chambers’s remnants are almost epigenetic. The function of remnants, to borrow a metaphor appropriate to Dex’s monastic calling, resembles the inborn architecture of the soul in Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle: structural, with all the local nuances of a city, and, likewise, traversable and signposted. Remnants carry trauma from the Factory Age, and guide the development of a robot culture despite the dispersion and solitude of Chambers’s robots, who spend most of their time alone in nature. The book itself also mimics this dynamic memory, as the natural world intervenes on the page with the inclusion of naturalistic fleurons of maple leaves at the beginning of every chapter. This symbolic infiltration of the processed paper of the book by its material precursor enacts what Connor Louiselle calls the “positive reinforcement of solarpunk” through aesthetic reminders of the natural world (Louiselle, Almanac for the Anthropocene)

Mosscap models this alternative way of being in an ecosystem for Dex by maintaining its inherent remnants alongside the embedded newness of its capacity for wonder and curiosity. This emphasis on both present being and cultural memory reframes construction as a creative, generative activity rather than an industrial one. Compare the craftsmanship of Mosscap’s with the manufacturing origin of its original central compartment, which is stamped with “643-143, Property of Wescon Textiles, Inc,” a name whose numerics evokes any number of dehumanizing historical precedents (Chambers 93). In contrast, Mosscap’s insistence on the ecosystemic embeddedness of robots models a creative, reconstitutive way of being in the world. Rather than being constructed, the “wild-built” robots are described as “composed,” like music, with the regular rhythm of consciousness accompanied by a melodic emergent cultural memory (Chambers 93). Like the crickets Dex leaves the city for, Mosscap’s existence sings. 

Resisting the temptation towards anthropomorphizing, Chambers’s depiction of Mosscap remains resolutely nonhuman.3 Mosscap insists on being called “it,” while emphasizing the dignity of an object operating outside of recognizably human behavioral norms: “We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its… We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value” (Chambers 69). Mosscap’s is not a call for objectification, for treating humans in the same way we currently treat objects. Rather, it’s a call to recognize different ways of being in an ecosystem by nonhuman actors, a recognition that does not detract from participation already realized by human ones. Dex’s rewilding results from a recognition that humans are made up of separable and often fluid component parts, built without purpose or calling, embedded in an ecosystem of which we are not always fully cognizant but must always try to be mindful. We must continue anyway, and we must continue to marvel.

From the vantage point of 2026, this novella already feels, in some ways, like a relic, with its optimism about the potential of technology to do more than steal our data, hallucinate our work for us, and provide positive reinforcement where gentle criticism from a human might do a better job. Russell and Norvig’s seminal text on the development of deep learning gestures at the Bayesian networks they anticipated in advanced AI models. The suggestion that machines will operate on Bayesian decision-making principles neither suggests any encouraging similarity to the unpredictable texture of human decision-making nor offers an alternative model for true robot consciousness. It certainly does not do much to reassure the reader of much opportunity for kinship with our future robot neighbors. 

Yet, as Bridle observes, “We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us” (Bridle 18). SF imagines alternative ways for us to coexist with these tools, and in turn posits alternative ways in which we may ourselves be better “technology.” To recognize our own constructedness in a way that extends beyond the social world into the natural one is to challenge our specialness within the ecosystem, and to perhaps have a shot at a more collaborative relationship with our environment. We clearly have remnants of cricket song. Perhaps the recognition that it is our duty as a species to listen to it might tug the reader to the wilderness, where we could unpack our constructs from a satchel and watch them flourish.

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either. (Chambers 135)

Footnotes

  1.  Perhaps best framed in religious terms, in conversation with Frank Herbert’s Litany against Fear or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed tenets.
  2.  Consider Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”
  3.  Much can be said about the reassurance found in treating machines that appear to think like people, and about the lengths we will go to in order to make these objects familiar to us. Consider the Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer, the CM-5, which had to use extra computational power in order to maintain the flashing red lights that made it appear to be “thinking” (Thiel, 1994).

Works cited and consulted:

Arianne. “A Psalm for the Wild Built: Analysis & Reflections,” Letters from Ari, Substack, 21 June, 2025. 

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Function, 2022.

Haraway, Donna. ‘4. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Harris, James. ‘A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY by Becky Chambers’, Classics of Science Fiction, 18 November 2025.

Hendlin, Yogi Hale. ‘Compost modernity!’, Aeon, 10 February 2026.

Ladd, Christina ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built Review: Find the Strength to Do Both’, Geeklyinc, 14 July 2021.

Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction’, Slate, 15 Jan 2019.

Magnasson, Andri Snær. Love Star, 2002; translated 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Russell, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Scott, Spencer. ‘Solarpunk: Refuturing our Imagination for an Ecological Transformation’, One Earth, October 5 2025.

Thiel, Tamiko, Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2: Design Legacy,” 1994 (Digitized).

Wagner, Phoebe and Brontë Christopher Wieland (eds.), Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, West Virginia University Press, 2022.

 


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Posted by Lori Dorn

When musician Simon Curtis brought his groceries home, he noticed that a little green blob inside the box of romaine lettuce that started moving. It turned out to be a tiny frog who somehow unexpectedly got caught in there. Curtis decided to adopt the frog, whom he named Tony, and make him a part of his family after a wildlife expert told him that it would be difficult for Tony to be released. Since that day, Tony has been very well loved by both Curtis and his partner.

Simon told us how he calmly welcomed a tiny frog into his family, and went above and beyond to make sure Tony felt safe, happy, and loved

Frog in Salad

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Posted by Lori Dorn

Reverb visited Jack White at Third Man Records in Detroit, where they talked about the unique vintage gear he uses to create his incredibly distinctive style. White shared that he often watches old clips of legendary musicians and then tries to find the instrument they used so he can replicate and perhaps improve on the sound.

My favorite thing to do is if I see an old clip of a musician and I see some equipment behind them is to try to find out what that equipment is if I don’t know already. And that can lead to a lot of amazing things.

White also talked about the history of Third Man and how it tied into his creativity.

Along the way, he shares stories about Third Man Records’ origins, balancing analog and digital recording, and why the right tool can spark entirely new music.

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Posted by Lori Dorn

Television essayist fluffieduffie explained how Peter Claffey went from a rugby player in Ireland to brilliantly playing Hedge Knight Dunk (Ser Duncan the Tall) in the breakout standalone Game of Thrones series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

The story of how Peter Clafy went from a rugby player to now the face of “Game of Thrones” is insane. 

It turns out that Claffey was quite well known for his rugby prowess and was about to go professional, but he found that he wasn’t very happy. So instead, he decided to go to Bow Fleet Academy acting school and audition where he could.

Shortly after quitting his professional rugby career in 2019, he enrolled in drama school and they made his first appearance in the show” Harry Wild” in 2022. And then a couple years go by and he gets an audition for Duncan the Tall. … although Peter is actually a huge fan of “Game of Thrones”, he didn’t let himself get excited. But then he got a call back and then another one and then he got the part. 

Claffey in His Irish Rugby Days

Claffey’s Drama School Showreel

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Stories From The Radio

Feb. 23rd, 2026 11:07 am
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Posted by Kuzhali Manickavel

Hallo strange fam! You are all so gorgeous that it’s not even funny. Today we are going to be listening to a story from a show called Nightfall, that ran from 1980 to 1983 from the good old CBC. So bear with me a little here. I used to be Canadian. Meaning that I was born and raised there and moved to India in my early teens. One thing I remember about my time in Canada is that as a country, we either made really awful stuff, or really cool stuff. There was no middle ground. Like there’s Informer by Snow. And then there’s the movie The Twentieth Century which is just so bafflingly amazing that it is obviously Canadian. I mean maybe that’s just me but anyway. For me, Nightfall is one of those really good shows. Often times, I would be listening to an episode thinking it was going to be like Inner Sanctum or something, and later I would be like why am I listening to this in the night when it is dark. This intro is already too long and probably didn’t make any sense. So without further ado, here is Love and the Lonely One from CBC’s Nightfall. Let’s go!

https://archive.org/details/NightfallUPGRADES

*

So there’s a man teaching some medical students about cutting cadavers and he made a joke but I didn’t understand it

Everyone’s laughing a lot though

I doubt if it was really that funny

This story has already set up its dialogue and back story so nicely

So two college dudes, Freddie and George, are carrying the body of an auld woman with a terrible mouth

They are going to use this to prank some girl who stood one of them up

Oh you silly boys

They have now dragged the corpse to the girl’s door and now they will probably run away quite fast

Wait! Creepy music!

Instead of running away so fast, Freddie is staring at the corpse

Freddie says that the corpse’s mouth was green and it was staring at him whaaaaaaaaat

This is what we came for you guys

Digging the synth music at the scene changes also

Now we are at the medical college hospital? And Freddie has suddenly been called in to assist with something. George, on the other hand, is going skiing because his priorities are different.

They are trying to revive this body but it is not cooperating

You know why? Because it has a huge hole in its heart and its face is dark purple

I’m not a doctor, but I would say such a person is dead. That is just my opinion though

Phone is ringing but since no nurse is around, Freddie magnanimously answers the phone himself

Oooh Freddie has a secret admirer who is calling him. He thinks it might be a prank though.

How did she know that Freddie would answer the phone? Dun dun dun!

The secret admirer has the perfect voice you guys

This secret admirer is bamboozling Freddie with her words

He has now promised to meet this admirer at the same place they dropped off the corpse

So a mysterious lady has asked you to meet her at a place where you dropped off a corpse. NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN I GUESS

Freddie has asked how she knew where to find him, pertinent question fam, and she says the guy next to you told me only the guy next to Freddie IS DEAD NO BIG DEAL

Now Freddie has come to meet the mystery lady and they are in some room? And there’s like twenties music playing? And she looks great apparently.

The lady has referenced banks crashing, so I guess she thinks it’s the thirties? I don’t know anything

We all know this is going to end badly for Freddie but right now, he’s dancing with a pretty girl and they’re having champagne and they seem happy

Now they have stopped dancing and he is asking what her hopes and dreams are

Feel like there is a rule somewhere that one should never ask the undead what their hopes and dreams are

Now I think they are going to have sex

FREDDIE DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD

Well, to be fair she said she was going to go change into what she really is.

That’s probably not a good thing

She just said that’s what you want, isn’t it? NO THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT FREDDIE

Freddie is saying stuff like when you meet someone special you just kinda know and we all feel bad for Freddie right now

OMG THE LADY SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S DECAYING WHAAAAAT

As we said before, DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD FREDDIE

Freddie has screamed and SCENE!

So I guess Freddie is trying to tell George about his ordeal but George is laughing

He has figured out that the ghost lady was the corpse lady

George is really, really laughing

Well whatever the boys are now going to sleep

None of this is going to end well for Freddie

Which seems unfair, considering that it was George who came up with the idea, no? Isn’t it?

Some twisted twenties/thirties music is playing and I have to say it’s uncomfortable fam

George is going skiing today and Freddie is staying back to study

It’s the phone DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE FREDDIE

It’s the corpse lady who wants to meet again

Corpse lady just said that they belong together. Which is discouraging when this kind of sentiment comes from the undead.

Bro is now having insomnia

There is now a knock at the door

Surprise! It’s the corpse lady!

She’s like you took me from my bed you can’t send me back now but again this was George’s idea no?

Is Freddie having second thoughts about this whole ‘don’t have sex with the undead’ thing?

Fred is actually considering this whaaaaat I mean the logistics alone Freddie

Maybe this isn’t about sex at all, maybe the corpse lady just wants to hang out.

Freddie just opened the door and the corpse lady is standing there with no clothes on.

Welp. There goes Freddie.

Now we are back to that same cadaver class like from the beginning

I think they have opened the cadaver freezer and found Freddie inside.

Oh, the corpse lady and Freddie are together in the freezer I think.

And they look so happy. Aw 🙂

*

That was pretty good fam! I enjoyed it a lot, a typical, strong Nightfall story. I thought the lady who was the corpse did a particularly good job and it is sweet that we got a happy ending here. I did expect the story to go another way because I thought it was going to be like any other undead story. But I am very happy to see that it wasn’t. For the next few weeks I am tempted to go through some of the other stories here. Frankly, they are a nice change from the usual OTR shows which, to be honest, are often on the sloppy side. So do join us next time when we will look at another show from Nightfall. Bai dears.

 

 

 

Columns Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Secondary Filters

Feb. 23rd, 2026 11:07 am
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Posted by Ursula Whitcher

Content warning:


Adjust the color of the sky,
my phone offers, trapped in the kindergarten knowledge
that cherry-blossom and atmosphere are distinct.
The sky-color is as cold as a sheet of paper
that only says true things:
my country does not love me; I don’t know
if you will pass the gate tomorrow after
they take your photograph;
I am still alive.

 

[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Gwynne Garfinkle during our annual Kickstarter.]


bones and bones and bones and

Feb. 23rd, 2026 11:07 am
[syndicated profile] strangehorizons_all_feed

Posted by IM Shulman

Content warning:


I unzipped my skin and all my bones fell out. This was not by design: I meant to loose my soul from the forest of my lungs, unfurl its banner past my legs and my toes and there, in the blameless earth, find a new alchemy for living. Instead—bones. Ribcage smiling across the grass. Femurs and tibias and clavicles in their wet dynasties between dirt, between roots, between the fern crawling its quiet way through this lower heaven.

You must not let them recollect me. Sing to the wind until it remembers its promise: The only law is motion. The only scripture is change. I have no more excuses; metacarpal tumble, they are lost to the loam. Only this reason remains: I wanted motion. I needed change. No wind can reach the cage they are crafting. I was staring down the barrel of stillness—the bleak gargoyle, its dazzling gunpowder, those months when only we were hysterical. Everyone else watched us from the boiling sea. Policies fell upon us, hard rain. Every headline a new lash of laughter: can it get worse? I decided I would not bear witness; they would strike no pillar of salt from me.

I remanded myself back to nature. I slipped open my skin and out came the bones. Perhaps this is for the better. The flesh has always sat strangely but the bones never betrayed. Freed from the burden of bearing, they do now as they always dreamed: kiss the moss, kiss the leaves. My bones are conferring with the earth. My bones are considering the vagrant seeds. They too wish to grow of themselves more selves, coccyx chrysalis unspooling into spines, into shoulder blades, into the steep curve of a jaw, a jewel, jumbled bouquet of geometries never to be resolved. A forensic mystery: did these bones belong to a man?

What is a man but bones and bones and bones, black wind pushing through a tunnel. This is what I learned through the unsteady years of needles and tubing and scars corded across my thickening flesh, fat recanting its vows of softness, settling against the pelvis in pouting shelves. Muscle is malleable but the bones remain. They are accustomed, now—to molting, eschewing, stripping my self from myself until I am more. Here is a riddle: what grows happier the more you take away? I never knew such joy until that day. Emerging from that blissed, undreaming haze and realizing, at last, I was free. I was only a box of pieces, but those pieces were not me.

You must not let them regather me. Not even the heap my bones have left behind. Pour my eyes into the river. My tongue, threaded through the trees. What must you tell them, when they ask where I am? Listen and listen, even the earth will not say:


[syndicated profile] strangehorizons_all_feed

Posted by Roy Salzman-Cohen

The Essential Patricia A. McKillip coverIn “What Inspires Me,” Patricia A. McKillip’s WisCon 2004 Guest of Honor speech, and penultimate entry in The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, the award-winning fantasy writer said: “What I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person” (p. 298). That’s the best possible summary of what this new career retrospective is, I think, though of course it’s made of short stories and not novels. It’s an excellent primer on McKillip’s themes, threads, preoccupations, imagery, and style, as well as her incredible range. And it led me to reflect on some of her intersections with other writers, too.

As far as themes and threads go: A prominent one is women who are trapped by their roles, by a lack of opportunity, and by men. These men are sometimes well-meaning and clueless—but often they are mean and even cruel, dismissive and neglectful, and closed. Men who don’t ask questions, who assume things about the women and the world around them: what they are like and what they are capable of and what they mean. Many of these stories (and a lot of McKillip’s work in general) are romantic and end happily (as she alludes to in “Writing High Fantasy,” the final entry in this anthology); but it’s the men who are willing not just to think, but to reconsider, who find happy endings. These men put metaphors together and uncover different perspectives, and they allow other people to know more than they do. The exception to this lies in the more fairy-tale or parable-feeling stories, like “The Lion and the Lark,” in which the man is a magical entity and doesn’t do a whole lot of learning or changing. But in “The Lion and the Lark,” the man at least does a good job of knowing and loving the protagonist.

The fairy world appears often, posited as a secret world. And here’s another of the collection’s threads: secrets, and particularly secret identities and their discovery. The majority of these stories have at least one character who isn’t who they seem to be, or who isn’t sure themselves who they are. There’s often a lot of intersection between secret identities and secret worlds, or sometimes simply a different, secret, way of things. Indeed, the most important hallmark of McKillip’s style, I think, is her particular mix of solidity and dreaminess. Her characters feel like real people, with practical concerns, who you could imagine stubbing their toes or running out of groceries—things that are mundane but also specific to them and their world. But these solid characters exist in much more fluid worlds. Her settings and plots are both held together by feeling, evocative description, and character, and so sometimes they’re vague and oddly shaped. Sometimes her novels can be a little loose and meandering because of that dreaminess, while some of the short stories in this collection end before I wish they did.

My two very favorite stories in the collection are “Lady of the Skulls and “Byndley.” Both of them exemplify this point about style in fascinating ways.

There’s something particularly powerful and rich about “Lady of the Skulls,” and I think part of that is due to how focused the setting is: a lone tower, filled with vast amounts of mythical treasure, standing far away from everything on a barren plain. Those who visit the tower are allowed to choose one thing to take with them. If they choose the most precious thing in the tower, they can leave freely; if they choose wrongly, they die as soon as they leave. The Lady of the Skulls is the woman who guards this tower and has to watch as men come and break themselves on it. She plants her flowers in old skulls. Her watering can is the helmet of some past adventurer.

I felt the awe of the magic here, and understood this woman as a particular, specific person. All of the complex elements and different flavors get to kind of marinate in this one specific place, which sits at one specific point in these men’s lives. We do get a flashback at the end, but it feels like a reward to me, not a break in focus, because it finally gives us the final piece we need to understand the place we’ve been in for the rest of the story.

In general, though, my favorite McKillip stories tend to sit somewhere in between her real-world style and her vaguest dream-like style. “Byndley” does exactly that. It is about a wizard named Reck who once fell in love with the faerie queen. The faerie queen invited him into the woods, and took him into her bed. But the queen has a husband, and Reck can’t help but be jealous. He steals a special gift that the king gave the queen: a “tiny living world within a glass globe” that’s astonishingly beautiful. Because he’s a wizard, he was able to escape, by jumping into the globe itself and making the globe vanish. Now, years later, he still has the globe.

“I took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.” (p. 111)

But Reck doesn’t say this to excuse or defend himself. He explains this to one of the citizens of the town of Byndley, where he’s come on a quest to return the glass globe back to the faerie world. He cannot live in peace with what he’s stolen. He feels the weight of the queen’s memory—or his own guilt. So he searches far and wide for a way to give it back. And in his search, it turns out, he seems to have discovered something true about faerieland and about himself, something that applies to McKillip’s stories generally: Something about the porousness of worlds, and about what it means to be inside one or another, and how you can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time, in different ways.

In fact, Reck discovers that he’s never really left the globe at all. The town of Byndley is made up of faeries in disguise, and the townsperson to whom he told his tale was the faerie queen herself. When he leaves Byndley, he doesn’t look back: “He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn” (p. 116). This is how McKillip’s work makes me feel, too, and I think it’s what I want out of fantasy most of all (alongside characters to be there with me): the feeling of that promise of wonder and enchantment, and the truth of that feeling. Somehow, by giving the globe back, Reck gets to keep that feeling with him, which was what he really wanted anyway.

Stylistically, “Byndley” and “Lady of the Skulls” work particularly well because of the way they give us that feeling—they give us a world that we can feel that way about. It’s magical enough to be wondrous, but it’s also defined enough to picture at all. Sometimes, McKillip’s more real-world stories lose the wonder for me—“Mer,” for example, is this way, although I did really enjoy it. Others are so vague that it’s hard to get a grip on anything, though this is more true of some of her novels than of any of the stories in this collection. In The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995), for example, there’s also a wizard who tries to travel between the fairy realm and the human realm. But that story is written in a much more dreamlike way, and also (maybe more importantly, even) the journey often takes place in Atrix Wolfe’s head. For much of the book, he has nobody to talk to about what he’s trying to do or what exactly is troubling him. In “Byndley,” Reck asks people questions all the time, so that even if we don’t get definite answers about what the world is like, we learn what the people of Byndley are like and what they think. In “Lady of the Skulls,” the two main characters ask each other questions, too. There’s something about that communication and the acceptance of wonder that really makes these stories come alive.

McKillip is unique; there’s no one else who you’d mistake for her. But she is deeply invested in fantasy as a genre, and fantasy in turn is often interested in interpretation and repetition (among other things). Le Guin is maybe the most obvious comparison, as far as feminism and the role of women in magic go (A Wizard of Earthsea [1968] notwithstanding; McKillip didn’t need to go through the learning curve that Le Guin did). Tanith Lee is also in there, and Angela Carter (Carter especially in “The Lion and the Lark”); and, a little bit more recently, Ursula Vernon—the matter-of-factness, the vivid lives of different unusual people (particularly women), the brand of humor. But “Byndley” in particular shows McKillip’s fundamental Beagle-ness.

Peter S. Beagle is an admirer of McKillip’s work and they collaborated on a novel; he also wrote the afterword to Dreams of Distant Shores (2016). Together, they’re two of my personal favorite writers because of their simultaneous true love of fantasy and reality—for the strangeness to be found within. McKillip is a little dreamier than Beagle is, Beagle a little more jokey and parodic, and Beagle’s women frustrate me sometimes, but that’s for some other review; but ultimately what we see in their fantasies is an unusual interest in people and in spaces-between.

Take, for example, McKillip’s “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath.” This is a relatively early story. And Kushner’s introduction explains that Terri Windling commissioned it for her collection Elsewhere in 1982; it was McKillip’s first published short story for adults. I like how surprising it is, and how funny it is. The characters are taken seriously—it matters who they are and why they think and feel the ways they do. What happens to them isn’t predictable, and nor is it predictable what the story focuses on and cares about. It’s excellent stuff. Likewise, in “The Witches of Junket,” the characters are great and at the very centre of the story, alongside a really fascinating portrayal of witchiness. The POV character in particular is one of McKillip’s excellent older women. If the story gets a little bit jumbled up, and the pacing is a little bit too fast—there are too many new characters and I would’ve loved the time to get to know them a little better, and to more clearly understand what was at stake—this can be forgiven because of the connection it makes between reader and characters.

“The Witches of Junket” is set in our contemporary world, as is “Out of the Woods.” This is another story that’s difficult to predict, but in this case that’s more because of what the story chooses to focus on than because of plot. The main character, Leta, is worked to the bone by her husband and by her magician boss, and we know that something must change. But that change is surprising, more melancholy than I expected, and somehow also exactly right. I wish this story had been longer, because I wanted to know what happens to the main character, but its abrupt ending is part of the point. Indeed, I’m not always very patient about shorter stories, especially when they hinge on ambiguity or some sort of “gotcha” moment, but McKillip almost always wrong-foots me. I have no idea what happens in “Weird,” for example, and yet I’m still thinking about it. I don’t feel irritated or upset about that, just intrigued.

Still, “Knight in the Well” is maybe the book’s primary example of McKillip’s dreamy vagueness: There’s a lot going on, it’s beautiful, and, again, I had no idea what any of it meant until maybe halfway through the story at best. This story, too, ends rather abruptly, and I would’ve enjoyed much more time with these characters instead of having their conflicts resolved so fast. In contrast with “Weird,” however, this is one of the volume’s longer stories, at around fifty pages. “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” is of similar length, and likewise I wanted more perspective from it: on the story’s women, as well as more information about the titular gorgon, who in a way was the least interesting part of the story. If the shorter stories can feel too brief, both of these longer stories feel a little bit structurally lopsided—and so also somehow unfinished.

Why are these stories the length that they are? Why not longer or shorter? I wonder what was going on with these stories; were they written for some purpose in particular? I would love more background information on them. This is perhaps my one real criticism of the present volume: I would have liked more information on the stories, and more information about the logic behind the anthology itself. It’s a lovely book, and all of the stories deserve to be here and to be read carefully. I’m just not sure what makes this collection the “Essential” McKillip, especially when compared to Tachyon’s earlier (and also excellent) McKillip anthology, Dreams of Distant Shores. With a title like this, I’d have liked there to be an explanation of why these stories, and not others, are so definitive.

For instance, “Wonders of the Invisible World,” collected here, is the title of another McKillip anthology, and so we might assume it has significance. In the story (which shares its title with a book by Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan), a researcher from the far future goes back in time and pretends to be an angel that Cotton Mather saw in a feverish revelation. Her boss has sent her there because he’s trying to write a history of imaginative thought—and, in their far future, everything possible to imagine has already been imagined by a very powerful computer. The researcher isn’t allowed to veer from her script, which is set to minimize any alteration of the past, even though she very much wants to. When Cotton Mather raves about witches, it’s difficult for her to stomach. But she’s supposed to keep the angel within the limits of what Cotton Mather would have imagined the angel to be.

When the researcher returns home, to a time when everything imaginable has already been imagined, her son and her friends are playing a video game together. Their characters are in an intergalactic zoo, and they try to defeat the computer by imagining different animals. The computer is always able to display whatever the children dream up—but then an angel appears in one of the animal cages. The angel belongs to none of them. Except, possibly, to the researcher. The angel is caught in the zoo, like the researchers are caught in history, and like her current world is trapped because imagination can no longer create a way out. But then the angel disappears, and that’s the end of the story. So what does this mean, and what can it tell us about the logic of this collection? My best stab at it: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is by and large concerned with three things—how can imagination set people free, what do people imagine, and how do those imagined things/people/places connect and change throughout space and time?

If nothing else, this collection certainly serves as an excellent McKillip primer. The anthology itself is beautiful: Thomas Carey’s cover illustration is so very McKillip, and it’s also resonant of the ornate Kinuko Y. Craft’s Ace covers. Ellen Kushner’s foreword is deeply personal and moving. But other excellent McKillip primers exist: They include Dreams of Distant Shores itself, a Strange Horizons roundtable on Ombria in Shadow, and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building. I also highly recommend The Riddle-Master of Hed and its two sequels, as well as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. But if you haven’t started reading McKillip yet, this is certainly a good place to start—and then, hopefully, continue. But, wherever you start reading McKillip’s work, you won’t want to stop.


which_chick: (Default)
[personal profile] which_chick
I got a fair amount of knitting done over the weekend. Go me! And, obviously, I also did some television watching because that's what I do while knitting -- that's how I get like three inches of wrong-color-scarf. LOL. It could be that this strategy has some issues and also I'm still having feelings about the scarf so it's still in timeout.

No time for scarf means more time for afghan! )
larryhammer: animation of the kanji for four seasonal birds fading into each other in endless cycle (seasons)
[personal profile] larryhammer
For Poetry Monday:

The Night Sky, Mary Webb

The moon, beyond her violet bars,
From towering heights of thunder-cloud,
Sheds calm upon our scarlet wars,
To soothe a world so small, so loud.
And little clouds like feathered spray,
Like rounded waves on summer seas,
Or frosted panes on a winter day,
Float in the dark blue silences.
Within their foam, transparent, white,
Like flashing fish the stars go by
Without a sound across the night.
In quietude and secrecy
The white, soft lightnings feel their way
To the boundless dark and back again,
With less stir than a gnat makes
In its little joy, its little pain.


(Hat tip to [personal profile] cmcmck.) Webb was a novelist and poet best known today as one of the authors parodied by Cold Comfort Farm.

---L.

Subject quote from Someone You Loved, Lewis Capaldi.

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