ethaisa

I'd forgotten how much I love https://theyfightcrime.org.

He's a lonely skateboarding shaman with a winning smile and a way with the ladies. She's a bloodthirsty wisecracking wrestler who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!

He's an unconventional soccer-playing grifter in a wheelchair. She's an orphaned foul-mouthed socialite from out of town. They fight crime!

He's an oversexed ninja werewolf fleeing from a secret government programme. She's an enchanted snooty advertising executive with a knack for trouble. They fight crime!

( something-something fic prompts )

 Given that Edrehasiver VII became known as the Winter Emperor, I’m not shocked that we don’t have much info about how Midsummer is celebrated in the Ethuveraz (Elflands) in the first book.

But after some searching, I’m saddened to report that there’s nothing in the entire Cemeteries of Amalo on the subject either.  In fact, The Grief of Stones has not a single mention of the word “summer,” and the other two only mention it in reference to things like the summer homes of the nobility.

I’m trying to come up with something for a project, and so far I’ve only come up with fireworks and summer fruits like strawberries and plums.   I imagine that there are various agriculture-related  activities in rural areas among commoners (for example, bonfires rather than fireworks), but does anyone else have any inspirations for Summernight activities among the nobility?

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/09/lapis-earth/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86628

My absolute unit of a Grand Master award arrived!

I kept trying to get a decent picture of it to show the lovely colours of all the different stones.¹ I tried dim light, bright light, sunlight… All the things. None of them conveyed its true glory—and sheer size. It’s well over 30 cm tall, maybe 11 cm square, and its weight is not trivial (though only about half what it might be if it were made of glass).

Then I lugged it into my office and stuck it on my desk while I decide what to do with it. Serendipitously I put it in front of a padded mailer (which I’m about to sent out to the winning bid on one of my Locus pledges) and that made everything look much nicer.

So then I futzed about a bit more and finally got a picture of the lapis sphere. It’s huge—at least squash-ball size—and in front of the buff envelope it looked its proper colour. Also remarkably like our planet turning serenely in space.

So here you go: my Damon Knight Memorial planet, Lapis Earth.

1. See The glory of a grand gong for an annotated image of what’s what. ︎

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/09/lapis-earth/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86628

These last few years it seems all this astrology and, as the kids say, "woo-woo", have become ever more popular. People seem to be practicing more and more. That's cool so long as people don't turn their backs on science and reason.

( Do you really wanna know more about me...? )

Currently, I'm focusing on walking The Red Road, delving back into the occult, green magick, and my own mix of Indigenous spirituality and Satanism. thefreaksclub Sibling Community the_magick_circle is where I talk about that. I also help run a few others.

ethical_society_of_satan which is about society, ethics, philosophy, humanism, non-theological satanism, and other such related things.
veg_life which is about vegetarian and vegan lifestyles, animal rights, the environment, and all that.
first_nations_freaks for all Native American news, culture, discussions, and whatnot.
openhearts_openminds ...polytheism? Maybe! Polyamory? Definitely. All about your less commonly discussed relationship types and other topics relating to relationships.

X-Posted in the_magick_circle (dark theme!)

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/08/aud-begins-to-meet-uk-readers/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86615

The Aud books have been out in the UK 5 days. I don’t really have much of a window into how they’re selling and/or how readers are responding, but I know that at in Edinburgh and London at least she’s beginning to find her way into new hands. I am jealous—I still don’t have my author copies.

Here’s Canongate in Edinburgh—home of Caongate Books, home of Aud in the UK.

And here’s Daunt’s, a bookshop in London, where apparently Aud was spotted face-out in a high-traffic area of the shop.

If anyone else has pictures, or simply reports of sightings of Aud out and about, I’d be happy to hear about it. (Pet pix a bonus!)

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/08/aud-begins-to-meet-uk-readers/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86615

Ellie is a Lipan Apache teenager in a world where magic, vampires, ghosts, and so forth are known to be real. She’s inherited the family gift for raising ghosts, though she only raises animals; human ghosts always come back wrong, and she’s happy with the companionship of her beloved ghost dog Kirby, not to mention her pet ghost trilobite. But when her cousin, who supposedly died in a car crash, returns in a dream to tell her he was murdered, she finds that knowing who killed him isn’t as helpful as one might imagine…

Ellie’s cousin Trevor told her the name of his killer, Abe Allerton from Willowbee, but he didn’t know why or how he was killed. Ellie enlists her best friend, Jay, a cheerleader with just enough fairy blood to give him pointy ears and the ability to make small lights. More importantly, he’s good at research. They learn that Willowbee is in Texas, near the town where Trevor lived with his wife, Lenore, and their baby. Jay brings in help: his older sister’s fiancé, Al, who’s a vampire.
All of them, plus Ellie’s parents and a ghost mammoth belonging to her grandmother, play a part in the effort to solve the mystery of Trevor’s death and bring his murderer to justice. And so, in a sense, will a major character who’s long dead (and not a ghost) but who’s a big presence in Ellie’s life: Six-Grand, her great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, the last person to have a gift as powerful as Ellie’s… and who vanished forever into the underworld.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mean, come on. GHOST TRILOBITE. GHOST MAMMOTH. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s heartfelt, it has lovely chapter heading illustrations, and it’s got some gorgeous imagery - I particularly loved a scene where the world transforms into an oceanic underworld, and Ellie sees a pod of whales swimming in the sky of a suburban neighborhood.

It's marketed as young adult and Ellie is seventeen, but the book feels younger (and so does Ellie.) I'd have no qualms handing it to an advanced nine-year-old reader, but it also appeals to adult me who misses the time when "urban fantasy" meant "our world, but with ghosts, elves, and so forth."

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/03/today-at-last-aud-in-the-uk/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86526

Buy

Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith

Today, for the first time, the Aud trilogy (The Blue Place, Stay, Always) will be published in the UK. It only took 27 years. I know I’m not even remotely an impartial observer but these books kick ass. I love them with a crazy love. And I would dearly like UK readers to go buy a copy—and then tell me what you think.

Do you know any other queer noir/not-noir novels ¹ praised by Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Lee Child, Manda Scott, Francis Spufford, Laurie King, Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Alex Gray, Elizabeth Hand, James Sallis, and more? No? Then maybe you should go find out what brings together such disparate writers in their love.

You can buy now or borrow from your local library. Enjoy!

Buy

Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith

---

1. They use some of the prose style of noir but they don’t do noir, in the sense that Aud, the protagonist, does not trap herself in an ever-downward spiral. The three books between them describe a hopeful arc—with, y’know, lots of sex, and scams, and seamy cityscapes. Aud, like Hild, has an essential joy in life no matter what tight spot she finds herself in… ︎

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/03/today-at-last-aud-in-the-uk/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86526

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/02/pulling-the-wings-off-flies/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86530

There are certain people in the world who are so uncaring of others’ needs and feelings that they are untroubled by conscience—they have no conscience. These are the people who as children pulled the wings off flies for fun, just because they could. These are people who, when they have power, kill other people.

Here today, by ‘people’ I am referring specifically to the current US administration. There are literally dozens of decisions the Trump administration and its minions in Congress have made that will kill people at home and abroad. Remember that: dozens.¹ I’m going to mention just two as examples, one foreign, one domestic.

Domestically:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency, the OBBB (‘one big beautiful bill’) package just passed by the Senate and now back with the House would increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the next decade due to the bill’s changes to Medicaid and the ACA, while more than half Americans will pay fewer taxes.

According to the Yale Budget Lab, after taking into account tax and social safety net changes, the poorest 20% of U.S. households will lose an average of 2.9% of their real income. The real income of the next 20% of households would remain flat. The top 60% of households (those earning over about $36,500 a year) will all benefit—but those in the top 20% (earning over about $120,500) will benefit massively—and just look at how much the top 5% (earning >$265,000) will gain.

At those low incomes, nearly 3% can mean the difference between survival and not: the old, the frail, the ill, the disabled will die—most especially the old, fail, ill and disabled people of colour. Can you spell ‘eugenics’?

Then add in the ballooning deficit, and what they will mean in terms of the value of the dollar and the ability of the US to borrow, and things get virulently worse, very quickly. In the short term, many people in the US will die; in the long term, many many people will die.

Internationally

Again, I’m going to talk about just one decision (of so many, so very many): the shuttering of USAID. I just looked at a new paper in The Lancet: ²

Higher levels of USAID funding—primarily directed toward LMICs, particularly African countries—were associated with a 15% reduction in age-standardised all-cause mortality (risk ratio [RR] 0·85, 95% CI 0·78–0·93) and a 32% reduction in under-five mortality (RR 0·68, 0·57–0·80). This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths). Significant decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.

Which boils down to

• USAID funding saved nearly 92 million lives during the 21 years analyzed
• including over 30 million children under age 5
• as result of o USAID, 14 million people will die within 5 years—14 million preventable deaths
• and 14 is just the average—it could be as many as 19 million

So what’s my point?

Do not try to appeal to the administration or Congress’s better natures. They don’t have one. They understand power. The power we have is our voice and our vote. Use it. Thinks of the tens of millions of people—real people, with real lives—who are dying now and will die in the future because people like us gave those wing-pullers power. Take their power away. Please.

---

1. Possibly hundreds. So many I truly don’t know where to start. Pandemic readiness, science funding, space funding, climate research, Gaza, Ukraine, tariffs, climate regulations, the ACA… ︎
2. The full text, open access: do read it. ︎

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/02/pulling-the-wings-off-flies/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86530

In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.

I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:

Time to give her the Alpha Male rizzzzzzz, baby!

The ending was, unsurprisingly, also a cliche.

( Read more... )

I'm Kraka, I've been on Dreamwidth before under a different account that was mostly for fandom, but created a new account to journal and share about myself and my path. I'm past mid-40s and used to be on LiveJournal until they sold. I've been a pagan of some stripe for nearly 3 decades. Also am disillusioned with the Book of Faces and other more recent social media.

I'm currently solitary, but I worship mainly Greek and Norse (I know, no relation at all between the religions) with some French-Canadian folk magic and practices thrown in and a heavy dose of animism. I will be studying with a group, starting in September. I used to be part of an Eclectic Wiccan "tradition", had my elevation to 2nd Degree and was teaching, but left due to realizing how toxic a group it really was. Funny how experience makes you realize people aren't what they seem to be on the surface. I've been sort of adrift since, and trying to find my footing again.

I love reading, writing, drawing and painting, learning new things, hiking and camping. I am obsessed with fountain pens and the inks for them, but don't have that extensive a collection because those things are not exactly cheap. I'm nostalgic for the 90s and early 2000s.

I am queer, happily married to my wife since 2017. We have a jenday conure who is almost 3 years old and is named Freyja (she is DNA tested female, since that species of parrots is not sexually dimorphic). She is a veritable toddler with wings.

I don't have icons yet, since I have just set up my account, but I intend to have some soon.

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/01/spear-audiobook-sale-4-99/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86450

It’s for sale on Audible worldwide for two weeks, starting today; I’m not sure about other platforms. But I hope so, because I loved doing the narration and I’m proud of it, and the more people who get to listen to it the happier I’ll be. And that’s a great price!

https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/07/01/spear-audiobook-sale-4-99/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=86450

The Earth is ruled by the authoritarian Mandate, which like all such governments is constantly alert for threats to its stability. This extends to its scientific research: although the Mandate has explored space and discovered a number of exoplanets (a few of which have some form of life), it still insists that scientific discoveries must support the philosophy of the Mandate, which holds that human beings are the pinnacle of creation and that other life forms must all be in the process of striving to achieve that same state of being.

Ecologist and xeno-ecologist Arton Daghdev chafes against both these mental manacles and the Mandate in general. Some time before the story opens, he becomes part of a cell of would-be revolutionaries. After discovery of his improper views and rebellious actions, he is sentenced to what is meant to be a short life assisting research on the planet Imno 27g, casually known as Kiln for the strange clusters of pottery buildings scattered over its surface.

Life as a prisoner on Kiln within the research enclave is brutal in all the ways any such prison can be, when the prisoners are nothing but human-shaped machinery to accomplish the goals of their jailers. The Mandate's leadership has absolute control over who among their prisoners lives or dies, and if anyone should harbor the intent to escape, the environment outside the base is all too lively. The death rate among the workers is appalling, but new shipments of convicted crooks and malcontents arrive all the time, so it hardly matters.

None of the weird aliens seem to be builders of the sort needed to create the clusters of mysterious structures or indeed intelligent in any way beyond, perhaps, the level of social insects on Earth. Yet somehow the small, dysfunctional cadre of scientists on Kiln must serve up the desired tidbits of discovery to keep their commandant happy with them: evidence that there once were intelligent humanoids on Kiln.

( Cut for more, including some spoilers )

I am an emotional person, and I want to like at least some of the characters about whom I'm reading. Daghdev is prickly, snarky, and fatalistic — but then, he has cause. He's also an unreliable narrator who only reveals to the reader what he wants, when he wants. The situation is really excruciating: people with a deep dislike of body horror might want to avoid this book. And there is not, in fact, a happy ending (at least not IMO).

On the other hand, this is very well written. For me, it moved along at a fantastic clip, and when I went back to check some particulars for this write-up, I found myself reading far more than I had intended because the story caught me up again. Some of the scientific ideas reminded me of other works (Sue Burke's Semiosis surfaced in my thoughts a couple of time), and sometimes I was reminded of something more elusive, a source that I can't recall. Does anyone else who has already read this have thoughts on the book's likely ancestors?

From my viewpoint, this was one of the most "science fictional" of this year's finalists. I think it might be my first choice in the vote.

Title: To Hell & Back
Fandom: 双镜 | Couple of Mirrors (2021)
Music: To Hell & Back by Maren Morris
Summary: 'lucky for me, your kind of heaven's been to hell and back'
Notes: Premiered at Escapade 35.5.
Warnings: quick cuts and flashing lights, violence

AO3 | bsky | DW | tumblr | YouTube

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff



A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.


I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis



The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.


The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton



A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

 

This one has multiple genres.

Books for sale, mostly $1 to $3

Hit the "Genres" button at the top of the page to narrow your search.

Happy reading!

ETA: Jesse_the_k notes that "This is a meta-search engine, compiling deals from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google and Kobo." I didn't realize that was note-worthy, but yeah. Whatever platform you use to read, you're covered.