Commit to Your Bit: The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow (2025)

 Read this for a reading challenge. It's fine. In some ways, it reminds me of Sailor Nothing. Nested time travel, multiple epistolary bits, swapping narrators.

But, as I tell anyone who will listen: you gotta commit to the bit. Why do Una and Owen have almost the same voice? Why not work the multiple books angle (three in the first half dozen pages) more thoroughly? Why use the cipher only on the last page.

Harrow is a more technically proficient writer than Gagnes (at least circal 2000 Gagnes). Her research is there. There are fewer typos (though I'm sure Tor gave her a hand there). But Gagnes worked his weird meta shit more in one chapter than she does in a whole book.

Also, lame ass "hubrised by my own petard!" ending.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Image
 The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955) Bonus:  No, not that one. Summary: In the future, the gays will oppress the straights! Commentary: After the hamfisted "the racial minorities will oppress the Whites!" from last night, I remember the infamous story of the Playboy story about a gay society oppressing straight people. I looked it up, and I'm going to kick off this blog with it. I feel like the fact that it exists is a classic piece of trivia, but the story itself doesn't get a ton of recognition. It's also not really that good, existing only to serve the moral, and even then not doing a great job. It opens with the "men lusting for men" verse from Romans. I wonder (not sure you could get away with it in 1955) if it would be better with a flipped version of the verse, suggesting the Bible had been altered to support the new homosexual order. I do like that "queer" is not a slur for straight people, good flup there.  The gay world is, of ...
Read more

BSD Games

Image
 Why don't operating systems come with games anymore? Windows sort of has Solitaire still, but it's a bloated mess. Chrome has the dinosaur game, I guess. MacOS has Chess, which I guess is the realest game. I think most Linux distros ship with at least a couple by virtue of their desktop environment. I think my KDE install came with Mahjong, Solitaire, Minesweeper, maybe one or two more. I don't think any of the BSDs include the old bsdgames by default anymore. The internet leads me to believe OSX used to, back when it was closer to FreeBSD. Here's the list: https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games Rain is obviously the coolest: I dunno. On the one hand, Windows is so bloated these days, I get trying to cut stuff. On the other, I think at least a couple of decent games is good "out of the box" as part of a complete system. If we're pretending your OS is anything other than a web browser opener.
Read more

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Chapter 31

 Was thinking about doing something vaguely Halloweeny tonight, and remembered this chapter from Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury: Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night. That's it. That's the whole chapter! I remember thinking that was so cool the first time I read it. I should reread the whole book one of these days.
Read more