It must be because I never had a dog: On the Day You Spend Forever with your Dog is a short story that tries to roll heart-breaking dog love and (emotional) time travel into one, but fell flat for me.

A bit on the nose, but still nice: Sweatheart is a well-written very short story by Abbey Mei Otis that is first sweet and then chilling in the path the story takes – nothing too special either, just a perfectly fine scifi short.

This book is, of course, adorable in every way. The dorky bear with his friends in various stages being excitable, exuberant, worried, forgetful, depressed, busy, or superior are delightful and a neat way to keep a child entertained.

First CS Lewis since reading and intensely disliking Narnia as a kid. Was told he considered this his best work. Intrigued and prepared for the worst, very pleasantly surprised. Deep, uncanny stuff, some weird stuff – Jungian vibes throughout. Very fairytale, in the weird-unsafe-dark way. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Let this website attest that I like Sarah Pinsker a lot – I'm not a short story person in general, and I love hers. That said: I wasn't a fan of this book. Her usual skill with small scenes and emotional gut punches showed, but the plot was so extremely on the nose that I did my best not to eyeroll my way through it. Hard to engage with the cool characters when the plot is yelling its generic dystopia blah lecture at you. (tldr: Brain enhancement that some want, others not, peer pressure, hmmm, wonder if the sleazy bigcos will have our best interest at heart, unconvincing HAPPY GOOD END. The end.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Entertaining and fun. If I were more into the whole SCP aesthetic, this would be an easy 5/5 read. I found myself constantly busy anticipating the (somewhat repetitive) twists in the stories – who is forgetting what? Who has odd blind spots? etc. Which is somewhat the charm of the collection, but got tiresome. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Must have fallen down a progression fantasy hole somewhere. Not usually quite my genre, but when it's some of the better written free fiction out there (aka no typos, actual sentences, punctuation!), what can you do. It's pretty much Stardew Valley but xianxia. Guy is oblivious but ultra powerful through his connection to the land. He's kinda plopped into the world, but entirely unfazed. All his our-world Western commentary from a nice guy are taken as absolute teachings in a rigid society he's barely aware of. Fun for a bit, got a bit tiring after a while. The animals gaining a conscience were a nice touch. Didn't much care for the romance, but I'll say that it was handled well, not icky, and actually plausible and written from a male perspective, which is pretty unusual. Not sure I'll continue reading – I had fun, but grew tired of the haha-funny towards the end, so maybe one book was just enough for me. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Absolutely adorable. I read this when I was in the mood for wholesome short fic, and this take on a haunted house delivered 100%. It's plain fluff with some attempt at heartstring-tugs. Nothing more – but great at what it does. Highlights: The moment the house realises what makes haunted houses go evil – they don't want to be alone. Very Pratchettian in its intentions. And how adorable is its conviction that the tired, skeptic dad doesn't need to know that his nice new podcast room doesn't technically exist? This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Canticle by R.A. Salvatore is just D&D style fantasy. As you'd expect from the early 90s (no offense, present company excluded): It's pretty generic, with flat characters, badass fights, and a very good vs evil outlook on life. It is not, however a Canticle for Leibowitz, no matter what the epub metadata claimed. I was so very confused. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Okay look. Dragonriders? A whole social group structured around dragons?!! A whole society slowly losing their belief in the ancient threat that made them support and accept the dragon riders? It sounds so, so good. But. The book, first part in the intimidatingly long Pern series, was a decent read, but shows its age in some meh ways and in some other actively uncomfortable ways. I know the 60s were a different time, but also, Babel-17 was published two years before this book, so I'm not inclined to be too understanding. The gender roles are beyond lazy and verge into terrible (I kept expecting subversion because this could not possibly be serious). All the women kinda suck, including the protagonist, and I don't even want to go into the way sex is handled. Yikes. Y i k e s. The worldbuilding is great and fun, and I want more. The harpers? The ancient traditions showing that spacefaring humans came to Pern and engineered dragons to protect against the extraterrestrial treat? All that slaps. But then there's the plot. It's a bit all over the place, I believe because the book was made up from different stories, which is fine. But why, why the time travel? I'm not sure I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about the arbitrary rules of time travel for 23 more books. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

All my notes are lost to a hardware disaster, so the tl;dr is just: material pop-science, fun read, drags on in places. Nice without being great. The chapters on steel and chocolate were great, the one on concrete could have been great but instead was grating. All in all cool info, presented well, if you can stand the voice. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

A solid scifi short story. I probably shouldn't be surprised at Clarke's knowledge of the Jesuits. At only four pages, it felt well-written (but not quite as moving as it wants to be). This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Adorable. Made me feel feelings, but found the ending unsatisfying. But the mysterious exchange by way of one of those free bookshelf libraries people put up outside their houese? Yeah, that was nice. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Brother, Sister and their inventor make a strange group. When their inventor is suddenly forced to leave without them, the giant, powerful beings are on their own – and are forced to learn things like morals, and lies. Beautifully written. The ending was a bit weak, but I can't bring myself to care when the rest was so good. Not adding the quotes to the quotes list because they don't make too much sense out of context: “Eve had had the knowledge of good and evil handed to her, but Sister had to create it for herself from first principles, and it went slowly.” “If she could no longer trust herself to speak the truth, that perhaps she would die. Her nanites might also learn to lie and then they would wreak falsehoods upon her metal shell.” This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Magic born in the silent movies, or rather, in the people reading out the dialog cards in movie theatres. Creative, fun, nice commentary on the power of language and editors (did Pinsker write this to appease her own editors? who knows). I'd have rated it higher from other authors, probably, but my standards for Pinsker are unreasonably high. Still a neat thing to read. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Horror is not my genre, so I feel out of my depth in reviewing this story. It stuck with me, though – I'm writing this review nine months after I read it, and I still remember the story, the characters (the lying protagonist, the creepy Uncle Bob of the even creepier TV show, and, oh dear, the hill). I'm not the biggest short story person, so "it stuck with me" and "wtf was this trip" is honestly as much as I can hope for. Not sure how she does it, but Pinsker's stories are just always so memorable. The story is available online. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Rabbits. One of those children's books that does also work for adults, but only while you make allowances for it being written for kids. I feel like I want to qualify everything with that sentence. Like: I did like the strong characters and how the storytelling managed to build an overarching sense of dread despite the episodic narrative. I liked the legends and myths, and how the rabbits (who would work just as well as aliens, lets be honest) are always being grounded in their behaviour, reflexes and needs. Maybe it's just that by now, 1970s sexism reads as jarring, or that 1970s environmental pessimism reads as factual, but the book never quite drew me in – I always knew I was reading a book, and analysing it as I went. Which isn't the worst thing to happen when you read a kids cult classic way too late. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

The Quantum Thief was amazing. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about what I should expect – a lot of the charm of The Quantum Thief was all about figuring out how the world works, while also keeping up with the absolute power and momentum of the characters involved – gods, gods who didn't know they were gods, their toys, their toys about to kill some gods, and so on. The Fractal Prince was … not terrible? It introduces another world for us to figure out, but we know so much of the background already that the story gets bogged down between a) figuring out the local mystery and how it fits into the larger picture, and b) making us guess what the inscrutable infinitely tricky gods of this world are planning in their multiple-personality war (which I didn't even attempt to solve, because it felt intentionally obscured). I did enjoy the backstory parts! But other than that, this book was a very pleasant drag. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

This is technical anthropology, and it is thorough and much better than you'd expect from a potentially dry dissertation from 1990, described as an “underground classic among ethnographers of work”. The central thesis of the book is that (technical) knowledge is a socially distributed resource that is transported by way of oral culture and that debugging works by constructing a narrative between technician, customer and machine. More details below, but this is both a central insight, well described and documented, and applicable to most areas of (work) life. Orr was shadowing Xerox technicians at their work of servicing and repairing photocopiers (helpfully, Orr had learnt this job, on slightly different machines, too, so he wasn't just an annoying nosy interloper). He initially describes their work as a “continuous highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine”, which very clearly demonstrates the respect and depth Orr displays throughout the book. He was only accompanying them during their work hours, there were no additional structured interviews. Debugging as narrative In Orr's experience, a diagnosis involves the creation of a coherent narrative explaining the problem, starting from available pieces of unintegrated information that is transformed into a coherent narrative. This narrative is both used to fix the problem, and to share the whole story of problem, diagnosis and fix with colleagues (see below). A significant part of the job is social. Extracting information from non-technical users, discovering their understanding, and then reflecting the technician's knowledge in a way that will shape the users' behaviour is tricky, and also always fraught with office politics, history, colleague's opinions and so on. They are very aware themselves that users are a large part of the equation – they even have a saying: “Don't fix the machine; fix the customer!” (Side note: I'm shorthanding Orr's “diagnosis and repair” to “debugging” here.) War stories Once a story has been formed by means of diagnosis, and performed by means of repair, it can be shared with the professional community. The tellers use it to build their identity (either of competence, when in the starring role, or as knowledgeable part of the community, when repeating somebody else's story). Stories are told in a very concise manner, as repeating obvious story elements would be superflous and mildly insulting to the listeners. It's assumed that all competent technicians will tell stories, both to display status, and to instruct. This comes with a certain civil competitiveness that manifests in one-upmanship in their stories about hard fixes, or challenges when the narrator only tells the problem, and asks the audience to provide diagnosis. This kind of one-upmanship, or challenge-response jokes, are only used in private, never in front of customers, where technicians present in a carefully controlled manner, and only joke at their own expense. This social cohesion also shows up in the interesting way that technicians are more worried about the social damage to another technician, when they have to take a job in their territory, than about the machine they are servicing, because they know full well that social relationships are harder to repair than machines. Knowledge as distributed resource Orr observes that the telling of debugging narratives both demonstrates and shares the technicians' mastery, creating and celebrating their identities (in this case: as masters of the black arts of dealing with machines and customers, both). They provide information about technical matters – past fixes, emerging problems, warnings of incorrect documentation –, but also social and administrative topics, like changes among customers, area distributions, and office politics. These stories, usually shared during meals, are necessary for the technicians to remain capable and perform their work. The official documentation is not always correct, and rarely sufficient. Well-known workarounds int he fields (starting with valid substitutes for individual parts and ending with MacGuyver style solutions to common problems) are only communicated here. On the nature of work It's interesting to see notes from a time when service work was still coming into its own. The remark that “Leftists routinely orient themselves to service work by assuming that service workers are a new proletariat even though most service workers apparently don't see themselves this way.” has aged well. This time also reflects that the technicians' status straddled both worlds: They were skilled workers dressed like office workers, ties and all, their tool boxes made to look like briefcases, while also performing dirty work, setting them apart from pure office workers. Orr also pointedly observes that this shift has also shifted the meaning of “to work” to have an added, possibly even primary, meaning of “to be employed” rather than “to do a thing”. Defining the job Another still very relevant comment is that the definition of work seems to be up to management, who focus on the activities required to deliver a product, and disregard other equally necessary activities, that need then to be snuck in by people on the ground. For example, there is no alotted time for services technicians to casually visit the clients, inquire as to the state of everything, provide quick checks and education. But these encounters are vital, and technicians take care to get them done despite their tenuous status as not-really-work. Orr also mentions that all the common management definitions of work are focused on individual workers, while the fact that work is commonly done by a group and an emergent professional community is rarely acknowledged. In this example, all work would be much, much worse or even impossible without the frequent shared lunches and exchanges of experience. However, no management would have classed those things as work. But that's not the only failure of management! They also tend to see technicians not as skilled workers (as they see themselves), but as easily replaced by semiskilled labour with a good set of instructions. This state is obviously advantageous to the company, and they try to produce and maintain it by providing worse documentation, dumbed down to a level that does not permit complex troubleshooting to emerge. So the second a problem diverges from the manual, it's again down to skill and shared oral tradition. Because intentional de-skilling cannot deprive workers of skills they have, it only reduces the amount of information they receive. When management attempts to de-skill and break up a community like that, it will resist in several ways. It may switch to "work-to-order" mode to show management what it would miss out on (in this case: only service machines according to the manual, not developing further fixes, and not maintaining customer relations). They may also devalue promotions heavily, preferring to remain a service technician rather than being promoted into in-house service or management. "This resistance can surprise employers who think of labor as a commodity that can be arranged to suit their ends." Other Notes I liked the apt description of the relationship between customers and technicians as the “contract between the customers' need and the technicians' ability”, and he goes on to describe the relationship: “The principal issues for the technicians in this triangular interaction are control and understanding, and one reward for achieving the two is their own identity as competent technicians.” Equally, I liked the observation that technicians have trouble reasoning about details of the machine when they can't see it in front of them. They can still figure out the larger scale problems, but they don't remember things like the location of individual components in the machine. They also sometimes leave the technical field and get promoted to be managers, but few succeed there, most return to being technicians: “Most technicians would rather remain a technician-hero than become an organization manager”. “The division between technician and senior technician is just one of seniority and salary; reputation and skill are not thought to be related to this distinction.” – things never change. And, how Marxian: “The occupational community shares few cultural values with the corporation; technicians from all over the country are much more alike than a technician and a salesperson from the same district.” “What really holds their interest is a situation they do not understand.” - haha, nerds. Machines are very much not all the same: technicians talk about the ones in their territories as individuals, with their specific histories, users, problems, anticipated problems, past fixes requiring special attention, and so on. And this kind of tricky detail is what really stood out to me: there is infinite complexity in detail, and you don't know the dimensions of complexity involved in any job until you have worked it or have had trusted conversations with people who work it. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

The Right Stuff is what you need to be an absolutely bonkers guy, who thinks that a 23% likelihood of dying in an accident on the job (as a soldier, so excluding any combat deaths) sounds great and fun. It's the story of fighter pilots, and how they became astronauts. Very journalistic in style, which meant both that it's very entertaining, and feels mildly untrustworthy whenever the author likes or dislikes one of the protagonists overly much. Notes Even in 1970, pilots had that 23% chance of dying in a non-combat accident (and combat deaths were at a catastrophic high during that time, in Vietnam). The resulting culture glorified unflinching certainty in the face of death, bravery, but also: alcohol, fast cars, avoiding or tricking doctors (who could ground you, possibly permanently, even for a thing like fallen arches), all kinds of idiocy. If a doctor told the group that pilots should never fly without a solid breakfast to keep their blood sugar up, the next day everybody would drink just a black coffee before their flight. Yup. Everybody who didn't stick around, who either flunked out, or decided to fly slower transport planes instead of fighter jets, was implicitly less worthy. Implicit rank was everything, and was established with the traditional means of big talk, hassling and racing, and idiotic stunts (like never, ever, calling in an emergency). Twelve hour drinking tours with dangerous flights the next morning, drunk driving – Wolfe paints a perfect picture of the idiocy of the young and immortal. All this is established tradition at the point the story really starts, and we get to see a bit of where the tradition comes from – the old guard, like Chuck Yeager. Mostly him, actually. Breaking speed records with two broken ribs out of sheer ego? Check. Lots of rivalry between the selected astronauts and the test pilots they used to be, with plenty of internal and external backstabbing (via the press): are astronauts national heroes or test subjects? The fight included wordings like “capsule” (passive, bad) vs “spacecraft” (active, heroic), and the redesign of the capsule so that it included real windows instead of just tiny portholes and periscopes. Or manual control, even, which wasn't initially meant to be included. Even more outrageously, they demanded to be able to open the hatch themselves from the inside! (All this with time pressure, political pressure, budget pressure.) We also get to see the realities of the press campaigns, of the individuals involved and their backstabbing and maneuvering, their home finances, their sudden fame, and so on. To be honest, of the seven, I lost track of the ones Wolfe clearly thought less important. He draws a beautiful background for everyone: family, faith, youth, and so on: but some are too similar, too eh. But the angling for the spot on the first flight and the handling of mistakes and tensions definitely triggered my gossip nerve, so I read it all. Presidents pressuring house wives for joint press appearances to make themselves look good? Yeah, that's the Right Stuff. I'd love to read a similar book for the early Soviet space program. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

A disappointing VSI book, this time around: light on substance, but heavy on the condescension. I'll list a couple of things that annoyed me (lest I start thinking I liked the book) and then some things I learnt: Annoyances “Even the word Europe is far from fixed. I shall use it to describe the westernmost part of a vast continental mass […].” – or write about Europe? Or call it Western Europe? A vast continental mass my arse. Uses so many words to say so little. I had hoped that a VSI book would be concise, and this is anything but. “In the course of the 14th century the religion born in Judaea, the offshoot of Judaism which for several centuries did not possess a name, became a growing and ultimately defining force—Christianity” – come on, really? Uses “barbarians” without qualification or irony (though at least not a lot). Notes Urban centres and commerce are later than I thought: England and France in the 12th century, Bohemia in the 13th and in the Baltics in the 14th century. Rennaissance people felt too high and mighty and so coined the term "Middle Ages" (gtfo Petrarch), and then the 19th century romantics rebelled against the 18th century enlightenment by celebrating the period (though also to go on with their whole nation state thing). In the Domesday book (1086), about 10% of the recorded population are slaves, and slaves and serfs are a established feature throughout the period, obligated to work on command and highly restricted in their ability to travel. Marriage tracks how far Christianity managed to take over culture, and how long it took to go from the Roman contract or the Germanic family enterprise to the religious/moral construct. Courts accepting the testimony of women give us unusual and early information on everyday worries, especially as they relate to relationships. Also, guild widows were allowed to carry on with their husband's work. Monasteries took their wealth not only from being given estates, but also from holding on to them over the centuries without having to split them up for multiple sons over and over again. (Makes total sense, but I never thought about it that way.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

More of the same, with the novelty worn off a bit. Some new interesting Roles (Bumbling Conjurer, Exiled Prince), and some hints at future escalation into less of the pedestrian wars with soldiers at borders and more of the world/universe crushing stuff. There's a lot of maneuvering against the protagonist's villainous nemesis, which I didn't really care about. But then, I didn't care about the big battles, either – I just hung around for the worldbuilding (which had some really good moments).

Web-serial that is generally not terrible! Takes place in a world with clear Good and Evil, with the protagonist an orphan in a country that was taken over by an Evil state. She starts her path to become a Villain to help her country, kinda? Complete with a mentor, a short stint at a school, and then some actual war. The morality on any of this is extremely iffy, but if you squint past that, it's decent enough fantasy fast food.

Second part of the Troy series, and I'm a bit less impressed (but still happy to read on!). Three new main characters are thrown into the mix (Andromache's lover, plus Kalliades and Banokles), in addition to the already established Helikaon and Odysseus. Through their eyes, we also get more information about Hector and Achilles.

Sherlock Holmes, just German and in the 1920s. If that sounds exciting to you, uh, here you go? I'm not kidding it's really straight up Sherlock, just in Cologne. There's a Mrs Hudson, the story is told from the point of view of his flatmate, a doctor returned from the army in the colonies, and they live together amid disputes about substance abuse in No 21B. Sherlock is talking incessantly about shoe soles instead of cigarette ashes, and they have to deal with a well-meaning but obviously wrong police officer, who invites them to the case only to not listen to them.

Sadly disappointing: Only the second book in a series that is currently up to eleven books and countless novellas, and it already feels like the series is out of ideas and just mushing things together. There are regular excursions (Jack the Ripper as weird monster hybrid in need of getting shot repeatedly), there are the enemies-in-time, there is the protagonist being temporarily Director of the institute in the future for a bit (!!), there is YET ANOTHER giant huge misunderstanding with her partner due to them not talking about things properly, going to absolutely ridiculous and uncalled-for lengths, then a Dodo hunt, and a bunch more side plots in case you were not feeling sufficiently entertained.

Word to the wise: this is not an "m/m fantasy romance". It's m/m, and it's fantasy, but mostly it's … slavery harem smut? I don't even know. Wouldn't have thought twice if this had been on AO3, but billed as fantasy, the lack of any serious reflection on the horrors or downsides of slavery, rape and oppression is a bit stunning. I'm guessing this is like a small-scale Fifty Shades thing, where people enjoy the horny parts and forget to also use their brain when later recommending the story to people.

Saying that the title has better writing than the rest of the book would be cruel and not quite true (but.) … I had hoped for better. This is basically a short story collection, taped together, which is always tricky because while your short story readers will want a basic recap of who's who and who did what, I really don't want that every 20 pages in a book.

More from the ever-same dramatic duo with the uncomfortably unhealthy Ds overtones. An old enemy returns for lack of interesting new ones, a new ally spawns in just to be hot and awesome. If not for the overly yikes and predictable parts, I might be interested to see where the series goes after escalating towards the end, but I think I'll stop here.

Surprisingly good: Crichton's version of Beowulf, told from the perspective of an Arab traveller who gets taken along on the famous journey. The book strikes a decent balance among several things: the voice of an old epos and modern pacing; displaying the clash between the two cultures while also being an adventure book; proposing plausible origins for the myth while also making them sound sufficiently magical. Neanderthals as the origin of Grendel were a particularly neat touch.

Very Zelazny – I had hoped, after liking Lord of Light a lot, that something similar would work equally well. And it's somewhat similar, superficially. Egypt religion instead of Indian, but regardless, high-powered gods with their own agendas, all that stuff.

Well, at least I'll learn to not trust /r/fantasy recommendations blindly. Praised as a really good piece of German Fantasy, where the author increased the tension by letting dice rolls decide the outcome of battles, I was cautiously optimistic.

City of Stairs was fun, and in a surprising way. To live up to it, the second part needed to be different – and it was, in a way. The narrative structure was a bit (very) close to the last book: civil servant gets shunted off to the continent, figures out that all is not as it seems, and that behind nasty local politics there is some old divinity, thought to be dead, is at work.

This is how The Expanse ends: not with a bang, not with a whisper, but with an appropriately depressing finale. It all wraps around back to the beginning, and it's just as bad as you'd think, and then some. How well this book will work for you depends pretty much on how much this series has hurt you in the previous books (as in: how much you love the characters). It's not the strongest book in the series, but it's a satisfying ending, and I didn't dare to hope for even that.

Second part to the series started in Orconomics, this book toned down its predecessor's drawbacks … but also its features. It has lessed forced humour, but also less actually emotional content. It's told at a slight distance, and turns into a mediocre blob instead of Orconomics and its mix of really good and really meh.

MORE gay Victorian (well, Gaslamp) magicians, will it ever stop? This one at least doesn't follow the cookie-cutter for the genre: no nobility, and magic is well-known and accepted, so there's an actual industry and civil services. Magic has actual rules, and a lot of it seems to be grammar-based, and people can, for example, take educated guesses about a magician's schooling (Oxford vs Cambridge styles) – but only guesses, not enough to be actually important clues, which I thought was a nice show of restraint.

Popcorn read: Victorian encounters with the paranormal continue, but this time it's in the US. A timid philologist from a wealthy family (have to do without nobility in the US, after all) meets a Dresden-style magician for hire. They need to solve a mystery that has its solution foreshadowed so strongly, I nearly couldn't see the text under all the shadow.

More Victorian urban history queer romance with an aristocrat with evil family and a lower-class magician – please somebody tell my why this is such a huge thing. I could do without the repetitiveness and the everything while just enjoying parts of the setting.

I wanted to learn more about Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit who contributed significantly to the Gregorian calendar reform, which is a standing interest of mine. It turns out that this book intentionally avoids that topic, to talk more about cosmology and how the intellectual state of the art was just before Galileo happened to it.

After reading Three Parts Dead in preparation, it was time to read this book – part five in the series that Three Parts Dead starts, but also the direct follow-up. I hadn't remembered the characters at all: Abelard, the mechanic monk, and Tara, the craftswoman who, in the end, decided to leave the industry and work for the Church of Kos, for little money, because she's needed.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone was just straight up enjoyable Fantasy. We get magic, and gods, and … magic lawyers? Dabbling in magic means dabbling in contracts, so our protagonist has clients (or, well, her employer does), and there is a lot of quibbling going on – of the kind that can cost you your mind, or your life. And the God of Fire (and therefore steam) has an engine room and priests that are more techies than anything else – except that their maintenance and debugging cycles include prayers and worship as well as fixing pipes and monitoring heat output. Yessss. Take the phrase "theological engineering" and go read.

Damn, this book could have been so good. But it falls into the trap of having extremely good worldbuilding and then being unable to back it up with an equally good plot. It's a shame, because the premise is so much fun:

The rest of this series was so good, but the last part just wasn't. It's backstory, in a way, but more importantly it sees itself as just backstory. Nobody gets any depth, everything is narrated as if this was the Silmarillion, family histories are recited as if we're in competition with the Old Testament … and then, emotionally important moments are skipped and mentioned in passing. Yikes.

Series continues to be good, with a few caveats: Tons of side characters being treated well means massively slower story progress. General competency porn continues, but the Latin somehow got worse (while the complaints about bad Latin, in-text, remained), which is mildly infuriating. Somebody explain to the author what a Vocative is, please.

More side characters come in to get a role, which is oddly satisfying. The Latin manages to get worse somehow, and for a while, everything looks pretty repetetive, but then we get open war, so I won't complain too much.

Novella, filling in some more backstory stuff. I'm not super well-versed in 14th-15th century Spain and France, so I spent half the time on Wikipedia. Generally entertaining, but too much is already known through previous and later story elements; and the author does not share Vonnegut's skill at telling you the ending, then making you care about how you get there. (Unsurprising and completely fair – asking for Vonnegut when reading fanfics is stupid).

More backstory, more carefully researched historical fiction. Well, some is inaccurate in minor details, but on the level of getting one of the historical lords of Orkney wrong, which seems to be a cruel thing to count against a fanfic. Thanks to checking the story, also need to complain about the list of English (Wessex) kings with creative names such as Æthelred, Æthelstan, Ælfweard, Ælfwynn, Æthelwold, Æthelhelm, Æthelberht, Æthelbald, Æthelwulf …

Back to the present timeline, this (long) part of the ongoing series proves fun, and dazzles with payoff. Plus, a new (mature, unexcited, beautiful) romance side-story. And then there's the extremely slow-building (4th long ) power gradient involving the British monarchy ffs (Elizabeth turns to Nizar. “Now then. What are your intentions regarding my kingdom, Lord Nizar?”).

This part of the series goes all in on historical fiction: It follows the backdrop of Rowena Ravenclaw, who is really called Hrodwunn of Hrabanklawa, Bavaria. We get some alright character building, and more importantly, some really fun historical fiction: Hrodwunn is friends with Theophanu, the wife of Otto II, and so her fate ist connected to the complex fate of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. It's well-researched and all kinds of fun (plus, part of it takes place in Quedlinburg).