tethered to a burning sphere

Owing to a combination of factors—reading a ton of fan fiction, loads of rereading (which I don’t track), lots of reading in Russian, lots of Fallen London—my number of new-to-me books for the year was lower than usual, but here they are:

( Books read in 2025 )

Also some stuff I read a solid chunk of but did not finish (I don’t formally track these but was reminded since I went to go through my Kindle to check if there was stuff I forgot to add to Goodreads):

( Books partially read in 2025 )

Still really want to finish writing up at least a few thoughts about the Steerswoman books, which were 10/10 INCREDIBLE and included what might be one of my favorite sci-fi plot developments I’ve ever come across in anything, and also about the last book in Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought series, which left me really wanting to write a fix-it fic (so maybe I should do that instead, except I’m fairly certain that it would have an audience of exactly 0, lol). Also should jot down some thoughts about Dead Hand Rule, which was so much fun! Maybe this month sometime if I can muster the spoons (optimism, always optimism).

Happy New Year to everyone <3

If you gave me your address your postcard is now in the post!

This week Gregory and I finally watched Season 2 of Andor, and I had this whole post lined up in my head after episode 8 about how it’s Not Good but I can be chill about it, since after all Season 1 was so much better than my wildest dreams that it doesn’t even matter if this one bombs, though I did still want to talk about what the issues were and how the season should have been handled to provide an effective connecting narrative between S1 and Rogue One...

...And then tonight we watched the last four episodes (the last three apparently written by Tom Bissell, a self-proclaimed Star Wars geek (...)) and those episodes were so absolutely, full-on unwatchably bad that actually I’m not chill about this, I’m viscerally offended by this crime against Rogue One in general and Cassian Andor in particular, holy fucking shit, that was TERRIBLE. Like, “had to stop actually watching and open another window to get through the last 30 minutes,” “wish I could drink alcohol” levels of terrible, just. WOW.

So actually I am not going to write that post today, I am going to go rinse out my brain and take a break from thinking about Star Wars! And possibly tomorrow I will write my essay about what S2 might have looked like from writers who actually understood the themes of......anything.....or even just basic narrative cohesion.....honestly, I’m not sure even filming during the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes with no involvement from Gilroy for 6+ months is sufficient to explain the results here, holy incompetence by committee Batman.

Part 3 of notes on recent reads:

Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Michael J. Collins
Memoir of a surgical resident at the Mayo Clinic. This was well-written and variously entertaining or existential but so full of casual old-school sexism, ugh. Not exactly surprising, since judging by the pop culture references and the fact that this guy had coworkers who’d been in Vietnam the memoir’s timeframe must be the ’70s, but still kind of exhausting. I was also kind of appalled by an anecdote of doing bone screws without anesthesia that came out to a moral of “we do what we can and it sucks that sometimes people get severe medical trauma” because actually, like, I do think that one was entirely the fault of the surgeon who went “it’s fine he’s already in pain” and (presumably this is the real reason, even if unstated) “general anesthesia for a quick procedure is too expensive”… Anyway, my core takeaway between reading this book and scrolling through a bunch of r/Residency a while back is that residents everywhere desperately need to unionize, because judging from the available evidence there is simply no valid reason to be literally working new doctors to death. (At least the hours this guy was working appear to be illegal now per ACGME, but then apparently those limitations are basically the opposite of enforced…)

The Owl Service, Alan Garner
Asked the library to get this a while back and remembered nothing whatsoever about it by the time they did, so was very disconcerted to discover that the titular owl service is not an organization of owls but a set of plates with owls on them, lol. Anyway: this was extremely Welsh and very sharply class-conflict-aware and really, really interesting; Garner has an extremely bare narrative style that leaves it to the reader to pull the meaning out of what’s happening or being said 100% of the time and never does any direct exposition, which is something I’ve never encountered before and found fascinating to read. (Though this did make a fairly pivotal paragraph in the ending borderline incomprehensible to me; I reread it about three times and then went and read a paper and some blog posts about the ending, which confirmed that I’d parsed the overall gist of the finale correctly but didn’t address those particular lines. I’m assuming the idea here is that ( spoilers )

Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami
The Rat series #3. The love interest from the previous book does finally get a name in this one, god, small mercies. That being said, for a book literally titled Dance Dance Dance Murakami’s protagonist spends a truly excessive amount of time aimlessly spinning his wheels; honestly kind of a slog, though it had its moments with the two main characters besides the narrator (the moody twelve-year-old girl with the neglectful celebrity parents and ( spoilers )

Overall my verdict on this one was that it’s kind of a mess, the resolution with the romance at the end felt really hackneyed + not compelling at all after the build-up with the Sheep Man.

The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed
Finally posted the rest of my language notes. I liked the ending culminating in ( spoilerish )

Yu-Gi-Oh, Kazuki Takahashi (everything up until Millennium World, which I haven’t finished yet)
Reread for the first time since grade school because that’s just the kind of year I’m having, this series remains absolutely deranged and a delight, enjoyed it a lot. Reading it as an adult one really does get the feeling that Atem came out of his 3000 years of imprisonment inside the Millennium Puzzle absolutely feral and proceeded to totally overdo it with punishing Yugi’s various bullies with shadow games, oml. ( cut for length )

Part 2 (of 3, now, felt like it made sense to break off this batch of DWJs into their own thing) of notes on recent books:

Cart and Cwidder, Diana Wynne Jones
Liked Moril’s reaction to his own actions at the end of this, and the way he realizes/absorbs pieces of what was going on with Clennen and Lenina (both separately and together) that he’d never noticed prior to ( spoilers )

Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones
DWJ writes sailing so clearly and coherently that I am now of course dying to know if she did sail! Her descriptions of how the tiller and boom/sail affect the motion and stability of the boat + how the boat responds to things like currents, shallows, turns, big waves feel very real; there’s a big section of the book where the protagonist kids run away aboard a small racing sailboat and eventually get caught in a storm, and the environment in that part is such an integral part of the storytelling, I can’t imagine pulling that off if you don’t personally know how a small sailboat handles/feels in the water. Really enjoyed reading that, it’s never boring and (obviously, since this is a children’s book) not over-the-top technical like you get with Patrick “need to consult a martime glossary just to make sense of what’s happening in this paragraph” O’Brian, lol.

The Spellcoats, Diana Wynne Jones
I was NOT expecting this to be as good as it turned out to be, wow, this honestly might be one of her best. Absolutely genius use of the first person and in-universe language, loved the narrator’s very unique voice (and the way it was very clearly In Translation!) and the whole concept of the story being told through the spellcoats (the temporal arrangement of the events vs. the storytelling! the narrator looking back at her own narrative to figure out what she’s doing! the specific way in which she narrated an event turning out to be salient to the story!! the fact that she explicitly tells us she’s leaving out lots of dialogue!). Amazing execution, terrific ending and in-universe postscript, DWJ really knocked it out of the park with this one. A narrative confection.

The Crown of Dalemark, Diana Wynne Jones
I had a ton of fun reading this, I love everyone in this bar (Navis!!! Maewen and Moril and Mitt and Kialan! everybody is so good, so many of their interactions are so good), but definitely felt like the plot got away from DWJ towards the end; ( spoilers and also me screaming because [redacted]’s plot thread is somehow the SINGLE SADDEST THING DWJ HAS EVER WRITTEN, oh my god??? )

Reading The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed and while I have various other thoughts on this book the thing I really need to drop a flyby comment about is that Reed’s Russian is the wildest combination of well-researched and totally wrong that I have ever seen, lol. I guess this is what you get writing from a place of “I researched this, but I don’t speak it and online translators don’t exist yet”?

E.g.: Absolutely knocked out by a female character being addressed as “tovarisha” (cursed, women are also addressed as “tovarish,” the word “comrade” is gender neutral,* that’s, like, the whole ideological shtick) and especially by the following exchange, which on the one hand manages to use an obscure Russian idiom absolutely correctly in context, and on the other hand mistranslates it so completely that it loses all meaning in English:

“Thank you.” I sat down, relief stinging my eyes. “I should have known. I guess I’m a little paranoid—oh, all right, I’m a lot paranoid. A felon on News One has to be. If one hint of my past made it out on the Net, I’d disappear, you know, kak korova yazykom menya slizala.”

“Like a what?”

I smiled, grateful for the change of subject. “As though a cow had licked me with its tongue. Meaning completely. The way you do when you run afoul of the Weavers.”

It’s not “as though a cow had licked me with its tongue,” it’s “as though a cow’s tongue had licked me away” (or, less precisely but more appropriately: “as though a cow had licked me up”) i.e., caused her to disappear, the way something does when lapped up by the huge tongue of a cow!

By no means the most consternation-inducing thing in this book but very predictably KILLING ME because of who I am as a person,

* Russian Wikipedia informs me that the actual feminine form оf this word is “tovarka,” which I’d never heard before due to the aforementioned reason of “tovarish” being used regardless of gender! (Both when used as an official form of address and in the colloquial sense of “mate/friend.”)

Pirate porn?? In 2025?? Boss, it’s the fascism,

(Also, having posted exclusively to minuscule-to-midsize fandom tags for the past 5 years watching this rack up fully 100 kudos in less than 24 hours has been absolutely wild, my god but pirate fandom has reached behemoth proportions over the past few years. Terrifying!)

---

didn’t even know you got the midas touch — 4,700 words, Monkey D. Luffy/Trafalgar Law, porn without plot, pain kink, praise kink, kink discovery.

The third time they wind up in bed, Law realizes that if he doesn’t do something soon he’ll be condemning himself to an endless series of throttled orgasms.

Law needs pain to get off.

A few nights ago I learned about ship’s bell time via the extremely roundabout process of: came across the term «склянки» in a Russian text, used in a phrase to the effect of “it was two склянки shipboard time”; Googled «две склянки» because I had no idea what this meant; got a Russian webpage telling me this was derived from hourglasses and providing a bunch of quotes translated from English literature, including one from Treasure Island; pulled a copy of Treasure Island from Project Gutenberg; found the English version of the translated sentence, which uses “three bells” to refer to “half past one”; Googled about ship’s bell timekeeping…

…All of which had me thinking that the Russian webpage was just wrong, but then it occurred to me that, of course, 30-minute increments for the ship’s bell necessarily would be kept by hourglass, it’s just that the Russian sailing terminology for a half-hour interval refers to the shipboard hourglass itself, while English refers to the resulting strike of the bell. I love language differences like this.

Finished the singable translation of «Наш дом» / “Our House” by Mashina Vremeni! (O.g. song: Spotify, Youtube.) Still struggling along with the other song but I’m so pleased with how this one turned out, the verses lined up just right.

The funny thing about translating this song is that in the original there are places where the sentences/phrases are broken up very weirdly around the (audible) linebreaks to achieve rhymes, or have an unusual word order to fit that scheme… Which ironically ends up producing phrases that work much better in English / provides sufficient syllable space to not have to break up the English phrases in a manner that would be nonsensical, lol.

Anyway, the lyrics of this one truly speak to my hermit heart, it’s such a charming concept for a love song (and an unusual one, I think? at least, I can’t think of another love song on this theme offhand). The promise of shared solitude, with every possible measure to ensure that everyone else on the planet leaves you alone! Which is maybe a very Russian sort of sentiment, talk about the desires of people who perpetually lack living space…

Warning for loud volume, probably.

( Our House, English singable lyrics )

And by way of notes a literal translation side-by-side with the original, showing where the actual phrase/linebreaks are versus the audible ones and the Russian word order:

( Our House, literal translation )

Finished reading Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky last night [on May 2, posting way after I wrote most of this as always] and it was so good, I enjoyed all 900 pages and the execution so much, he absolutely needed all of that space and he used it so well!

The premise of this story is that two groups of explorers + intergalactic traders have traveled to a distant planet (in cryosleep, because there’s no FTL travel) around a star that turns on and off, cyclically, so that it shines for 30 years and then turns off for 200; there’s a civilization of sentient spider-people on the planet, and the explorers end up (for spoiler reasons) having to wait around for those spiders to achieve sufficient industrialization to make First Contact, trading off cryosleep watches so that most people only use up a few years of their lives on the wait rather than a full 40. Part of the story is about the conflict among the two groups of explorers/traders and the other is about the spiders on the planet, who are busy fighting Spider World War I when we meet them and rapidly advance to splitting the atom.

And of course as always compsci professor nerd man had his third eye absolutely wide open, one of the key pieces of sci-fi tech in this story is literally ambient IoT, the only reason I even know what that is is because I just recently filed a case for someone who’s working on making this real:

…

Trinli stood so they could all see him over the top of the lens-shaped gad­get. “This is the ba­sic Qeng Ho lo­cal­izer—nor­mally em­bed­ded in pro­tec­tive bar­ri­ers, and so on. But see, in a be­nign en­vi­ron­ment—even out­side in the shade—it is quite self-suf­fi­cient.”

“Power?” said Reynolt.

Trinli waved his hand dis­mis­sively. “Just pulse them with mi­crowaves, maybe a dozen times a sec­ond. I don’t know the de­tails, but I’ve seen them used in much larger num­bers on some projects. I’m sure that would give finer con­trol. As for sen­sors, these pup­pies have sev­eral sim­ple things built in—tem­per­a­ture, light lev­els, son­ics.”

This, also, is both a) so topical right now, my god but people who fall for the generative AI hype could stand to learn this and b) so very much the theorizing of a computer science professor, lol:

“The word for all this is ‘ma­ture pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment.’”

“What spe­cialty do we need the most, Bret?”

Trinli rolled his eyes. “You mean that can bring us the most in­come? Ob­vi­ously: Pro­gram­mer-Arche­ol­o­gist.”

The ques­tion was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever be­come one? By now, the boy could use al­most all the stan­dard in­ter­faces. He even thought of him­self as a pro­gram­mer, and po­ten­tially a ship’s mas­ter. With the stan­dard in­ter­faces, one could fly the Reprise, ex­e­cute plan­e­tary or­bit in­ser­tion, mon­i­tor the cold­sleep coffins—

“And if any­thing goes wrong, you’re dead, dead, dead” was how Sura fin­ished Pham’s litany of prow­ess. “Boy, you have to learn some­thing. It’s some­thing that chil­dren in civ­i­liza­tion of­ten are con­fused about, too. We’ve had com­put­ers and pro­grams since the be­gin­ning of civ­i­liza­tion, even be­fore space­flight. But there’s only so much they can do; they can’t think their way out of an un­ex­pected jam or do any­thing re­ally cre­ative.”

“But—I know that’s not true. I play games with the ma­chines. If I set the skill rat­ings high, I never win.”

“That’s just com­put­ers do­ing sim­ple things, very fast. There is only one im­por­tant way that com­put­ers are any­thing like wise. They con­tain thou­sands of years of pro­grams, and can run most of them. In a sense, they re­mem­ber ev­ery slick trick that Hu­mankind has ever de­vised.”

Bret Trinli sniffed. “Along with all the non­sense.”

Sura shrugged. “Of course. Look. What’s our crew size—when we’re in-sys­tem and ev­ery­body is up?”

“One thou­sand and twenty-three,” said Pham. He had long since learned ev­ery phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Reprise and this voy­age.

“Okay. Now, sup­pose you’re light-years from nowhere—”

Trinli: “You don’t have to sup­pose that, it’s the pure truth.”

“—and some­thing goes wrong. It takes per­haps ten thou­sand hu­man spe­cial­ties to build a star­ship, and that’s on top of an enor­mous cap­i­tal in­dus­try base. There’s no way a ship’s crew can know ev­ery­thing it takes to an­a­lyze a star’s spec­trum, and make a vac­cine against some wild change in the bac­try, and un­der­stand ev­ery de­fi­ciency dis­ease we may meet—”

“Yes!” said Pham. “That’s why we have the pro­grams and the com­put­ers.”

“That’s why we can’t sur­vive with­out them. Over thou­sands of years, the ma­chine mem­o­ries have been filled with pro­grams that can help. But like Bret says, many of those pro­grams are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are pre­cisely ap­pro­pri­ate for our needs.” She paused, looked at Pham sig­nif­i­cantly. “It takes a smart and highly trained hu­man be­ing to look at what is avail­able, to choose and mod­ify the right pro­grams, and then to in­ter­pret the re­sults prop­erly.”

Pham was silent for a mo­ment, think­ing back to all the times the ma­chines had not done what he re­ally wanted. It wasn’t al­ways Pham’s fault. The pro­grams that tried to trans­late Can­ber­ran to Nese were crap. “So…you want me to learn to pro­gram some­thing bet­ter.”

Sura grinned, and there was a barely sup­pressed chuckle from Bret. “We’ll be sat­is­fied if you be­come a good pro­gram­mer, and then learn to use the stuff that al­ready ex­ists.”

Pham Nuwen spent years learn­ing to pro­gram/ex­plore. Pro­gram­ming went back to the be­gin­ning of time. It was a lit­tle like the mid­den out back of his fa­ther’s cas­tle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten me­ters down, there were the crum­pled hulks of ma­chines—fly­ing ma­chines, the peas­ants said—from the great days of Can­berra’s orig­i­nal colo­nial era. But the cas­tle mid­den was clean and fresh com­pared to what lay within the Reprise’s lo­cal net. There were pro­grams here that had been writ­ten five thou­sand years ago, be­fore Hu­mankind ever left Earth. The won­der of it—the hor­ror of it, Sura said—was that un­like the use­less wrecks of Can­berra’s past, these pro­grams still worked! And via a mil­lion mil­lion cir­cuitous threads of in­her­i­tance, many of the old­est pro­grams still ran in the bow­els of the Qeng Ho sys­tem. Take the Traders’ method of time­keep­ing. The frame cor­rec­tions were in­cred­i­bly com­plex—and down at the very bot­tom of it was a lit­tle pro­gram that ran a counter. Sec­ond by sec­ond, the Qeng Ho counted from the in­stant that a hu­man had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the start­ing in­stant was ac­tu­ally about fif­teen mil­lion sec­onds later, the 0-sec­ond of one of Hu­mankind’s first com­puter op­er­at­ing sys­tems.

So be­hind all the top-level in­ter­faces was layer un­der layer of sup­port. Some of that soft­ware had been de­signed for wildly dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Ev­ery so of­ten, the in­con­sis­ten­cies caused fa­tal ac­ci­dents. De­spite the ro­mance of space­flight, the most com­mon ac­ci­dents were sim­ply caused by an­cient, mis­used pro­grams fi­nally get­ting their re­venge.

“We should re­write it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura, not look­ing up. She was pre­par­ing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days try­ing to root a prob­lem out of the cold­sleep au­to­ma­tion.

“It’s been tried,” cor­rected Bret, just back from the freez­ers. “But even the top lev­els of fleet sys­tem code are enor­mous. You and a thou­sand of your friends would have to work for a cen­tury or so to re­pro­duce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you fin­ished, you’d have your own set of in­con­sis­ten­cies. And you still wouldn’t be con­sis­tent with all the ap­pli­ca­tions that might be needed now and then.”

Sura gave up on her de­bug­ging for the mo­ment. “The word for all this is ‘ma­ture pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment.’ Ba­si­cally, when hard­ware per­for­mance has been pushed to its fi­nal limit, and pro­gram­m­mers have had sev­eral cen­turies to code, you reach a point where there is far more sig­ni­cant code than can be ra­tio­nal­ized. The best you can do is un­der­stand the over­all lay­er­ing, and know how to search for the odd­ball tool that may come in handy—take the sit­u­a­tion I have here.” She waved at the de­pen­dency chart she had been work­ing on. “We are low on work­ing fluid for the coffins. Like a mil­lion other things, there was none for sale on dear old Can­berra. Well, the ob­vi­ous thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by di­rect ra­di­a­tion. We don’t have the proper equip­ment to sup­port this—so lately, I’ve been do­ing my share of arche­ol­ogy. It seems that five hun­dred years ago, a sim­i­lar thing hap­pened af­ter an in-sys­tem war at Torma. They hacked to­gether a tem­per­a­ture main­te­nance pack­age that is pre­cisely what we need.”

Also, the key evil piece of tech in this story is Focus, which is—genuinely, word-for-word, I cannot sufficiently stress how accurately Vinge describes this—artificially-induced ADHD hyperfocus, which is used to enslave people and use them as human automation. Dying to know whether Vinge was aware that this was what he was wrote, because on the one hand there’s one scrap of dialogue that makes me think that he wasn’t, and on the other hand it’s such a 1:1 description of 50% of my life (especially now that I have a writing-based job, which means I’m trapped in the hyperfocus depths for hours upon hours every day) that I have to wonder if he was writing from personal experience of what it was like to be engaged in his work, including the negative effects. (In general, I almost regret that I didn’t read these books sooner, because I would have loved to be able to write to him about them! Alas.)

But!! My very favorite thing about this story was how Vinge rendered the species of never-contacted-by-humans-before spider-aliens and their language, because what he did was so odd that I spent the first 250 pages of this book wondering about it—the way he introduces them initially really makes you double-take, because the descriptions are bafflingly human and earthlike—and then the book explicitly addressed all of my questions, and indeed also the questions I’d had about how he’d handled alien-language-rendered-as-English in the last book, too. I love it so much, here’s the whole section about that (arguably spoilery since experiencing the weirdness followed by the book explaining it to you is imo an essential part of the reading experience / what it’s doing as a text, but I’ve got to excerpt it at least for myself). For context, the characters are working on learning the spider-aliens’ language while waiting for them to achieve sufficient industrialization, Trixia is a translator who’s been given the artificially-induced ADHD hyperfocus:

“So you’re say­ing that she’s achiev­ing a higher level of trans­la­tion, giv­ing us in­sight by trad­ing on our own self-aware­ness.”

Much of the time, Trixia sat in the semi­dark­ness, lis­ten­ing and speak­ing her trans­la­tions at the same time. Sev­eral of the trans­la­tors worked in that mode, scarcely more than au­toma­tons. Trixia was dif­fer­ent, Vinh liked to think: like the oth­ers, she an­a­lyzed and re­an­a­lyzed, but not to in­sert a dozen ex­tra in­ter­pre­ta­tions be­neath ev­ery syn­tac­tic struc­ture. Trixia’s trans­la­tions seemed to reach for the mean­ing as it was in the minds of the speak­ers, in minds for which the Spi­der world was a nor­mal, fa­mil­iar place. Trixia Bon­sol’s trans­la­tions were…art.

Art was not what Anne Reynolt was look­ing for. At first she had only lit­tle things to com­plain about. The trans­la­tors chose an al­ter­na­tive or­thog­ra­phy for their out­put; they rep­re­sented the x* and q* glyphs with di­graphs. It made their trans­la­tions look very quaint. For­tu­nately, Trixia wasn’t the first to use the bizarre scheme. Un­for­tu­nately, she orig­i­nated far too much of the ques­tion­able nov­elty.

One ter­ri­ble day, Reynolt threat­ened to bar Ezr from Trixia’s work­room—that is, from Trixia’s life. “What­ever you’re do­ing, Vinh, it’s mess­ing her up. She’s giv­ing me fig­u­ra­tive trans­la­tions. Look at these names: ‘Sherkaner Un­der­hill,’ ‘Jay­bert Lan­ders.’ She’s throw­ing away com­pli­ca­tions that all the trans­la­tors agree on. In other places she’s mak­ing up non­sense syl­la­bles.”

“She’s do­ing just what she should be do­ing, Reynolt. You’ve been work­ing with au­toma­tons too long.” One thing about Reynolt: Though she was crass even by Emer­gent stan­dards, she never seemed vin­dic­tive. She could even be ar­gued with. But if she barred him from see­ing Trixia…

Reynolt stared at him for a mo­ment. “You’re no lin­guist.”

“I’m Qeng Ho. To make our way, we’ve had to un­der­stand the heart of thou­sands of hu­man cul­tures, and a cou­ple of non­hu­man ones. You peo­ple have mucked around this small end of Hu­man Space, with lan­guages based on our broad­casts. There are lan­guages that are enor­mously dif­fer­ent.” “Yes. That’s why her grotesque sim­pli­fi­ca­tions are not ac­cept­able.”

“No! You need peo­ple who truly un­der­stand the other side’s minds, who can show the rest of us what is im­por­tant about the aliens’ dif­fer­ences. So Trixia’s Spi­der names look silly. But this ‘Ac­cord’ group is a young cul­ture. Their names are still mostly mean­ing­ful in their daily lan­guage.”

“Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spi­der talk merges given names and sur­names, that in­ter-phona­tion trick.”

“I’m telling you; what Trixia is do­ing is fine. I’ll bet the given names are from older and re­lated lan­guages. No­tice how they al­most make sense, some of them.”

“Yes, and that’s the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Ami­nese. These Ladille units—‘hours,’ ‘inches,’ ‘min­utes’—they just make for awk­ward read­ing.”

Ezr had his own prob­lems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn’t go­ing to ad­mit that to Reynolt. “I’m sure Trixia sees things that re­late to her cen­tral trans­la­tion the way Ami­nese and Ladille re­late to the Nese you and I speak.”

Reynolt was silent for a long mo­ment, va­cantly star­ing. Some­times that meant that the dis­cus­sion was over, and she had just not both­ered to dis­miss him. Other times it meant that she was try­ing very hard to un­der­stand. “So you’re say­ing that she’s achiev­ing a higher level of trans­la­tion, giv­ing us in­sight by trad­ing on our own self-aware­ness.”

It was a typ­i­cal Reynolt anal­y­sis, awk­ward and pre­cise. “Yes! That’s it. You still want the trans­la­tions with all the point­ers and ex­cep­tions and caveats, since our un­der­stand­ing is still evolv­ing. But the heart of good trad­ing is hav­ing a gut feel for the other side’s needs and ex­pec­ta­tions.”

Reynolt had bought the ex­pla­na­tion. In any case, Nau liked the sim­pli­fi­ca­tions, even the Ladille quaint­ness. As time passed, the other trans­la­tors adopted more and more of Trixia’s con­ven­tions. Ezr doubted if any of the un­Fo­cused Emer­gents were re­ally com­pe­tent to judge the trans­la­tions. And de­spite his own con­fi­dent talk, Ezr won­dered more and more: Trixia’s meta-trans of the Spi­ders was too much like the Dawn Age his­tory he had pushed at her just be­fore the am­bush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr’s spe­cialty and he saw too many sus­pi­cious co­in­ci­dences.

Trixia con­sis­tently ig­nored the phys­i­cal na­ture of the Spi­ders. Maybe this was just as well, con­sid­er­ing the loathing that some hu­mans felt for spi­ders. But the crea­tures were rad­i­cally non­hu­man in ap­pear­ance, more alien in form and life cy­cle than any in­tel­li­gence yet en­coun­tered by Hu­mankind. Some of their limbs had the func­tion of hu­man jaws, and they had noth­ing ex­actly like hands and fin­gers, in­stead us­ing their large num­ber of legs to ma­nip­u­late ob­jects. These dif­fer­ences were all but in­vis­i­ble in Trixia’s trans­la­tions. There was an oc­ca­sional ref­er­ence to “a pointed hand” (per­haps the stiletto shape that a fore­leg could fold into) or to mid­hands and fore­hands—but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen trans­la­tions that were this soft, but those had been done by ex­perts with decades of face-to-face ex­pe­ri­ence with the Cus­tomer cul­ture.

Chil­dren’s ra­dio pro­gram­ming—at least that’s what Trixia thought it was—had been in­vented on the Spi­der world. She trans­lated the show’s ti­tle as “The Chil­dren’s Hour of Sci­ence,” and cur­rently it was their best source of in­sight about the Spi­ders. The ra­dio show was an ideal com­bi­na­tion of sci­ence lan­guage—which the hu­mans had made good progress on—and the col­lo­quial lan­guage of ev­ery­day cul­ture. No one knew if it was re­ally aimed at school­ing chil­dren or sim­ply en­ter­tain­ing them. Con­ceiv­ably, it was re­me­dial ed­u­ca­tion for mil­i­tary con­scripts. Yet Trixia’s ti­tle caught on, and that col­ored ev­ery­thing that fol­lowed with in­no­cence and cute­ness. Trixia’s Arachna seemed like some­thing from a Dawn Age fairy tale. Some­times when Ezr had spent a long day with her, when she had not spo­ken a word to him, when her Fo­cus was so nar­row that it de­nied all hu­man­ity…some­times he won­dered if these trans­la­tions might be the Trixia of old, trapped in the most ef­fec­tive slav­ery of all time, and still reach­ing out for hope. The Spi­der world was the only place her Fo­cus al­lowed her to gaze upon. Maybe she was dis­tort­ing what she heard, cre­at­ing a dream of hap­pi­ness in the only way that was left to her.

---

[So it turns out that all the scenes that take place on spider-world have been written in this mode of translation! I love that, it explains so much.]

And then ( massive spoilers in rot13, genuinely Do Not un-rot13 this if there’s any chance you’ll ever read this book )

I would love the book just for this even if it weren’t also such a fun and engaging story, 10 out of 10 stars for use of the storytelling medium, GENIUS.

( more rot13 thoughts on ending spoilers )

Anyway. Terrific book, enjoyed it enormously, regret that my dad isn’t alive for me to talk to about it since I’m pretty sure he read these back in the day. :,)