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juushikaHere's a trio of works available online. Look, I'm an avid library user, basically all my books are free—but there's something that feels so clever about finding alternate free book sources like Open Library, or something more obscure like a fan favorite on the Internet Archive or "turns out, this tab I've had open since time immemorial is a novel-length original work!" That feeling of cheating the system (the system is ... also free books), that sense of infinite possibility, but also that overlap of original works and fanworks/fan culture: these works were made and released for fun, they're probably jank but probably also weird and indulgent. And indeed, they are!
I really liked The Northern Caves. Pretty sure I saw it linked via DW? If that was you, thanks.
Title: The Northern Caves
Author: nostalgebraist
Published: 2015
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 416,305
Text Number: 1571
Read Because: found this in my open tabs when closing tabs, but no idea how it ended up there!; available free on Archive of Our Own
Review: Members of an online messaging board tackle the author's final and most obscure book, or: If wanna-be Quentin Coldwaters can't travel to Fillory, no problem, they can The Secret History-up a Fillory experience at home! I loved this. I might not call it flawless (some voices overwritten; I don't buy every moment of thespiral into abject madness . But it's certainly compelling: a deep dive into fandom, particularly the fan theory style of transformative work--and whether a source material "deserves" this effort--and the gray boundaries between source, authorial intent, reader experience, fandom, transformative work, and obsession. All gathered in an epistolary-via-the-Wayback Machine style that makes me want to join a forum and have a nervous breakdown--a format that offers an easy buy-in via nostalgia and makes for a nuanced, ambiguous identification with the speaker. What a ride. It gave me a hell of a book hangover. I know I'll reread it.
I love that this is on AO3--it looks like the author has published multiple works there, but this has a distinctly "fandom is my fandom" vibe that makes it the perfect fit to the platform.
Title: Floornight
Author: nostalgebraist
Published: 2015
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count:
Total Page Count: 416,825
Text Number: 1573
Read Because: reading more from the author, available free on Archive of Our Own
Review: An undersea research station uses soul-splitting technology to fight a war against alien consciousness. I dig the big worldbuilding concepts at play here, both for themselves (iterated consciousness is one of my favorite speculative concepts, and I'm especially intrigued by its functions in the New City) and for the balls-to-the-wall willingness to take them to ever-weirder, ever-further extremes. The almost-fantastic conceptualization of the tech reminds me a little of Yoon Ha Lee and is suitability evocative and weird.
But my investment waned as this went on. Partially that's the consequence of a kitchen sink approach that means, inevitably, not all the elements will land (I'm particularly bored by the Wild Children society). But the core fault is that I don't care about the cast, which in turn ungrounds the way that branching/parallel lives direct the ending. They're too caricatured, too ironic for me to form an investment. So this is fun and fine, but I mostly appreciate for how it adds to my mental map of narratives playing with similar concepts.
Title: All Tomorrows: The Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man
Author: C. M. Kosemen
Published: 2006
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 450,935
Text Number: 1575
Read Because: fan of the genre, available on the Internet Archive
Review: Self-publishing makes for a lot of errors, particularly in the punctuation. And the author is right, this is a little cringey--a lot of shock value and nihilism functioning as weak social commentary. But! I love speculative evolution, and 1) I was able to follow the lineages, so however improbable these evolutions are they're also sufficiently memorable and even logical and 2) these are weird. The genre is always weird! It also lends well to body horror. But this is more than usually weird and very body horror, and I dig it.
I really liked The Northern Caves. Pretty sure I saw it linked via DW? If that was you, thanks.
Title: The Northern Caves
Author: nostalgebraist
Published: 2015
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 416,305
Text Number: 1571
Read Because: found this in my open tabs when closing tabs, but no idea how it ended up there!; available free on Archive of Our Own
Review: Members of an online messaging board tackle the author's final and most obscure book, or: If wanna-be Quentin Coldwaters can't travel to Fillory, no problem, they can The Secret History-up a Fillory experience at home! I loved this. I might not call it flawless (some voices overwritten; I don't buy every moment of the
I love that this is on AO3--it looks like the author has published multiple works there, but this has a distinctly "fandom is my fandom" vibe that makes it the perfect fit to the platform.
Title: Floornight
Author: nostalgebraist
Published: 2015
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count:
Total Page Count: 416,825
Text Number: 1573
Read Because: reading more from the author, available free on Archive of Our Own
Review: An undersea research station uses soul-splitting technology to fight a war against alien consciousness. I dig the big worldbuilding concepts at play here, both for themselves (iterated consciousness is one of my favorite speculative concepts, and I'm especially intrigued by its functions in the New City) and for the balls-to-the-wall willingness to take them to ever-weirder, ever-further extremes. The almost-fantastic conceptualization of the tech reminds me a little of Yoon Ha Lee and is suitability evocative and weird.
But my investment waned as this went on. Partially that's the consequence of a kitchen sink approach that means, inevitably, not all the elements will land (I'm particularly bored by the Wild Children society). But the core fault is that I don't care about the cast, which in turn ungrounds the way that branching/parallel lives direct the ending. They're too caricatured, too ironic for me to form an investment. So this is fun and fine, but I mostly appreciate for how it adds to my mental map of narratives playing with similar concepts.
Title: All Tomorrows: The Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man
Author: C. M. Kosemen
Published: 2006
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 450,935
Text Number: 1575
Read Because: fan of the genre, available on the Internet Archive
Review: Self-publishing makes for a lot of errors, particularly in the punctuation. And the author is right, this is a little cringey--a lot of shock value and nihilism functioning as weak social commentary. But! I love speculative evolution, and 1) I was able to follow the lineages, so however improbable these evolutions are they're also sufficiently memorable and even logical and 2) these are weird. The genre is always weird! It also lends well to body horror. But this is more than usually weird and very body horror, and I dig it.
