• Book Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

    Someone You Can Build a Nest In is a horror-fantasy romcom hybrid told from the point of view of Shesheshen, an amorphous shape shifter that relies on a grab bag of sticks, bones, rocks, and man-made tools to form a skeleton when she changes shape. She’s an obligate carnivore and has been known to opportunistically…

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    • In Which I Have a Beef With Shirley Bogart

      Great Illustrated Classics is a series of books that redacts/abridges novels so they are “easier for kids to read.” And apparently, more palatable for younger readers. Who are going to be damned confused if they ever read Shirley Bogart’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which won’t have the far future mini adventure with…

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      • It’s About Fridge Horror Post-Apocalypse

        Reading Witch King and listening to the audio book pointed out some interesting things to me. You don’t really get the full implications of the setting at first. The scope of the destruction is just too big to fit into the frame of what is basically a case fic. (Well, basically a political thriller.) That…

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        • Ember is (Not) the Angel in the House

          As mentioned in a previous essay, Martha Wells plays a lot with gender roles and expectations in the Books of the Raksura. Moon is our semi-reliable narrator who was raised outside Raksuran culture, and therefore does not act very much like a consort. (Or rather, he doesn’t act the way a consort is “supposed” to…

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          • Book Review: Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson

            Those Beyond the Wall came at me like a combination of Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting and a “post-apocalyptic iconoclastic road warrior” novel from the eighties. (Though it might also be said to be a “post-apocalyptic iconoclastic road warrior novel as written by someone who is NOT a conservative, kinda racist anti-intellectual gun nut.” That…

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            A Wicked Convergence of Circumstances is an original fiction, writing and sf/fantasy analysis blog.

            Secondary topics may include: day to day slice of life, navigation of various services for the disabled, and Special Interests.

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