Swan Tower

This is a new technique for me, meaning that I only started consciously using it with the Rook and Rose novels -- and, credit where credit is due, I think the idea originated with my co-writer Alyc Helms. It is simultaneously a quick 'n dirty trick for helping you generate various facets of your worldbuilding (everything from religion to slang), and a way to bolster the feeling that the culture you're creating is an integrated, coherent thing.

The idea is to pick one or two central motifs, and build outward from those. I wouldn't go with more than two, maybe three at the most; the more you increase the number, the more you lose that feeling of coherence. On the flip side, though, I'm not suggesting that everything in your setting should be centered on these motifs -- not unless you deliberately want to make something that feels artificial! Just that you're choosing a small number of wells to draw from repeatedly in the course of your worldbuilding.

Let's illustrate with an example. From the moment Alyc and I decided the divinatory cards in the Rook and Rose books would be called a "pattern deck," textiles suddenly went everywhere in our setting -- that is to say, they became one of our central motifs for Vraszenian culture. Within the deck itself, the suits are called "threads," and their symbols are a spindle, a weaving shuttle, and shears. In Vraszenian clothing, embroidery and lace are prominent forms of elaboration; lineage is recorded via a kind of quasi-heraldic embroidery on shawls. Men and women alike regularly braid their hair in various ways. They practice a form of knotwork inspired by Chinese tradition. Their street gangs are called knots, too (a term I actually got from historical English slang), and they use knotwork charms to mark their allegiance. Someone seen as a traitor, especially a race traitor, is called a "slip-knot," i.e. the type you can't trust to hold fast.

All that and more, from one word for a deck of cards.

Then there's the significance of the river Dežera in the geography of Vraszan. That intersects with the textile thing at the delta, thanks to the "braiding" of the channels, but the river's water and wildlife crop up on a semi-frequent basis. Going back to idioms, "playing both sides of the river" is a way of saying somebody is double-dealing. River rats are what another novel might term "street rats," i.e. orphan children and other such impoverished outcasts; in Nadežra specifically, you might insult somebody by calling them "canal scum." Somebody who's "leaky" is untrustworthy, and mud/muck both come up frequently in a lot of derogatory terms. "Pearls" can be testicles. The food very much reflects the importance of the river, with water-irrigated rice, turtle soup, and freshwater mussels. When we needed to name a restaurant, it wound up being the Heron of the South Wind, because our minds immediately went to waterbirds.

If this seems very staged to you, step back and think about where it applies in our own culture. A ton of language and imagery in Catholicism comes back to pastoralism: separating the sheep from the goats, Christ as the Lamb of God, a shepherd leading his flock, and so forth. It would sound very different if the religion had arisen in a cow-focused culture instead! In modern America, where baseball is a beloved sport, we talk about hitting a home run, things coming out of left field, knocking it out of the park, being in the right ballpark of some target, doing something right off the bat, three-strike laws or having two strikes against you, pinch hitting for someone else . . . I could go on.

Choosing a central motif means you're not always starting from a dead halt when trying to decide on a new element or figure out how to describe things. Why is Nadežra ruled by a five-person council? Because numinatria, the sacred geometric/numerological magic we invented for Liganti culture, was an endless font of material for our worldbuilding, and five is the number associated with authority and power. As you can probably tell from above, I especially like this trick for creating idioms and metaphors: it provides an excellent way to break yourself out of the usual cliches and come up with something that feels specific to your characters' world.

For this to work, though, you need a fairly elemental motif -- something with a broad enough ambit to provide lots of different angles you can take it in. Roses are too narrow; flowers are better; gardens or growth are better still. This is as much a matter of how you think about it as it is the motif itself: remember that if you're running with a central idea of "gardens," then that brings in not just the plants but the soil, the water, the sun, the gardener, pruning, weeding, harvesting . . . Now you're working in a space with a lot of varied potential.

But don't hammer it too hard. Robert Jordan, in the Wheel of Time series, rather infamously decided that one of his major secondary characters came from a fishing village, and so every third sentence out of her mouth had to do with fish. Sometimes it got leavened with nets and boats and sails, but instead of it being the whole culture -- a thing we didn't really get to see, since we only knew it through a single character now living in a different culture -- it was just the way this one person talked, all the time. Even the most ardent baseball fan probably doesn't talk about the sport as much as that character did!

That's why I think two (or possibly three) may be a better number than one. If you have only a single motif, then you're always going back to the same well, or you're picking unrelated ideas. If you have two -- and if they're suitably different; "fish" and "boats" are not very separate -- then they can cross-cut each other, providing variety and keeping it from feeling overly artificial.

Of course, real-world cultures are nowhere near this simple. Even if I limit myself to talking only about Catholicism and no secular part of European society, the pastoral imagery mentioned above isn't the whole story; martyrdom, for example, is also a huge element of the discourse there. (And that's before you get into more concretely theological topics like sin and salvation.) Step past religion into everything else, and it gets vastly more complex. But no fictional culture is ever going to be as detailed as reality, as intricate a web of hundreds and thousands of years of history and social change and cultural contact and so on. What this technique does for you is provide a touch of centralizing force, a way to feel like you're not just creating a hodgepodge of unrelated shiny ideas -- and also traction for that moment when you're flailing and trying to figure out what should be at a holy site or craft a more original phrase than a frightened person being "white as a sheet."

(Fair warning, though. You may instead get stuck trying to figure out what the lore of pearl ghosts is, since you just said someone's as pale as one.)



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/pCCAm8)

What's more horrifying, after all, than a customer service complaint from a self-centered woman?

<aide runs up, whispers in ear>

Oh. Sorry, this just in: the actual horror is apparently supposed to be the thing she's complaining about. Anyway, my pantoum "One-Star Review" is up at 4LPH4NUM2R1C, where you can either read it or listen to me read it!

I've got a ghostly little piece (and I mean little; it's less than three hundred words long) up at Small Wonders this month! "Tomorrow Night" is based on a folkloric source, but to say which one would be a spoiler . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/10/14/new-flash-story/)

I've mentioned before that until you have industrialization or some equivalent that makes the manufacture of things easier, people will own a lot less stuff, furniture included. But what does that look like in practice? What is a person's house likely to include and exclude?

Probably the first thing to be invented was the chest or box, and not just because it's useful for keeping your belongings from rolling around loose on the floor. It gives them (some) protection from vermin, and also -- once locks are invented, about six thousand years ago -- protection from thieves. Chests are useful for organization, for transport, for a bunch of different purposes.

Including subbing in for other pieces of furniture! I'm sure we've all experienced the phenomenon of every available flat surface ending up with stuff on it; well, boxes have a long history of doubling as tables, perhaps with a set of boards laid across the top to expand the surface and give somewhere for your knees to go, which can be removed when the table isn't in use. Smaller boxes become stools to sit on, with or without cushions for padding. Long chests, topped with a mattress, have served as beds -- which probably adds to the security if your valuables are inside. It'll be one heck of a skilled thief who can get in there without waking you up.

Sleeping atop a chest is also good for getting you off the floor, which means you're away from cold drafts and less likely (though not guaranteed) to have a mouse or a beetle run across your face. But we've already covered beds, back in Year Four, so I won't repeat all that here. Instead let's go back to what's early and common: the shelf.

This can either be a freestanding structure or something fixed to the wall, and it has the obvious merit of expanding your storage options vertically, making better use of the space. But while people nowadays tend to use shelves in the public parts of our houses for storing things like books, photos, and pretty knick-knacks, in earlier times they'll be much more like a modern pantry or garage, holding utility items. And, again, holding them away from vermin, though enterprising critters will still find a way. Meanwhile, purpose-built tables (as opposed to repurposed chests) offer storage room beneath, again making better use of what would otherwise be wasted space.

(By the way, if you want to see "making better use of the space" really take off in a modern context, look at tiny houses or watch a Japanese home remodeling show. When you're operating in close quarters, ingenuity around where to put shelves, cabinets, closets, and other storage rules the day. I have to imagine the same would be true of some futuristic person living in an orbital habitat or other confined place.)

Combine shelves with chests, and you get cabinets. As anybody with a chest-style freezer knows, a top-opening box can be a nightmare for internal organization; one that opens on the side and has subdivisions within is vastly more useful. Drawers seem to be a much later development, though, which makes sense when you think about the additional material required and the woodworking challenge of getting the drawer to slide in and out anything like smoothly.

What about chairs? These are shaped by both history and culture. They exist going back for thousands of years, especially when you include stools (folding or rigid) alongside chairs with backs. But they've often been elite or special-use items, with most people -- even rich people! -- sitting on floor cushions; Elizabeth I's ladies-in-waiting took their meals in chairs at tables, but sat on the floor the rest of the time. There's a practical reason for this: when most rooms are heated by wood fires in a hearth, being on the floor puts you below the worst of of the smoke. As chimneys improve, though, smoke reduces, and chairs become more appealing places to be.

But bring your cushion with you. I haven't been able to find out when attached upholstery was first developed; quite possibly we don't know, given how poorly materials like that would survive archaeologically. Regardless of timing, it's definitely only for the wealthy, and not just because of the added expense: think about the difficulty of keeping it clean and vermin-free. A ruined cushion can easily be thrown away, but ruined upholstery has to be torn off and replaced, or a new chair acquired.

Then there's the category of furniture that goes under many names: couch, sofa, settee, and more. These have come and gone, and they blur into other categories as well (a "couch" originally meant a bed). Once again, I think these more often had removable mattresses and cushions rather than the installed upholstery we're used to. The Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans dined on such things, chaise longue-type couches where they could recline while they ate, rather than sitting upright. After that went out of fashion in Europe (apparently during the medieval period!), the sofa, to use its Turkish-derived name, came to be associated with the Middle East, and only filtered back into Europe later.

Furniture, of course, comes in many more kinds than this. We have specialized versions of the items I've already mentioned, like end tables and footstools and étagères and curio cabinets and trundle beds and recliners and . . . you get the point. We also have pieces of furniture built for specific purposes not needed in most of the past, like the filing cabinet in my office. But that all comes later, with wealth and especially with the cheaper production afforded by industrialization. (Though it's not purely a one-way street: we no longer have things like free-standing braziers to help heat our rooms.)

That doesn't mean, however, that the future is going to be even more furniture-crammed. Fashion plays a role here; one generation will fill their houses full of stuff, and then the next will rebel against all that clutter and strip down toward a more minimalist look. The shift to digital technology and other modes of entertainment has greatly reduced the need for bookshelves in some households, or filing cabinets, or other things meant to wrangle paper in its various forms. If we improve both 3D printing and the recycling of its materials, then we might be able to create furniture when it's needed, then get rid of it as soon as the use has passed.

The key point is that our current state of furnishing is neither universal nor inevitable. And changing up what's in the room may change how the characters behave there!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/10/09/new-worlds-furnishing-a-room/)

A poem + a Little Book = I quote Catullus, apparently.

I have a new poem out today! It's the result of reading articles on astronomy and historical demonology in quick succession -- y'know, like you do. You can read "expand/contract" for free online at Just Keep Up.

And on a semi-related topic (but only semi because "expand/contract" is a syllable-counted poem, not a metrical one), The Writer's Little Book of Meter is out today! That will be followed next month by The Writer's Little Book of Rhyme and in December by The Writer's Little Book of Forms, completing a trifecta of the Little Books on poetical topics. You can pre-order those latter now!

Don't assume corridors.

This is my mental shorthand for reminding myself that, when you're looking at history -- and when you're building a secondary world -- certain things you take for granted as natural and inevitable may not be. Back when I started drafting the Elizabethan faerie fantasy Midnight Never Come, I had two characters conversing while walking down a corridor and out onto a balcony at Hampton Court Palace. Got to London for my research trip and discovered that not only does the building have no balconies (which I would have known if I'd looked more closely at pictures), but back in that era, it had no corridors. No hallways, passages, or whatever word is used in your locality for the interior spaces that connect rooms to each other. Instead, rooms just opened directly onto one another: an arrangement you may have seen if you've visited a stately historical home from the eighteenth century or watched the kind of movie set in such places.

Hallways give you greater privacy, by providing a buffer of empty space between rooms and by making it possible to come and go without tramping through other rooms that may be occupied. But they also kind of waste space, since the hallway is only used for coming and going, maybe with some decoration to liven it up. I'm fairly sure they became more common post-industrialization, when cheaper materials and greater efficiency in construction made it easier to justify empty space like that.

But the idea wasn't unknown in earlier ages; it just tended to appear somewhere else. Specifically, on the outside of the building, rather than in the middle. Quite a lot of places are fringed with covered colonnades, peristyles, loggias, verandas -- again, there are a number of terms. These not only grant shelter as you pass from room to room, but shelter the rooms themselves, preventing the rain and sun from beating directly on the walls, doors, and windows (while still allowing for some natural light). In Japan, these spaces could sometimes be closed off with removable shutters in the winter, thereby providing a modicum of insulation for the rooms behind them . . . and, yes, turning that space into a corridor.

Going back to those stately eighteenth-century European houses, though, some of them did have corridors -- just not for general use. If you were rich enough, then not only did you have servants, but you could afford to build in a fashion that minimized how often those servants had to be seen. If you've ever spotted a camouflaged door in the wall, paneled or papered to look like everything around it, that's a servants' door. It probably gives access to a narrow passage behind that leads to the service areas of the house -- often including a dedicated staircase -- so that servants could come and go with minimal disturbance to the inhabitants and guests. (In the really ugly scenarios, e.g. those where the servants are actually slaves, there might even be an intent to segregate them so they don't "sully" the regular doors and stairs.)

This points us toward another broad principle of layout, which is the separation of the public and private. Even in a one-room peasant's hut, odds are good that the bed will be at the back of that room, and the work area is at the front. That's partly for practical reasons -- you don't want to be carrying firewood and buckets of water and dead chickens past your bed, or hauling those things any farther than you have to -- but the pattern persists throughout many types of residence, even when there are multiple entrances giving direct access to other parts of the building.

Quite simply, we tend to differentiate "that which strangers are allowed to see" from "that which is only for the family." These lines aren't hard and fast; people sometimes chose to entertain guests in their bedrooms, with the host even lying in bed during the conversation. But that was usually a mark of intimacy, an honor of sorts offered to select guests: "You may enter my private sanctum!" Less privileged guests were received in public rooms.

Private space comes in two kinds, though, one of which is bedrooms and other personal areas, the other of which is the service quarters I mentioned before. The shift toward open-plan architecture in recent decades is a deliberate, though not complete, breaking of that latter distinction: rather than the kitchen being separated from the dining and other social areas, it's incorporated into them, in ways that genuinely reflect changes in the status of women and how we entertain guests. The laundry room, however, is still probably separate, or tucked into a closet: that part remains not for public viewing. (Though attached garages in car-centric cultures can make a weird hash of this, if you pick up a guest at the airport, drive them to your house, and then . . . bring them in through the laundry room.) Worth thinking about when worldbuilding, even if household tasks are carried out via magic or handwavy technology -- where do you put your matter replicator?

How the spaces get separated will depend on the overall architecture. In a house built around a courtyard, reception areas will be toward the front, service and private chambers toward the back. If you have enough space, the service areas -- including quarters for the servants to live in -- might even be one or more separate buildings; as the kitchens essay in Year One mentioned, this is important for removing smells and fire risk from the main building.

If instead you have one structure, but it's multi-story, then many of the personal spaces will be upstairs. Not too far upstairs, though; a place big enough for servants' quarters often sticks them in the attic, where you have to climb a lot of steps and then probably put up with sloping ceilings encroaching on your space. Or, if soil conditions permit, service rooms and servants's bedrooms are placed in a half-basement: not fully subterranean (as that creates its own problems), but with only a thin strip at the top where windows can let in light and air.

None of this, to be clear, is a hard and fast rule. The specifics will always depend on circumstances -- which include fashion. Once garden design really got rolling, a lot of European houses placed their main entertainment rooms on the "piano nobile," an Italian term for the first floor above the ground, from which you could have a nice view. Meanwhile, in the days before indoor climate control, it was fairly common for Mediterranean households to preferentially occupy the cooler ground floor in the summer, then move upstairs for the winter.

And shifting like that was made easier because of the last principle to bear in mind: that we are far more committed these days to the notion of dedicated, single-purpose rooms than people used to be. We even have regulations saying things like "bedrooms must have exterior windows for safety" and "you can't list a rental space as a bedroom if it doesn't have an attached closet." But when the function of a room depended largely on what furniture you put in it and people had a lot less furniture, then rearranging according to the needs of the moment was much simpler to achieve.

So the layout was what you made of it. But the underlying principles were common enough to be fairly safe bets to lean on!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/10/02/new-worlds-building-layout/)

It's a two-sale day! "Eternally Bound" has been purchased by Lightspeed Magazine (which is currently running a Kickstarter), and "Sorcerer, Councilman, Priest has sold to Strange Pilgrims!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/news/two-story-sales/)

Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures. But hoo boy is it the thin end of that wedge!

People can adopt an ascetic lifestyle for purely philosophical reasons; Stoicism in the classical era headed in this direction, though I think most of its adherents were more concerned with restraint and moderation than with absolute denial. The overwhelming majority of the time, though, asceticism is linked with religion -- and specifically with transcendental religions, i.e. those which treat the divine as otherworldly and separate from the material world we all live in.

The logic there is pretty easy to follow. The divine is more important than the mortal, so it ought to be the focus of our attention. And if that's the goal you're pursuing, then aren't mortal, material concerns a distraction from what really matters? You should set them aside so you can devote yourself more fully to God and the pursuit of salvation/the Buddha and the pursuit of enlightenment/etc. In some strands of thought, this world gets characterized as fundamentally evil, a trap we have to escape. Ascetism is the way to freedom.

Note that this isn't (necessarily) the same thing as subjecting oneself to pain, or seeking that out for its own sake. A number of religious traditions involve practitioners doing horrible-looking things to themselves in pursuit of triggering a religious experience, but that doesn't mean they think one should eschew pleasures as an ongoing habit. The latter, from what I can tell, seems to have cropped up most frequently as a feature of Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism: not to say that there haven't been ascetic movements in Islam (e.g. Sufism) and Judaism or other faiths, but they haven't achieved the same idealization and centrality as in those first four. (And yes, I'm aware that Buddhism's "Middle Way" advocates against extremes of asceticism. That doesn't mean lighter versions haven't been very important to a number of Buddhist traditions.)

The basic practices of asceticism often involve disciplining oneself to live with a reduction in material comforts. I led into this essay with the one on fasting because it's extremely common for ascetics to limit what they eat, how much of it they have, when they eat, and so on. Although "Buddhist temple cuisine" in East Asia can rise to the level of high art, in most cases the emphasis will be on plain, monotonous food, discouraging sensual pleasure from the act of dining. The purpose of food is to sustain the body and nothing more.

Next up is sleep. If you're pursuing ascetic ideals, your bed should not be soft, and you shouldn't spend much time in it, either. If you're a normal Christian monk or nun, you might be getting up in the middle of the night to pray; if you're St. Peter of Alcántara, you sleep standing up with a beam of wood for your pillow. As for doing anything in that bed other than sleep . . . you likely won't be surprised to hear that celibacy is hugely common among ascetics. We'll leave that one for the next essay, though, because it deserves to be unpacked at greater length.

What about bathing? While we have the idiom "cleanliness is next to godliness," historically, not everyone has agreed. Quite aside from the obstacles (described in earlier volumes) that used to make regular bathing difficult, some ascetics have held that, since the body is unimportant at best, actively corrupting at worst, attending to it more than absolutely required for survival is mere vanity. So: minimal bathing, or none at all -- and although that sounds horrifying to us now, some people thought of the resulting stench as the "odor of sanctity," proof of the unwashed one's holiness.

Secular entertainments, of course, are off the table. Ascetics aren't supposed to watch plays, or read frivolous literature, or participate in dances. Music and literature are usually limited only to holy matters. Prayer is a far more suitable pastime, perhaps carried out under uncomfortable conditions: for a Catholic that might mean kneeling for a long time on a hard floor, while a Buddhist might stand under a cold waterfall.

Clothing should not only be un-ostentatious but quite possibly uncomfortable. The proverbial garment here is the hair shirt -- in Catholicism, formally known as a cilice -- which is an undergarment of coarse, skin-irritating fabric. Often worn for penance, it was therefore ideal for people wanting a more constant experience of humility. Going without shoes is another option, though "discalced" (shoeless) orders in Christianity may permit sandals: enough to protect the sole of the foot from danger, not enough to keep the rest of it warm.

Enduring cold is a recurrent option in temperate climes. Historical Catholic monasteries often had tight regulations forbidding the lighting of warming fires before a certain date, regardless of what the weather was doing; I wouldn't be surprised if the same is still true today, except it applies to central heating instead. Similar regulations governed when you broke out winter clothes -- which still might be what other people would consider inadequate for the weather! Basically, if it would make you more comfortable, you should limit it to the bare minimum necessary for safety and health.

. . . or you could go further.

Self-mortification can describe any of the above practices, but we often use it to mean the more severe end of the spectrum. In Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, the mortification on the flesh can be framed as a way to draw closer to Christ, by sharing in his suffering. This can involve everything from adding twigs to your hair shirt to scratch yourself more, to harsher and more extended fasts, to active practices like self-flagellation.

Which, from an outside perspective, sure does invite the label of "self-harm." And the Catholic Church is not unaware of that risk; there's a recurrent thread in its history of trying to discourage the extremes, and making sure that people only go there under the supervision of an appropriate spiritual director. In modern parlance, that person's job is to make sure the behavior in question isn't a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, or some other mental illness. But Church history is also full of devout people who desperately wanted to mortify themselves more than they were allowed -- especially in pursuit of mystical visions during which they felt themselves to be in God's presence.

Because that's one possible result of ascetic life: spiritual power. Depending on your religious framework, it may purify the body and spirit, burn away karma, concentrate and intensify your personal energy, or enable you to contact and perhaps even compel the attention of the divine -- the Sanskrit epics contain many instances of people practicing austerities (tapas) until the heat generated thereby forces a god to respond. (I recall my Hinduism professor phrasing this informally as "lighting a spiritual fire under their butts.")

We see this occasionally in fiction as a thing the wise old mentor does, but I feel like it's generally less common for protagonists. Not hard to imagine why; we tend to want our characters to partake in the full range of ordinary experience, rather than swearing off three-quarters of it. And since many of us disagree with the basic principle that one ought to subordinate the self and personal desires to the concerns of a higher power, it may be hard to get the reader on board with the idea that doing so is anything other than a tragic tale. But the notion that exercising self-denial is necessary to the generation of spiritual force seems like a fruitful one to me, with plenty of tasty potential for inner conflict!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/09/11/new-worlds-the-ascetic-life/)

Alyc and I are over at r/Fantasy today, doing an AMA (AUA, really) for The Eye of Leviathan and anything else you might care to ask about! Stop on by . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/09/08/aua/)

Short list for me this month. I did not have a ton of brain for reading, and then the latter part of the month got devoured by 1) preparing for Worldcon and 2) being at Worldcon. (Normally it wouldn't be so bad, but running a table in the dealers' hall entails a lot of stock counting, packing stuff for transport, and prepping ancillary materials like booth decorations.)

Death on the Caldera, Emily Paxman. There's been a minor surge in "fantasy on trains" lately, and I am here for it! Though this one is only briefly on the train, as an accident soon derails it and leaves the characters trying to solve the mystery of both the crash and the ensuing murders while stranded in a hostile environment. I think I wanted a bit more on both the mystery and hostile-environment fronts, but there's not a ton of room to develop those things when you're also dealing with several different magic systems and the politics around witches, who are welcomed and honored in some places and very much not in others, and are almost certainly responsible for the crash.

The witches were an interesting twist! In this world, they're a Jekyll-and-Hyde setup: a normal human woman -- they're all women -- may also have a witch self, which takes over when someone else utters her witch name, and reverts to her human self when that name is spoken instead. It takes time and effort for those two halves to even remember what the other side has been doing, and they're reliant upon/vulnerable to other people switching them back and forth. I feel like it may have been slightly too complicated of a concept to play nice with the plot premise of the crash and subsequent murders, though, at least at the length of this novel; both elements felt a little short-changed by the need to fit in the other material at the same time. This is clearly a setup for a longer series, so possibly, with the groundwork in place, later novels will feel more balanced.

(BTW, I have zero reason to think Paxman read my Doppelganger novels, but the combination of "all witches are women" and "they exist in bifurcated halves" certainly did remind me of those.)

The Library of Amorlin, Kalyn Josephson. Do not go into this expecting much library-ness; the titular Library is much more of a menagerie with some books. That's not a flaw, just something to set your expectations around. ("The Librarian" is admittedly a much more attractive title for the male lead than "the Zookeeper" would be.)

This is an odd world where ordinary animals have nearly gone extinct, replaced by magical beasts that are variously useful and dangerous. Different kingdoms respond to them differently, and the Library is responsible for dealing with problems when beasts wander where they shouldn't be and/or attack humans. The protagonist comes from a realm where beasts are universally hunted and killed; as a criminal, she's been sentenced to the front lines of that fight. But someone approaches her with a deal: if she infiltrates the Library, replacing the woman who's supposed to be sent as the Librarian's new assistant, and helps get the current Librarian removed from power -- thereby furthering the agenda of her kingdom, which hates what the Library stands for -- then she'll be pardoned of her crimes.

Overall I liked the book, but a few things niggled at me. Of course you know going in that Kasira is working for the bad guys and will ultimately not wind up serving their interests, but that pivot takes a while to happen, and I wasn't quite sold well enough on her reasons for staying the course. She's traumatized by being kept in solitary confinement (but not nearly as traumatized as she should be, given that we're told she was there for years) and fears going back, plus she thinks the people at the Library will immediately turn on her when she's unmasked. Which is generally reasonable, but something about the presentation of it just wasn't quite persuasive enough to keep me from being mildly irritated as she passed up one opportunity after another to come clean and ally with the Library.

The narrative also regularly fudges her point of view: more than once, Kasira engineers a situation to ingratiate herself and earn trust from those at the Library, but the reader doesn't know until well into the scene (or even after it) that she arranged the whole thing. I would have liked to see the book use Allaster's viewpoint more often; that would have gotten around that issue while also developing him more as a character -- though then the fact that he's hiding a secret, and the reader doesn't know the full story of it until the end, might have been harder to dodge.

So anyway, I had a lot of quibbles here, but none of them added up to me quitting the book or vowing not to read the sequel. The world is interesting, I want to know what's up with the kingdom that's gone incommunicado, and none of my gripes were deal-breakers.

The Last Contract of Isako, Fonda Lee. I know many people who love the Green Bone Saga, but I am so profoundly allergic to stories about organized crime that I just could not get into Jade City no matter how good the writing was. (Vargo in the Rook and Rose trilogy is Alyc's creation, and the parts of his narrative that focus on the gang end of things were usually not my favorite bits to write.) This book, therefore, gave me a chance to try out something of a different flavor!

Mind you, I'm not super enthused by corporate plots, either, so that bit was an uphill climb. I was more here for the worldbuilding -- especially the fact that Lee commits to and does not back down from the harshness of a more realistic terraforming situation than I normally see in SF. The process takes centuries and is nowhere near being done; in the meanwhile, it's a situation where resources like oxygen and heat are extremely limited. And so people who can no longer contribute to the success of the colony's efforts are incentivized to "resign": they walk out into the lethal landscape, and how far they get before they die is celebrated as a marker for the progress of the terraforming. Their surviving family members get their resignation bonuses, and later, when the domed city expands to encompass where they fell, they're memorialized by having streets and the like named for them.

Of course, this is far from an egalitarian process. The whole planet is a company town, and the directors and board members get to enjoy life-extending treatments or even a second life in a cyborg body, along with greater rations of resources. But even if you were able to transform the colony into a utopia (and this is very much not the kind of story where that's going to happen), there still would fundamentally not be enough resources to go around. And there are other neat elements to the worldbuilding, too, like "kiths" people belong to that form a second kind of non-biological family, and raising kids on behalf of bio-parents is a vital line of work. There's also the weird cognitive dissonance of greenhouse gases being exactly what everybody needs to produce more of, to aid the terraforming efforts.

I've got Breath of the Dragon, Fonda Lee's collaboration with Shannon Lee, on my TBR, and I really need to check that one out -- fantasy being much more my speed than SF!

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman, trans. Erica Moore and Elizabeth Manton, narr. Rutger Bregman and Thomas Judd. It took me quite a while to get through this one in ebook, but it was worth it.

Bregman's core thesis is that, contrary to all the sources we have telling us that humans are inherently selfish and violent, we're actually inherently generous and kind. The first part of this book systematically works through some of our most famous narratives for People Are Terrible -- Lord of the Flies, the environmental devastation of Rapa Nui, the murder of Kitty Genovese, psych studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, etc. -- and debunks them: the actual Tongan boys who wound up in a Lord of the Flies situation survived through intense cooperation and support; Rapa Nui was devastated by rats rather than human wastefulness; people did call in Genovese's murder and were there for her in her final moments; the experiments had a heavy thumb on the scales, misrepresented what the data actually said, or both.

But of course, we do not live in a utopia. So why do people act badly, as they so obviously do? Building on the first part, Bregman shows that many of the usual explanations are wrong. For example, though the Nazis famously claimed they were "just following orders," the actual evidence shows that the leadership were motivated to propose ever-more horrible plans out of a desire to impress Hitler; Milgram's participants were more likely to quit pushing the button when they were nakedly ordered to do so. Most of them kept going because they thought they were making an important contribution to science that would help people in the long run. All too often, bad actions arise out of good impulses: our kindness and generosity, our loyalty to the people around us, can be leveraged to encourage us toward horrible acts.

One of the only bits of received wisdom that still holds water in this book is "power corrupts": yes, it does, absolutely. The minute you put someone in a position of power, the odds that they will begin to abuse it rise noticeably, even if they were a decent person before. And, of course, leadership often attracts people who aren't decent. (The average terrorist is a normal person who thinks they're fighting for a good cause, but the average terrorist leader is a genuine psychopath.)

The final section of the book is simultaneously the most delightful and the hardest to swallow. Bregman turns his attention to efforts that aim to leverage our good qualities, rather than controlling our bad ones: alternative approaches to incarceration and criminal rehabilitation, alternative schools (the usual model is practically designed to produce bullying), alternative corporate structures, etc. These things sound incredibly naive and Pollyanna-ish, and it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that . . . they work? If you can let go of the feeling that We Need to Punish Criminals, you can massively reduce recidivism and get fewer criminals in the long run. If you stop punching Nazis (which makes them feel tough) and instead turn their annual march into a fundraiser for de-radicalization charities, the Nazis stop marching. A key part of the dismantling of FARC in Colombia literally involved putting Christmas trees out in the forest with notes about how your mother would love for you to come home.

And the narratives matter. I have long been extremely tired of post-apocalyptic worlds that assume an instant and inevitable descent into dog-eat-dog tribalism, because I know that's not what we see during actual disasters. But Bregman also shows how much things like our news media reporting terrible behavior measurably increases terrible behavior, while stories of cooperation and charity up the likelihood that people will cooperate and be charitable. That doesn't mean every story needs to be a cozy thing in which everyone is nice all the time, but it does mean I'm taking a good hard look at what motivations we ascribe to characters and what strategies we show as being successful.

Death on the Cherwell, Mavis Doriel Hay. Sonya Taaffe mentioned this in passing as making a pair with Gaudy Night for mysteries taking place in the same year at fictional Oxford women's colleges, so when I saw the library had it in ebook, I picked it up! This is much slighter than Gaudy Night and not so concerned with having an overt conversation about feminism, scholarship, and so forth, but the first half in particular feels extremely Nancy Drew, in a charming way: a group of undergraduate girls are about to pronounce a hex on their collage's disliked bursar when they find her dead. Ultimately those girls are only part of the investigation, and not the load-bearing one at the end; it is a police officer who finds the culprit, though aided by some information the girls provided. It's a great look at then-contemporary college life, though, from a number of different perspectives.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/09/03/books-read-august-2026/)