I threw together a little rec list for fans of Murderbot :)
This is aimed at fans of the novellas and the TV show and I tried to capture various different elements of the story and characters.
Text of slides below the cut
The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard
Adult science fiction novella
Imagine Sherlock and Watson if Watson was a sentient, traumatized spaceship and Sherlock was a human detective investigating a murder
Faster-than-light travel, deep space unreality, mind-altering herbal teas
Spaceship POV
The spaceship really enjoys reading/watching period dramas
Vietnamese-inspired sci fi setting
No romance
One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adult science fiction novella
The grumpy last survivor of a catastrophic time war lives a solitary life…until other time travellers try to disrupt his carefully curated retirement
The main character has a pet dinosaur
Darkly funny, misanthropic narrator
If you liked Murderbot’s first-person POV in the books, you’ll probably enjoy the narrative voice of this novella
The Butterfly Assassin by Finn Longman
Young adult dystopian thriller set in a walled city ruled by assassin guilds
Isabel Ryans is a former child assassin and the daughter of a notorious scientist
Wanting nothing more than to live a normal life, she escapes and assumes a civilian identity…but finds her past and her assassin training harder to leave behind than she’d hoped
“Raised as weapon” character grappling with violence, morality, and friendship
Aromantic asexual main character with PTSD and severe hand scarring
No romance
The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt by Merc Fenn Wolfmooor
Adult dark fantasy novella
Scythulf, a wolf shapeshifter, was raised to be nothing more than a pit fighter until he’s rescued by Brennus, a knight who offers him a new life
When Scythulf accidentally kills a corrupted nun, his only chance at redemption is to run with the Wild Hunt, a trial of blood and courage
“Raised to be a weapon” protagonist; aspec rep; strong platonic bonds
Aroace protagonist; aroace nonbinary queerplatonic partner, queernorm fantasy world
No romance
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Adult science fiction novel
A motley spaceship crew finds adventure and friendship on their voyages through the universe
Episodic storytelling and found family dynamics
Interesting alien characters and cultures
Queer characters + F/F relationship
Cursebreakers by Madeleine Nakamura
Adult fantasy novel
Adrien Desfourneax, a disgraced physician turned professor of magic, finds himself investigating a dangerous curse while grappling with his own mental health and a dangerous ally
Gay main character with bipolar disorder; autistic-coded side character
If you love rotating TV!Gurathin in your mind, you will probably find Adrien a very interesting character
Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Young adult fantasy/dystopia
A young ghost hunter joins forces with the ghost of a supersoldier to traverse the underworld in search of the lost ghost of his partner and answers about their post-apocalyptic world
Characters shaped by ruthless dystopian worlds learning to claim their autonomy and identity
Strong M/F friendships that don’t turn into romance
Aroace-coded main character + no romance
Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie
YA science fiction novel
Hundreds of years in the future, the last survivors of the human race travel through space in a fleet of ships, searching for a new habitable planet to settle
When two girls join the order of cyborg soldiers who keep order in the fleet, they find themselves questioning their loyalties as violence brews
Explores bodily autonomy and privacy through sci fi elements
Main characters of color + ace main character
No romance
The Outside by Ada Hoffman
Adult science fiction novel
Cosmic horror x space opera
In a galaxy ruled by AI gods and their ruthless cyborg-angels, young prodigy scientist Yasira develops new technology that could change the trajectory of humanity–until her work backfires and is declared heretical
Offered her life in exchange for hunting down her vanished heretical mentor, Yasira must decide who to trust as her world’s fate hangs in the balance
Autistic lesbian main character of color
Redshirts by John Scalzi
Adult satirical science fiction novel
Ensign Andrew Dahl is excited for his new position on board the the starship Intrepid…until he begins to realize there’s a mysterious pattern of low-level ensigns like himself dramatically dying on missions…and the reason why might reshape his very understanding of reality
For the enjoyers of the TV’s take on Sanctuary Moon being a Star Trek parody
The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
Adult science fiction novel
Anti-colonial space heist
Maya Hoshimoto, an art thief turned grad student, finds herself pulled into one last job to retrieve an artifact that could save an alien species–and possibly doom humanity
Alien-human friendships, explorations of sentience and consciousness
Japanese diaspora main character with chronic migraines
Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
Adult science fiction inspired by classic horror stories
Demeter is a spaceship that transports humans across galaxies–except her passengers keep dying in mysterious paranormal murders
To prevent herself from being decommissioned, Demeter must track down the ultimate evil behind her passengers’ deaths: Dracula
In a near-future dystopian America, salvager Valentine runs odd jobs in the wastelands of Utah in hopes of earning enough for the gender-affirming care he desperately needs
When he encounters Osric, an AI forced into an android body, he’s offered a job that could pay him everything he needs–but at the cost of his own morals
Explores sentience and autonomy through a science fiction lense
Android/human romance
Gay, trans man main character with ADHD; gay main character
Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot
Adult science fiction novel
In a galaxy ruled by three warring rival factions, gunslinging inventor-turned-thief Rig has abandoned her former faction and is happy as a rebel–until her former faction ransoms her twin sister for what she stole from them
Alongside her librarian girlfriend, a mysterious bounty hunter, and a network of resistance contacts, Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister–and maybe tear down the factions for good
Rip-roaring romp of a sci fi story full of action
Alien protagonists
Lesbian main character; amputee representation
Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden
Adult science fiction novella
Scorn is a state-of-the-art AI investigator who becomes entangled in brewing corporate warfare
When Scorn wakes up one day day on the moon with no memory of zir past ten days, ze begins a hunt into zir own past that leads them to uncover far more explosive truths than ze could have expected
Port FreeCommerce - Unnamed Station in Mihira & New Tideland System: [unknown time]
Mihira & New Tideland - RaviHyral: 21 cycles
RaviHyral - [Unnamed]: 7 cycles
[Unnamed] - HaveRatton: 26 cycles
HaveRatton - Milu: 20 cycles
HaveRatton - "hub station": 7 cycles
"hub station" - TranRollinHyfa: 4 cycles
Preservation - NE Survey Planet: 4 Preservation cycles
Preservation - Adamantine Colony: 20 cycles
Other Locations:
All Systems Red Survey Planet
Divarti Cluster: Tapan's collective is from this noncorporate polity.
Kalidon: Corporate Rim political entity where company funding Ganaka was based.
GoodNightLander Independent's home polity: Noncorporate, ownership of SecUnits banned.
Parthalos Absalo: Noncorporate.
WayBrogatan: Indie station.
Network Effect Survey Planet.
Station from the short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.
UplandGateway One: Nearest station to the Mihira & New Tideland system. Corporate charters say stations are supposed to be independent/sovereign territory.
Planetary Torus.
I tried making noncorporate polities warm-colored and corporate ones cool-colored. But not sure I got that all right, and sometimes it's ambiguous.
Thank you to mensah for sharing their transit time notes with me!
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
A research team led by Professor Jin Yong Lee from the Department of Chemistry of Sungkyunkwan University, with co-first author HyoungChul H
A research team led by Professor Jin Yong Lee from the Department of Chemistry of Sungkyunkwan University, with co-first author HyoungChul Ham, and in collaboration with research teams from Korea University and the National University of Singapore, has developed a next-generation phototherapeutic agent, "NDI-COE." This agent induces pyroptosis (inflammatory cell death) in hypoxic tumor tissues by directly oxidizing intracellular water.
The oligoelectrolyte was designed to overcome the oxygen-dependency limits of conventional photodynamic therapy by intercalating into the cell membrane to oxidize water. The research is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.
as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”
small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.
i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.
Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity.
Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low).
Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me!
Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice.
Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first.
Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.
I love this so much: “Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first.” YES. THIS.
My goal is “write one sentence a day”. I don’t always meet it, but there’s also about a 90% chance that if I write that one sentence, another one will happen
Then another, then another
But so long as I sit down and write one sentence on one of my WIPs, I win
not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’
for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker
I was in martial arts for years, and in particular I kinda specialized in working with the younger kids.
The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was-
1. Compliment before Critique
2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’
Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.
Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive.
Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.
Wording can absolutely make or break a child’s motivation and interest.
Honestly I use all of these to teach vet students too. I think people in general respond better to positivity in teaching. Not coddling, but acknowledging when a student got part way to the right answer, or had a good thought process, is something I’ve found keeps students engaged and builds confidence, which encourages them to keep going instead of shutting down and just “getting through” a lab or a rotation
“No homo” cries the team at the dig site. The head archaeologist sinks to his knees, sobbing. He has dedicated his entire career to the pursuit of homo habilis, an important part of the hominid evolutionary line. All his work led up to this archaeological dig site. But now, his whole life has been for nothing. There is no homo….there is only Australopithecus.
everyone jokes about the pope's hat but most people don't know it actually serves an important purpose! evolutionary threat display to assert dominance against rival bishops
now you might think THIS is a plummage mating display
but popes are bred to aggressively seek territory and hierarchical power, not potential mates. so anytime you see something like this, it's still very much a standard threat display
[image description: image 1 first post: screenshot of a tweet: Someone called dandelions "tiny suns that grow into tiny moons that drift into tiny stars" and honestly? That's forever stuck in my head now. flower emoji. star emoji.
image two is second post illustrating the sentiment, a dandelion with yellow head with a sun over it, then a dandelion with a fluffy white head as a globe with a moon over it, and then the dandelion fluff scattering into stars. end descriptions]
EMPHASIZING before the Right gets ahold of this that this is science working as it should!!!!
We are SUPPOSED to check each others’ work and to be skeptical of results and to test and re-test and switch up variables and look at problems from new angles. It’s a collaborative effort that’s constantly evolving!
Nicotine, a potent insecticidal alkaloid unique to the nightshade family, has been employed in agriculture as a pesticide since 1690. It als
In a study published in Cell, a research group led by Prof. LI Dapeng from the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences elucidated the complete biosynthetic pathway of nicotine in the wild tobacco species Nicotiana attenuata using an information theory-guided multidimensional omics approach. The results revealed a five-component dynamic metabolon—a temporary cluster of enzymes working together to carry out a series of chemical reactions in a cell—that orchestrates the final condensation steps of nicotine synthesis and its transport.
If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.
Like. You don't need to blow it into some huge thing. Just. Make sure all your bits and peices still work the way you think they do.
Can you turn your head to look behind you without twisting your shoulders? What about standing on your toes? If you sit down on the floor can you get back up without using your hands?
If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.
Just saying, bodies are a use it or lose it kinda thing.
okay so every time I see this post crop back up in queues and notifications I end up thinking about it. Because I made the post and even I'm still doing the thing where I read the post about maintaining range of motion in my delicate meatsuit and I nod and hmm and think yeah that's a good idea and then dont move from where I'm curled up shrimp style staring at the nightmare rectangle.
So like. Thinking real hard about moving doesn't count as moving. Major bummer. Anyways. Joints.
I think I should write a guidebook to go along with it.
I know nothing about tarot, so it'll just be giving the names of the symbols, giving explanations of what the symbols literally mean, and giving examples of symbolism-rich objects/substances they could apply to
germansingergirl
janainaart
origamiaround
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
