literary elise

book enjoyer • she/they

[ciricearts]

ohh so scaryyy!!

[melkingmd]

Bruce Wayne in Batman (2025) #5 Written by Matt Fraction; art by Jorge Jimenez and Tomeu Morey.

[literaryelise]

you see i love batman and i love when he he’s doing his little batman things successfully but i love him most when he fails. in fact it makes him all the more interesting to me how much he has failed his children and i love to hate him a little bit and yes i have folders and folders of angsty jason todd and dick grayson edits saved to my phone and these things are not contradictory at all

[abcdfghjklmpqrobin]

Au where nobody tells 10 year old Damian who Jason is. And the way they talk about him, Damian just assumes Jason is like a raccoon or something.

Damian: Grayson, why does Pennyworth leave food on the counter every night?

Dick, on his phone, not even paying attention: Oh, that's for Jason.

Damian: For 'Jason'?

Dick: Yeah. Sometimes he sneaks into the kitchen at night, so Alfred started leaving food out for him.

Damian, confused: I've never seen anyone here.

Dick: Well he doesn't always come. And last time, Bruce caught him crawling through the window and scared him away so, who knows when he'll show up again.

Damian, definitely thinking of a raccoon: So then Pennyworth is feeding a random stray that crawled out of God knows where?

Dick, annoyed: He's not a 'random stray', Damian, he's family, and he has been living in this house for way longer than you have.

Damian, trying to remember how long do raccoons live for:

Damian: I hope he doesn't die soon.

Dick: ????!!

*Later that night in the Bat-cave*

Tim, typing away in the computer:

Damian: Drake. Have you ever met Jason?

Tim: Uh. Stupid, annoying and looks like a skunk? Yes, why?

Damian, picturing a mix between a racoon and a skunk:

Damian: Is he friendly?

Tim: Well, the first time I met him, he attacked me, so...

Damian: Hmm... What did you do to provoke him?

Tim: What did I do to– Bitch–

Tim: Nothing! He just didn't like me taking 'what was his', or something.

Damian, nodding: You invaded his territory.

*The next day*

Damian: Father, when do you think Jason will visit again? I want to meet him.

Bruce: Um. I don't know, Damian. He doesn't come here often.

Damian: Why?

Bruce: Because he lives somewhere else.

Damian: Why doesn't he just live here with us instead? He would be safer.

Bruce, wincing: I don't think he would like that, Damian. He's not confortable here.

Damian: But, maybe if I befriend him I could convince him to stay.

Bruce, sighing: I don't think so, Damian. You have to respect his space.

Damian: Oh...

Damian: I hope he doesn't get rabies

Bruce: ???!!

[scleraphone]

breaking the cycle

[daredevil-vagabond]

Truthfully, don't we call humanity's origins, "betrayal" and the like? - Caravan, Syudou

[possumtion]

Jason todd angst hours

[swimmingback]

[literaryelise]

netgalley has been treating me so well

[literaryelise]

marianne gordon entering the robust SFF canon of devastating lesbian love stories

[literaryelise]

Why does Simulation Swarm by Big Thief work so perfectly for Alien: Romulus omg

[kaitcake1289]

you say you love me and look in my eyes but i know, though mine, you were looking in yours.

[literaryelise]

Baru: I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

Tain Hu: Mama kudos for saying that. For spilling.

[fruitcd]

[xuanelle]

they may be doomed by the narrative but atleast they had gay sex

[lethologicaee]

jason again because im sick

[canmom]

Exordia - advance review

So. I finished the book!

This is not everything I will write about Exordia. That will come when the book is like, officially out, and I feel comfy spelling out the ending and quoting passages at length.

This 'advance review' is split into two parts. The first part is quite abstract, so I'll copy it here.

If Baru took an elliptical path towards its subject matter, by defamiliarising and rearranging the material of history… Exordia just gets straight in there.

How to describe Exordia? Maybe you could call it philosophy-driven science fiction, a thought experiment about ethics. Maybe you could compare it to Arrival, but shot up with black humour (it’s a book that could make me laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time) and real tragedy (at the core is the genocide of the Kurds in the late 80s, and the many betrayals and failures of American imperialism). It’s got a lot of action and military details, with a good few spies and soldiers as central characters, but broadly it’s one of the sharpest eviscerations of the US military and its role in the world I’ve encountered in Western science fiction.

The first two thirds or so lay out the driving, fascinating ‘what the hell is this thing’ mystery lined with all manner of juicy body horror and drama—yet the core high-concept premise is laid out almost immediately, you know what's at stake. The last third… escalates.

It’s full of the usual meaty Seth themes, iterating on the ideas first laid out in Baru. But it’s a distinct flavour of its own. That escalation is… well, I can’t describe in detail, not while the book isn’t even out, but it’s nuts. Not just for the scale, but for how convincingly it sells concepts that if I described them straightforwardly would sound completely ridiculous.

Equally, it’s a study of a markedly diverse group of characters thrown together from all over the world, each constructed with very evident care and nuance. It goes places that so many writers would probably feel ‘damn, that’s probably way too thorny for someone like me to write about’—and yet somehow, it manages to handle it gracefully each time. Certainly, you can perhaps inevitably tell when Seth is writing from direct experience and when they are (as they used to say back in the ’10s) Writing The Other, if only through what they assume you know and what they need to explain as much as everything—and yet there are always all these telling details (the scientist cursing out R) that make these characters come alive with convincing presence and humour.

(Of course the autistic-ass lesbians are my faves. It’s not as overtly a Lesbian Book as Baru was, but there’s a strong current of gay shit.)

A few other reviewers mention Crichton, but I haven’t read Crichton, so… I’ll have to make other comparisons. But then the thing is it’s very self-aware about existing in the fabric of science fiction. This book is set in our world, not in the near future but the recent past, in the late Obama administration. A lot of the things you might compare it to (including a couple I’ve mentioned, Arrival, Crichton) will be invoked as explicit, in-character allusions as these very sharp, funny, modern people try to make sense of their crazy situation. Sometimes it feels like Tamsyn’s use of memes as texture, but it never gets overbearing. The rhythms of Seth’s prose have been refined by Baru into a powerful suite of devices to make you cackle and go, noooo, Seetttthhhhh…

It’s a fascinating blend of hard-ish scifi, with the big ideas carried by surprisingly accurate higher-mathematical technobabble, and what you could probably best call occultism: narrative and ethics and gods and mythology. Seth always tends to deflect when praised for their ability to hop between a dozen different disciplines and pull them together into one unifying story, saying that they’re just good at looking up summaries, or that they had help from the right people. Maybe so, but it works, it passes the smell test, and Seth’s real genius is their remarkable ability to tie all these big grand ideas back into the world of character and emotion.

Since this is an advance review… I gotta be careful how much I say! Usually I assume you’ve read it if you’re going to and dive straight into the spoilers and long quotes, but here I feel like I should take a little care to avoid describing too precisely the exact beats of the story. (Rest assured I will give it the thorough treatment when it comes out in full).

But, I feel like I want to say something a little more substantial. So here’s a description of the mechanism. If all you want to know is whether you should read this book, hopefully I’ve given you plenty of reasons that the answer is god, yes, do it. If you want to know more, read on.

Seth Dickinson writes a fun book as a breather. Which for Seth means a brutally imaginative scifi cross-examination of sacrifice, genocide a