#middlegame

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite Twins

Round 2

Roger and Dodger (Middlegame) VS Cersei and Jaime Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire series)

Roger and Dodger

Cersei and Jaime

Show results

Voting ended onSep 7, 2025

Propaganda under the readmore

Propaganda for Roger and Dodger (Middlegame by Seanan McGuire) :

"Psychically connected manifestations of math and language"

No propaganda for Cersei and Jaime (A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin)

[zmeyche-dot-com]

MIDDLEGAME meme compilation

A while back, still in the bad place, @seananmcguire said MIDDLEGAME isn't meme-able and thought that this statement is amongst the less beautiful lies she'd woven in the span of her writing career.

Cross-posting here the thread I posted on bluesky.

It's been 5 years since the first publication of MIDDLEGAME, so I am not overly worried about spoiling you much, but I will still try to contain them to the book in question and keep the rest of the series out of it (for now).

First, let's go through the basics:

Then let me introduce you to the cleverest, ahead of her time, the best alchemist there ever was - Asphodel Baker.

You think that book is simple?! Have you met Seanan McGuire? Have you fought the urge to finish one of her books in one sitting?! Well, strap in, buckle up, cause you're in for a ride with MIDDLEGAME!!

You think you are ready for another heartbreak? You think you are ready for another book hangover? You think you are stronger thatn Dodger's math and Roger's words?! You think you are ready for MIDDLEGAME?!! Think again, buddy!

MIDDLEGAME is going to make a clean cut right through your sense of reality. MIDDLEGAME is going to make you face your worst memories and your deepest scars. MIDDLEGAME is going to give you the hug you never knew you needed, all while your brain is in a constant state of a "WTF?"

MIDDLEGAME is all there is and all there is not. MIDDLEGAME is an Improbable Book turned out into Impossible Reality.

I am choosing to think that the Doctor Who & Leverage cross-universe memes could be considered a special treat. Also, Dodger can absolutely create a Tardis, she'll crunch the math after The Doctor has told her that "it's bigger on the inside" for a split second.

Look, the Doctrine of Ethos is really really good at two things:

taking its sweet time

surviving.

Sadly, this does not mean anyone involved will enjoy any of the above. The Doctrine of Ethos is the dictionary definition of the word "stubborn", and EVERYONE will learn it the hard way.

What we are NOT going to do it calculate the amount of times Roger and Dodger have reset the timeline. What we WILL do is be grateful we are not in their shoes.

Dodger Cheswich and Roger Middleton are pretty much the same person, and also, just as much, very different people.

Roger is the only person allowed to hurt Dodger. And only in past tense, and never again.

[tanoraqui]

I’m finally getting around to reading Seasonal Fears, the quasi-sequel to Middlegame, and I really appreciate how every other chapter or so, someone is like, “Now that James Reed is dead—thank goodness, what an asshole…”

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Hello! Relatively new follower but our taste in books seems to align pretty well! As a fellow lover of POV fuckery, I’m wondering if you have any recommendations? Examples of books I’ve enjoyed are Leech, Harrow the Ninth, The Spear Cuts Through Water, Metal from Heaven, and pretty much everything by Ann Leckie. I’ve read The Archive Undying but unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me — there was a little *too* much going on and I didn’t really connect with any of the characters :/ (forgive me lol). Hoping to explore this niche more though!

omg hello!! this ask made my whole morning, thank you!! Lovers of POV Fuckery, unite!

un/fortunately: you and i have SUCH overlapping taste that you've already read literally all of my go-to recs (i have not yet read SPEAR, but seeing it in this lineup makes me bump it up my TBR haha). so on the one hand: yay!! book buddies! if you find additional POV fuckeries, please drop them in my inbox.

on the other hand: this does mean i have slim pickings for you, and a bunch of them are Kind Of A Stretch™. these are presented in descending order of relevance. a great deal of these are dark and fucked up, too, but since you put LEECH and HARROW on your list i figure that's not a deal breaker lol. if i had wrap-up thoughts, i linked them! all internal to tumblr.

THE FIFTH SEASON by NK Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy): this is the first POV Fuckery book i ever read, and it's phenomenal. apocalyptic fantasy. second/third person.

THE WORKS OF VERMIN by Hiron Ennes (their second book!): you have got to check this one out since you liked LEECH and METAL. the POV fuckery is much more subtle here but there's a payoff toward the end (unless i'm just dense and missed it?? reskimming the first couple pages indicates that it's seeded well, but the worldbuilding is very immersive and i missed it first pass). third all the way through but those THIRDS man.

MIDDLEGAME by Seanan McGuire (technically book one of a series, but i think it stands alone perfectly and i didn't like the second book nearly as much): also much more subtle, to the point where i'm not sure this one quite counts as POV fuckery but there's definitely other fuckery going on, and explicitly naming that other fuckery is spoilers lol. masterful book, hugely recommend. if you DO wind up reading this one and you're grumpy with me about it not being POV fuckery, please come back and i'll give you my spoilers rationale XD

SHRIEK by Jeff VanderMeer (book 2 of a trilogy so i feel weird about this one, but book 1 is a 700+ page behemoth): anything VanderMeer writes is weird and fuckery, honestly. if you can get through CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN (the 700+page book 1, which is a collection of shorter fictions and non-fictions set in this weird city PLUS an appendix with MORE loadbearing story; it's a structurally fascinating volume in its own right but dense as hell), then SHRIEK is much more approachable. memoir by an ex-socialite woman about her historian brother (the same brother who wrote parts of book 1), with the historian brother annotating/cutting in through in-line annotations. so mostly first person, with some second person asides, epistolary-ish-style.

HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski (i can't mention Ambergris and not HOL now, apparently): an absolute puzzle box of a book; three stories and three main narrators/contributors, but no those narrators don't perfectly overlap with the stories. it's about a film that doesn't exist and a dead man's analysis thereof; everyone's a liar and unreliable and this is such an obsessive book. excellent enrichment, loses points for being deeply het and casually misogynistic, but WOW what a journey.

WALKING PRACTICE by Dolki Min (translated novella!): okay this one's straight first person, but it does some very neat stuff within those confines! alien shapeshifter stranded on earth who has to eat people to survive. lots of sex and...eating people......but very queer about it. typographically fascinating.

NOTHING BUT THE RAIN by Naomi Salman (tiny novella!): also primarily first person, narrated through journal entries, but it's set in a town where rainwater washes away memory, so our POV character keeps forgetting swathes of information. (this one does have child and animal harm/death content warnings though, which i feel like is a different classification from most of what you read above, just FYI)

and then bonus round, for Weird Epistolary Novels I Have Enjoyed (letters are like fuckery lite, right?):

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

ELLA MINNOW PEA by Mark Dunn (as letters fall off a statue in a town, they're banned from use! since it's epistolary, you see the linguistic tightening in real time)

[jittery-wisp]

Commission of Dodger and Roger from Middlegame by Seanen McGuire for the delightful and wonderful @dodgerkedavra❤️😊🙌✨

[alwaysbeyondhope]

So…

Y’all know I’m a completist and I have special interests that I can talk about for days.

Well.

I mentioned before about the foreign language versions of Every Heart a Doorway and how pretty the artwork is. And how there’s so many translations of Seanan’s works and how I want them all.

Well…I’m now 21 books closer!

Seanan sent me 21 foreign translation copies of books from the Newsflesh series, the October Daye series, the Wayward children series, and the Alchemical Journey series.

What. The. What.

(now, of course, I need a bigger bookshelf)

So I took some pictures of the new copies! Here’s what I got!

German translations of Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation

French translation of Every Heart a Doorway and Spanish translation and collection of Every Heart a Doorway and Beneath the Sugar Sky

French and Italian translations of Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Bulgarian translation of Every Heart a Doorway (!!! She’s SO PRETTY) and Portuguese translation of Beneath the Sugar Sky

German translation and collection of the first three Wayward Children novellas: Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, and Beneath the Sugar Sky

Italian translation of Middlegame

French, Spanish, and German translations of Feed

French and German translations of Deadline

French, German, and Polish translations of Blackout

These make me so very happy. And when the world is burning, anything that makes me happy keeps me sane.

So many, many thanks to Seanan for the books. I’m so excited to add them to my collection!

[alex-van-gore]

“Do whatever you have to do. Break whatever you have to break, but don’t you die.”

[rains-of-words]

“We burn bright, but we do not last. The trick is making the light beautiful.”

— Seanan McGuire, Middlegame