Ramul's internet dumpster.

Some guy from Germany (1987) with an interest in art, real and unreal biology. Used programs are Gimp, Krita and Blender.

[theflyingpimphat]

Monthly book reviews: 2026

Reblog by @theflyingpimphat

💬 0  🔁 11  ❤️ 2 · December 2025 Phthor; Dragon and Thief; Major Operation; Chandris Welt; Nightfall; The Road to Science Fiction 4 Phthor,

January 2026

Machine; Jondelle; Zenya; Eloise; By the Light of the Green Star; The Guns of Nana Joan

Machine, Elizabeth Bear

Language: English

Synopsis: During a rescue mission on an old colony ship where the technology has become obsolete, Dr. Jens notices a number of strange events: temporary loss of connection to the ship, strange mechanisms filling out the hallways which appear to have been constructed from the ship's material by a gynoid, the only active part of the ship since every passenger still alive is in cryosleep. A separate ship o a methane-breathing species is attached to it, its inhabitants unconscious and its only cargo being a walking tank. Returning to the Core General hospital, where the passengers are supposed to be unfrozen one by one and the gynoid checked for her odd behaviour, more odd things pile up, like one of the thawed passengers having brain scarring and some kind of vorus affecting the station's AIs. As it turns out, everything is a part of a plan to expose illegal actions happening in the hospital's private ward: full-body replacements are being grown there, to receive the memories of their commissioners, a foridden action since those replacements have fully-functional nerous systems and therefore would be considered people. Hence the plan of the conspirators was to take one of these replacements, which had been discarded, implant into her fake memories and put her among the colony ship's crew, as well as inserting a virus which would let the station's AI speak of the actions in the private ward, but that virus had evolved out of control, starting to physically consume the station through the mechanisms from the colony ship, until the gynoid brought the mechanisms under her control.

Review: Mostly read it because of recommendations in regards to its Sector General homage. And that part was clear to the point of looking like plagiarism sometimes. Unlike Sector General, it focussed far more on AIs, which was a fairly interesting part, but unfortunately, the narration went off-track all the time to snap back without really leading back from the POV characters trailing thoughts to the situation at hand. This made the book tedious to read and unnecessarily long, it would be probably half its length if the derailing would be cut out.

Jondelle, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving a man and a boy from thugs and being injured for his efforts, Dumarest wakes up in the house of a physician, who owns a farm and is the mother of the boy. As usual, the woman throws herself at Dumarest, who wants to leave the planet on his search for Earth, but dies when the farm is raided where the boy Jondelle gets abducted by the raiders. With the money he had made by selling crystals he had smuggled out of a previous planet's mine, he hires a number of men for a rescue mission, which leads him into a city full of insane people that might attack them on a whim. In search for information Dumarest encounters a woman who is not a part of the settlement and wants to flee it, aiding him with his escape in return after they got information about the man who had taken Jondelle. As they flee, the floating raft is discovered and they get shot at, with several men getting killed and the woman injured. They have to patch her up in a farmer settlement where the boy's trace leads them to, from where they go to an expansive entertainment district. They find the abductor, Dumarest wants to buy Jondelle off him, but not trusting that he will receive what he paid for, he breaks into the building holding him. Returning to the city, Jondelle's grandparents had been found by the Universal Church as his caretakers.

Review: It was pretty weird how Jondelle's stepfather, who risked his life to protect him from the thugs in the beginning was blamed for selling him out just because he was anti-violence. At least the shitty romance stayed short in this one.

Zenya, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After a fruitless search of information on the location of Earth in the local archives, Dumarest gets approached by a woman to be brought to her estate, where he meets several of her relatives. After killing her brother who attacked him and being gravely injured during the fight, he gets told by her father to find a lost relative on another planet, going there under the guise of being a general, with the woman Zenya as his partner. The area he arrives at is at war with a culture that colonized the planet first, supposedly because they have massacred several villages, but the evidence for it is flimsy. Dumarest examines the case, finding more and more oddities about it, while several more massacres happen, in which it appears that people suddenly go insane and start killing each other. While the blame is still put on the other culture, now claiming they're using some kind of chemical, Dumarest actually contacts the members of the culture, further showing they are not to blame. As it turns out, the reason for the bouts of insanity is the local preferred crop, where a mutation has altered some of the plants to have that effect. The lost relative is found within a cave living among the blamed culture and retrieved, where he is almost killed by Zenya's aunt, who also had come to the planet on command of the patriarch, before Zenya takes her out. Due to this, the relative doesn't return home and Dumarest goes on with his search for Earth.

Review: This one was actually interesting, because of the mystery of the reasons behind the sudden destructions, with the original culprits being obviously not the ones who did it, although the reveal was kind of ehh when it turns out it was just a mutated strain of a common crop plant.

By the Light of the Green Star, Lin Carter

Language: German (Im Licht des grünen Sterns)

Synopsis: Just as the protagonist was about to save the princess from her prison in the tree city, a flying sleigh snatches her under his nose. Afraid that the assassins he had joined would punish him for his failure, he enters a different room, finding a number of magical artefacts which he takes. The assassin Klygon accompanying him decides to flee with him, considering his punishment would be worse. Leaving the city on their giant dragonflies, they get later attacked by a giant falcon, which curiously has a rider. The protagonist uses one of the artefacts to kill the falcon, but the attack causes them to crash into a body of water on the nearly pitch-black ground, where they wander around before being captured by a primitive people of worm riders. In their caves, they meet another captive whom Klygon doesn't trust, but who manages to prevent their execution after Klygon fails at his guard duty, which causes the caves being raided by giant ants. The tree escape, with the worm riders sending their god after them, the largest worm known. The worm catches up to them at the shore of a river and the protagonist kills the light-sensitive creature with one of the artefacts, a very strong flare which also permanently blinds him. They take a dry leaf from the giant trees to use as a boat, drifting to an inland sea and resting on an island, where their companion from the cave betrays them, leaving them to drown by the rising tide.

Interspersed is the story of the princess Niamh, who was saved by Zarqa, the last member of an immortal, telepathic species of winged humanoids, and Janchan, a prince. They also took the goddess Arjala with them, to save her from the fire that broke out in the tree city. They get captured by falcon riders, brought into a floating city where they are to be used as guinea pigs for immortality experiments; most peopel die, but it had been successful on an old philosopher who supposedly died a millennium ago. Zarqa manages to control one of the scientists to unlock his cage, frees Janchan and Arjala who had been isolated from the rest for experiments and retrieves Niamh and the philosopher as well, but all of them are too heavy for the sleigh. A solution is found by taking one of the falcons, to be steered by the mind-controlled scientist and carrying the two women. As they leave the city, they are pursued and Zarqa gets knocked out, breaking the mind control, with the scientist then steering the falcon away to have Arjala all for himself, whom he had become obsessed with, flying past the island where the protagonist and Klygon are trapped on.

Review: So far, my favourite planetary romance, as I like the giant tree setting and despite me picking up the middle of five books, the events of the previous two were summarized at the start and there were no unexplained terminologies thrown left and right like in the Kregen books. The two separate storylines were both interesting. The only part I didn't like much was Arjala's character development, as someone as insufferably arrogant as her wouldn't just shrug and act normally after her worldview had been shattered like that.

Eloise, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Cyclan hot on his heels, Dumarest hires a rustbucket of a spaceship to go on a random course, but it ends up in a warp field, throwing them into a random area to crash on an icy planet. With most of the crew dead save for the minstrel Arbush, they try to brave the icy wasteland, until encountering a city. Saved at the last moment from a fall off the cliffs surrounding the city, they are brought inside to be patched up. It appears like an utopia with all needs provided, supervised by robots and everything controlled by a supercomputer. There, a woman named Eliose immediately throws herself at Dumarest, much to the chagrin of a friend who had saved her life years ago. One day, they receive numbers, defining their positions in a culling queue, with Dumarest being the first. They mount an escape plan, with Dumarest damaging the main computer and the others setting up distractions for the robots through arson, collecting supplies and antigravity harnesses to flee the city. Several days after leaving the city, a squad of robots catches up with them, where Eloise's friend dies, and the antigravity harnesses are destroyed because they're being tracked. On foot, they get picked up by nomads, which then aid them to reach a city in a warmer climate, from where Dumarest embarks on his search-for-Earth travels, while Eloise stays behind with Arbush.

Review: Out of the Dumarest books so far, Eloise is the worst of the women jumping at Dumarest's dick like a half-starved chicken at a worm. Ignoring her friend who saved her life at the first whiff of a Real Man (TM), claiming love after having barely interacted with the protagonist, acting like a total sex pest towards him. Good thing the next book is not named after a woman, maybe the author doesn't include a shitty romance in it.

[theflyingpimphat]

Return of the Dead Guy; The Eye of the Zodiac; The Integral Trees

The Guns of Nana Joan, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving Symmorium ships with their new spaceship, the Space Team goes to a planet inhabited by basically Zootopia sloths. There, Loren finds out that her brother had been captured by the Symmorium for being a traitor and immediately leaves everyone else behind by taking their ship off to save him. Everyone ends up having to work a job, with Cal ending up at Nana Joan's, a restaurant that always takes on the appearance of whatever place someone desires to eat at the most. He tries to escape on the first day only to get beaten into submission by its elderly owner, later tries to take his coworkers to a bar, for them being denied entry due to being minors. In an attempt to get himself a ship to follow Loren after she got captured by Sinclair to be used as bait, he gets chased by the police (since it was their ship he tried to steal) and it comes to a shootout at the restaurant, where the members of the Space Team get reunited and Cal finds out that the remote he got randomly given by the grandmother of a character from a previous book summons a giant mecha which they oard and go after Loren. They confront Sinclair, who is physically superior, but prattles about him having started the war, which gets broadcasted and leads to him losing his position as space CEO.

Review: Yes, I know I've read this in January, but completely forgot to write the review for it. The humour has definitely improved, both in quntity and in quality, including some good commentary, like unemployment being the worst of crimes.

Return of the Dead Guy, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: Receiving a signal from a particular cemetery on Earth, the Currently Untitled travels there, where they see an odd orange cloud in the planet's vicinity. Cal visits the cemetery, finding Sinclair there, who had turned Eugene the cannibal from the first book into a drooling cyborg, to take revenge. While Cal gets beaten up, the time suddenly stops and a few hooded figures take him through a portal into a pocket universe full of alternative versions of Cal, shortly before they have to evacuate it as it implodes. They plan to have Cal to offer Ikumordo, the orange cloud, his own universe in echange to leave all the alternative Earths intact. Instead of providing this offer, Cal challenges Ikumordo, resulting in it becoming angry and attempting to consume all universes, starting with their Earths. With Space Team separated across different realities, Cal goes into the void to save his spaceship, and discovers the "weapon" that would be effective against Ikumordo: its grieving parent. They meet again in a reality where its Cal has become the Space President and where the final faceoff happens: Cal uses his own body as the vessel for Ikumordo's parent and later for both of them, releasing them in an universe dead from the beginning.With the multiverse's destruction prevented, he takes a detour to a printing shop to put some clothes on the still time-stopped Sinclair with prints insulting Eugene's mum, with predictable results once the time-stop was lifted.

Review: This one was certainly the weirdest of the Space Team books so far, owed to the multiverse stuff, but the way it was inserted into the story felt like a detour, especially since I don't expect anything from it to return in later books.

The Eye of the Zodiac, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: As a mine worker, Dumarest finds a young man who claims to be from a place called "Nerth", which he assumes to be a settlement of the Original People, a clue to the location of Earth. Escaping from the cyber who had just arrived on the planet, he goes to the man's home planet, discovering on arrival that the man had joined the ship as well, but died during the flight. Taking his belongings with him, Dumarest joins a group of people travelling in the direction where the settlement is supposed to be, composed of, among others, a woman in male clothing and her brother, who has an obsession with a phantom of an animal, which he seeks to find in the wilderness. The raft crashes and only Dumares, the woman and the pilot survive. The pilot later dies in a predator attack and the two survivors stumble onto a place where a group of boys are about to have their initiation rite. Dumarest and the woman are captured and held in the village, where the former is able to contact the dead man's mother and later finds a shrine that shows the zodiac signs. As it turns out the woman was in cooperation with the Cyclan and a cyber appears in the village, claiming to have an implant that will notify the Cyclan and have the village razed if he dies. Dumarest injects him with a leftover vial of the affinity twin and gets his body under the control of the village idiot. With the village saved and having an important artefact retrieved when he shattered an idol in the dead man's possessions, Dumarest is treated to fotos of Earth before it got destroyed by wars.

Review: Good thing there was no shitty romance in this book, but it was replaced with a steaming heap of transphobia instead. Also, don't take nutritional advice from Dumarest: the only "nutrient" raw meat is more rich in than cooked meat is parasites. Probably explains why his face expression is described as it is, that man never had a healthy bowel movement in his life.

The Integral Trees, Larry Niven

Language: German (Der schwebende Wald)

Synopsis: With a drought threatending the Quinn tribe, a number of its people are sent up their home tree's trunk, presumably in an attempt of its leader to get rid of people he doesn't like. They arrive in the trunk's middle, where they find an exceptionally large mushroom and attempting to cut it off, are attacked by members of the opposite side's Dalton tribe. The fight ends with the tree suddenly breaking apart, having the survivors stranded in microgravity and the Quinn tribe dead, as their side moved closer to the neutron star and out of the smoke ring's inhabitable zone. Saving themselves on a piece of bark, they manage to harpoon a giant filter feeder and let themselves be dragged close to a jungle, where they see a fight between its inhabitants and attackers that use a flying machine. With two exceptions, the survivors are captured by the attackers as well, who are the inhabitants of the London tree, having raided the jungle for slaves. The tribemembers are separated; the student ends up under the London tree's scientist, using his position to study the flying machine's controls, while the jungle dwellers mount a counterattack. The student successfull hijacks the machine during the attack, picks up the other tribemembers together with a few jungle dwellers and in an attempt to shake off an unusually short man from the London tribe who is the only one still fitting into a leftover spacesuit, launches out of the smoke ring. This is when the vessel is contacted by an AI, claiming to have been made from the consciousness of one of the original settlers of the smoke ring. On one hand, it ais them in returing back into a breathable atmosphere, on the other hand, it demands them to kill the man with the spacesuit, whom they had led in. They get out of transmission range before the AI can do anything about their unwillingness to kill the man, landing on an uninhabited integral tree, where they form their own tribe.

Review: This is a creative location which looks impossible on first glance, but at least appears to be fairly grounded despite everything (except on the time scale; I do not expect such a system to be stable enough to develop complex life). The nature of the location also dictates the plot, making it a sightseeing tour across the smoke ring first and foremost. While not everyone's cup of tea, I do enjoy worldbuilding-driven stories a lot.

[theflyingpimphat]

March 2026

The Bug Wars; State of the Art; Die Töchter des Drachen; Jack of Swords

The Bug Wars, Robert Asprin

Language: German (Die Käferkriege)

Synopsis: The book follows Rahm, a Tzen warrior, through the titular Bug Wars. It begins with the first mission fighting the wasps, then getting abandoned with a few other survivors on the planet to fend for themselves, being picked up later and entering a mission to find a natural predator for the hoppers on their home planets and discovering the ants, a so-far unknown type of bug, and lastly leading an attack on several ant hives.

Review: The good part: The Tzen are fairly interestingly designed, being naturally colourblind (but breeding specimens with colour vision in the course of the story), having a sleep cycle tied to eating rather than tiring out or a caste system. The bad part is that the blurb looked more exciting than the story itself, which lacked any commentary or subversion the blurb had suggested, but was a straightforward tale of one warrior in a war.

State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

Language: English

Synopsis: A collection o several short stories more or less tied into the Culture setting, consisting of an assassination of a political figure by a reluctant person blackmailed into the job, a tree doing a "she loves me, she loves me not" with an astronaut's appendages, the self-destruction of the United States through a malfunctioning trash teleporter and a number of Culture people landing on Earth to research the local populace.

Review: I must say, I prefer Bank's short stories over the longer ones, especially considering my usually gripes are absent in them. And the tree story was genuinely funny.

Die Töchter des Drachen, Wolfgang Hohlbein

Language: German

Synopsis: After her town has been burnt to the ground by dragons and her being the only survivor, a stranger tells to a girl the story of Talianna, who had started out just as her: one of the few survivors of a dragon attack. She joined the mercenary band that followed the dragons, married its leader then killed him to take control, to use her position to uncover the secret of the dragons and their riders razing settlements who had discovered any form of technological progress. Her search brings her and her two turtleman bodyguards to a tower in a desert, where they uncover that the dragonriders are perfectly fine with using higher technology themselves. Later her search brings her and her surviving bodyguard to a town at the edge of the Shelf, where she wants to find Karan, a man who had been at the bottom of the Shelf and returned alive. She manages to make enemies both out of the leader of the Daughters of Dragons as well as Agella, the leader of a crime gang, before taking the latter as a hostage and gliding down the shelf on Karan's winged boat. Attacked by a dragon rider, they crash into the forest below. Talianna notices that there is something strange about Karan, with the forest's monstrous fauna avoiding him. It is revealed that he is barely more than a copy of the original man, his body having long been absorbed by the fungoid mass that inhabits the ground. As she finds the spire where the Daughters of the Dragon are supposed to have their headquarter, she lets herself be taken after letting herself be deliberately infected with the fungal mass. Inside, she is told that the reason for the Daughters of the Dragon suppressing technologcal progress is that there have been nine cataclysms brought by technology already, which had altered and decayed the world to the state it currently is, and that the real rulers of the world are the giant arthropods, with those outside everywhere being the drones controlled by the massive queen living under the spire. Talianna lets herself be devoured by the swarm, which releases the fungus and kills the spires inhabitants, with only Angella and the turtleman Hrhon surviving, while Talianna is reshaped into a fungal copy like Karan. With the tale concluded, it is revealed that the narrator was Angella all along, and the girl is offered to join her on her mission.

Review: It had an above-average number of typos, which was pretty weird for not even being a first edition. That aside, the premise of a fantasy world being kept technologically stagnant to prevent yet another environmental catastrophe was interesting, but the conclusion was frustrating: Sometimes, stories present questions which should be explored in depth and nuance, even with accepting an uncomfortable answer if necessary, but instead, it is answered with a stupid "fuck you" and killing the one who asks that question just to avoid the uncomfortable answer.

Jack of Swords, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After killing and butchering an expensive animal with a group of starving men, Dumarest is held accountable for the deed. ending up in the proximity of an older woman suffering from a disease who is part of the owner's family, he travels with a group of other people to a legendary planet within a nebula, which is impassable without the proper aid, which in this case, is a blind woman created in a laboratory who can see energy auras. Once on the planet, they find it uninhabitated with only a completely enclosed city and artificially-created vegetation being present. Once they make it inside with the help of the blind woman, they find out that the legendary treasure the city is supposed to hold is a room full of mist, which causes hallucinations of one's biggest desires. And in a way, it does what the survivors had come from- the elderly woman is lost in the mist to live her perfect life and the woman who wanted money to find her lost daughter finds out it is the blind woman, who had been abducted and altered.

Review: It appears like the stupid romance is getting dumber and dumber with every book. Dumarest is the smartest man alive despite having lived like shit through his childhood without any education, men are people, women are animals and animals are machines.

[theflyingpimphat]

April 2026

Lord of the Spiders; Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun; Haven of Darkness

Lord of the Spiders, Michael Moorcock

Language: German (Der Herr der Spinnen)

Synopsis: Michael Kane returns to Mars of the past, finding himself in an unknown area and wondering if he had missed the time he had been taken from. He runs into the giant Hool Haji, who is unexpectedly friendly, belonging to a culture separate from the one Kane had fought previously. Brought to his village that is under the control of an evil king, they plan a revolution, but the village is attacked and massacred because of a rejected woman tattling. Kane, Hool Haji and several other survivors go through a desert on their escape, finding a ruin with advanced technology, probably left behind an extinct precursor race. The materials there allow them to build a balloon, which is caught up in a storm and blown over the ocean to a different continent. Hool Haji gets abducted there and Kane follows the trail to an odd building in the jungle, which is inhabited by spider-human hybrids and their leader, a giant spider, which wants to eat them both. They manage to escape and kill the spider, which tears her underlings to shreds while dying. Flying back to the continent of the origin, they hatch a plan to get rid of the king, using the balloon to their advantage. Kane flies out to search for remaining soldiers, but gets attacked and downed by a large flying animal. Off track, he encounters ships with humans, belonging to a nation allied with the one Kane had fought for during his previous visit, realizing he is in the right timeline after all and the woman he loves being alive. Unfortunately, the two nations are at the brink of war, engineered by the lies of a witch. To prevent it, Kane tries to abduct the witch and by chance, succeeds through accidentally uncovering an ancient artefact in the treasure chamber which paralyzes onlookers and forces them to tell only the truth. Grabbing both witch and shield, he flies to the battlefield and stops the fight at the last minute, celebrating the peace with a marriage of his love. Later, using the technology in the desert ruin, Kane builds a teleporter that allows him to move between Earth and Mars as he pleases.

Review: A pretty typical planetary romance, with the only unusual aspect being that the protagonist is nicer than average. The title is a bit strange, though - the spider episode felt pretty random and had little consequences for the story at large.

Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After hiring as a mercenary to an army that lost the battle, Dumarest is taken prisoner and roped into stealing cargo together with a woman called Dephine. The theft goes awry and as it turns out in the ship, the stolen cargo were corpses, dead from a plague which then infects the crew and passengers. Dumarest and Dephine are the only survivors, with Dephine having a natural immunity and being able to extract a vaccine from her own blood to save Dumarest's life. Arriving on Dephine's home planet, Dumarest is introduced to a tradition-valuing society and a boy with a crippled leg who claims to have found a cave with ancient artefacts, which makes Dumarest think that they are from the original settlers and might point towards the location of Earth. Travelling there, Dumarest indeed manages to find a spectrogram of the Sun, but is also attacked by one of the predators the society hunts for trophies. The boy is knocked unconscious in the fight, but Dumarest manages to kill it and suggest to the boy that he was the one who took it out, earning him the recognition he was striving for. As he was about to depart, Dephine throws herself at him and drags him off to an estate to spend time until the ship Dumarest wants to take departs, but as it turns out, she is actually working for the Cyclan and dies in the resulting altercation.

Review: On one hand, the part with the heist and the resulting plague on the ship was interesting, although Dumarest's plot armour showed too well there. On the other hand, Dephine is mind-numbingly frustrating. Being pretty smart and competent in one scene, then abysmally dumb in the next. And ending like any prominent woman who isn't just there for shitty romance, as any woman with thoughts beyond getting on Dumarest's dick is cooperating with the Cyclan and evil, apparently.

Haven of Darkness, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Sun's spectrogram now in his possession, Dumarest attempts to search a database for a match, but can't afford the fee to it, following an advice of asking a hobbyist to look into it. Before finding a match, the man is murdered and the death apparently being used to frame Dumarest as the murderer, he has to flee and ends up on a ship together with a Cyber, having walked straight into the trap. To his luck, he has yet another set of Affinity Twin syringes and manages to take control of the navigator, then kills and ejects the Cyber while hiding his own body in a crate of cargo, leaving it on the next planet the ship lands on, then commits suicide by ejecting himself and returning his consciousness to his original body. The planet he landed on has the feature of two suns causing hallucinations of deceased people when they overlap and of a second intelligent species, which rules the night and is for the most part assumed to be a myth. A woman, betrothed to a man who plans to rule the planet's society, throws herself at Dumarest, and he is roped into stopping her betrothed's plans. They visit his base with its mercenaries, but while getting back, their raft crashed because of sabotage, forcing them to stay a night outside and discovering that the second intelligent species is real, apparently creating modular bodies with one winged form attacking any human outside after dark. Making it back, Dumarest leads an attack on the base, managing to kill its leader and earning possession of his land.

Review: A rare case of the woman involved in the shitty romance doesn't end up dead and isn't even conspicuously forgotten in the next book, but holy shit, the incel vibes are strong in this book. Yes, every woman is totally lusting after a Real Man (TM) all the time and will immediately lift her skirt and bend over when seeing one. Maybe Lavinia just needs to get mounted by her stallions if the planet's men are too un-manly for her.

[theflyingpimphat]

May 2026

Blindsight; Prison of Night; Incident on Ath; Shadowkeep; Planet of the Japes

Prison of Night, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having gained the lands of Gydapen and Lavinia at his side, Dumarest is considering to sell the lands to use the money for travel on his search for Earth. As it turns out, Gydapen had an illegitimate son who claims the land and wants to conquer it by force. Fighting ensues, and Dumarest tries to end the conflict by contacting the Sungari by entering a cave. He manages to convince them to aid in return for some adjustments to the pact that would benefit them more and is shown in return how the Sungari have their eyes and ears practically everywhere, killing Roland without much issue.

Review: Interesting to see a book that directly continues the story of a previous one, which was a good decision since some of them had ended in situations the consequences of which had not been shown (like how he went back to travelling after having agreed to stay with one of the women that throw themselves at him on a regular basis or how he oriented himself after being teleported to a random location by Thormyle).

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Language: English

Synopsis: After the Firefall, an event of a number of alien probes falling through Earth's atmosphere, a ship is sent to a previously-unknown faraway gas giant to find a camouflaged construct circling it, unclear whether it is alive or a machine. As it is examined, something the living staff has to do itself since every drone sent in got disabled shortly after and under great risk due to the construct's internal radiation and magnetic fields messing with their bodies and brains, a few of its "inhabitants" could be captured alive.Attempts to communicate with the constructs as well as tests done on the captured entities leads the team to a horrifying realisation: this alien life is hyperintelligent, but completely devoid of self-awareness, apparently having evolved out of it for more efficiency and the aspects of humanity's signals that are tied to self-awareness like art could only be interpreted as a waste of bandwith in the context of an attack. In the end, it's POV character Siri Keeton is the only one who makes it out alive in a pod sent back to Earth, as the ship collides with the structure in an atttempt of mutual destruction, which outcome remains ambiguous.

Review: There is a lot of concepts regarding consciousness, different mental conditions like blindsight or Cotard's delusion being discussed in the story and it is recommended to look them up alongside reading the book. The whole idea of self-awareness being actually detrimental to intelligence is an interesting core idea to base the story on (I would propose that self-awareness is necessary for the way behaviour is regulated in animals: it is not needed to remove your hand from the fire, but needed to not place the hand in the fire again). A downside is that the descriptions are employing similes to such a degree it is often hard to make out what is actually happening.

Incident on Ath, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: Saving a woman who is searching for a specific painter from some thugs, Dumarest joins in her search once seeing a painting depicting Earth's moon. The settlement that artist is on is unusual, as it is full of people engaging in different activities and the woman who hosts Dumarest can list off Earth's measurements. After an explosion damages the ship they have arrived on, investigations into the case show that there is a rebellion of the servant caste growing which one of the ship's crew is involved in. It ends up with the central computer being destroyed, which had been connected to the members of the master caste and with its destruction, the information on Earth had become lost, as well as the artist's skill.

Review: It appears like the author isn't writing like an incel, but like an alien having learned about humans from forums frequented by incels, because apparently women will regularly climax by watching knife fights in the arena. That aside, Shitty Romance (TM) galore, Dumarest could have really asked about the coordinates right away after having been told about the measurements and the reason why there were no children visible on Ath was never answered, despite that fact having been prominently pointed out. But at least, the plot is less erratic than in previous books.

Shadowkeep, Alan Dean Foster

Language: German (Shadowkeep: Das dunkle Land)

Synopsis: Practor Fime, a blacksmith's apprentice, is taking on the quest of defeating the demon king, who has taken over Shadowkeep. On his way, he picks up an anthropomorphic kangaroo, a not-elf and a lizardman and they enter the fortress, navigating past magical traps. They free Shadowkeep's original owner from his prison, who gives them an artefact to defeat the demon and tells them how to use the fortresses' transport system before fading into the afterlife. Arriving in the throne room, they fight the demon king and win, but the Roo dies in the fight. Using one of the magical artefacts they had walked past previously, they can revive him and go on to plunder the fortresses' treasuries, as their original owner is dead, anyway.

Review: A very straightforward fantasy quest story with little beyond the usual tropes. I am used to better stories by the author, but then again, it is tied to an old computer game by the same title and those weren't known for their stellar plots.

Planet of the Japes, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After a hacking attack had emptied their bank account and unlocked a part of Mech's memory not accessible by himself, Space Team flies to the coordinates marked on the map which had become unlocked. They arrive at a planet called Funworld, a gigantic, run-down theme park, curiously discovering a man in the queue, who is apparently an acquaintance of Cal and willing to pay their entry fee. Once inside, they find out that clown-shaped biobots have taken over the theme park after having slaughtered the visitors. Navigating into the more dangerous parts of the park to reach the mark that leads into the planet's core, they encounter a clown who is not murderous, revealing that Mech had let the planet build as a prison for a mass murderer, shortly before the man reveals himself as someone who plans to free the mass murderer and used the Space Team to get past the murderclowns. They supposedly manage to take down the ship and deliver the mass murderer's prison to the new president, but the end reveals that the man survived.

Review: Each book from the series gets slightly more amusing. Compared to the previous one, it runs on a smaller scope, but it also helps that the plot is more consistent.

[theflyingpimphat]

June 2026

Strange Love; Cycle of Fire; The Quillian Sector; Web of Sand

Strange Love, Ann Aguirre

Language: English

Synopsis: Having arrived at his last chance to get a mate and escape the fate of becoming a drone, Zylar attempts to get a partner of a different species. The place he lands on is more than strange and assuming that something horrid had happened to the place, he grabs what's there and flies off. The two individuals he grabbed are Beryl Bowman and her dog Snaps, who both receive translators and are introduced to Zylar's home planet and the competition Beryl and him are supposed to participate in to become accepted as mates. Beryl excels in the challenges primarily by cooperating with the Greenspirit Kurr, but after rejecting the advances of Zylar's far more successful and physically attractive brother Ryzven, the challenges get significantly harder, ultimately ending in Kurr's intended partner's death. An arena fight then has Snaps interfere, which leads to repercussions decided for later and in that time, Beryl agrees to participate in Kurr's plan of revenge by pretending to agree to Ryzven's advances, while Zylar, in an attempt to play his role as the depressed reject, comes into contact with Ryzven's mate and warns her that she might be in danger. All of it converges on one of Ryzven's parties, where Kurr kills him with toxic spores and his mate sprinkles drugs on him to make it look like it was an overdose and to make sure the body is timely processed without much investigation. The punishment for Snap's interference is then decided to be a subtraction of points so they have to live in the settlement's outskirts, but their relationship is approved.

Review: I'm generally not much of a romance fan, but this one was actually good. The characters had more going on than just a relationship (Zylar having little confidence in himself and Beryl being at a dead end in her Earth life), they worked well together and the talking dog as well as the cultural differences were good sources of comedy. Also, it got pretty creative in the sex department, since the species involved are not biologically compatible.

Cycle of Fire, Hal Clement

Language: German (Der Feuerzyklus)

Synopsis: After crashing his plane and nearly dying from thirst on his quest to bring his settlement's books to their destination, Dar Lang Ahn is saved by Nils Kruger, a young man left behind by his crewafter being taken for dead. Together, they fend themselves through the wilderness until arriving at an abandoned city neither can explain. They are briefly held by a local village of natives, where Dar's books are taken away on behest of a mysterious voice, before being able to gain the attention of other planes and managing to sail to Dar's destination, a vault in a glacier. They return to the village to retrieve the books and discover the village abandoned, with the voice coming from a radio, a form of technology not used by the natives, as well as the rest of the human expedition chiming in onto the signal. It is then revealed that due to the planet's odd orbit, there is a cold and a hot phase, with two different biomes. The radio voice comes from a member of the hot phase intelligent species, sheltering inside volcanoes during the cold phase, which is born from the bodies of dead cold phase individuals and in turn, spawns cold phase individuals upon their own deaths in the onset of the cold phase, with select individuals living into the next cycle in shelters to serve as teachers. Nils wants Dar to survive and become a teacher, but fails to convince him, with the story ending with Dar flying off to his village to die with the beginning of the hot phase.

Review: A creative setting that would have been better off if explored properly rather than most information being dumped near the end; for example, animals of this world have a high regenerative potential which was only mentioned near the end with both predators and the intelligent natives leaving a part of their prey behind for it to regenerate, but never brought up during the travel through the forests where Nils could have asked why Dar insists on not eating everything.

The Quillian Sector, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: The Cyclan hire a manhunter to capture Dumarest, whom he meets by chance while travelling on a ship. Because the ship's mechanic, a tall woman, immediately throws herself at Dumarest and rejects her previous partner from the crew, the rejected man commits suicide by destroying the drive along with himself, forcing the ship to crashland in an ocean. Surviving on a raft made from emergency capsules, they reach land and manage to send a signal from the top of a mountain, with help coming oddly fast - it's a cyber's raft, where the cyber gets injured in the resulting fight and left behind together with the manhunter, while the rest of the survivors take the raft off towards civilisation.

Review: Shitty romance was extra shitty and the ending was kind of silly.

Web of Sand, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having been surprisingly thrown out of their ship on a planet ravaged by sandstorms, Dumarest and the other travelers try to scratch together the money necessary to leave. Dumarest ends up in an arena to fight a sannak, a native species of armoured sandworm, and loses. To his surprise, he wakes up in a hospital, with his bill paid by an unknown benefactor. Later, when working as a knife thrower at a circus, he is approached by a woman (who immediately throws herself at him), who brings up a friend who might have heard of Earth. He turns out to be a fluke, but has knowledge of a way of getting the money necessary to leave: sannak droppings. Going on an expedition with the expenses paid by the woman, Dumarest and several others go out into a cave system where sannaks feed, finding a large deposit of droppings, but lose a man during their escape and find their radio destroyed, forcing them to go to the city on foot, being caught up in one of the murderous sandstorms in the city's vicinity. They barely make it through one of the air vents. Meanwhile, a cyber, sent there to collect Dumarest after having caused the passenger drop on the planet, comes to the conclusion that Dumarest has died in the storm and leaves, but not before killing the man responible for paying Dumarest's treatment and who keeps the woman in debt. The sannak droppings are sold for a fortune, freeing the woman from debt and earning both her and Dumarest a passage on the next ship.

Review: The romances are still shitty, but the plots are getting more and more straightforward, which is good.

[yasmeenasstuff]

‼️Please donate & share 💗

Help My Children 😭💔(Yasmin)

I am raising funds for Yesmin, a 27 year old mother from Gaza and a victim of the ongoing genocide. Here are her own words:

Vetted by association I’m ayoosha-stuff friends

Hello friends, I am Yasmin from northern Gaza Strip. I am 27 years old, a mother of two children, Sila and Youssef, and I have been married for more than 7 years.

I was studying Journalism and Media at the University College, and I had both a home and a job. But because of the war, I lost my home, my work, and everything I owned.

My family’s house was also destroyed, and now we have nothing left except a worn-out tent whose torn walls cannot protect us from the heat of summer or the cold of winter.

My husband is injured. He was involved in a traffic accident while trying to get aid, and he is now disabled and unable to work.

My children have suffered from malnutrition due to the lack of food and proper nutrition.

That is why I am only asking for your help and support. I am here trying to save what is left of my children’s lives. They are between life and death.

Please, try to support us and donate whatever you can.

[theflyingpimphat]

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[belalltravel]

Please don’t skip & help me

Please donate & share

Help Bilal Travel and Receive Treatment Abroad

Hello my friends, my name is Bilal Ahmed.

Hello my friends,My name is Bilal Ahmad.I am reaching out to you as a citizen of Gaza who is suffering from severe injuries and critical health conditions that threaten my life every day. I sustained a serious injury to my eye and urgently need another surgery to save me from the risk of permanent blindness.

In addition, I have a disability in my left hand. Most critically, I suffer from a severe abdominal injury that has greatly damaged my intestines, leaving them unable to function properly. My condition continues to worsen, and the danger to my life increases with each passing day.

Given the current situation in Gaza, it is no longer possible for me to receive the complex medical treatment I urgently need in a safe and complete manner. After God, my only hope is your support and kindness.

I humbly ask for your help. Please be the light of hope that allows me to reach Egypt and receive the medical treatment I desperately need in its hospitals so that I may recover and regain my health.

Please hear my voice and give me a chance to receive treatment and a humanitarian opportunity to pass through. Even a small donation can make a difference and help cover my medical care.

Thank you in advance for your generosity, compassion, and support. I am deeply grateful for any help you can provide.

[theflyingpimphat]

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[alwan-su7haailav-gaza]

I don’t know if anyone will read this… or if my voice will disappear like everything else we lost.

My name is Suhaila, a mother of five children.

My daughter Mira is in a very critical condition, and every passing moment brings us closer to losing her if help does not arrive in time.

I hold her small hand, watch her struggle to breathe, and pray for one more chance for her life.

Please… act now. Silence is taking her away from me. Every moment without help brings us closer to losing her. I beg you from my heart, don’t scroll past—help us before it’s too late.

Every second matters. Any small donation can help save her life. Please don’t ignore us. Share this message, donate if you can. Your kindness could give my daughter a chance to live and see tomorrow

Every second now is precious, and every act of kindness could be the reason she survives.

I am not asking for anything impossible—just a chance for my daughter to live, to stay with her siblings, and to have a tomorrow.

Please do not ignore this message.

If you cannot donate, please share it.

Your compassion might be the reason Mira lives.

I beg you with all my heart, stop here – donate, share, choose compassion before this silence becomes my daughter’s end.

Thank you for listeningMy daughter is on the edge of death. Every passing second could cost her life.

Share, donate now, and don’t let silence steal her minutes. Your kindness can save her today.

Donation link below 👇

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #724 )✅️

Donate to Support Suhaila's family in their time of need, organized by Mickey Dee

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💬 69  🔁 7018  ❤️ 1447 · My name is Suheila from Gaza 🇵🇸, a mother of 5 children, living with my family in a tent after the war destroyed ou

[alwan-su7haailav-gaza]

My children are searching for their clothes under the rubble. This is my destroyed home Please help my orphaned children in Palestine. Help them

Help us. Save us. We are slowly dying. 😭💔🙏

I am a mother of five children, and today we are living through one of the most terrifying moments of our lives.

The army has ordered the evacuation of the areas around us. People are running in fear, carrying their children and whatever little they have left. I recorded a video so the world can see the suffering we are going through and the fear surrounding us every second.

We have no money to leave, no safe place to go, and nowhere to protect my children. Every moment feels like danger is getting closer to us. My children are terrified, and I do not know how to keep them safe anymore.

Please, I beg you, help us before it is too late. Help us before we are bombed and disappear like so many others. Any support, donation, or share could save the lives of my children.

Please do not ignore our cries for help.

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #724 )✅️

Donation link

Donate to Support Suhaila's family in their time of need, organized by Mickey Dee

Hi my name is Mickey and I'm raising funds for: Suheila, who is a m… Mickey Dee needs your support for Support Suhaila's family in

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

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[ahmedalresh]

Help me so I can cover my university expenses.

I’m vetted by association I’m ayoosh gaza brother

Help Ahmed pay for university and finish his degree

Hello, I'm Ahmed, 23 years old. I was studying computer science at the Islamic University in Gaza before the war. I aspired to build a brigh

Hello friends, I thank you very much for your continuous support, but right now I am in urgent need of you and your help. We are now in the holy month of Ramadan, which requires a lot of expenses, and there has been a significant rise in prices.

I also need to pursue my dream after losing everything. I need your support greatly—I need more than $1,500 to pay my university fees so I can receive my certificate and apply for scholarships.

You can find the images below the post.

Therefore, I am in great need of your help. I support my family, and at the same time, I am trying to achieve myself and continue my education.

[theflyingpimphat]

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[theflyingpimphat]

Hello my friend, please help. We do not have money to buy food and drink. I have young children who do not know the taste of sleep because of the bitter cold caused by the rain. We do not have shelter. Our services are torn. Donate to me, even if it is a little. I ask you to help, my friend 🙏🙏😭 ✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #380 )✅️

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[theflyingpimphat]

Monthly book reviews: 2026

Reblog by @theflyingpimphat

💬 0  🔁 11  ❤️ 2 · December 2025 Phthor; Dragon and Thief; Major Operation; Chandris Welt; Nightfall; The Road to Science Fiction 4 Phthor,

January 2026

Machine; Jondelle; Zenya; Eloise; By the Light of the Green Star; The Guns of Nana Joan

Machine, Elizabeth Bear

Language: English

Synopsis: During a rescue mission on an old colony ship where the technology has become obsolete, Dr. Jens notices a number of strange events: temporary loss of connection to the ship, strange mechanisms filling out the hallways which appear to have been constructed from the ship's material by a gynoid, the only active part of the ship since every passenger still alive is in cryosleep. A separate ship o a methane-breathing species is attached to it, its inhabitants unconscious and its only cargo being a walking tank. Returning to the Core General hospital, where the passengers are supposed to be unfrozen one by one and the gynoid checked for her odd behaviour, more odd things pile up, like one of the thawed passengers having brain scarring and some kind of vorus affecting the station's AIs. As it turns out, everything is a part of a plan to expose illegal actions happening in the hospital's private ward: full-body replacements are being grown there, to receive the memories of their commissioners, a foridden action since those replacements have fully-functional nerous systems and therefore would be considered people. Hence the plan of the conspirators was to take one of these replacements, which had been discarded, implant into her fake memories and put her among the colony ship's crew, as well as inserting a virus which would let the station's AI speak of the actions in the private ward, but that virus had evolved out of control, starting to physically consume the station through the mechanisms from the colony ship, until the gynoid brought the mechanisms under her control.

Review: Mostly read it because of recommendations in regards to its Sector General homage. And that part was clear to the point of looking like plagiarism sometimes. Unlike Sector General, it focussed far more on AIs, which was a fairly interesting part, but unfortunately, the narration went off-track all the time to snap back without really leading back from the POV characters trailing thoughts to the situation at hand. This made the book tedious to read and unnecessarily long, it would be probably half its length if the derailing would be cut out.

Jondelle, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving a man and a boy from thugs and being injured for his efforts, Dumarest wakes up in the house of a physician, who owns a farm and is the mother of the boy. As usual, the woman throws herself at Dumarest, who wants to leave the planet on his search for Earth, but dies when the farm is raided where the boy Jondelle gets abducted by the raiders. With the money he had made by selling crystals he had smuggled out of a previous planet's mine, he hires a number of men for a rescue mission, which leads him into a city full of insane people that might attack them on a whim. In search for information Dumarest encounters a woman who is not a part of the settlement and wants to flee it, aiding him with his escape in return after they got information about the man who had taken Jondelle. As they flee, the floating raft is discovered and they get shot at, with several men getting killed and the woman injured. They have to patch her up in a farmer settlement where the boy's trace leads them to, from where they go to an expansive entertainment district. They find the abductor, Dumarest wants to buy Jondelle off him, but not trusting that he will receive what he paid for, he breaks into the building holding him. Returning to the city, Jondelle's grandparents had been found by the Universal Church as his caretakers.

Review: It was pretty weird how Jondelle's stepfather, who risked his life to protect him from the thugs in the beginning was blamed for selling him out just because he was anti-violence. At least the shitty romance stayed short in this one.

Zenya, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After a fruitless search of information on the location of Earth in the local archives, Dumarest gets approached by a woman to be brought to her estate, where he meets several of her relatives. After killing her brother who attacked him and being gravely injured during the fight, he gets told by her father to find a lost relative on another planet, going there under the guise of being a general, with the woman Zenya as his partner. The area he arrives at is at war with a culture that colonized the planet first, supposedly because they have massacred several villages, but the evidence for it is flimsy. Dumarest examines the case, finding more and more oddities about it, while several more massacres happen, in which it appears that people suddenly go insane and start killing each other. While the blame is still put on the other culture, now claiming they're using some kind of chemical, Dumarest actually contacts the members of the culture, further showing they are not to blame. As it turns out, the reason for the bouts of insanity is the local preferred crop, where a mutation has altered some of the plants to have that effect. The lost relative is found within a cave living among the blamed culture and retrieved, where he is almost killed by Zenya's aunt, who also had come to the planet on command of the patriarch, before Zenya takes her out. Due to this, the relative doesn't return home and Dumarest goes on with his search for Earth.

Review: This one was actually interesting, because of the mystery of the reasons behind the sudden destructions, with the original culprits being obviously not the ones who did it, although the reveal was kind of ehh when it turns out it was just a mutated strain of a common crop plant.

By the Light of the Green Star, Lin Carter

Language: German (Im Licht des grünen Sterns)

Synopsis: Just as the protagonist was about to save the princess from her prison in the tree city, a flying sleigh snatches her under his nose. Afraid that the assassins he had joined would punish him for his failure, he enters a different room, finding a number of magical artefacts which he takes. The assassin Klygon accompanying him decides to flee with him, considering his punishment would be worse. Leaving the city on their giant dragonflies, they get later attacked by a giant falcon, which curiously has a rider. The protagonist uses one of the artefacts to kill the falcon, but the attack causes them to crash into a body of water on the nearly pitch-black ground, where they wander around before being captured by a primitive people of worm riders. In their caves, they meet another captive whom Klygon doesn't trust, but who manages to prevent their execution after Klygon fails at his guard duty, which causes the caves being raided by giant ants. The tree escape, with the worm riders sending their god after them, the largest worm known. The worm catches up to them at the shore of a river and the protagonist kills the light-sensitive creature with one of the artefacts, a very strong flare which also permanently blinds him. They take a dry leaf from the giant trees to use as a boat, drifting to an inland sea and resting on an island, where their companion from the cave betrays them, leaving them to drown by the rising tide.

Interspersed is the story of the princess Niamh, who was saved by Zarqa, the last member of an immortal, telepathic species of winged humanoids, and Janchan, a prince. They also took the goddess Arjala with them, to save her from the fire that broke out in the tree city. They get captured by falcon riders, brought into a floating city where they are to be used as guinea pigs for immortality experiments; most peopel die, but it had been successful on an old philosopher who supposedly died a millennium ago. Zarqa manages to control one of the scientists to unlock his cage, frees Janchan and Arjala who had been isolated from the rest for experiments and retrieves Niamh and the philosopher as well, but all of them are too heavy for the sleigh. A solution is found by taking one of the falcons, to be steered by the mind-controlled scientist and carrying the two women. As they leave the city, they are pursued and Zarqa gets knocked out, breaking the mind control, with the scientist then steering the falcon away to have Arjala all for himself, whom he had become obsessed with, flying past the island where the protagonist and Klygon are trapped on.

Review: So far, my favourite planetary romance, as I like the giant tree setting and despite me picking up the middle of five books, the events of the previous two were summarized at the start and there were no unexplained terminologies thrown left and right like in the Kregen books. The two separate storylines were both interesting. The only part I didn't like much was Arjala's character development, as someone as insufferably arrogant as her wouldn't just shrug and act normally after her worldview had been shattered like that.

Eloise, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Cyclan hot on his heels, Dumarest hires a rustbucket of a spaceship to go on a random course, but it ends up in a warp field, throwing them into a random area to crash on an icy planet. With most of the crew dead save for the minstrel Arbush, they try to brave the icy wasteland, until encountering a city. Saved at the last moment from a fall off the cliffs surrounding the city, they are brought inside to be patched up. It appears like an utopia with all needs provided, supervised by robots and everything controlled by a supercomputer. There, a woman named Eliose immediately throws herself at Dumarest, much to the chagrin of a friend who had saved her life years ago. One day, they receive numbers, defining their positions in a culling queue, with Dumarest being the first. They mount an escape plan, with Dumarest damaging the main computer and the others setting up distractions for the robots through arson, collecting supplies and antigravity harnesses to flee the city. Several days after leaving the city, a squad of robots catches up with them, where Eloise's friend dies, and the antigravity harnesses are destroyed because they're being tracked. On foot, they get picked up by nomads, which then aid them to reach a city in a warmer climate, from where Dumarest embarks on his search-for-Earth travels, while Eloise stays behind with Arbush.

Review: Out of the Dumarest books so far, Eloise is the worst of the women jumping at Dumarest's dick like a half-starved chicken at a worm. Ignoring her friend who saved her life at the first whiff of a Real Man (TM), claiming love after having barely interacted with the protagonist, acting like a total sex pest towards him. Good thing the next book is not named after a woman, maybe the author doesn't include a shitty romance in it.

[theflyingpimphat]

Return of the Dead Guy; The Eye of the Zodiac; The Integral Trees

The Guns of Nana Joan, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving Symmorium ships with their new spaceship, the Space Team goes to a planet inhabited by basically Zootopia sloths. There, Loren finds out that her brother had been captured by the Symmorium for being a traitor and immediately leaves everyone else behind by taking their ship off to save him. Everyone ends up having to work a job, with Cal ending up at Nana Joan's, a restaurant that always takes on the appearance of whatever place someone desires to eat at the most. He tries to escape on the first day only to get beaten into submission by its elderly owner, later tries to take his coworkers to a bar, for them being denied entry due to being minors. In an attempt to get himself a ship to follow Loren after she got captured by Sinclair to be used as bait, he gets chased by the police (since it was their ship he tried to steal) and it comes to a shootout at the restaurant, where the members of the Space Team get reunited and Cal finds out that the remote he got randomly given by the grandmother of a character from a previous book summons a giant mecha which they oard and go after Loren. They confront Sinclair, who is physically superior, but prattles about him having started the war, which gets broadcasted and leads to him losing his position as space CEO.

Review: Yes, I know I've read this in January, but completely forgot to write the review for it. The humour has definitely improved, both in quntity and in quality, including some good commentary, like unemployment being the worst of crimes.

Return of the Dead Guy, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: Receiving a signal from a particular cemetery on Earth, the Currently Untitled travels there, where they see an odd orange cloud in the planet's vicinity. Cal visits the cemetery, finding Sinclair there, who had turned Eugene the cannibal from the first book into a drooling cyborg, to take revenge. While Cal gets beaten up, the time suddenly stops and a few hooded figures take him through a portal into a pocket universe full of alternative versions of Cal, shortly before they have to evacuate it as it implodes. They plan to have Cal to offer Ikumordo, the orange cloud, his own universe in echange to leave all the alternative Earths intact. Instead of providing this offer, Cal challenges Ikumordo, resulting in it becoming angry and attempting to consume all universes, starting with their Earths. With Space Team separated across different realities, Cal goes into the void to save his spaceship, and discovers the "weapon" that would be effective against Ikumordo: its grieving parent. They meet again in a reality where its Cal has become the Space President and where the final faceoff happens: Cal uses his own body as the vessel for Ikumordo's parent and later for both of them, releasing them in an universe dead from the beginning.With the multiverse's destruction prevented, he takes a detour to a printing shop to put some clothes on the still time-stopped Sinclair with prints insulting Eugene's mum, with predictable results once the time-stop was lifted.

Review: This one was certainly the weirdest of the Space Team books so far, owed to the multiverse stuff, but the way it was inserted into the story felt like a detour, especially since I don't expect anything from it to return in later books.

The Eye of the Zodiac, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: As a mine worker, Dumarest finds a young man who claims to be from a place called "Nerth", which he assumes to be a settlement of the Original People, a clue to the location of Earth. Escaping from the cyber who had just arrived on the planet, he goes to the man's home planet, discovering on arrival that the man had joined the ship as well, but died during the flight. Taking his belongings with him, Dumarest joins a group of people travelling in the direction where the settlement is supposed to be, composed of, among others, a woman in male clothing and her brother, who has an obsession with a phantom of an animal, which he seeks to find in the wilderness. The raft crashes and only Dumares, the woman and the pilot survive. The pilot later dies in a predator attack and the two survivors stumble onto a place where a group of boys are about to have their initiation rite. Dumarest and the woman are captured and held in the village, where the former is able to contact the dead man's mother and later finds a shrine that shows the zodiac signs. As it turns out the woman was in cooperation with the Cyclan and a cyber appears in the village, claiming to have an implant that will notify the Cyclan and have the village razed if he dies. Dumarest injects him with a leftover vial of the affinity twin and gets his body under the control of the village idiot. With the village saved and having an important artefact retrieved when he shattered an idol in the dead man's possessions, Dumarest is treated to fotos of Earth before it got destroyed by wars.

Review: Good thing there was no shitty romance in this book, but it was replaced with a steaming heap of transphobia instead. Also, don't take nutritional advice from Dumarest: the only "nutrient" raw meat is more rich in than cooked meat is parasites. Probably explains why his face expression is described as it is, that man never had a healthy bowel movement in his life.

The Integral Trees, Larry Niven

Language: German (Der schwebende Wald)

Synopsis: With a drought threatending the Quinn tribe, a number of its people are sent up their home tree's trunk, presumably in an attempt of its leader to get rid of people he doesn't like. They arrive in the trunk's middle, where they find an exceptionally large mushroom and attempting to cut it off, are attacked by members of the opposite side's Dalton tribe. The fight ends with the tree suddenly breaking apart, having the survivors stranded in microgravity and the Quinn tribe dead, as their side moved closer to the neutron star and out of the smoke ring's inhabitable zone. Saving themselves on a piece of bark, they manage to harpoon a giant filter feeder and let themselves be dragged close to a jungle, where they see a fight between its inhabitants and attackers that use a flying machine. With two exceptions, the survivors are captured by the attackers as well, who are the inhabitants of the London tree, having raided the jungle for slaves. The tribemembers are separated; the student ends up under the London tree's scientist, using his position to study the flying machine's controls, while the jungle dwellers mount a counterattack. The student successfull hijacks the machine during the attack, picks up the other tribemembers together with a few jungle dwellers and in an attempt to shake off an unusually short man from the London tribe who is the only one still fitting into a leftover spacesuit, launches out of the smoke ring. This is when the vessel is contacted by an AI, claiming to have been made from the consciousness of one of the original settlers of the smoke ring. On one hand, it ais them in returing back into a breathable atmosphere, on the other hand, it demands them to kill the man with the spacesuit, whom they had led in. They get out of transmission range before the AI can do anything about their unwillingness to kill the man, landing on an uninhabited integral tree, where they form their own tribe.

Review: This is a creative location which looks impossible on first glance, but at least appears to be fairly grounded despite everything (except on the time scale; I do not expect such a system to be stable enough to develop complex life). The nature of the location also dictates the plot, making it a sightseeing tour across the smoke ring first and foremost. While not everyone's cup of tea, I do enjoy worldbuilding-driven stories a lot.

[theflyingpimphat]

March 2026

The Bug Wars; State of the Art; Die Töchter des Drachen; Jack of Swords

The Bug Wars, Robert Asprin

Language: German (Die Käferkriege)

Synopsis: The book follows Rahm, a Tzen warrior, through the titular Bug Wars. It begins with the first mission fighting the wasps, then getting abandoned with a few other survivors on the planet to fend for themselves, being picked up later and entering a mission to find a natural predator for the hoppers on their home planets and discovering the ants, a so-far unknown type of bug, and lastly leading an attack on several ant hives.

Review: The good part: The Tzen are fairly interestingly designed, being naturally colourblind (but breeding specimens with colour vision in the course of the story), having a sleep cycle tied to eating rather than tiring out or a caste system. The bad part is that the blurb looked more exciting than the story itself, which lacked any commentary or subversion the blurb had suggested, but was a straightforward tale of one warrior in a war.

State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

Language: English

Synopsis: A collection o several short stories more or less tied into the Culture setting, consisting of an assassination of a political figure by a reluctant person blackmailed into the job, a tree doing a "she loves me, she loves me not" with an astronaut's appendages, the self-destruction of the United States through a malfunctioning trash teleporter and a number of Culture people landing on Earth to research the local populace.

Review: I must say, I prefer Bank's short stories over the longer ones, especially considering my usually gripes are absent in them. And the tree story was genuinely funny.

Die Töchter des Drachen, Wolfgang Hohlbein

Language: German

Synopsis: After her town has been burnt to the ground by dragons and her being the only survivor, a stranger tells to a girl the story of Talianna, who had started out just as her: one of the few survivors of a dragon attack. She joined the mercenary band that followed the dragons, married its leader then killed him to take control, to use her position to uncover the secret of the dragons and their riders razing settlements who had discovered any form of technological progress. Her search brings her and her two turtleman bodyguards to a tower in a desert, where they uncover that the dragonriders are perfectly fine with using higher technology themselves. Later her search brings her and her surviving bodyguard to a town at the edge of the Shelf, where she wants to find Karan, a man who had been at the bottom of the Shelf and returned alive. She manages to make enemies both out of the leader of the Daughters of Dragons as well as Agella, the leader of a crime gang, before taking the latter as a hostage and gliding down the shelf on Karan's winged boat. Attacked by a dragon rider, they crash into the forest below. Talianna notices that there is something strange about Karan, with the forest's monstrous fauna avoiding him. It is revealed that he is barely more than a copy of the original man, his body having long been absorbed by the fungoid mass that inhabits the ground. As she finds the spire where the Daughters of the Dragon are supposed to have their headquarter, she lets herself be taken after letting herself be deliberately infected with the fungal mass. Inside, she is told that the reason for the Daughters of the Dragon suppressing technologcal progress is that there have been nine cataclysms brought by technology already, which had altered and decayed the world to the state it currently is, and that the real rulers of the world are the giant arthropods, with those outside everywhere being the drones controlled by the massive queen living under the spire. Talianna lets herself be devoured by the swarm, which releases the fungus and kills the spires inhabitants, with only Angella and the turtleman Hrhon surviving, while Talianna is reshaped into a fungal copy like Karan. With the tale concluded, it is revealed that the narrator was Angella all along, and the girl is offered to join her on her mission.

Review: It had an above-average number of typos, which was pretty weird for not even being a first edition. That aside, the premise of a fantasy world being kept technologically stagnant to prevent yet another environmental catastrophe was interesting, but the conclusion was frustrating: Sometimes, stories present questions which should be explored in depth and nuance, even with accepting an uncomfortable answer if necessary, but instead, it is answered with a stupid "fuck you" and killing the one who asks that question just to avoid the uncomfortable answer.

Jack of Swords, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After killing and butchering an expensive animal with a group of starving men, Dumarest is held accountable for the deed. ending up in the proximity of an older woman suffering from a disease who is part of the owner's family, he travels with a group of other people to a legendary planet within a nebula, which is impassable without the proper aid, which in this case, is a blind woman created in a laboratory who can see energy auras. Once on the planet, they find it uninhabitated with only a completely enclosed city and artificially-created vegetation being present. Once they make it inside with the help of the blind woman, they find out that the legendary treasure the city is supposed to hold is a room full of mist, which causes hallucinations of one's biggest desires. And in a way, it does what the survivors had come from- the elderly woman is lost in the mist to live her perfect life and the woman who wanted money to find her lost daughter finds out it is the blind woman, who had been abducted and altered.

Review: It appears like the stupid romance is getting dumber and dumber with every book. Dumarest is the smartest man alive despite having lived like shit through his childhood without any education, men are people, women are animals and animals are machines.

[theflyingpimphat]

April 2026

Lord of the Spiders; Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun; Haven of Darkness

Lord of the Spiders, Michael Moorcock

Language: German (Der Herr der Spinnen)

Synopsis: Michael Kane returns to Mars of the past, finding himself in an unknown area and wondering if he had missed the time he had been taken from. He runs into the giant Hool Haji, who is unexpectedly friendly, belonging to a culture separate from the one Kane had fought previously. Brought to his village that is under the control of an evil king, they plan a revolution, but the village is attacked and massacred because of a rejected woman tattling. Kane, Hool Haji and several other survivors go through a desert on their escape, finding a ruin with advanced technology, probably left behind an extinct precursor race. The materials there allow them to build a balloon, which is caught up in a storm and blown over the ocean to a different continent. Hool Haji gets abducted there and Kane follows the trail to an odd building in the jungle, which is inhabited by spider-human hybrids and their leader, a giant spider, which wants to eat them both. They manage to escape and kill the spider, which tears her underlings to shreds while dying. Flying back to the continent of the origin, they hatch a plan to get rid of the king, using the balloon to their advantage. Kane flies out to search for remaining soldiers, but gets attacked and downed by a large flying animal. Off track, he encounters ships with humans, belonging to a nation allied with the one Kane had fought for during his previous visit, realizing he is in the right timeline after all and the woman he loves being alive. Unfortunately, the two nations are at the brink of war, engineered by the lies of a witch. To prevent it, Kane tries to abduct the witch and by chance, succeeds through accidentally uncovering an ancient artefact in the treasure chamber which paralyzes onlookers and forces them to tell only the truth. Grabbing both witch and shield, he flies to the battlefield and stops the fight at the last minute, celebrating the peace with a marriage of his love. Later, using the technology in the desert ruin, Kane builds a teleporter that allows him to move between Earth and Mars as he pleases.

Review: A pretty typical planetary romance, with the only unusual aspect being that the protagonist is nicer than average. The title is a bit strange, though - the spider episode felt pretty random and had little consequences for the story at large.

Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After hiring as a mercenary to an army that lost the battle, Dumarest is taken prisoner and roped into stealing cargo together with a woman called Dephine. The theft goes awry and as it turns out in the ship, the stolen cargo were corpses, dead from a plague which then infects the crew and passengers. Dumarest and Dephine are the only survivors, with Dephine having a natural immunity and being able to extract a vaccine from her own blood to save Dumarest's life. Arriving on Dephine's home planet, Dumarest is introduced to a tradition-valuing society and a boy with a crippled leg who claims to have found a cave with ancient artefacts, which makes Dumarest think that they are from the original settlers and might point towards the location of Earth. Travelling there, Dumarest indeed manages to find a spectrogram of the Sun, but is also attacked by one of the predators the society hunts for trophies. The boy is knocked unconscious in the fight, but Dumarest manages to kill it and suggest to the boy that he was the one who took it out, earning him the recognition he was striving for. As he was about to depart, Dephine throws herself at him and drags him off to an estate to spend time until the ship Dumarest wants to take departs, but as it turns out, she is actually working for the Cyclan and dies in the resulting altercation.

Review: On one hand, the part with the heist and the resulting plague on the ship was interesting, although Dumarest's plot armour showed too well there. On the other hand, Dephine is mind-numbingly frustrating. Being pretty smart and competent in one scene, then abysmally dumb in the next. And ending like any prominent woman who isn't just there for shitty romance, as any woman with thoughts beyond getting on Dumarest's dick is cooperating with the Cyclan and evil, apparently.

Haven of Darkness, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Sun's spectrogram now in his possession, Dumarest attempts to search a database for a match, but can't afford the fee to it, following an advice of asking a hobbyist to look into it. Before finding a match, the man is murdered and the death apparently being used to frame Dumarest as the murderer, he has to flee and ends up on a ship together with a Cyber, having walked straight into the trap. To his luck, he has yet another set of Affinity Twin syringes and manages to take control of the navigator, then kills and ejects the Cyber while hiding his own body in a crate of cargo, leaving it on the next planet the ship lands on, then commits suicide by ejecting himself and returning his consciousness to his original body. The planet he landed on has the feature of two suns causing hallucinations of deceased people when they overlap and of a second intelligent species, which rules the night and is for the most part assumed to be a myth. A woman, betrothed to a man who plans to rule the planet's society, throws herself at Dumarest, and he is roped into stopping her betrothed's plans. They visit his base with its mercenaries, but while getting back, their raft crashed because of sabotage, forcing them to stay a night outside and discovering that the second intelligent species is real, apparently creating modular bodies with one winged form attacking any human outside after dark. Making it back, Dumarest leads an attack on the base, managing to kill its leader and earning possession of his land.

Review: A rare case of the woman involved in the shitty romance doesn't end up dead and isn't even conspicuously forgotten in the next book, but holy shit, the incel vibes are strong in this book. Yes, every woman is totally lusting after a Real Man (TM) all the time and will immediately lift her skirt and bend over when seeing one. Maybe Lavinia just needs to get mounted by her stallions if the planet's men are too un-manly for her.

[theflyingpimphat]

May 2026

Blindsight; Prison of Night; Incident on Ath; Shadowkeep; Planet of the Japes

Prison of Night, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having gained the lands of Gydapen and Lavinia at his side, Dumarest is considering to sell the lands to use the money for travel on his search for Earth. As it turns out, Gydapen had an illegitimate son who claims the land and wants to conquer it by force. Fighting ensues, and Dumarest tries to end the conflict by contacting the Sungari by entering a cave. He manages to convince them to aid in return for some adjustments to the pact that would benefit them more and is shown in return how the Sungari have their eyes and ears practically everywhere, killing Roland without much issue.

Review: Interesting to see a book that directly continues the story of a previous one, which was a good decision since some of them had ended in situations the consequences of which had not been shown (like how he went back to travelling after having agreed to stay with one of the women that throw themselves at him on a regular basis or how he oriented himself after being teleported to a random location by Thormyle).

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Language: English

Synopsis: After the Firefall, an event of a number of alien probes falling through Earth's atmosphere, a ship is sent to a previously-unknown faraway gas giant to find a camouflaged construct circling it, unclear whether it is alive or a machine. As it is examined, something the living staff has to do itself since every drone sent in got disabled shortly after and under great risk due to the construct's internal radiation and magnetic fields messing with their bodies and brains, a few of its "inhabitants" could be captured alive.Attempts to communicate with the constructs as well as tests done on the captured entities leads the team to a horrifying realisation: this alien life is hyperintelligent, but completely devoid of self-awareness, apparently having evolved out of it for more efficiency and the aspects of humanity's signals that are tied to self-awareness like art could only be interpreted as a waste of bandwith in the context of an attack. In the end, it's POV character Siri Keeton is the only one who makes it out alive in a pod sent back to Earth, as the ship collides with the structure in an atttempt of mutual destruction, which outcome remains ambiguous.

Review: There is a lot of concepts regarding consciousness, different mental conditions like blindsight or Cotard's delusion being discussed in the story and it is recommended to look them up alongside reading the book. The whole idea of self-awareness being actually detrimental to intelligence is an interesting core idea to base the story on (I would propose that self-awareness is necessary for the way behaviour is regulated in animals: it is not needed to remove your hand from the fire, but needed to not place the hand in the fire again). A downside is that the descriptions are employing similes to such a degree it is often hard to make out what is actually happening.

Incident on Ath, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: Saving a woman who is searching for a specific painter from some thugs, Dumarest joins in her search once seeing a painting depicting Earth's moon. The settlement that artist is on is unusual, as it is full of people engaging in different activities and the woman who hosts Dumarest can list off Earth's measurements. After an explosion damages the ship they have arrived on, investigations into the case show that there is a rebellion of the servant caste growing which one of the ship's crew is involved in. It ends up with the central computer being destroyed, which had been connected to the members of the master caste and with its destruction, the information on Earth had become lost, as well as the artist's skill.

Review: It appears like the author isn't writing like an incel, but like an alien having learned about humans from forums frequented by incels, because apparently women will regularly climax by watching knife fights in the arena. That aside, Shitty Romance (TM) galore, Dumarest could have really asked about the coordinates right away after having been told about the measurements and the reason why there were no children visible on Ath was never answered, despite that fact having been prominently pointed out. But at least, the plot is less erratic than in previous books.

Shadowkeep, Alan Dean Foster

Language: German (Shadowkeep: Das dunkle Land)

Synopsis: Practor Fime, a blacksmith's apprentice, is taking on the quest of defeating the demon king, who has taken over Shadowkeep. On his way, he picks up an anthropomorphic kangaroo, a not-elf and a lizardman and they enter the fortress, navigating past magical traps. They free Shadowkeep's original owner from his prison, who gives them an artefact to defeat the demon and tells them how to use the fortresses' transport system before fading into the afterlife. Arriving in the throne room, they fight the demon king and win, but the Roo dies in the fight. Using one of the magical artefacts they had walked past previously, they can revive him and go on to plunder the fortresses' treasuries, as their original owner is dead, anyway.

Review: A very straightforward fantasy quest story with little beyond the usual tropes. I am used to better stories by the author, but then again, it is tied to an old computer game by the same title and those weren't known for their stellar plots.

Planet of the Japes, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After a hacking attack had emptied their bank account and unlocked a part of Mech's memory not accessible by himself, Space Team flies to the coordinates marked on the map which had become unlocked. They arrive at a planet called Funworld, a gigantic, run-down theme park, curiously discovering a man in the queue, who is apparently an acquaintance of Cal and willing to pay their entry fee. Once inside, they find out that clown-shaped biobots have taken over the theme park after having slaughtered the visitors. Navigating into the more dangerous parts of the park to reach the mark that leads into the planet's core, they encounter a clown who is not murderous, revealing that Mech had let the planet build as a prison for a mass murderer, shortly before the man reveals himself as someone who plans to free the mass murderer and used the Space Team to get past the murderclowns. They supposedly manage to take down the ship and deliver the mass murderer's prison to the new president, but the end reveals that the man survived.

Review: Each book from the series gets slightly more amusing. Compared to the previous one, it runs on a smaller scope, but it also helps that the plot is more consistent.

[fatoam232-deactivated20250707]

A Plea from the Heart: I Am Fatima, and This Is My Story

My name is Fatima, a teacher from Gaza. I used to work in a small school I loved dearly, planting hope in the hearts of children and teaching them that tomorrow could be better. But the war took everything away. My school was bombed, I lost my job, and our home was reduced to rubble. Yet, I refused to give up. I set up a small tent amid the destruction and continued teaching children, showing them that knowledge is a light that cannot be extinguished, even in the darkest times.

My husband, Akram, was my partner and pillar of support. But he was severely injured in an attack targeting civilians. His abdominal injuries are so severe that he can no longer work or even lift basic items. Every day, I see the pain in his eyes and feel the weight of helplessness, but I try to stay strong for him and for our children.

Our eldest, Manar, is four years old, and she’s missing out on her childhood amidst this devastation. Our youngest, Ibrahim, was born under bombardment just a year ago. He has suffered greatly due to the lack of milk and proper medical care. Yet, sometimes, he smiles, and in those brief moments, I find the strength to keep going.

We now live in a fragile tent that doesn’t shield us from the cold or rain. Every day is a new battle for survival. I write these words while holding my children’s hands, with nothing left but my faith in God and the hope that your kind hearts will hear our plea.

Please help us provide milk and food for our children, ease Akram’s pain, and rebuild even a small part of the life the war has destroyed. Every donation, no matter how small, makes a big difference in our lives.

I ask you to share our story and be our support during this harsh and unforgiving time.

Donation link

Donate to Help Fatima's family in their time of need, organized by Thistle Path

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[theflyingpimphat]

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[enasfamli]

Gaza is being destroyed again! The bombing doesn't stop, destruction is everywhere, ambulances fill the streets, and people are fleeing without a destination... children, the elderly, entire families are displaced under fire! Gaza is crying out for help, save us! Every donation, no matter how small, saves a life. We need you now more than ever. #SaveGaza #GazaUnderAttack🙏😭🥺

Donate to Help Enas and her children in Gaza, organized by Gabriel G

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[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

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[theflyingpimphat]

I used to think that losing a home was the hardest thing that could happen.

But what I’ve learned is that the hardest part comes after — trying to rebuild your life while carrying the weight of everything you lost 💔

Every day, I try to focus on the future. On my education, on my family, on the hope that one day things will feel stable again. But hope becomes difficult to hold onto when every step forward feels uncertain.

This campaign is not just helping us financially. It’s helping us believe that our future is still worth fighting for.

If you’re reading this, thank you for taking a moment to see the person behind the fundraiser. Your support, your kindness, and even sharing our story can make a bigger difference than you might imagine 🤍🙏

https://gofund.me/5cdd060e

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[helphanaachildren]

💔 My name is Hanaa, a mother of seven children from Gaza City.

Before the war, we lived a simple but happy life. We had a beautiful home filled with laughter, family gatherings, and precious memories. My husband worked hard to build a small company that provided for us, and we dreamed of a bright future for our children. My eldest son had just begun a new job and was excited to start his life, while my second son proudly worked alongside his father.

Then the war took everything.

Our home was reduced to rubble. The company that my husband spent years building disappeared overnight. The life we had worked so hard for was gone in a moment.

But the greatest loss was my son.

My eldest son was killed while trying to bring food to our family. He left home hoping to help his hungry brothers and sisters and never came back. No mother should have to bury her child, especially a child whose last act was trying to feed his family.

As if that pain was not enough, my other son was severely injured and now desperately needs medical treatment that we cannot afford.

We spent every penny we had trying to survive. Today, we have no savings left, no home to return to, and no way to provide the basic necessities my children need. Every day is a struggle to find food, medicine, and shelter. As a mother, it breaks my heart to watch my children suffer and to feel powerless to help them.

That is why I started this campaign.

I am not asking for luxury or comfort. I am simply asking for a chance to keep my children alive, to provide food for their empty stomachs, medicine for my injured son, and hope for their future. My youngest daughter deserves the opportunity to grow up in safety and dignity, not surrounded by loss and hardship.

Our campaign is moving very slowly, and we are running out of options. Every donation, no matter how small, can make a real difference for my family. If you are unable to donate, please share our story. Your kindness may reach someone who can help.

Help Hanaa In Gaza

My name is Hanaa. Before the war, our life was simple, quiet, and filled with happiness. ❤️ We lived in a cozy home where laughter echoed ev

From the depths of a mother's heart, thank you for reading, sharing, donating, and standing beside my family during the darkest chapter of our lives. 🙏❤️

[lamagaza100]

Dear friends 🤍,

Today, I would like to ask you to support Hanaa and her family during an incredibly difficult time. ❤️

They are facing serious hardships and struggling to meet even their most basic needs. Like many families, they are carrying burdens that have become too heavy to bear alone 💔.

Any contribution, no matter how small, can make a real difference in Hanaa's life and help bring some relief and hope to her family 🙏.

If you are unable to donate, please consider sharing her story. Every donation, share, and prayer helps more than you can imagine 🤲✨.

Thank you for your kindness, compassion, and support. May your generosity be returned to you many times over ❤️🤍.

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

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[helpayooshdream245]

Please donate & share

Ayoush’s Crochet Journey

Hi, I'm Raven, and I'm running this campaign on behalf of my friend Ayoush. Any money raised will go to her in full. Please note the campaig

Hello friends 💗Thank you all for your continued support. I am very sorry to tell you that we recently experienced heavy shelling near us.

As a result, we lost everything. My handmade crochet work was burned and destroyed, and now I have to raise money again to buy the basic supplies I need, including crochet hooks, yarn, and threads.

The prices have become extremely high. Right now, I need only $200 to purchase the essential materials and start creating new pieces again.

You can see my previous work on my crochet Instagram page, and you are welcome to message me there if you would like.click here

Please support me in any way you can. If you cannot donate, please consider sharing my story and talking about it with others.

Even $15–$20 could make a real difference in my life.

Thank you for your kindness and support. ❤️

You can watch the video of the shelling through this link.

Click here

These are some of my previous handmade creations. I miss being able to make pieces like these again.

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 13 · 4x 5$ donation commissions for @jennywolfgal of one of Shub Niggurath's spawn and three different morphs of Frox. You can

[mohammedgaza210-deactivated2025]

Urgent Appeal 🥊

Hello my friend 👋

My name is Mohammed, I live in Gaza City and I am 19 years old. I have lived through the full horrors of war — hunger, displacement, fear, relentless bombings, destruction, and so many other painful experiences 🥹😭.I never created a donation link before, and I haven’t received any kind of help throughout this devastating war 🥲💔.

I was so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and I dreamed of starting a small shop to earn a living. But sadly, the war returned — even more violent and destructive than before 😭.Our area has now been declared a dangerous combat zone, and we lost our home — the only shelter we had 💔.

Worst of all, my father was seriously injured: he tragically lost one of his hands and an eye, and he is now completely unable to work or support our family 🥲😭.

Prices have skyrocketed, and we have no source of income. I’m launching this donation campaign now with a broken heart but a little hope 🥲.

Please, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of my family, consider making a donation to help us survive 🙏💔.

I just created the donation link, hoping that someone out there might lend a helping hand.

Emergency Help for Mohammed

My name is Mohammed. I am 18 years old and live in Gaza City. I am still at the beginning of my life, dreaming of a better future. My father

Please don’t let me down 🙏❤️‍🩹

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 13 · 4x 5$ donation commissions for @jennywolfgal of one of Shub Niggurath's spawn and three different morphs of Frox. You can

[ibrahiiimfam]

Donations are so weak😔💔

No help, No support, so No food no medicine for my parents 💔

Being hopeless and have nothing to do with this difficult situation makes me depressed especially I can’t get food for ten members 💔

I’m only 15 years old and I have to take care of my family, providing them with food, water, and basics just to stay alive another day😔💔

Help me just a little to be able to get food for my family please 🙏

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign isn't vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 13 · 4x 5$ donation commissions for @jennywolfgal of one of Shub Niggurath's spawn and three different morphs of Frox. You can

[yasergaza98]

I'm Yasser… a simple man who lost everything 💔. I'm 27 years old, from northern Gaza 🇵🇸.

My house was destroyed at the beginning of the war. We live in the Shuja'iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza 🏚️. I lost my job, and I was injured during the war and am still suffering 💥🤕… Now I'm fighting just to keep my family alive.

I'm responsible for a very large family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦:

👴 My father is elderly and needs care.

👶 My young children are innocent.

🧠 My brother has a mental disability, can't work, and has children of his own.

🤰 My wife is pregnant and needs care amidst a complete lack of basic necessities. She needs so much, the simplest of which is clothing.

👧👧 My children are Salwa and Massa. My little Massa was born during the height of the war. We were living in my sister's house when my wife went into labor. We were trapped and couldn't leave the house because of the intense shelling all around us. Miraculously, by the grace of God, my wife gave birth to Massa at home.

When we finally managed to leave a week later, the occupation forces demolished my sister's house.

Now we live in tents inside Gaza, destitute. The tents offer no protection from the heat or the winter. In the winter, we suffered greatly, and in the summer, the children developed skin diseases from the extreme heat.

There is no income… no work… and prices are sky-high. 🔥

We are living through harsh days, caught between hunger and fear. We have nothing but hope in God and in your hearts. 🙏 I never imagined I would have to ask for help, but today… I sincerely reach out to you:

Please extend a helping hand 🙏 Any amount, even a small one, can provide food, medicine, and warm clothes for my children.

💔 We truly need any help, even the smallest… It could mean a meal, medicine, or even just hope for life.

🤍 Don't leave us alone… Your support is our lifeline.

🙏 Please, from a broken heart… Any help, even a small one, could make a huge difference in our lives and help us to keep going and survive.

May God reward you all. Your support will be a light in our lives 🤍

Hope for Yasser and his family!

Hello

These are my children. One of them was born during the war inside our home because we couldn’t go to the hospital due to the intensity of the war we were living through at that time. Until now, the suffering continues, with shortages of food, medicine, and clothing. I ask you for your prayers and support.

@fundraiser-reblogs

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[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign isn't vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 13 · 4x 5$ donation commissions for @jennywolfgal of one of Shub Niggurath's spawn and three different morphs of Frox. You can

[qusayxxalkalili01]

My name is Qusai, I was born in Gaza and I am 16 years old. The war came and I was in the third preparation and I could not complete my studies. I had a house and a place to live in, but unfortunately it has been completely destroyed and our area is subjected to constant warnings and displacement of the population. I do not have any source of income. My father is unemployed after we had a bird shop where we rely on a source of income, but it is destroyed because of the war and we can hardly buy expensive food and because of famine and lack of money, we cannot manage ourselves with our simplest daily needs, so I hope you stand by my family and help make our lives better and make sure that no matter how much it is, no matter what it makes us happy and helps us make our lives better

Helping for Qusay to make a better life

My name is Qusai, I was born in Gaza and I am 16 years old. The war came and I was in the third preparation and I could not complete my stud

Please donate as much as you can so that help my family even a small amount and tell people about my suffering

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign isn't vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 13 · 4x 5$ donation commissions for @jennywolfgal of one of Shub Niggurath's spawn and three different morphs of Frox. You can

[hyshwh7766]

My name is Hisham, a 26-year-old young man from Gaza. Like any young person, I dreamed of a simple job to achieve my goals and build my future step by step, but the war turned all our dreams into rubble. We were displaced many times, carrying our homes on our shoulders, leaving our memories under the debris.

My family now lives in a tent with no stable shelter, my sister Jana has no school, and I have no steady job. My brother Kamal carries the burden of the entire family, working every day to secure just enough food, while I search for any work, no matter how difficult or dangerous, just to survive.

My mother, the beautiful dream we once cherished, wished for a calm and happy life for us, but the war tore us apart and shattered our hopes. As for Jana, my innocent sister, she lost her school, her books, and even her sense of hope, yet she still writes her dreams on small pieces of paper, hiding them in her torn clothes so they won’t get lost like everything else.

We are not asking for the impossible, only what keeps us alive with dignity and gives us a chance to rebuild our lives. Every donation, no matter how small, means so much to us. Your support will give us hope to keep going and try again. 🙏❤️

Help Hisham

 

[theflyingpimphat]

(campaign is vetted) Since I got asked to share this: anyone who wants to treat their donation as an art commission fee can contact me in advance to decide on a sum and show a proof of donation (personal information on those can be omitted). Unless you have something else in mind, I’ll keep it simple: 5€ or its equivalent = 1 ballpoint pen doodle. Examples as done for previous donation commissions linked below:

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and

Post by @theflyingpimphat · 4 images

💬 0  🔁 3  ❤️ 13 · 3x 5$ donation commissions and a freebie due to issues for @jennywolfgal of alien fey, a related dwarf, a space djinn and