Spear

Nicola Griffith's Spear is a short, fascinating novella that retells a side quest legend in the Arthurian constellation of stories and characters.

It's lovely. The prose is gorgeous, as always from this author. The main character is a woman who gets to make her own choices and have skills and an identity as an individual, which is the kind of detail I wish I didn't have to highlight but I'm glad to see.

Just as with Hild, this book included certain details of daily life and choices that stayed with me. It's raining and two knights are escorting through the woods? One must offer to go hoodless, for the peripheral awareness. Is magic real or is it just cultural significance and placebo suggestions? I loved this, and it was a brief and delicious read.

(I was left with the impression that I missed significant plot choices and story details because I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legends and lore. That's okay, the book was great anyway.)

This post's theme word is evanescent (adj), "fading quickly; transitory." The evanescent details of lore dimmed beneath the onslaught of accrued cultural Arthurian baggage.

There is no antimemetics division

There is no antimemetics division is a novel / series of short stories / piece of collaborative fiction authored by qntm. The entire work is readable for free online. It is vaguely unsettling horror --- not my usual preference --- but excellently written and with a compelling premise.

There is no antimemetics division lives inside SCP, a huge online collaborative fiction site loosely based around a single fictional prompt and set in roughly the same universe. If you read widely on the SCP site, you will eventually find some mutually-incompatible storylines; these are explicable under the premise of the universe: the site documents a sort of parallel reality (or is it) where certain ideas have the power to erase themselves from your memory. These are "antimemes", and they can propagate just like memes but are much more difficult to secure, contain, and protect against (SCP).

I don't usually enjoy horror, but this novel and the SCP project more widely are very gentle about the horror angle. If you go looking to be scared, you can find that --- but there are also storylines that are 100% playing the premise for comedic value, entire stories based around one pun punchline, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink stories that play with the tropes of horror joyfully. Spending many hours reading this novel, and various other SCP works, convinced me that I'm actually OK with horror, as long as it is psychological and interspersed with jokes. SCP is more like Jasper Fforde's sense of humor, melted with Peter Watts' attitude and then forced to write exclusively in the format of bureaucratic filing reports.

Rereading the above, my opinion might not be clear. I'm trying to be descriptive. 

I strongly recommend There is no antimemetics division. Try the first few chapters and see if they scratch a particular brain itch for you, as they did for me. If you like the premise, then I hope you've already read Peter Watts' Blindsight (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW, it remains my #1 most-recommended-to-others book).

This post's theme word is descript (adj), "having distinctive features or qualities." This novel made me much more cognizant of the aggressively descript and nondescript elements of my environment.