This is an important announcement: I was actually able to make progress on my story! There are words on the page that weren't there three days prior! To those of you who fight the fight of making something out of nothing - sending you all the good wishes and encouragement in your journey up hill.
This week I finished reading Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhoarse, and while I'm still forming my thoughts around it, I found it to be a richly textured story with great worldbuilding that hints at, but doesn't dive deep enough (for my taste), into the history. And perhaps that's by design, seeing as it's the first in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy. I'll have longer review out shortly.
In the meantime, dear Frivolous - enjoy this week's 3TTN (plus one for the kids).
Hopeful SFF
So much of the SFF world bends towards darker, grimmer futures or alternatives. But there are those who present the other. A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers starts off a new set of stories set in a world where humans have everything. What more could they want? A robot and a monk spend some time on this thought experiment.
2021 British Fantasy Awards Shortlist
Feast your eyes and shuffle some time for these. Many of these are on my TBR. Take a look at the shortlist here; NK Jemisin's The City We Became, Dominion Anthology, ed. by Zelda Knight and Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald, are of particular interest to me.
For the little ones
Wordless, beautifully illustrated, and surprisingly captivating, The Journey, by Aaron Becker book and its sequels are a lot of fun to "read" to the kids. There are no words, and yet the story progresses. The fun of it, if you have kids, is paying attention to how you narrate it differently each time you read it, or what the kids pay attention to during each reading. Not new - but I love these.
Black holes - once more with resolution
Back in 2019 the EHT gave us the first real picture of a black hole; a bright orange circle with a bright spot that spun around super fast (for the galactic scale). Now, astronomers dug deeper into the data and analyzed the movement of polarized light. The result was a view of the black hole's magnetic field lines.