“By fans, for fans”: Gearing up for the DMCA hearings; have my fingers crossed that a new Register will still hear our voices.
Fic recs: First, Jayne L.'s Epilogue, which I was privileged to beta. NC-17, Dean/2014Cas/Castiel, and permutations thereupon. Warnings: 'The End'-verse, and all that entails. Lucifer sends Cas back.
Second,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
malkingrey's Elsinore, SPN/ Hamlet fusion. It’s like it was written just for me! Demons! Winchester family drama! Sam with powers! Hamlet and Horatio as scholar-buddies! Murder most foul, as in the best it is! Also, best Sam and Dean aliases ever, which I’m now so tempted to appropriate for a story set in our time!
Lauren Beukes, Zoo City: All of a sudden, murderers acquire animals; when they die, a black cloud called the Undertow takes them. Additional magic also comes to the world, usually strongest among the animalled, or zoos as they’re also known. The South African protagonist has an animal because her actions killed her brother, back when she was a junkie. Now she scrapes by running email scams and occasionally using her magic to find lost things. When she gets involved in the search for a missing pop star, her life gets even more dangerous. Really fabulous worldbuilding and an appealling but not idealized protagonist; I hope Beukes writes more in this world.
Tanya Huff, Smoke and Ashes: Huff is so up and down for me! This was light and basically charming; it’s a spinoff of her main vampire series focused on a wizard who works for a cheesy Vancouver fantasy series about a detective vampire. Our hero is mostly doing fine (though his crush on the series’ sidekick, who is at least pretending to be straight, is giving him angst), until an immortal stuntwoman seeks out his help preventing a demon invasion that will kill her—and destroy the world, but she doesn’t care so much about that. Bantery and breezy, with what seemed like lots of cheap Vancouver TV in-jokes, or jokes at least.
Second,
malkingrey's Elsinore, SPN/ Hamlet fusion. It’s like it was written just for me! Demons! Winchester family drama! Sam with powers! Hamlet and Horatio as scholar-buddies! Murder most foul, as in the best it is! Also, best Sam and Dean aliases ever, which I’m now so tempted to appropriate for a story set in our time! Lauren Beukes, Zoo City: All of a sudden, murderers acquire animals; when they die, a black cloud called the Undertow takes them. Additional magic also comes to the world, usually strongest among the animalled, or zoos as they’re also known. The South African protagonist has an animal because her actions killed her brother, back when she was a junkie. Now she scrapes by running email scams and occasionally using her magic to find lost things. When she gets involved in the search for a missing pop star, her life gets even more dangerous. Really fabulous worldbuilding and an appealling but not idealized protagonist; I hope Beukes writes more in this world.
Tanya Huff, Smoke and Ashes: Huff is so up and down for me! This was light and basically charming; it’s a spinoff of her main vampire series focused on a wizard who works for a cheesy Vancouver fantasy series about a detective vampire. Our hero is mostly doing fine (though his crush on the series’ sidekick, who is at least pretending to be straight, is giving him angst), until an immortal stuntwoman seeks out his help preventing a demon invasion that will kill her—and destroy the world, but she doesn’t care so much about that. Bantery and breezy, with what seemed like lots of cheap Vancouver TV in-jokes, or jokes at least.