I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

It's been a while! I've been busy with classes; didn't even manage to pick up a Yuletide pinch hit this year, sadly. I've been listening to Kesha on repeat (and Dessa and Taylor Swift with her cat chorus). And I just saw either a very large mouse or a small rat poke its head out of our basement closet, which was very unpleasant. While I wait for the pest control to call me back, have some fiction!

Alix E. Harrow, Starling House: ( southern gothic )
Jason Pargin, Zoey Ashe Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia: ( book three )
Christopher Golden & Amber Benson, Slayers: A Buffyverse Story: Good to hear the familiar voices, but the writing was sadly not good.

Seth Dickinson, Exordia: ( highly recommended )
Alexis Hall, 10 Things that Never Happened: ( romcom )
Martha Wells, System Collapse: ( Murderbot! )
Rebecca Kuang, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023: Isabel J. Kim’s Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist, starring Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, is great. The others were fine but I don't really have anything to say about them.

Terry Pratchett, A Stroke of the Pen: ( non-Discworld )
Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory: ( fascist deradicalization )
John Scalzi, Starter Villain: ( eh )
Tobias S. Buckell, A Stranger in the Citadel: ( banned books )
Richard Kadrey & Cassandra Khaw, The Dead Take the A-Train: ( Wolfram & Hart in NYC )
Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World:( accepting self, gaining empire )
Christopher Rowe, The Navigating Fox: ( oneiric fantasy )
Best of British Science Fiction 2022, Donna Bond, ed.: ( AI & environmental collapse )
Stephen King, Holly: ( Covid horror ) Ben Aaronovitch, Winter's Gifts: ( side quest )

I’m enjoying listening to Nessa Barrett’s “Tired of California”—“I keep saying that I’m leaving/But it doesn’t work that way” seems genuinely creepy to me.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances: ( new fantasy world(s) )
John Scalzi, ( what if Starship Troopers but updated? )

Alexandra Rowland, A Taste of Gold and Iron: ( tropetastic fantasy )
Jason Pargin (previously David Wong), If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe: A John, Dave, and Amy Novel: ( wacky fun for us, not so much for them )
Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids: A Novel: The less-weird book of which I spoke.( Read more... )
Simon Stephenson, Sometimes People Die: ( mystery of killer medical professionals )
Nghi Vo, Siren Queen: ( Hollywood glamour )
Frances Hardinge, Unraveller: ( Cursers, cursees )
Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves: ( destroying the enclaves )
R.F. Kuang, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution: ( wherein Britain is rich because others are poor )

John Scalzi, The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means:( when murder isn't fatal, what do the criminals do? )
Stephen King, Later: ( he sees dead people )
Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead: ( he talks to dead people )
Ben Aaronovitch, What Abigail Did That Summer: ( magic shenanigans )
Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry: ( why do all these humans keep getting murdered? )
C.L. Polk, Stormsong: ( magic weather )
KJ Charles, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting: ( marriage and the alternatives )
David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick: ( if this goes on, social media x mafia )
Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education: ( it eats you starting from your bottom )
Genevieve Cogman, The Dark Archive:( at last )
Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians: ( hunt gone wrong )
Stephen King & Joe Hill, In the Tall Grass: ( bad things happen )
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became: ( sentient cities )
Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X: ( visitation from beyond the grave? )
Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires: Salem’s Lot meets The Stepford Wives, sort of. ( Read more... )
Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland: ( the monster is you )
Daryl Gregory, The Album of Dr. Moreau:( animal/human hybrids in a boy band )

The New Voices of Science Fiction, ed. Hannu Rajaniemi & Jacob Weisman: ( yay new voices )

Seanan McGuire, Laughter at the Academy: ( short stories )
John Scalzi, A Very Scalzi Christmas: ( xmas stories )
Rainbow Rowell, Attachments: ( big crusher is watching )
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War: ( red v blue )
Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House: ( a different kind of fantasy for Bardugo )
L.L. McKinney, A Blade So Black: ( Alice in Wonderland kicks ass )
Alexis Hall, The Affair of the Mysterious Letter: ( Sherlock Holmes x many fantasy/horror tropes )
Ada Hoffman, The Outside: ( there were AO3 style tags on the back cover, like autistics in space )

Your internet law PSA of the day:

The latest iteration of this recurrent question centers around seizure- and migraine-triggering user icons. Many people have suggested that LJ, by not taking action against such icons, risks legal liability for the harm caused by them. This is modified from a comment I made to mecurtin’s post (which has, by the way, a fair amount of the usual trolling).

I'd agree that LJ should at least ban such icons, and probably users who admit to deliberately using them. However, under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, LJ is not responsible for user-provided content, except in circumstances not relevant here. The closest litigated analogy is probably lawsuits against MySpace for exposing underage users to sexual predators; MySpace wins those cases, and should. The rules for internet service providers are very protective compared to the rules for offline publishers, and there are pretty good reasons for that, though I think that section 230 is probably too broad and should be modified.

In response, one commenter agreed with me and expressed the opinion that the dividing line between liability and immunity is whether users can post content without prior approval, and that LJ risks its safe harbor by censoring content. (I set aside, as not helpful here, discussion of what it means to “censor.”)

The commenter’s opinion is intuitive, but law is not always intuitive. In the US, the protections are much broader than that. LJ could screen and select content and still be entitled to the protections of 230. The key distinction is whether LJ itself created the unlawful content, or merely allowed it to be posted. Moreover, LJ would not lose any 230 safe harbor by censoring. In fact, 230 was passed in large part with the promise that it would encourage internet service providers to monitor and suppress objectionable content, by promising them that they wouldn't ever be held liable for what was left over. (This was thought to remove the bad incentives created by previous court decisions holding one ISP not liable for defamation by a user, because that ISP didn't ever screen, whereas CompuServe had been held liable for the same thing based on its monitoring of its messageboards for things like profanity.) Take a look at the title of the section: "Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material." It didn't do what Congress hoped, but that was the intent.

( Scalzi, sf )