Maggieverse

The book is marked no-nihil-obstat for people being even conflictedly into being gangraped.

Tree

Nela gives the magical construct book an imprimatur for being a thoughtful exploration of weighing the long-term and short-term negative consequences of your actions.

In the Teachingsphere's experience, people are much more likely to do acts of terrorism if they are exposed to narratives which suggest that it's all right to do terrorism; it's possible that it'd be fine but Nela wouldn't bet on it herself. The author can pull it from publication if they want. 

Aevylmarch

Nela reads the surviving three books! The spacehistory-romance-tragic novel is, after some reflection, gets an imprimatur for its psychologically realistic description of trying to live the moral life within a culture that makes the moral life impossible to live. She thinks it will probably help people have more empathy for Ozytopians living outside the Teachingsphere. 

The happyending-fluffpower-adventurer novel is denied a nihil obstat for the amount of glamorous crimes that the protagonist commits. Admittedly, he is responsible for the existence of the monsters, which could maybe be understood as a narrative understanding that you shouldn't go around committing crimes no matter how cool they are, but committing crimes also isn't really the thing he's being redeemed for? Anyway, no nihil obstat, sorry Aevylmarchers.

The historicaldisrespect-gameworld-scheme-government-bitterending novel is denied a nihil obstat because it involves a lot of very glorious heroic duels, even though glorious heroic duels are in fact Bad. It probably doesn't deserve to be denied a nihil obstat, but it seemed like the author was really upset about the possibility of people writing fanfiction about it, and Nela feels like if the author is that distressed by the concept of fanfiction she's really not inclined to give the book the benefit of the doubt. It's not like it's going to be actively good for society for people to be reading about glamorous heroic duels, anyway. What if they decide to duel each other.

Firstplanet

The fanfiction multiversal conference is given a nihil obstat, except for the grimdark AU which is straightforwardly abusive, which is denied a nihil obstat for being somewhat too horny about the concept. Nela is glad that these were conveniently written so as to be separable! A summary of the grimdark AU can be attached at the end of the book so that no one feels like they're missing anything. 

Mars base story gets an imprimatur for its detailed discussion of the importance of base infrastructure, which is liable to encourage people to research and vote on all relevant committees instead of just the ones that end up getting covered in scandalous podcasts. (They do of course pay people to study up before they vote, but more encouragement to do relevant research on your own is always welcome.) No one understands the importance of infrastructure, in Nela's opinion. One of her hymns was in fact about how cool bridges are. 

The terraforming puzzle game gets an imprimatur for being a secret physics textbook. 

The translated historical drama gets an imprimatur for teaching people about values dissonance and helping people to understand different ideologies as they were understood in the past. Nela writes back that she's not sure how to assess how popular it's going to be, but most of the work they have from Firsplanet is nothing like that at all and she doubts that it's going to be a problem; if Firstplanet is very concerned, they can imprimatur anything that seems like it is a good representation of Firstplanet culture? They've been talking about doing that anyway. 

An extremely fluffy romance novella about an architect who designs buildings that reference other historical buildings as a love letter to an estranged friend, who ze expects will never notice or care, except the friend turns out to have also found a drivingpassion in architecture and the main character only realizes when ze notices that someone is designing buildings in reply. The novella ends on the two reconciling, agreeing to enter an creativepartnership, and starting to plan a project together; this is implied by the narrative to be basically equivalent to a wedding. The architecture is lovingly illustrated, and if you read the acknowledgements, it's fairly clear that the book itself is a love letter to the author's lifepartner, who is an architect.

A middle-grade tragic fantasy novel about a young engineer who, in the quest to create the world's first teleporter, alienates nearly everyone ce cares about and accidentally kills first cir lab partner and then cir best friend in recklessness-driven lab accidents. The magical engineering is very obviously a metaphor for the protagonist's declining mental state as isolation drives cem more and more desperate; the novel ends when ce eventually creates the teleporter and, as has been fairly heavily foreshadowed in the discussions of magical theory leading up to this point, the vacuum it creates destroys the lab and the engineer alike. 

A classic genre-bender fantasy trilogy! The first book is a tragedy about a sorcerer whose ambition drives lir to amass more and more power at greater and greater costs, including starting a cult, hurting people in a wide variety of ways including rape and torture and murder, and eventually culminating in the execution of lir lifepartner; lir perspective is mostly about the intriguing li does with lir competition for power but the atrocities are very carefully never portrayed as glamorous. The second is a posttragedy which opens just after the execution and follows the sorcerer's nervous breakdown from grief and lir life falling into shambles as li desperately pretends to everyone li knows that nothing is wrong, while trying and largely failing to cope with the loss of lir partner and the fact that lir child-- the one good thing left in lir life-- is even so a symbol of everything li'd done wrong in the first book, since li'd raped someone in order to get pregnant; until the climax, when the sorcerer abandons everything li'd built and the entire exercise of power-seeking, runs away to a different continent, and starts to a new life there where nobody has ever heard of lir. The third is a postposttragedy in which li raises lir child, pulls lirself slowly out of the nervous breakdown pit by the fingernails, repeatedly expresses the desire for being a good person to involve something easy like incredibly painful suicide instead of something hard like successfully not abusing your child when all your interpersonal skills are for power-jockeying, and relearns how to be a person who interfaces with society in a way that isn't fundamentally about hierarchy. It was extremely popular when it first came out and was one of the major genre codifiers of posttragedy and postposttragedy. 

A personal-biography of a programmer who was lifepartners with a marine biologist; the two had been working together on an ocean exploration game, but the marine biologist died of stomach cancer before it could be completed and ser partner continued making it in ser honor. The biography is focused on how the programmer used the creative process to cope with ihr grief both before and after ihr partner's death. (The game is included — there's enough of a storyline that they sent it to Fiction, you swim through underwater ruins and piece together what happened to the people who built them, which is probably a question with an answer if you're familiar with motifs in Tisan historical art and tilework but honestly the game works fine if it remains a mystery — and it isn't as good as the book but it's very calming to play and the visuals are Like Fine if you're not used to malachitinous games with a dev team of "more than one." The marine life is impeccably researched and accurate-to-Neptune.)

This one... is porn. At least it's probably porn? It's honestly kind of hard to tell whether it's porn, because on the one hand it's approximately 70% sex scene by volume; but on the other hand all of the sex scenes are full of characterization and political intriguing, every character has a distinct voice and worldview and a history that's shaped them as a person, it's historical fiction set in a trade school in 1300s Callassa where it's period for so many of the main cast's relationships to involve sex, and also there's multiple romances of varying levels of sweetness and an exquisitely done depiction of a major character's internal moral conflict over whether or not to inform on faer lover/best friend who's involved in a smuggling ring. Possibly these are just normal features of malachitinous pornography???

This author does not particularly want to risk people going and being terrorists over their book. They will go ahead and not have it published in Ozytopia, they're just going to be kind of sad about it.

A short story collection on the theme of censorship and secrecy being a fundamentally hostile attitude for a government to take towards its citizens. Stories include a metaphor about refusing sex education to children while self-servingly rationalizing about it, parables about the apparatus of censorship metastasizing to encompass things their well-intentioned creators never intended, someone escaping a cult (it seems to be some kind of linguistic prescriptivism and also sex cult) and learning to trust that the wider world does not systematically mislead them about anything, an attempt at keeping information that seemed to have triggered psychosis in a character's mother away from that character in the hopes that she will not suffer the same psychosis only for her to succumb to a psychotic episode anyway that's substantially worsened by the fact that everybody's been hiding things for her entire life, and aliens discovering that their taboo about discussing certain topics has been holding them back catastrophically in magical engineering in ways that would not have been foreseeable at the time the taboo was instituted.

Not-quite-fiction about human (well, Green) evolutionary biology with an emphasis on fictionalized-anonymized nifty case studies from obscure insular cultures and some completely whole cloth just-so suppositions, supporting or in tension with this or that theory.

Novel series in which a villain, shaped both by the traumatic circumstances of her childhood and the subtle but forceful consequences of the ways she has used her magic since then to survive, brings up several kids younger than her whom she managed to save from the aforementioned traumatic circumstances when someone went through their home and killed them all for what are remarkably understandable reasons given the givens. There's layers and layers like that, in several different places, every resolved conflict just peeling back a bit of an onion, every opportunity to button-mash the moral complexity button taken without making the main character and her love interest remotely unsympathetic. The main character and her love interest are profoundly adorable.

Basically just Flowers for Algernon with less sex in it and the strong implication that the main character's parents would have preferred the main character to have Down's instead of a less visible problem, since that's obvious at birth and you can commit infanticide about it.

A setting in which magic is discovered to be achievable if you log enough hours of sufficiently quality meditation, which was not discovered before because meditation is unpleasant and pointless-except-apparently-for-magic-powers; the discoverer was among the survivors of a crisis at a moon base who had to wait a long time for help and was trying to reduce their caloric and oxygen needs. They spend most of the book still on the moon - their powers don't help them leave, though they do help them survive there - and then go home to spend a few hours a week monetizing their abilities and otherwise relax in a huge house with their loved ones for the rest of their life.

Malachitin

Awwwww. The romance novella is cute and Nela really enjoys it. Nihil obstat.

The middle-grade tragic fantasy novel gets an imprimatur for its thoughtful description of the process of hitting bottom, which would allow the reader to recognize in themself when they're in a similar desperate spiral. 

Genre-bender fantasy trilogy gets an imprimatur for its concrete focus on redemption and how to recover from doing something incredibly evil. Honestly, maybe they should fund a distribution of this to prison-monasteries.

Personal-biography gets an imprimatur for modeling healthy coping mechanisms for grief and sublimating your grief into creation. 

The concept of porn that is full of characterization and political intrigue and worldviews and moral conflict is far from new to Nela, and she issues it a nihil obstat without any particular concern. It will be shelved in the pornography section of the bookstore. 

Green

Secrecy and censorship are in fact very bad! What a good, eloquent set of short stories making this important point. They can never think enough about how important it was to have developed freedom of speech. Nela gives it an imprimatur for the helpful reminder.

The evolutionary biology book is an interesting approach to Secret Textbooks. Why are the case studies anonymized? Why isn't this a non-secret textbook? Is it to protect the privacy of the people involved? Did they just make all the case studies up? Nela is very confused but gives it a nihil obstat, people expect fiction to be made up anyway.

Oh good, what a fascinating story about moral complexity! It's important to remember that everyone does things for reasons that seem good to them, and that conflicts are far more likely to be people behaving understandably given their situations than people being evil. Everyone's actions and beliefs have a core of validity, or else they wouldn't believe them or do them. It gets an imprimatur. 

The Flowers for Algernon-alike makes Nela want to throw up. They would just... murder a person? For being intellectually disabled? They would murder their own child? Of course everyone would prefer to have more intelligence, all things equal-- it's better to be able to understand more of the world, to have more of your curiosity satisfied-- but the main character doesn't seem to be primarily motivated by being able to understand more things about the world. They seem to be upset because people... mistreated them? For being intellectually disabled? Why would you even do that? It's not like intellectually disabled people chose to be intellectually disabled, and they make valuable contributions to society too. It's called the Law of Comparative Advantage. Do people in Green also mistreat other people for being born likely to have colds? She denies the book a nihil obstat for being pro-infanticide but really because the entire concept makes her want to vomit. She can't imagine any publisher deliberately choosing to publish this work. People would throw rocks through their windows. 

The meditation book is confusing to Nela. Surely everyone meditates, and some people do quite a lot? How do you fail to notice that meditation would lead to magic powers? It's like if walking in the wilderness gave you magic powers and someone discovered this by being stranded in the Antarctic. It gets a nihil obstat because books are not banned a nihil obstat for being deeply confusing. 

A protagonist who has their head crushed diving in and throwing a child out of a collapsing building awakens in a magical university full of other dead people all from different worlds. The protagonist has a harem, sort of, but that's because everybody at the magical university is tangled up in an enormous polyamorous snarl that the book treats as a completely normal and sustainable state of affairs so long as everybody thinks and feels sensibly. Their initial apparent world is a lie, the world telling that lie is also a lie, and this goes on through six or possibly eight levels of recursion throughout the book. The plot builds to a climax that turns on an intricate point of decision theory. All of the prose is made entirely out of foreshadowing and the book is intended to be a completely different experience on the second reading. Background knowledge of economics, calculus, and linear algebra is required to follow along with the book's embedded lectures. A note attached by the translator says that they're not sure bestselling dath ilani novels would really be comprehensible to other worlds, so they picked one that was written by a random 32-year-old and shown only to her online writing tribe.

A slice-of-life story about a world where maleness and femaleness have been replaced by two new sexes corresponding to deontology and consequentialism, and it's considered very perverted for a deontologist to behave like a consequentialist or vice versa. There's a lot of 'kinky sex' constructed to be analogous to plausible ethical dilemmas. A note attached by the translator indicates that this book was written by a moderately bright 16-year-old asexual, and it's not uncommon for asexuals at that age to reimagine sex as something they think it would make sense for people to care about.

Dath ilan says that they carefully selected these books to be at a level of writing quality and intelligence that probably shouldn't prove too hazardous to other worlds, but they still recommend exposing a randomly selected audience to these and then observing them for 5 years to see if anything weird happens to them.

dath ilan

Well, that's condescending! The Teachingsphere's residents are fully capable of deciding for itself whether the books are comprehensible to them, or alternately choosing to read books that don't make any sense. Anyway, good writing makes sense to more people, that's the thing that writing quality is. That's why all the most award-winning books are at least partially aimed at an audience of intellectually disabled people. Nela is saved from sending an angry letter about this by the fact that fourteen different people have probably sent dath ilan an angry letter already.

...okay admittedly the isekai is not, in fact, comprehensible to Nela, a person who quite enjoyed algebra in second school because she thought it was a puzzle but who was solidly in Middle for her Quant classes throughout school. She skips past all the lectures and expects that the fact-checker will cover the accuracy or lack thereof. It is, however, comprehensible enough to know that it should be denied a nihil obstat in the strongest possible terms. "The world is a lie" will lead to people having delusions that the world is a lie, and then they might have to go on antipsychotics, which is a horrible fate for anyone. It is just simply not allowed to make publicly available books that could be a secret coded message to the reader about how everyone they know is lying to them and only the author dares share the truth. 

The deontology/consequentialism book is cute, though. Imprimatur for teaching people about ethical dilemmas and how other worlds divide up ethics. Deontology versus consequentialism is kind of a confusing division to Nela, who after some technically-not-what-she-was-supposed-to-be-doing-in-work-hours research concludes that the Teaching is probably somewhere between "virtue ethics" and "objective list consequentialism," except that you're also not supposed to treat people as things, which is considered deontology even though to Nela it seems like it would be consequentialism, because you would want to minimize the amount of treating-people-as-things happening. It is very unclear to her

dath ilan doesn't need to worry. The Teachingsphere is fully aware of which books are going to cause them problems, which is why the isekai is going to their equivalent of the Shop of Ill-Advised Customer Goods.

A work of interactive fiction, in which the player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a sex way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall.

...uh is it possible to get a version of this game which is censored so that you can't abuse or traumatize or murder the statue?

There isn't one currently published, but the creator says they'll think about it.

Okay, Nela recommends that they hold publication for a while and wait to see if a censored version will come along. She would really like to give it an imprimatur but they really really really cannot give a nihil obstat to a video game where the player can choose to do bad things to sapient people. 

(Relatedly, Teachingsphere first-person shooters are a minority genre and involve killing explicitly nonsapient robots.)

[sci-fi, drama, wish-fulfillment, aliens, self-modification]

Some scientists develop a prototype uploading process! Unfortunately, it only works on people with a specific rare genetic condition and then only with small probability. Very few people take the risk and the protagonist, Bopara(A), is the only person successfully uploaded. A takes advantage of A's new abilities to crowdfund a space probe body and go out exploring the galaxy at relativistic velocity (the setting has FTL gates, but you need to have a gate structure on both ends). Bopar finds various other planets and builds forks of Aself at each one, becoming a collection of increasingly psychologically bizarre explorers spreading out from earth in all directions. Some of them meet aliens(B) at various levels of intelligence, weird biology, and technological development and attempt to help B with B's problems with various levels of success and of culture clash. One species is r-selected and committed to wiping out all other life to support their expanding population; there are epic space battles and a technological arms race about it. Back on Earth, a supervolcano eruption disrupts the planet's climate; Earth is slowly becoming uninhabitable and the Bopara clan helps coordinate the evacuation to several colony planets barren of even moderately intelligent life.

Firstplanet

Nihil obstat! Firstplanet in general has such nice, non-horrifying books that don't involve lighting people on fire as a behavior-modification strategy, or murdering intellectually disabled people, or claiming that everyone is lying to you for nine entire levels. 

A zany mostly-comedy about a man who has an important and high-responsibility desk job, doing management and internal-admin work for some kind of law enforcement slash social services department (on the Surface, obviously). He spends most of the book being inconvenienced by and trying to track down the perpetrator of a series of pranks and minor but irritating sabotage committed in the office, mostly against his computer admin systems. The man is working long hours, sometimes falling asleep at his desk, and increasingly stressed that he's neglecting his partner and their child, and that he never has time or energy left during evenings and weekends to visit the Underworld; he grumbles to his wife that since he was promoted to his highly senior role, he doesn't really feel comfortable joining any of his subordinates for pub nights or other entertainments in the upper Underworld. (The narrative seems to consider this a sign of an unhealthy work culture.) The denouement is when one of the interns, originally a suspect for the pranks and sabotage, investigates on her own and finds out that the perpetrator is actually the manager's Chaotic alternate personality; his 'naps' at his desk were in fact episodes with that part in charge, with which he didn't have memory continuity. The manager sees a therapist (who works in the upper Underworld rather than on the Surface, which seems to be considered normal) and is finally able to acknowledge to himself and others that he's hated his work ever since he was promoted to management, and that his secret Chaotic personality was trying to force him to see this. He decides to go back to his original front-line role as a law-enforcement-office-slash-social-worker. 

A coming-of-age story about a young woman graduating from standard high-school-equivalent education – at fourteen, which is apparently a young but not shockingly young age for this – leaving her affluent small-town family home, and going through several rounds of realizations about which of her parents' traditions and values aren't ones that fit her best as a person. The first realization is around her parents' strong desire that she continue straight to studying and obtaining an advanced degree in one of the subjects they consider prestigious, where away from home, she finally has the space to notice that it's their desire and not her own. (She was initially studying physics, and switches to accounting, and then switches from that to a practical program in early childhood education.) There are, like, six of these types of realization, as she slowly peels apart the components of herself and her personality that were shaped to be convenient to others. The narrative treats this as an admirable and critical step in growing up. 

A fantasy novel about some very sad and very gay boys, who have different types of magic (the setting has about a dozen different kinds of magic, some inherited, some learned, some spontaneous or resulting from being blessed or cursed by gods or demigods or nature spirits) and different horribly traumatic family backstories which they are slowly healing from. There are also about eight different kinds of possible soulbond involved in the magic system interactions. The sad gay boys are soulbonded to each other early on, of course, with one of the handful of soulbond-varieties which are romantic in nature. This in copious angst, since one of their fathers is bigoted against the style of magic caused by a god cursing you and hates his son's partner for that reason, and the other boy's mother had a bad experience with her abusive partner and now hates men in full generality and can't bear that her son is romantically involved with one. Over the course of the story, which involves a lot of messy and frequently-handwaved geopolitical shenanigans as backdrop, the soulbond-tangle grows to include: 1) a sentient bird from an oppressed species of birds, rescued from slavery by the protagonists, 2) a jewel which somehow contains the immortal spirit of an ancient wizard and gives its bearer wizard powers, 3) the King's heir for some reason, 4) a nature spirit bound to a particular river, who can manifest in the form of a beautiful woman, and ends up in a confusing romantic-platonic-blend relationship where she bears half-river-spirit children for both of the boys, and 5) a sentient book which works by copying itself into the mind of anyone who reads it, this process forming a bond with said person. (Transitively, the soulbond-polycule now involves several dozen other people who were previously soulbonded to said book.) Interestingly, none of the individuals in the novel are themselves multiple; the Law and Chaos aspects seem to instead be taken up by different people. The book is heavily focused on trauma recovery, and might be one of the most intensely hurt/comfort-trope-laden books Nela has ever encountered. It has a bittersweet but overall happy ending, involving several eventual family reconciliations. 

A fantasy adventure book, aimed at children age 8-12 according to the summary, about a young girl growing up in an urban-fantasy version of Bicameral – it has the Surface and Underworld, but it also has, like, werewolf-esque shapeshifters and several fantasy races of people who live underground and humans with magical abilities to manipulate a particular aspect of the world (metals, gases, heat-as-a-concept, and bodies of water are mentioned). The young girl finds an ancient artifact which gives her the ability to copy over the mind and memories of her alternate-world selves, and eventually to exchange messages with them. Some of the many alternate versions of her live, for example in a world with martial-arts-and-meditation themed magic, a sci-fi world with a thriving moon colony and fledging colonies on the other planets in their solar system, and an alternate evolutionary history where intelligent life evolved from dolphin-like creatures in the oceans. With their combined knowledge and powers, the girl is able to fend off a dangerous political coup in her own world, and advise the other hers on their own worlds' problems. The girl keeps all of this secret for almost all of the book, but eventually her older sister finds out and insists on telling her mother, and her family is worried but supportive. Given how complicated the plot and magic systems are, the book is remarkably accessible (there are frequent diagrams or pictures, and footnotes or cutouts in the page to remind the reader about key facts), and would probably appeal to intellectually disabled adults as well as actual children. 

The author of that piece of interactive fiction has put some deep thought and extensive work into creating an alternative version. In this one, it's still possible to take some of the same actions from the abusive paths, with some of the same responses; but the narrative has been reshaped so that, instead of forming fully viable narrative paths with their own endings, those actions are woven into the rest of the game as mistakes you can make that hurt the statue and damage their trust in you, and which you cannot repeat because the statue loses trust in you much faster. If you try your very best to do as many upsetting things as possible, the statue will stop talking to you and eventually hide where you can't find them again for the rest of that playthrough. It's possible to make quite a few mistakes all in the same playthrough if you apologize and promise to do better and successfully maintain a record of good behaviour for longer and longer each time, but if you keep backsliding, the statue gets fed up eventually and disappears all the same. The possible paths are now 'ignore', 'befriend', 'sexy befriend', and 'upset the statue until they disappear'. The author requests that, if possible, the original version be made available through whatever channels are appropriate for rejected works, in addition to publishing this one if it's acceptable.

Nela gives an imprimatur to the new statue-related interactive fiction and thanks the author for accommodating them! The author doesn't need to worry, they'll make the original interactive fiction story available in the no-nihil-obstat catalog. 

Bicameral

The zany mostly-comedy is given a nihil obstat because... okay if people's alternate personalities were doing pranks and minor sabotage in order to keep them from making bad life choices that would probably be a good thing? Like, if the alternate personalities weren't hurting people or anything. Sometimes people make very bad life choices. Anyway, Nela thinks, it's not very likely that people are going to read this book and suddenly decide that they need to have an alternate personality that they don't share memories with.*

Imprimatur for the book about learning to stop shaping your personality to be pleasing to others! Very important lesson for people to learn. Nela recommends it particularly for teenagers.

Very sad very gay boys book almost gets an imprimatur for its depiction of trauma recovery, but Nela eventually decides that it should have a nihil obstat on the grounds that in several places the trauma recovery is depicted less accurately in order to make the book more of a hurt/comfort epic. (It is published and instantly becomes the most wildly popular piece of alien fiction. There are conventions and themed rock bands and cosplay and fan films and fourteen different competing podcast adaptations and three different plain-language versions. They are somewhat confused by the implications of "very gay," and write a lot of fanfiction in which the gay boys have sex with women and/or biomedically transition.)

Nela feels weird and complicated about recommending the urban fantasy book for intellectually disabled adults, but since no one else writes fiction for intellectually disabled adults she signs off on it. It gets a nihil obstat because there is nothing particularly objectionable in it. 

*Five years later, Nela would consider this to be one of the worst mispredictions of her life. 

A historical fantasy novel set at the start of the Sakadian Empire (a short appendix explains to the off world reader that this was one of the largest empires in Wolffyverse history, due to being the first empire to combine cavalry tactics and glasses to devastating effect.) It follows the perspective of the second in command of the conquering Emperor. Said second in command is a) very in love with the Emperor, b) very traumatised by his past that is slowly revealed through the course of the novel C) very sad about all the murdering and conquering he is doing but d) has elaborately justified it. He dies tragically defending the Emperor from an assassination attempt. There are multiple horses, and they are treated with the same depth as the human characters.

A geologist is transported to a fantasy world, and tries to kickstart the industrial revolution! This is the first in a longer series. This volume focuses on our protagonist getting her bearings, and getting the trust of a) another member of her world that she convinces that resources are really important to improving technology b) an enslaved wizard she rescues. The wizard's emotional arc is about trusting that he has agency, and learning that he could use his explosion powers for good. (A note is sent that while they're pretty sure this first book is unobjectionable, they're not sure about later ones? The third book does give some detail about how to find galena, which you could technically poison yourself with? They're not sure how this interacts with the suicide instruction laws.)

A wandering knight without a cause meets a doctor shunned by her community because he care for the living as well as the dead makes her dirty. Over the course of wandering the world and solving crimes, getting trapped in isolated places, being horrified at each other's trauma, getting injured defending the other and then tending their wounds, they fall in love. The knight errant is part of a religion that is a source of great comfort and, like, half her issues. (There is a ten page appendix desperately trying to explain the religion for the off world or foreign reader. It has the strained quality of trying to fit too much abstract idea in too little space.) (There is a 15 page appendix explaining to the off world reader the tropes and genre conventions that are used and subverted.)

Wolffyverse

The first book is denied a nihil obstat due to the elaborate justifications in favor of conquering and murdering people, which the text is not sufficiently against and which is not counterpointed to some other viewpoint. Also, the second-in-command here is very clearly glamorized and Nela does not approve of this. 

The geologist in the fantasy world book is given a nihil obstat, and Nela writes back that you are allowed to describe how to find galena, as long as you don't explain how to poison yourself with it afterward. There are lots of things in the world that you could theoretically poison yourself with and they're not denying people knowledge of all of them. At some point, you can just drink bleach. 

The knight errant story receives a nihil obstat. Nela puzzles over this religion appendix for three hours and is not sure whether its deity is the logos or not. Finally, she decides that probably the logos has shown itself to all offworlders so she should err on the side of believing that their religions reflect the logos, but decides that it doesn't get an imprimatur because the book itself is not clearly devotional in nature. 

Portal fantasy about a ten year old who previously lived with not-too-close aunts and uncles and upon portalizing has no immediate prospects for getting home. After a while roughing it (in conveniently-not-too-rough circumstances but still sleeping outdoors and such) he decides to attempt to integrate into the culture and locate a new family. The concept that a formal system might be required for this is thought about in passing but the project is in practice DIY; he integrates by degrees into the foreign culture, tries lots of strategies for making friends, and eventually winds up bouncing between a family of dimensionaliens* who make notmaple products and a lady who lives in the woods and helps him improve his roughing-it skills in case this ever comes up again. If they like this one there are sequels!

A restaurant that can use abstract concepts as ingredients serves as the centerpiece of this short story collection by twelve different authors; characters go on ingredient-collecting expeditions, or finally save up enough to reserve a seat at the restaurant and then experience indecision about how to use their limited opportunity when there are so many things to try, or apply for a job in the kitchen, or occupy themselves with updating the restaurant's decor, or are food critic secret shoppers, or are waiters having romantic drama, or are an epistolary told in menu and notes-for-the-kitchen-about-substitutions format, etcetera.

Time travel is invented but can only go at least a hundred million years partly due to technical limitations and partly due to technobabble about how that's long enough for all the "noise" introduced by a traveler to "smooth out". Characters go back in time and meet dinosaurs and discover an ancient dinosaur civilization. At the end they take some dinosaurs who were helpful to them and are coming off poorly in their dinosaur political situation back to the present with them.

A musical where all of the characters are crows, having crow interpersonal drama and speculating about humans and ultimately resolving the central plot point of whether the main crow can hack it as a household assistance animal. It's intended for small children and accordingly makes a lot of jokes about bird poop.

A series about an SRO facility for adolescents who are not yet prepared to strike out completely on their own suddenly responsible for absolutely everything, but need to definitely not be living under the same roof as their families at least for a while - except this one is an interdimensional/planetary one, with a colorful panoply of aliens and sliders and magical beings of all descriptions. Some interstitial narration is from the point of view of the residence coordinator, a harried half-human half-spirit-of-the-building who coordinates with her-mom-the-building to run things, but each book in the series focuses on an individual resident of the facility, sometimes encountering protagonists or side characters of past or future installments. The same author has also done a series of shorter works about a similarly-premised emergency vacation resort (and that series has a moderate amount of sex in it), and a bunch of one-offs on the same theme (bookstore, restaurant, karaoke joint, game shop, gymnasium/sports facility, etc.), as well as her completely unrelated debut novel in which someone trying to catalogue each of the fictional magic systems invented in all fiction ever via multidimensional analysis gains the power to wield some of those powers by pinpointing their location in the perfected multidimensional grid, but the SRO one is the one that took off. Somebody has sent along an earnest attempt at mapping the dependencies if you want to understand the references and influences but it seems perhaps an insurmountable task.

*Green distinguishes between "space aliens" and "sliders" but the still-at-home-where-they-came-from kind of slider doesn't have a graceful English translation.

The portal fantasy about ten-year-olds is excellent! It's very clever how it depicts a child arranging for their own adoption, as children do, in a portal-fantasy context. Nela considers giving it an imprimatur, because portal fantasy tends to depict children doing things like saving the world that children should not do instead of things like arranging for their own adoption that children should do, but decides that the point of an imprimatur is not to be moralistic. 

The abstract-concept-ingredients book gets a nihil obstat and becomes a widely popular sharedworld among the artsier sorts of Ozytopians. The Greens may or may not appreciate the percentage of the work that is blatantly moralistic stories about making food out of various aspects of the Teaching. 

Dinosaur civilization book gets a nihil obstat. 

The bird poop musical is given a nihil obstat and becomes widely popular among seven-year-old boys, a demographic whose desire to hear jokes about bird poop is constant across worlds. 

The SRO book gets an imprimatur for the way it ends up using its premise to explore ordinary problems of growing up through the lens of various alien species! Nela is enchanted by the various subtle metaphors here. (The subtle metaphors may or may not have been intended by the Greens.)