A book about how the existence of a small number of adventurers with various magical powers would affect medieval military tactics, written by a PhD in medieval military history. Would you like a chapter that is just an infodump about how teleportation magic affects supply logistics? Well, you're going to get that chapter. Battles are described sufficiently carefully that a dedicated person could map it out with a sand table and miniatures; an appendix implies that this is an intended way to enjoy the book. There is an extensive bibliography. The author wrote a program to simulate correct population dynamics so everyone has a statistically accurate number of siblings.

A book about merchants using faster-than-light travel to trade between planets. The orbital mechanics are flawless and described in loving detail. One chapter is just a journal article explaining how faster-than-light travel could in theory be compatible with known physics; a footnote explains that this has of course passed a top physics journal's standard peer review process. The main character is a fourteen-year-old who has just enlisted on the merchant ship; it's a bildungsroman. However, this is at least twenty percent an excuse for the main character not to know much about supply chain logistics, so other characters can explain it to them at great length. An... auxiliary book? sequel?... explains how the author's worldbuilding has caused changes in how supply chains work in our timeline. 

A book about how an extremely hot girl was taken as a sex slave by aliens and raped repeatedly. She enjoys it a lot. There is an appendix explaining the aliens' reproductive biology. 

"Hot girl getting raped" is denied a nihil obstat, that's not even in question. The kinksters are going to enjoy their first alien porn. Nela enjoys some hot-girl-is-a-sex-slave-of-aliens pornography herself, and she finds the reproductive biology worldbuilding fascinating. 

... ...The other two books get an imprimatur? Nela guesses? They're certainly educational. She marks them as teaching about (respectively) "military history, military strategy and tactics, medieval history" and "physics, astronomy, economics, logistics" and adds a note that alien psychology may make the information not generalize to the Teachingsphere. On second thought, can they contract with a nonfiction publishing company and get a factchecker to look at these? It's not fraud to sell fiction that isn't fact-checked, like it is with nonfiction, but she thinks it's going to be valuable to readers to know whether they are educational about the Teachingsphere or just about the Topherverse. 

A young but talented female chemist is interested in her brilliant and mysterious colleague, but when she asks him out he swears her to secrecy and confesses to being a vampire, ageless but capable of surviving only by drinking human blood. He is unwilling to let himself get close to her while she is mortal, but refuses to turn her into a vampire for fear that the thirst will drive her to murder, as it once did to him. She accepts his self-imposed isolation, but declares a quest to create a synthetic blood substitute. She spends ten years researching in secret from everyone except the vampire (ten years in which they move from colleagues to friends to best friends as the vampire admits it's better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all), and eventually succeeds. They kiss, he turns her into a vampire, they reveal their existence to the world and make everyone immortal and have an extremely fancy wedding.

A doorstopper novel about a newly oathed Committed of Truth having a handwaved physics lab accident while there as a witness to the experimental results, and landing in an alternate universe where being committed to tell the truth is a serious liability. He wins over a local girl after she's initially incredibly suspicious of him because sliders are rare and sliders who aren't just pretending that they have to tell the truth as a thin tactic to make their lies believable are rarer, but he sticks to his oath through dangerous situations and she realizes he means it and helps him navigate the world in which they find themselves. They manage to send his family a letter but he does not go home.

A children's book about talking big cats (anthropomorphic enough to eat sandwiches and manipulate objects manifestly designed for human hands, but not enough to wear clothes); the protagonist is a tiger, and goes to a demystification program to get tours of factories and offices and see how performers practice and prepare backstage and stuff like that. It's a long book but each chapter is quite short.

A nonfiction memoir about someone's deconversion from an animist sect, driven by her frustration about how all the spirits supposedly around her were not in fact capable of good faith negotiation like a normal person and in fact if she wanted her disk reader to work she had to take it to a repair shop, which wasn't even owned by an animist, and force it to; in fact if she wanted her house clean she had to clean it, not ask nicely; in general if she wants stuff to happen correctly she has to think of inanimate objects like things and not like spirits. Describes her gradual reconciliation with her family after she suffers a long period of alienation because of being reactively allergic to all their propitiation rituals.

A novel about two members of the same artists' salon during a civil war, whose ideological loyalties place them on opposite sides, falling in love; it's an epistolary novel told primarily via the fiction and poetry the two lovers write although there are also occasional full-color oil paintings (the author notes in the acknowledgements that they got a visual-artist friend to paint them). One of the lovers dies at the other's hand in battle in the second-to-last chapter; this is conveyed by the use of the color red in the subsequent art and poetry by the lover who killed them. (There is, fortunately, an appendix explaining the cultural references and subtext to aliens who might not pick it up, written just for export. It's two-thirds the length of the book.) 

A video game about three mecha pilots in space in which mecha battles are a metaphor for flirting and sex, which is occasionally interrupted by characters getting out of their mechas to have literal sex; each mecha pilot is a member of a different faction in the three-way war for the future of humanity in the solar system. The game goes into the worldbuilding on mechas, which establishes that mecha battles never kill or even injure, but Neptune weapons can and do. There are three possible endings, in which each of the respective factions wins; in all three, the three pilots live together and are in love. The backgrounds are painted in watercolor (except for scenes that take place outside of the mechas, which are instead rendered in different mediums depending on which characters are present) and every scene has subtle aesthetic variations depending on which pilot's perspective you're playing from. The soundtrack won several awards. 

A novella about vampires which is a metaphor for domestic partner abuse. You are not supposed to root for the vampire at any point but xe is charismatic and the blood drinking scenes are, in addition to being moderately gutwrenching in their depiction of the fed-on partner's inner conflict, sexy as hell. 

Another novel, this one with a large ensemble cast, about cyclical abuse and how traumatized parents create traumatized children and this can fuck up people's relationships for the rest of their lives. Almost every emotional plot beat is conveyed via a flower language common in the author's country. (Again, there is an appendix explaining this flower language, although this one isn't for aliens it's for people reading who aren't from said country.)

Firstplanet

Did the vampire sign off on this quest to create a synthetic blood substitute or did the chemist do this on her own without the vampire's explicit consent or even over his objections?

The vampire is very supportive! He had given it up as impossible and resigned himself to stealing from blood banks, but saw the promise of her new research direction and helped test the prototypes. There's a touching hurt-comfort scene where he has an adverse reaction to one of the proteins and she has to do first aid and then when the danger is over they mutually freak out and reassure each other. (This incident inspires them to brainstorm better safety practices, and all future experiments are done first on vampiric mice that drink mouse blood.)

Firstplanet

Cute! Good!

The vampire book does display appropriate relationship skills: taking no for an answer, expressing your devotion in a prosocial way like scientific invention instead of an antisocial way like cutting yourself or stalking people, a mutually supportive relationship, and not causing people you love to do bad things like commit murder. She also approves of the safety practices. However, it doesn't get an imprimatur because very few of the things people do in this book they could reasonably do in real life. Scientific research is generally done by teams, not individuals. People couldn't exactly model themselves after it. 

Genre: Bildungsroman (+Realistic Fiction) (+Conflict: Self v. Self) Content Warnings: Executive Dysfunction >70th percentile, Detailed Portrayal of Self-Esteem Issues, Detailed Portrayal of Intrusive Thoughts

This one is about a teenage girl who desperately wants to be an ICU nurse but cannot reliably perform tasks which those around her occasionally observe to require much lower executive function than being any kind of nurse; she spends much of the book struggling to reliably perform a set of household chores which have come to represent her difficulties in her mind, culminating in a nervous breakdown at the climax of the book, after which she spends a lot of time in talk therapy coming to terms with her limitations and her options. She spends part of the time she is dealing with her frustration experiencing the urge to self-harm, which she resists. Her problems are at one point exacerbated when she overhears her parents commenting on how if she just set her standards lower then she would be fine, which she resents and resists. 

Genre: Educational Fiction (Educational Subspecification: Mathematics) (+Exploratory Worldbuilding) Content Warnings: Detailed Portrayal of Crises and Crisis Handling

This one is about a pair of engineers in a science fiction setting who have to fix the space station they live on using a lot of technology that is postulated to exist, the workings of which aren't gone into excessive detail about but the mechanics of working with which are; they use complicated calculus to determine what the problem is and how they should fix it, and probability theory to determine how likely various possible solutions are to work, and various other fields of math to handle other aspects of the situation, and also to solve non-crisis-related problems during slower parts of the book. It is mentioned offhand at several points that the two engineers are queerplatonic metamours both married to a botanist but the botanist doesn't get a lot of screentime and the book focuses much less on the romantic aspects of the situation than with the engineers' friendship and the space station crisis.

Genre: Romance (+Erotic) (+Fast Burn/Slice of Life) (+Realisticoid Fiction: Divergent Culture and Psychology) (Content Warnings: Kink-related-events/practices-that-would-be-extremely-problematic-if-implemented-in-real-life, Attraction to Minors, Implausible Psychology

This one would be a pretty vanilla romance if it weren't for the fact that one of the participants is a twelve-year-old who divorced his parents and moved in with an older woman. The woman is a teacher at a prestigious university; the twelve-year-old is on basic income and spends most of his time not involved in sex-and-romance related pursuits doing amateur digital art; the difference in status is never brought up as a point of tension in the relationship, although the twelve-year-old occasionally has to resolve frustration around his partner's more demanding schedule. 

Green

Does the book about the newly oathed Committed of Truth discuss in detail the Committed's responses to moral dilemmas, ways of resisting temptation, or reasoning about unexpected edge cases which develop when you are in an out-of-context situation?

...can they get a factchecker on retainer, actually, the children's book about demystification is cute and good but Nela can't decide whether to give it an imprimatur because she doesn't know if factories work the same way in the Teachingsphere. (There do seem to be fewer noise-canceling headphones.) Actually, it should probably get an imprimatur anyway, even if it's not accurate for the Teachingsphere it'll teach them things about different ways that people can be and how the aliens work. But Nella wants to know which of these she should recommend it for. She also tentatively wants to mark it as recommended for intellectually disabled people. It's condescending to recommend children's books for intellectually disabled people, and usually against policy. But there seems to be a real shortage of intellectually stimulating books written by aliens for intellectually disabled people, and it'd be doing them a great harm to completely cut them off from all the alien knowledge. (Several of the alien species seem to not even have intellectually disabled people.) There can at least be a plain-language translation. 

...while she's at it she's going to email the noteskeeper for Committee For Interworld Trade, Subcommittee For Media, Subsubcommittee for Written Fiction and ask him to ask the Topherverse to send over everything they've written aimed at intellectually disabled people. Surely they have something. This is a basic thing societies are supposed to provide. 

Nela marks the animist book with an imprimatur about ten percent of the way in. One thing she hadn't realized about there being universes with false religions is that people would write books about coming to realize false religions were false. (She guessed you got this a little bit with immigrants, but it's not like polytheism was a proper religion anyway; the nonexistence of the gods is a fact taught the same way that they teach that stars are actually very far away.) She writes a gushing review of the book recommending it to anyone who wants to understand what it feels like from the inside for their entire worldview to be incorrect and to overcome social pressure to believe in things. She stops just short of suggesting that books of this genre should be required reading in Virtue class, although she definitely thinks it. 

Malachitin 

The novel about lovers on opposite sides of a war straightforwardly gets a nihil obstat without an imprimatur. It isn't going to teach you much of anything-- the odd style of telling the story makes that basically impossible-- but no one behaves especially badly given their circumstances. It is hardly like there are going to be any wars in the Teachingsphere for people to kill their lovers about. She makes a note that they might want to give books an imprimatur for being an unusually good representation of their cultures; the amount of explanation this book has suggests that it would be particularly appropriate for people who want to learn about Malachitin. 

The mecha pilots in space game is very pretty and Nela enjoys it a lot. She marks it as nihil obstat without imprimatur. What is it with Malachitin and stories about lovers on opposite sides of wars. This is an odd thing to have so many books about. 

The vampire novella does not get a nihil obstat. It is long-established precedent that, if something is depicted as very sexy and glamorous and also Bad Actually, it does not get a nihil obstat. That's how you get criminals being very cool for the first 95% of the movie and then defeated by lame, boring investigative monks in the last 5%, and that is how you get people who think it is a good idea to commit crimes. 

The cyclical abuse book gets an imprimatur for its excellent depiction of how traumatized parents create traumatized children. It is very realistic and psychologically accurate, according to Nela's understanding of how trauma works. It will be validating to people with parents who shouldn't have had children, and help people with good parents empathize with the struggles of those who are less fortunate. (It also made Nela cry, and she has a certain tendency to give imprimaturs to books about abuse which make her cry.)

Yes, the Committed of Truth spends a lot of time dealing with that sort of thing; sometimes he has to respond to something too quickly to muse on it much beforehand but usually does a postmortem when he has a minute and wants to assess the quality of his oath adherence.

-

A rambly cowritten story about a planet with castes that is mistreating one of the castes and the travails of this one family and the people they confide in as they try, desperately, in a way that could destroy them all if discovered, to nudge the arc of history towards justice at a critical juncture.

A middle-grade nonfiction demystification book about engineering bridges; the careful textbooks which measure are represented as helpfully color-coded and well-organized, and every step of building a bridge is touched upon, though it doesn't specify exactly where e.g. the steel girders they order come from, just what specifications they have to order them to.

A long-running TV show available in broadcast, dense, and padded formats depending on whether you want the fight scenes and atmospheric shots and isolated plot-irrelevant jokes and metatextual fake advertisements and surplus seconds of anything else the trimmers had their eye on removed so you can just blitz through the core story, or if you want all of that and also stuff they cut for broadcast length included. It's about the future people of Green sending FTL spaceships out to make contact with other species, mostly though not all lower tech, having lots of alien-of-the-week diplomacy conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-arc diplomatic conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-series precursor ruins research project. Also ensemble drama. Lots of that.

A musical about ten generations of a family that breeds a particular kind of dog (it takes care of sheep - like, mostly it herds them, but it can also detect if they're sick or parasitized or injured, and be trained to assist with shearing (there's a number about how the dog would certainly do it itself if it had hands and a character who gets sidetracked trying to invent a device that will allow that despite handlessness).

A graphic novel about a little boy trying to find a teacher he likes enough to put up with school happening upon a person who washed out of actual teacher school due to executive dysfunction and limited energy but clicks with him really well; he winds up going over to her house all the time and shadowing her and asking her questions and eventually convincing his parents to pay the tuition budget to her. It includes a lot of the educational conversations and since it's a graphic novel they're accompanied by helpful visual aids, though it doesn't cover any single topic in much depth.

Maggieverse

The bildungsroman gets a nihil obstat. Nela is kind of confused by the decision to make the nervous breakdown occur at the end of the book rather than the beginning; surely the time in talk therapy (which seems to be some alien form of spiritual direction) is the interesting part? But if people want to read about other people having trouble coming to terms with their limitations and then hitting bottom, that seems fine to Nela. Aliens have different approaches to a lot of things. 

What is it with aliens and books that are secretly textbooks. Is there some kind of pent-up desire for secret textbooks? Are these going to fly off the shelves? She gives it an imprimatur and is the first person ever to tag a book as getting an imprimatur for calculus. (She is secretly smug about this. She has always wanted to originate a tag. It isn't actually more impressive than working in the Alien Fiction Censorship Bureau to begin with, but it is important to make sure that you're grateful for all the good things in your life and not let a single extremely good thing displace all the merely very good things.) She sends a note that they should also request educational fiction aimed at intellectually disabled people from the Maggieverse. 

Nope, no nihil obstat for the romance with a twelve-year-old. Come on. 

A fantasy novel set in a world in which powerful and dangerous magical constructs periodically appear, causing significant destruction. Their appearance is semi-predictable but preventing them requires taking action against the source of a given construct several hundred years before they actually produce a construct, although it is generally safer and easier to destroy a construct-source than to fight an appeared-construct. Fighting the constructs and destroying the construct-sources both require a specific and rare form of magic; the bulk of the story involves weighing tradeoffs between destroying existing constructs and destroying sources-of-future-constructs. In the climax of the story the protagonist sacrifices kemself in a magical ritual that increases the frequency at which people are born with the necessary type of magic, thereby solving the issue of having insufficient mages.

Another fantasy novel, this one set in a world where everyone has some sort of minor magical talent. The protagonist of the work is a terrorist attempting to assassinate various owners of livestock farms out of a philosophical conviction that raising animals for slaughter is wrong even if they have nice lives; a significant part of the story involves te attempting to figure out how to use tir magical talent (the ability to manipulate sound waves) to do this. Te is ultimately arrested, and the book concludes with tem using tir power to broadcast an impassioned speech about how even if te spends the rest of tir life in prison, te believes the tradeoff was worth it. The person submitting the book includes a note, attached to the very beginning, saying that they aren't sure how far Ozytopian laws surrounding instructions on how to do terrorism extend, and that while the book doesn't contain instructions that would be usable in the real world it does technically contain lots of instructions for how to do terrorism if you have magic powers. The submitter says that they are very sorry if that's still a violation of the rules and that if it is a violation of the rules Ozytopia should please just let them know and they won't do it again.

A setting sourcebook for a tabletop roleplaying game, describing the history and current state of the world. The sourcebook contains extensive discussion of how the magic present in the setting affected historical trends, technological development, and everyday life. 

An anthology of short stories, each of which involves a character using some form of limited time travel to save a historical figure from their preventable death and bringing them to the present day. Most of the stories in the anthology place a heavy emphasis on values dissonance between the rescued historical figures and the present day, in which all of the characters are given the chance to articulate their perspective (though in some cases it is clear which side the author falls on). 

A science fiction webcomic involving an alien anthropologist with lampshaded-Suspiciously Similar Biology to humans impersonating a human teenager and enrolling in a human school in order to collect data on humanity. The story appears to be humorous, though many of the jokes about schools are easy to miss without context. 

A historical fiction novel set roughly five hundred years in Tree's past, discussing the attempts of a (real) scholar attempting to prove that another (real) scholar's work was in part fraudulent. A significant part of the work is devoted to the protagonist's attempts to determine whether the work is fraudulent, not-fraudulent-but-sloppy, or whether in fact the protagonist is wrong (although the protagonist is clearly assuming throughout the work that they are not wrong). Other major subplots include: the protagonist mourning the death of rir eldest sibling while simultaneously struggling with complicated feelings about the fact that ae died in an assassination attempt on two members of the de-facto rulers of a neighboring city, the surviving member of which is a major supporter of several of rir friends' scholarship; several background political debates on a war that seems to be going on nearby; and a handful of sex scenes in which rem and rir spouse attempt to conceive a second child while spending the entire time miserable about it. An attached cultural-context guide notes that everything about the story is consistent with the current state of knowledge about the events in question, but notes a few specific places where the narrative in the story conflicts with the current leading hypothesis (though not with an alternative reasonably-plausible hypothesis) and several more places where the story just completely made up details that could be true but probably aren't.

Four different attempts by different translators at translating a certain epic poem into Teachingsphere language, with accompanying notes on which ones chose to keep the original poetic form and which ones chose to adapt to local poetic forms and why; one gets the sense that there was a pretty heated discussion about which way is better. (The original is also included but it's legitimately fairly difficult to translate and the actual translations got out ahead of the half-finished annotations-in-depth which are included with it.) The poem is about an ancient king who did, like, so many atrocities, but in a really badass way, and then a fed-up peasant with magic powers lit him on fire and he fell in love with her and began the slow process of deciding to do fewer atrocities because atrocities are bad and also his wife keeps threatening to light him on fire again. The scansion and the psychological depth are both exquisite, but the logistics are often very handwavy in a mythologized sort of way.

Extremely well-researched historical fiction detailing the life of a high priestess of the River Kingdom who, by contrast to most high priestesses of the River Kingdom, did actual politics instead of spending all her time managing the movement of water. One gets the impression that the author wishes they could spend all their time managing the movement of water; lovingly detailed descriptions of River Kingdom plumbing and water management take up a solid third of the book, intermingled with plenty of inner monologue from the high priestess and lots of interactions with very well-fleshed-out side characters. An appendix carefully distinguishes side characters for whom there is historical evidence (and what that evidence covered) from side characters the author made up (and the census data and contemporary sources from which they extrapolated those characters' likely traits).

Porn about masochists with access to magical healing is its own entire genre but here is a widely acclaimed example, in which a [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic] (this is a two-word phrase in the author's native language) gets an unexpected visitor and falls in love with them despite being sort of shaky on this whole 'human interaction' concept. Neither of them has much of a clue how to pursue a healthy relationship, but they are both highly motivated to figure it out, and they make it to the end of the book having successfully reinvented most of the basics from scratch and settling into a life together full of art and luxury and wholesome, loving, extremely gory sex. The climactic scene involves the introverted-sadist-architect breaking into tears about how much they love their partner and needing to be wrapped in blankets and snuggled until they calm down. The two of them are the only characters in the entire book, unless you count the introverted-sadist-architect's house as a third character, which you very well might given how much screentime it gets.

A crossover between the settings of three other popular works of fiction, but written in such a way that all the colliding settings successfully explain themselves to each other so the audience doesn't need to be familiar with the originals to follow the plot. Two of them are masqueraded magic systems that turn out to exist in the same surface universe, shocking both societies to their core when the collision is revealed; the third is an alien planet, whose attempt at first contact is what ends up breaking both masquerades. The worldbuilding is impeccably well-thought-out, the characters are all richly detailed and deeply alive, and the politics is sort of an afterthought.

A duology of very long fantasy novels, which turn out to be collectively about 40% appendix by pagecount. The appendices cover worldbuilding, conlangs, and a set of six different detailed maps of the world, each from the perspective of one of the major nations involved in the plot, all of which have subtle disagreements with each other on matters such as which landmarks are important, what they are called, and who owns them. The plot consists of a ragtag yet lovable ensemble cast, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control which accidentally leave them the only people in the world capable of saving it from a cataclysmic threat, having breakdowns about how they're not ready for this and then going ahead and doing their best anyway. In the end, they pull it off by the skin of their teeth and with rather more casualties than any of them are comfortable with. The second volume has a long denouement consisting mostly of our heroes leaning on each other and their friends and loved ones to help them cope with all their realistically-described trauma once the crisis is over; the last chapter concludes when they're all psychologically stable again and leading healthy, thriving lives, and the epilogue shows a bittersweet scene of the six of them holding a private memorial ceremony together ten years later, after which they are going to attend a massive celebration being held in their honour on the anniversary of their success.

A long, meandering slice-of-life novel about a younger and an older woman who end up in a relationship. The story starts when they first meet; the younger woman, a teenager at the time, is attending some sort of after-school improv club specified to be in the Upper Underworld*. The older woman runs the salon where the improv club is hosted, who introduces herself as fully integrated obligate-Chaos; she doesn't have a house in the Lawful Surface world at all, and sleeps behind the bar in her salon, spending most of her time putting on theatre performances. The story covers a fifteen-year period, during which they slowly drift into a pleasant and low-friction but gradually more serious romance. At least three-quarters of the novel by wordcount doesn't involve the partners interacting directly at all, and details their lives separately. The younger woman graduates from the local equivalent of high school, does some specialized education in supply chain logistics, happens to meet and impress a young entrepreneur running some kind of computer-related startup in a different part of the Upper Underworld, ends up semi-accidentally as one of the early founders, and spends five years frequently traveling all over the world. (The details of the computer-related startup products are skimmed over; the various challenges involved in their supply chain logistics and accounting practices are shown in loving detail.) Meanwhile, the older woman, by now in her forties, is starting to develop a fledging Lawful personality, who is apparently based on a character written by the younger partner in some sort of ongoing collaborative online fiction/improv/roleplay project they've done together. She decides to register as a specialized foster parent for traumatized children, and takes in a series of teenagers, whose life challenges are also described in much more detail than any of the romantic interactions between the two partners. The novel ends when the younger partner, having amassed a substantial pad of investment income from her equity in the computer startup, decides to buy the Surface land directly above her partner's salon and build her dream home. The pair have a long conversation about whether to legally get married, but eventually concluding that their relationship is based more on Chaos than Law, and settle into domestic life with the most recent fostered teenage siblings, who they decide to adopt. 

A very confusing novella that seems to be set in the Underworld but may or may not be entirely a dream sequence or possibly a psychedelic drug trip? Various physically impossible and absurd events happen to the teenage protagonists, who are trying to make their way to a fabled Spring of Eternal Memory** but keep encountering stranger and more ridiculous obstacles. The writing style changes over the course of the novella, going from colorful but otherwise normal prose, through various formats of poetry and verse, and eventually trailing into pictures with only the occasional word. At the end, it seems like the protagonists learn that the Spring of Eternal Memory was inside of them all along. Probably? It's actually kind of hard to tell what's happening plot-events-wise by this point. 

A hard science fiction novel about a colony ship traveling to another world, discovering that their intended destination planet already has intelligent life, and making contact with the local aliens. There are several different sapient and nearly-sapient species; in the the dominant one, "individuals" are actually made up of colonies of eusocial insects. There are also sulfur-breathing worms that live in undersea hydrothermal vents and communicate via electrical signals, and a species with an incredibly complicated life cycle that involves both an amphibious froglike larval form and an enormous flying adult form. (A surprise twist is that the 'adults' are actually made up of multiple larva combining, with their brains literally growing together and merging.) Most of the book is about the biology research team with the colony ship figuring out how to communicate with these vastly different lifeforms – it involves a lot of extremely detailed biology notes and clever experiments – and then mediating a brewing war between the eusocial-insect-colonies and the flying adults of the third species. All dozen or so of the researchers are named and fleshed out, which actually adds up to several dozen names-and-personalities given the frequency of multiplicity that Bicameral seems to take for granted. There are some minor social conflicts and romantic flings between various pairings of the Chaotic personalities, one of which leads to a chapter focused entirely on social drama caused by one of the researchers having an unnamed Chaotic personality that her usual Lawful self was unaware of. There's a glossary. There are maps and geological survey data and every other chapter is in the form of scientists' notes; the characters all write papers in different styles with widely varying polish and formality. The appendices include copies of all of the scientists' tables of data and the statistical analysis done on language samples from the aliens. 

(If Nela is interested, there's apparently a sequel about to be published! The teaser blurb in the back says that this one focuses on the physics team with the colony ship, and some sort of intrigue related to the moons around one of the outer gas giants in the star system.) 

*Cultural translation notes explain that Bicameral is divided into two separate societies – the Surface which has a normal government and schools and trains and such, where most of the important work of civilization is done, and the Underworld, which is officially exempt from rule of law and where most people present as the 'Chaotic' sides of themselves, often but not always fully-fledged separate personalities. The Upper Underworld, closer to the surface, runs on strong local social norms and is usually quite tame and safe. 

**An added footnote specifies that this is mythological, and was included in a very well-known fantasy series from fifty years ago. 

This one is a secret textbook about spatial physics; the preteen protagonist develops magic powers for no readily apparent reason, and as her parents are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, she experiments with her new powers and discovers that her abilities are directly based on her knowing what she's doing. She learns a lot about vectors and angular momentum and circular motion. Her parents, to whom she has explained how her abilities work, freak out a little when they find her with a book on celestial mechanics. The author seems to have at least a minor aesthetic obsession with parabolas. The book ends with the magic preteen picking up a book on biology and opening the cover as she dreams of making everyone immortal; it's heavily implied that this is a sequel hook. 

This one is about a woman getting abducted by secret magic beings and gang-raped, ending up pregnant with a secret magic baby and figuring out how to use the baby's magic without harming it and going back and burning down their secret magic rape hideout. The second half of the book is mostly the woman interacting with her adorable magic baby. Like the MAP book, it's got content warnings all over it for problematic kink. 

This one is set in a world where everyone is magical beings who have a very specific body type which is probably the author's fetish; it includes bird wings and bug eyes and unconventional arrangements of body fat. The book is about a boy and a nonbinary magical being spending about the first third of the book in will-they-won't-they relationship development and then the latter two-thirds being adorably romantic together and supporting each other as they work through their personal issues. 

An intricate collection of what might be called poems, although they often push the boundaries of the form, about the empty void before any life existed being lonely and bored and suffering and wanting to have something to hold onto. It creates the burning suns, and decorates them with planets, and wants to see something move on the planets, and creates storms and unstable rings and eventually life, and the life also suffers and also strives and also creates. It's subtextually about cycles of violence but also someone was really into the beauty of nature.

A slice-of-life comic about someone who really likes snails. Or maybe about the snails, a bunch of snails living in various terrariums and aquariums, many of them drawn in striking colors or with unusual shell shapes. They have various needs that their keeper has to help them meet, and they escape and go where they shouldn't be. It's all extremely cute and chill and includes many facts about various species of snails.

A novel about exploring alien ruins. The aliens are assumed to have committed collective suicide, and the astronauts examine the ruins through the understanding that they were an intentional memorial. They find samples of alien text, the shorter of which are reproduced in their entirety untranslated in a conlang created by the story's author, and they work on translating them, a process which is shown in detail. As the characters pick up more of the alien language, the reader is assumed to also pick it up and when the characters use alien words they're not always translated. Eventually, the characters discover that the aliens died of a pandemic, and didn't believe it was their time, and were afraid, and left a cache of eggs in suspension just in case. There is not a dictionary in the back only because the dictionary is in a companion volume along with a short story set on the alien planet when the aliens were alive and another document ostensibly written by the aliens and presented in the conlang.

A fantasy octet (you can tell it's fantasy or historical fiction because it has gender in it) in a setting where war is profitable, peace is not profitable, and everyone is violent and status-obsessed. Various visionaries try to come up with new, better ideologies, all of which are described in loving detail as if the author were really trying to sell the reader on all of them, even though they're mutually incompatible even just with each other. They win people over, but end up mostly turning into new warring factions that sometimes engage in intrigue instead of outright war. One of the visionaries encourages everyone to create art so beautiful that it makes their lives worth it, but eventually becomes so disillusioned with his own jewelry that he comes to believe he was wrong and nothing can make his life or anyone else's life worth it. He commits suicide, in such a way that he has time to realize that his death is so beautiful that it makes his life worth it. He's unable to tell anyone, though, and dies in aesthetically pleasing anguish, upon which he discovers that there is an afterlife and it's crushingly empty and boring and he can't affect the living. He journeys through it looking for other people, and this plotline is interspersed with the living trying to figure out whether his death was murder and killing one another over it. Someone is so furious about his supposed murder that she assassinates several people, takes over an entire kingdom, and tries to force everyone in it to value each other and also themselves. The ensemble cast does war and intrigue and eventually everyone including the dead person teams up to unravel the mysteries of life, the afterlife, and the supernatural, and then reshape it all to suit their tastes better. It ends with the cast looking forward to existing for as long as they want, which for more than half of them is an indefinite amount of time expected to be very long.

A slice of life young adult romantic comedy intended to help people figure out how to navigate adult life, which goes into extreme detail on all sorts of things that could possibly be taken for granted. The leads, neither of whom has a gender, move in together and get along horribly and move away from each other and then coauthor a novel and eventually assert that they will probably love each other forever. Along the way they have hilarious mishaps trying to do things that adults need to learn how to do.

A spacehistory-romance-tragic novel (it is marked as such on the cover, along with an elaborate code specifying what fanfiction you are allowed to write about it and how, which appears to be a universal feature of Aevylmarcher novels) about how three people (a persecuted aristocrat, a time-traveler from the past and a scientist/schemer) try and fail to fix a horribly flawed and tragic culture, the aristocrat carefully working within its evil and arbitrary rules, the time-traveler lying to achieve power so she can use it to improve the system, and the scientist/schemer openly defying the rules and trying to reinvent morality on her own, who end up in a complicated love-dodecahedron with each other and with several other equally tragic characters. There are no sex scenes on page but lots and lots of characters being unhappy about how the decisions they're making For The Greater Good are ruining their love lives. Over the course of the story, all of the protagonists are destroyed by the compromises they make and thereby come into conflict, and at the end they all fail and the society continues unfixed. The culture is apparently post-apocalyptic; people paying attention may notice that the pre-apocalyptic culture was also post-apocalyptic. Also there are multipage spaceship battles, most of which seem to exist primarily so characters can make agonized moral choices during them; an author's appendix at the end explains that everything is a melded adaptation of six different adaptations of an ancient legend theoretically based on history, and spends several pages on detailing all the inspirations; The cultural translator's appendix adds several more, including an explanation of the variety of the default-standard-fictional-setting-with-spaceships that they are using and how the spaceships do not technically violate the laws of physics but also would not work.

A scheme-war-smartpower-tragic novel about how a horrible but very likable person builds a city-state, the flaws in the form of government of the city-state he builds, and how these flaws (stemming from his deep psychological dysfunction) result in a civil war which kills off essentially the entire cast, him first. The setting appears to have a set of rules of alternate physics that are never explained, because every character on the story knows them already, and exist solely so there can be very creative fight scenes. Packaged with it are six different spinoffs about how random supporting characters (mostly survivors, but not all) have cheerful low-stakes adventures in the setting after the events. A cultural appendix explains that this is selected as an example of a very common genre, and wants to know if they should package spinoffs for other novels, too.

A happyending-fluffpower-adventurer novel about a cheerful, funny protagonist with magic superpowers wandering around a world full of evil monsters, rescuing people and getting into adventures with his sidekick, an older woman from a high social status situation who immediately abandons it for the opportunity to have adventures. They are pursued by agents of a law-enforcement-organization (its name is an elaborate pun in the original) trying to catch him to punish him for laws he breaks on his adventures, who are portrayed as better people than he is, but less cool. Halfway through it turns out he's responsible for the existence of the monsters, and it genre-shifts into a grim tale of him attempting to muster the strength of character to redeem himself while the two leads build a relationship (largely in nearly-incomprehensible subtext) which is made more difficult as he attempts to reconnect with his estranged son; at the end, he redeems himself, both relations are rebuilt, he saves the world, and the story immediately ends.

A historicaldisrespect-gameworld-scheme-government-bitterending novel, which opens with an introduction explaining that 60% of the profits of the book are donated as ethics offsets to pay for writing disrespectfully about historical figures the author approves of, and than an elaborately detailed map of the geography of a fictional region. In the plot itself, about two of the world's top players of a historical-warfare-board-game (the rules of which are specified in a cultural appendix; everyone in the story is assumed to know them) are pulled into a fantasy setting that resembles the history that inspired the board agme except with a complicated magic system that resembles the rules of the board game. The two are good friends but have different feelings about who should have won the original war, and so they scheme their way to power then carry out the war against each other using their superior knowledge of the future and its technology, while simultaneously dealing with faction members on their own side (all of them as richly psychologically detailed as the protagonists) who don't trust the travelers from an alien universe. Everyone acknowledges that the war is extremely terrible throughout and should not be happening, but nonetheless all the battles are elaborately detailed and full of glorious heroic duels and complex military maneuvers, and most of the plot dwells on them. It continues, roughly evenly balanced, until one of the protagonists is murdered by a lieutenant with a personal grudge letting the other win a decisive battle; the story then ends with two more chapters of peace negotiations while the armies maneuver, and the successful conclusion of these negotiations is written as the climax of the novel. There is a very annoyed authorial appendix about how the two leads are not romantically involved and it is disrespectful to the author to write them as such, followed by the cultural appendix explaining the rules and another explaining the historical events the story is based on.

Every one of them is divided into chapters that open with quotes from popular music, most of which music is adaptations of adaptations of adaptations of work from several hundred years ago, and all of them are written in a terse style that puts them about forty percent the length you'd expect for that much plot, even in translation, and all of them end about two pages after the climax of the novel. Also, about half the cast of each novel is male and about half the cast is female, and it's usually hard to tell which is which unless the language you're speaking in specifies.

A story set at a multiversal conference for instances of the same famous fictional crime-fighting duo from thirty-two different fanfictions, at which they have to find and subdue the pair from a grimdark AU who are trying to kill off the others, plus the original material and the thirty-two fanfictions for context. Before and during the mystery there's a lot of conversations about the subtle (or occasionally massive) psychological differences between the alts; a subtext guide at the end explains the history of various interpretations of the characters and which of the fanfictions were originally in conversation with each other. Some of the thirty-two fanfictions are full of porn, which usually involves fairly intense dominance and submission content; which member of the duo is the dominant one varies by fic and sometimes by scene within a fic. In the grimdark AU that the murderers are from, the relationship is significantly asymmetrical even outside the sex scenes and straightforwardly abusive; it has its own entire paragraph of content warnings and the massive crossover fic is carefully written not to require more knowledge of its events than can be acquired from a summary.

A series of short stories set on a Mars base, featuring a series of debates about how to prioritize various pieces of base infrastructure. The first entry ends after all arguments have been heard but right before the final votes are counted. The second entry in the series is set five years later and has two versions picking up after each possible decision with which the first one could have ended, each of which in turn ends with a vote; this goes on until the last one in the series is set on sixteen heavily diverged versions of the base. It has a lot of textual musing on how the choices you make determine your options later, and a lot of mostly-subtextual musing on how the choices you make shape your view of yourself which influences your future choices.

A terraforming puzzle game in tabletop and PC formats, with rulesets for three locations in Firstplanet's star system (Hotplanet, Redplanet, and Bigplanet-Icemoon) and four levels of extra rules that can be added for realism or removed for speed and simplicity, plus dramatic novelizations of a couple of narratively satisfying playthroughs. It's basically a secret textbook.

A translated historical drama from over five hundred years ago, set over five hundred years before that, in which the monarchs of two kingdoms marry for reasons of state, gradually fall in love, and then the political winds shift and the viewpoint character betrays and murders the love interest to ensure the security of the viewpoint character's kingdom. The two protagonists and several supporting characters get a lot of psychological detail and have a lot of philosophical and ethical disagreements in which all sides are convincingly pitched and internally consistent but pretty horrifying from a human-flourishing perspective; the book comes with a stamp of approval from a prominent scholar of the relevant period saying that while these specific events didn't happen, the cultural and economic context is very plausible. There's also a note specifically for the censorship board that Firstplanet definitely doesn't have these particular fucked-up governments or ethical philosophies right now and that the author would specifically prefer that this book not get published if it's expected to be so popular it gives people a skewed view of what present-day Firstplanet is like.

Green

Excellent. Nela issues an imprimatur to the book about the Committed of Truth, with a note that it discusses moral reasoning and avoiding temptation with a particular emphasis on oathkeeping and honesty. 

There is a major character in the caste story about the planet with castes who is implied to have done terrorism. Nela is not really sure about how she feels about this; in context, the terrorism is certainly sympathetic, but you don't want to be encouraging people to commit terrorism because someone is doing atrocities. They already have enough of a problem of that with the foreign-aid caravans. The situation in the caste story is different, but ultimately she's worried that this is too much up to individual judgment for her to be comfy recommending it. She eventually decides to deny it a nihil obstat, but expects that this is going to be a major topic of discussion when they talk about creating guidelines. 

Why is this non-memoir nonfiction book in Nela's files? She sends it to the much smaller Alien Nonfiction Censorship Bureau, the purpose of which is to check that everyone followed guidelines about terrorism and stuff. 

How do people behave in the ensemble drama in the long-running TV show? Does it depict stalking, abuse, rape, harassment, etc as being romantic or glamorous or otherwise the sort of thing that people should do? Is the diplomacy accurately depicted? Do they see people using emotional regulation techniques to handle their feelings about complicated diplomatic situations?

The musical gets a nihil obstat. Nela is charmed by the number about the dog wanting to shear the sheep if it had hands. 

Awwwww, the graphic novel is cute. She imagines this as a wish fulfillment fantasy for the students who would really like to be able to have a different teacher, but unfortunately are stuck with the teacher they're assigned; it's difficult to match everyone with someone their personality meshes with. She doesn't mark it as educational because it lacks depth. 

The TV show does not depict any of those things as being romantic or glamorous, though there are routine plotlines where alien species have, for whatever reason, different needs and cannot abide by human-normed rules about those things (among others). The diplomacy doesn't seem very accurate to the Teachingsphere but it does hold together internally. Coping mechanisms seem to be less called for than usual but stressed characters will do things like VR extreme sports or venting to their partners about it.

Green

The TV show gets a nihil obstat. Green in general does seem to have a lot of imprimatur works; they should consider importing more fiction from it. 

Tree

Is the story about powerful and dangerous magical constructs a metaphor for something, or do they just have a bunch of philosophical discussion about something fictional? Nela is kind of puzzled about whether magical rituals that require a person to die technically count as suicide-- this isn't something that comes up in Teachingsphere books much-- but eventually issues it a nihil obstat on the grounds that magic doesn't actually exist in real life and conceptually it's really more like working in a foreign aid caravan in a dangerous area. 

No, no, no, absolutely not. No nihil obstat for a book about assassinating owners of livestock farms for raising animals for slaughter. Some people need to eat meat for medical reasons, and they haven't invented artificial meat yet. The author seems nice, so Nela writes back a note saying that it is publishable in the Teachingsphere but it seems likely to inspire people to commit murders, and if people commit murders because of the author's book they won't be allowed to publish anything in the Teachingsphere again. This isn't a no-- the Teachingsphere takes freedom of speech very seriously!-- but it seems like the sort of thing the author might want to be informed of, in case they didn't want to inspire murders. 

...She also suggests that the guidelines be clarified to say that physically impossible terrorism is not considered to be a legal violation. 

Setting sourcebook gets a nihil obstat and a referral to the Board Games Bureau, who will play it and see if the rules also get a nihil obstat. Nela hadn't thought that this was a real problem. Before first contact, mostly the Board Games Bureau distinguished between games that get an imprimatur and games that don't. But the Kellearth game of "Diplomacy" has been outright banned for likely causing people to commit murder? So that is apparently a problem that happens now?

Time-travel short stories gets an imprimatur for values dissonance and helping people to understand what it feels like to be totally wrong about ethics. This is something the Teachingsphere always struggles with: it's so easy for people to go "well, I would very simply not be wrong.'

Science fiction webcomic gets a no nihil obstat. Nela is not precisely sure, given lack of cultural context, whether that is sexual harassment but she has decided to err on the side of safety here. 

Oh, that historical novel is really cool. Nela likes it. She gives it an imprimatur for detailed and accurate descriptions of the scientific process, nuanced political debates from other worlds, and (if they decide that this is the sort of thing that gets an imprimatur) teaching people about aliens. 

Grapeverse

No nihil obstat for the epic poem. Lighting people on fire is not an appropriate way to deal with someone wanting to commit atrocities, even if they get better from it. 

The book about the high priestess of the River kingdom gets an imprimatur for... historical plumbing and water management? Nela guesses? Conditional on the factchecker confirming that this is in fact how historical plumbing worked in the Teachingsphere, but Nela thinks it must be, because historical plumbing and water management can't be that different across worlds, even if some of them have magic. She has originated a second imprimatur tag! She also really appreciates the work of the historical-fiction factcheckers in other worlds. She writes a note to a publisher suggesting that maybe they should get some of their factcheckers to factcheck historical fiction novels and podcasts, the aliens seem to really like it and Nela personally would find it very interesting. 

Imprimatur for the porn about masochists with access to magical healing. Nela really likes the detailed, gears-level description of how healthy relationships work! Starting with two people who have absolutely no idea allows you to have a very clear description of the basics without coming off as condescending or like people are thinking too much about things that they should just have down cold. It also lets you explore why certain relationship skills are important! An excellent book. Highly recommended. It is an excellent change from the one that thinks that the correct way to help people learn relationship skills is to light them on fire. 

Colliding-settings world gets a nihil obstat assuming that no one lights anyone on fire to teach them relationship skills in the progress.

Imprimatur for the fantasy-novel duology given its excellent description of trauma recovery and coping with breakdowns about having a task that you're not ready for but you have to work on anyway.

...It is kind of weird that all of these excellent books were produced by the world that also thinks that lighting people on fire is a good way to solve relationship problems. Nela writes a note suggesting that they import more books from Grapeverse but only, and this is important, if they don't involve torture as a solution to relationship issues.

Bicameral

The slice-of-life novel feels to Nela like it ought to get an imprimatur, because of the richness and depth and accuracy with which it explores people's mental health issues, relationship problems, and coping mechanisms. However, it seems kind of weird to give it an imprimatur because... none of these are problems that Nela expects anyone to have at all... in fact the concept of the Teachingsphere having a Chaos makes Nela need to lie down in a quiet room for a couple of hours. She eventually gives it a nihil obstat with a note that she's worried it will make people try to acquire Chaotic personalities and if that happens they are going to need to crack down on imports from Bicameral. 

Weird novella gets a nihil obstat because Nela can't figure out what's happening in it and would frankly be impressed if someone managed to figure out what was happening enough to be inspired to rape people by it. 

The hard science fiction novel about biology gets an imprimatur for teaching about biology, the scientific method, and the necessity of communicating with alien people instead of just assuming that they are not people. There is no such thing as enough teaching that you need to communicate with alien people instead of just assuming they're not people. Nela has read several books about factory farming and she is very firm on this fact. 

Maggieverse

Secret spatial physics textbook gets an imprimatur for teaching about spatial physics. Somehow this is, in fact, a tag which already exists in the system. 

Is the abduction-by-secret-magical-beings-and-gangrape book content-warned for kink because the protagonist enjoys being gangraped by magical beings, or because the reader is intended to jerk off to it, or what?

Will-They-Or-Won't-They Probably-The-Author's-Fetish book gets an imprimatur for healthy relationships and being supportive while working through your emotional issues. 

Proliferationverse

The proliferationverse has a very strange view of the logos, but Nela stamps it with an imprimatur. She's actually kind of puzzled by how little devotional material she's gotten. Presumably it's all over in nonfiction. They plan to give an imprimatur to anything that is recognizably about the logos. The viewpoints of other worlds may be heretical, but there's no reason on principle to assume that they're heretical and the Teachingsphere isn't, and so due to epistemic humility they must be published. 

The cute story about snails gets an imprimatur for being a good thing to read when you're really sad and want something cheerful and low-stakes to make you feel better. 

...okay, so, the alien ruins story is odd, and Nela isn't really sure if a species committing collective suicide and that being understood as basically a good thing should lead to something being denied a nihil obstat...? This has never come up in the Teachingsphere before, as far as Nela knows. After spending a few days digging through caselaw, she eventually concludes that it has in fact never come up before, and decides that in her personal opinion this should lead to the book being denied a nihil obstat, because people might decide to take matters into their own hands as regards humanity's collective suicide. But she expects this to come up more often. 

The fantasy octet is given no nihil obstat because you can't go around writing books that say that your death is so beautiful it makes your life worth it. Come on. For fuck's sake. That's going to result in mass suicide! Nela writes the author and informs them that she thinks that the series is going to result in people committing suicide in the hopes that their death will be so beautiful that it makes their life worth it, and if given this information they want to withdraw the book from publication they are welcome to do so. Also, when this inevitably happens, they won't be allowed to publish any more books in the Teachingsphere.

The slice-of-life comedy gets an imprimatur for how educational it is about all the things that adults need to learn how to do. Some of the details are different from the way they are in the Teachingsphere, but that's fine, the basics are all pretty similar. 

An Interlude Concerning Fanfiction 

The way that webfiction of various sorts-- including text, video, and podcast-- is regulated in the Teachingsphere is that all websites that host fiction are required to either pay a fee to have each work of fiction certified nihil obstat*, or to pay a small tax per user. In order to cover hosting costs, development costs, taxes, and profit, all webfiction hosting websites charge their users. Because they have to pay with a debit card**, it is easy to verify that users are over the age of sixteen and legally allowed to consume fiction without a nihil obstat, and that writers haven't been banned from publishing their fiction. Free webfiction still exists, but if it gets sufficiently popular the fiction-hosting companies generally report it to the government themselves; after all, it cuts into their own profits.  

While different webfiction hosting companies have different policies, the most popular is willing to host everything that is not illegal, as long as it is properly tagged. As such, it is full of depraved porn, romance novels with abusive love interests, extremely cool terrorists who are destroying the Bad People so it's fine, and books about committing genocide against orcs. 

...The Teachingsphere doesn't in fact have any way to enforce the Aevylmarchers' rules on fanfiction, nor would they be using those resources on fanfiction enforcement when they could be using them on making it harder to get books about how fun it is committing genocide against orcs. And a huge percentage of the population is going to see those rules, with no enforcement mechanism and no obvious reason why they should follow them, and go "FUCK YOU YOU'RE NOT MY MOM" and specifically write fanfiction in the exact ways they were told not to.  

Nela writes them a letter explaining these facts and asking whether they want to export fiction, given these constraints. 

*The fee is also charged for conventionally published fiction but has been waived for alien fiction. 
**The Teachingsphere, for the obvious reason, doesn't have credit cards. 

... The Aevylmarchers debate this. Obviously it would provoke an international crisis if aliens were pirating* their fiction, but aliens aren't so much pirating their fiction as warning them that piracy might occur due to alien laws being different from local laws. The Alien Trade Coordination Board passes the message down to the original authors.

The author of the first book is prepared to accept publication without fanfiction control in exchange for extra money, which a charity of fans trying to avert the tragedy of people who would like the book not reading it puts up. The author of the second book is unwilling to compromise on his control of the depiction of a minor supporting character as asexual and withdraws it from consideration. The author of the third's code was 'do whatever, just pay me ten percent of the fanfiction profits' and he's willing to give up those since the Ozytopians lack the state capacity to collect it, and he thinks that's a very noble and virtuous sacrifice of theirs that should be encouraged. The author of the fourth initially refuses, but is prepared to be talked into it For The Good Of Society when her husband promises to censor all the fan mail she gets from Ozytopia so she doesn't need to learn about any shipping she wouldn't approve of. (The authorial note will be removed, since it will be counterproductive, says her husband, who is handling this for her because discussing the entire concept gives her stresscollapsedays** and he's in the eightieth percentile for the Virtue of Resilience.)

(*: Lit: "Benefitting from the goodness of another who agreed to provide that goodness only under certain terms in defiance of the terms and where you have the power not to do so in areas where the socially-agreed upon law has decided that they have the right to enforce their wishes." A one-syllable word in most languages.)

(**: Two syllables.)

...the Teachingsphere actually has all this infrastructure for determining whether the publication of a book is expected to advance The Good Of Society and is happy to publish certain books only on the condition that it gets an imprimatur or a nihil obstat, if that would make people feel better about not being able to control the shipping. 

... Huh, that's cool. Aevylmarchers assume that all fiction is either zero-effect or advances The Good Of Society by default just because people can just put down bad fiction, but aliens are aliens. Sure, why not?

(The protagonist isn't zero conflictedly into it, but the narrative still portrays her as unambiguously Wronged; it's definitely labeled as kinky for being fap material.)

The person submitting the magical-construct book writes back that the story overall is generally viewed as a heavyhanded metaphor about weighing the relative importance of the near-term and far-term consequences of your actions; the magical constructs themselves are not generally understood as a metaphor for anything in particular, although there are some common fan theories ([1] [2] [3] [4]) about problems that they Could Totally Be An Analogy For.

The author of the terrorism book is so concerned about people being inspired to do murders! They had sort of been assuming that anyone whose ethical system would indicate they should do murders was already aware of this fact but maybe aliens are different. If Nela thinks it's likely that people are going to do murders if they read this book then probably it shouldn't be published in the Teachingsphere? How likely does Nela think that is, is this mostly a precautionary thing or a major concern?

The science fiction webcomic's author is sort of confused by what sexual harassment is or why anyone would ever do it but 'cultural differences with aliens' are something well within their ability to understand and if the webcomic is depicting things the aliens are uncomfortable with it's not like they can stop them from being uncomfortable with it.

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.)

A working group has been put together to assemble a collection of some the Union's most significant or impressive works. These are some of the selections they've made for fiction. (The form of the submission is a box containing paper books, naturally.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which everyone has a physical 'soul' which records their memories, instincts, and parts of their personality. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a recently dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since these souls decay shortly after a person's death, it is customary for them to be eaten, that a part of the deceased may live on. Furthermore, this is transitive, and individuals can contain memories or traces of people from hundreds or thousands of years ago, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and intuitions. He is able to mostly think clearly, but often does so in weird, sideways paths. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. He soon realizes that a great surge of monsters has penetrated civilization's defensive lines and is now heading inwards, towards populated areas. He sets off for the nearby city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself through his insight and valor. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things—the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very quickly. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

(There are other books of lies, designed to be deceptive taking into account that you expect to be deceived, those are much more dangerous and the curators thought it best not to send any to other worlds just yet.)

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. (There is never any doubt that the Union will be put back together.) The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot is rather straightforward structurally, but contemplative. There is a strange sense that so much has changed, and so much time has passed, yet the world and its people are the same as they ever were.

*'Accuracy' in this context seems to be related to how safe it is to draw conclusions about the world from a work. In the case of fiction, it mainly has to do if the work's implicit or explicit models of psychology, sociology, economics, biology, etc. are accurate.

Nela likes Olam. It makes sense. 

The book about souls gets an imprimatur for its accurate explanation of the prophet experience through an innovative use of metaphor. It's often difficult for non-prophets to understand prophets, and Nela is glad it's using a fantasy element to explain their experiences!

The memoir gets an imprimatur for teaching perspective-taking and helping people understand the experiences of immigrants, who are so often a marginalized group. It will also, of course, get an imprimatur for understanding alien cultures, if they end up doing this. 

...

...

...

THE BOOK OF LIES IS SO COOL HOW COME THE TEACHINGSPHERE NEVER THOUGHT OF THIS

The Book of Lies becomes an instant bestseller. Book clubs throughout the Teachingsphere spring up to work through it. Hundreds of ethicist monks drop what they are working on to make their own versions. Curricula are developed to use this in schools (although in this case they give the answers to the students, because it's wrong for schools to ultimately mislead people). They request all of the non-dangerous Books of Lies immediately and will be happy to share the Teachingsphere's versions once they are ready.

The post-post-apocalyptic book gets an imprimatur for teaching perspective-taking and providing an accurate view on the effects of a plague on society. 

The Teachingsphere begins a program of imports from Olam. 

A story in which a mad genius has finally gotten fed up and vowed to push out the moon's orbit to realign "months" and "year-parts". The protagonist is an unrealistically-competent-crime-investigator who winds up responsible for auditing the mad genius' calculations to confirm that this won't kill everybody, and also has to prevent multiple assassination plots by concerned states and individuals. Many of the technical audits are depicted in detail, though all mentions of the mass of the moon or the energy required to change its orbit have been replaced with phrases like "It's really big" or "That's a lot of energy, Bob!". In the end, the mad genius flees the country after being told that her plan will not be allowed because it will kill lots of people and upset the international order; The protagonist tracks her down to a remote desert and tries to arrest her, but she declares that no law will stop her from fulfilling her vow and escapes into space to try to enact her plan from Forlorn Sister, outside of any state's jurisdiction.

The first chapter of a serial fiction detailing life on a recently-colonized alien planet; It is presented as a collection of colony summary statistics, reports from the colony's governing officers, and a small number of letters from colonists to their families back home. An author's note explains that the nature of the wormhole allowing access to the colony limits communication to infrequent size-limited transmissions, and that the work will simply be a collection of those transmissions; A second note explains that the author has agreed to release the existing installments to the wider interdemensional community on an accelerated catch-up schedule, but that she's not going to dump the whole thing on them all at once.

A tragedy-of-sorts about a Very Wise Person living in an ancient despotism; She derives from first-principles a number of economic and social reforms that would make the country richer and better for its people. She works her way up through the bureaucracy and about halfway through the book presents her ideas to the Despot, who is impressed and elevates her to be one of his ministers. Three days later someone poisons her food and she dies. The rest of the book is blank.

A fantasy story about an empire which betrays its gods - Not in the sense of blaspheming or going against the old ways, but in the sense that they decide to lock the gods up in metaphorical boxes and stop them from governing human affairs. There is a bloody civil war, and a number of terrible divine curses, but the story ends on an bittersweet-optimistic note as the survivors rebuild and plan for a future free of divine intervention.

A story in which a mad genius has finally gotten fed up and vowed to push out the moon's orbit to realign "months" and "year-parts". The protagonist is an unrealistically-competent-crime-investigator who winds up responsible for auditing the mad genius' calculations to confirm that this won't kill everybody, and also has to prevent multiple assassination plots by concerned states and individuals. Many of the technical audits are depicted in detail, though all mentions of the mass of the moon or the energy required to change its orbit have been replaced with phrases like "It's really big" or "That's a lot of energy, Bob!". In the end, the mad genius flees the country after being told that her plan will not be allowed because it will kill lots of people and upset the international order; The protagonist tracks her down to a remote desert and tries to arrest her, but she declares that no law will stop her from fulfilling her vow and escapes into space to try to enact her plan from Forlorn Sister, outside of any state's jurisdiction.

...Nela is kind of delighted by the implication that Listeners could in theory realign the moon, and therefore are worried that they need to prevent Ozytopians from committing this crime. She sends back a note clarifying the technological level of the Teachingsphere, with particular reference to the fact that they needn't worry about any sort of terrorism involving extraterrestrial bodies. The Teachingsphere has in fact never been to space. 

The book manages to avoid being a secret textbook due to the censorship of all the technical audits, and therefore receives a nihil obstat. It is popular among the kind of people who enjoy their books to also be puzzles.

The first chapter of a serial fiction detailing life on a recently-colonized alien planet; It is presented as a collection of colony summary statistics, reports from the colony's governing officers, and a small number of letters from colonists to their families back home. An author's note explains that the nature of the wormhole allowing access to the colony limits communication to infrequent size-limited transmissions, and that the work will simply be a collection of those transmissions; A second note explains that the author has agreed to release the existing installments to the wider interdemensional community on an accelerated catch-up schedule, but that she's not going to dump the whole thing on them all at once.

Cool! This book receives an imprimatur because puzzling out what is actually going on is a good exercise of the brain muscles; it is classified in the same category as particularly good logic puzzles. 

A tragedy-of-sorts about a Very Wise Person living in an ancient despotism; She derives from first-principles a number of economic and social reforms that would make the country richer and better for its people. She works her way up through the bureaucracy and about halfway through the book presents her ideas to the Despot, who is impressed and elevates her to be one of his ministers. Three days later someone poisons her food and she dies. The rest of the book is blank.

This book receives an imprimatur for combating the just world fallacy and the idea that things happen for narratively satisfying reasons-- so difficult to do in fiction-- and for educating the population about economic and social reforms. 

A fantasy story about an empire which betrays its gods - Not in the sense of blaspheming or going against the old ways, but in the sense that they decide to lock the gods up in metaphorical boxes and stop them from governing human affairs. There is a bloody civil war, and a number of terrible divine curses, but the story ends on an bittersweet-optimistic note as the survivors rebuild and plan for a future free of divine intervention.

This book does not receive an imprimatur, because "polytheism is stupid and low-status and even if gods existed we would have to murder them for their bad behavior" is hardly the kind of message the Teachingsphere needs more of. Honestly, to Nela's mind, it probably needs less of it, to make integrating immigrants easier. Nevertheless, it receives a nihil obstat and is very popular among the kind of people who enjoy the idea of murdering gods. 

A series of novels where planets, entire, come over all magic suddenly at a certain point in their geologic time; Green is on the cusp of this transformation itself but has been being visited by people from a magically mature civilization for centuries. The focus is on a romance between one of the magic aliens - she's mostly human, for reasons, but has the alien powers - and a non-magical Green; they're cute, at first, but the relationship turns darker as the alien's political pressures overshadow their underlying feelings for each other.

A shared world collection of stories and fanart about an alternate dimension populated by fairies, who can be sorcerers, and also have individual powers depending on what kind of fairy they are to make it easier for authors to remain setting-compliant (just make up a new kind of fairy and say it's rare or lives far away from all the previously mentioned Fairyland locations). Knowing their names, or feeding them, confers the ability to force them to do as you say; they do this amongst themselves, but it works slightly differently for mortals. As a quirk, Fairyland doesn't have animals in it except for things like coral and sponges, but it has lots of plants, many made up, and cool geographic features like floating islands.

An olden-times story (Green authors usually don't like research nearly enough to pick a time or tech level more specific than "preliterate", "literate", "preindustrial", "industrial", "electrical", "internet", especially when it's fantasy anyway) about a woman who is faceblind and doesn't know it, marrying the foreign governor appointed to her region after its conquest. They can't really talk to each other, but he can read minds, which allows him to ultimately sort out why she is so confused about whether she has been raped by his brothers who don't exist and are actually him in different outfits. There are more in this world if they like it - different ethnic groups have different magics pop up in their populations, the main character of this one has a brother who is magically good at aiming ranged weapons.

A story about a woman who finds an isolated pocket of magic: a door that leads to a short featureless hallway there isn't actually space for. She is deeply disappointed by the uselessness of this magic, but fucks around with it some anyway, and discovers that it will "help" if she makes modifications to it. Ultimately she creates a society of tiny winged people in a dollhouse city and then leaves, so that someone else can discover not-so-disappointing magic one day, and goes looking for another pocket of magic to turn into something cool.

All four books are issued a nihil obstat due to not containing any objectionable material or anything that they feel is particularly likely to help; the one about being raped about his brothers that don't exist may be denied a nihil obstat, depending on how accurate its depiction is of the trauma of believing yourself to be raped. The last one is appreciated by a lot of Ozytopians, but the other ones don't acquire a huge audience. 

A novel about a young girl who has to come to terms with the years long horrific crime spree she engaged in while being raised by a small gang who committed similarly depraved acts. The novel starts after she has been separated from her 'family' and largely doesn't onscreen any gruesome acts. She starts off reveling in her violent activities but as she makes friends she begins to find ways to relate to people that aren't gruesome torture based. For much of this process she avoiding thinking about her past, feeling empathy for her new friends but not her past victims. In the climax of the novel she slips up and torturously near murders a new friend's brother after he upsets her friend. Realizing what she did, and how she can't deny how her past led to her present, she breaks down realizing that her previous victims were no different from the people she's grown to love and care for. She runs away from her new home, only to realize that she can't avoid her problems - returning to try to be better.

At the end of the novel a section provides discussion questions for grade school teachers to go over with their students.

This book receives an imprimatur for its excellent study of how people should work to improve after they do very bad things! Is this intended for people in first-school (six through eight), second-school (nine through eleven), or third-school (twelve through fifteen)?

Second-school and third-school - there are three different sets of questions for students of different ages. Most Faylien children in first-school have not started their intense reading phase yet and so fewer books exist aimed at them. 

Excellent! This does seem appropriate for second-school and third-school children. Some Verbal class teachers teach it and some works from Green, Malachitin, Olam, and First planet as a comparative interdimensional literature class.

This secretly-textbooks novel series for intellectually disabled people is clearly written for adults but covers basic math and science concepts that non-intellectually-disabled persons tend to learn as children. The protagonist is a new crewmember on a starship, whose tasks are mostly unskilled labor; the other starship crew members are happy to break down complicated concepts for him as much as necessary and the narration never implies that it's odd that nobody treats him differently for his disabilities. He bonds with a young, highly intelligent science officer over their shared love of tactile stimulation toys. 

This novel is about a young woman who gets introduced to a secret magic system when a side-effect of the magic system results in her being dead but still awake inside her body; when she is graverobbed by a nefarious cult, the fact that she is unbeknownst to them still stapled to her body results in their ritual going horribly awry and herself alive again and in possession of all the cult's magical power, which as it turns out is sourced from a prehistoric bug ghost. The main plot involves her recovering from the trauma of having been trapped immobile in a grave for a month while fending off surviving cultists and mastering her new powers; sub-plots include her exploring her gender identity as she realizes that the prehistoric bug was a boy one and how her loved ones deal with ongoing grief in the wake of her not being dead anymore. 

This song-cycle/epic poem is about a young man who has decided that this other young man is his True Love and that it is their destiny to be together, and his efforts to win the affections of his beloved as all around him literally everyone else explains that the guy isn't interested and he's behaving in an extremely unhealthy way. The cycle ends with the protagonist attempting to abduct his would-be love interest and the reluctant object of his affections killing him in self-defense. As he lies dying he begs his beloved to grant him one kiss before he dies, which said beloved refuses; the last line of the last song is of the beloved's retreating feet and ankles as he walks away. 

The Maggieverse is really good at sending books that the Ozytopians like!

The secretly-textbooks novel gets an imprimatur for teaching math and science.

Nela is confused by the concept of a "gender identity". Is that like being hard? But still, it's a very interesting trauma-recovery book and it gets an imprimatur. Lots of people find it easier to read about fantasy trauma-recovery, because it's less likely to trigger them; things that actually happen are harder for a lot of people to deal with, and you can still learn the skills. 

The song-cycle gets an imprimatur for its exploration of what it's like to believe that someone is your soulmate when they actually don't want to date you. Nela sends a note to the Maggieversers to ask if it already comes with discussion questions, or if the author would like to write some, or give Nela permission to write some; she thinks that a lot of readers would benefit from taking the opportunity to experience some introspection. 

They don't have a single standard set of discussion questions but they can send a file of collected public-domain discussion questions produced by various educators. Nela is welcome to develop her own. 

Nela does, with great attention to which details you might notice in your own thought processes when trying to figure out whether someone you are in love with returns your affections or is convinceable to do so. 

There are three works so far from Iie*a, home of the neotenous, monogendered, largely aquatic race which have mostly by accident come to be referred to as the Joeys.

One is a song, apparently for children, about a young Joey who is implanted with a lover (executive-function-boosting symbiote, the more or less literal backbone of their society) and immediately sets out to adventure, leaving his dozen or so fathers behind, because he's desperate to do something interesting, not just make art and have fun as is approved of by society. Unfortunately, he is not very well suited to adventure; fortunately(?), he's self-deluded enough that he manages to convince himself at every turn that whatever disaster has just ensued is what he wanted. He loses his possessions fairly early, but reasons that he wanted to experience the world on his own merits. He makes several friends and drives them away with his terrible luck and inability to own up to mistakes, but convinces himself that they were the cause of whatever disaster latest befell him. Eventually, he falls in battle against a shark he had convinced himself was threatening a nearby village, which is actually a farmer's beloved pet; he goes to his grave convinced that he is a hero dying before his time, and when the spirits of the deeps show him his life and ask his regrets before letting him drift out of reality, he cheerfully claims none. The spirits state that he is the only man who has ever died happy, and that on balance, more people should lie to themselves if they want to enjoy life.

The second is a book centered around the internecine drama of a family of Joeys that really shouldn't be raising a child together. Some of the fathers aren't even speaking to each other, though they present a unified front to the outside world. As their fry grows, the fathers' relationships break down further, and the kid grows up faster than he should; he ends up climactically yelling at them for a while and going off to live on his own until he's old enough to get his lover. (This is seen as incredibly impressive; apparently the executive dysfunction treated by the implantation of a lover is normally so crippling that a Joey without one should not expect to be able to get out of bed most days without the help of his fathers.)

The last is a lightly annotated collection of poems by a fry afflicted by a terminal illness which meant he would not live long enough to be implanted with a lover, and chose to spend his brief existence writing about what life meant to him. It's stylistically shaky, not as polished as one might expect from a professional, but it's certainly more than might be expected of a six-to-ten-year-old equivalent. His tone shifts almost schizophrenically between bitter sarcasm and raw fear-anger-suffering and appreciating small joys in life, not only between individual poems but between stanzas or lines within the same poem. One of the better-regarded poems swings wildly between apologizing to his fathers for bringing them pain and railing against them for not smashing his eggsac with a rock when they realized the suffering he would experience. The poems deteriorate stylistically as his health declines, until his final poem, which he transcribed through a Morse code equivalent after seizures had taken his speech and motor function: i am filled with words i cannot say i fear the end no end my pain is not your pain beloved fathers love me let me leave you

...the children's song about how great lying to yourself is is denied a nihil obstat. Obviously. Nela cannot imagine anyone wanting to read something so blasphemous but she supposes that they'll make it available in case someone wants to read blasphemous literature. It will be next to the Flowers-for-Algernon-alike on the Perhaps You Are Interested In The Horrifying Things Aliens Believe section of the catalog. 

The family drama gets a nihil obstat because it doesn't seem to approve of this situation, but Nela finds it not particularly uplifting. Novels from other worlds have a very odd tendency to begin as soon as the interesting plot starts: surely the part you care about is how the Joey survives on his own without a lover? She supposes that there could be some stuff about identifying a toxic family dynamic but to Nela's mind this is not thoroughly explored.

The terminal illness poetry makes Nela cry. She considers giving it an imprimatur for its sheer honesty, but eventually decides against; however, it does become wildly popular among people who love tragedies, and starts a brief fad for death poetry among the terminally ill.  

A fanfiction author has found a way to send their sequel to the family drama, though it didn't find its way into the same data packet! In this one, picking up a few months after the climax, we see that "living on his own" turned out to be kind of a very bad mistake for the boy. He is in many ways more unhappy than he was back at home, though in some ways he appreciates his newfound freedom; it's just not enough to make him eat consistently. He is propped up to a limited extent by the wider community, but only enough that he's surviving, not enough that he's happy; after a few tearful breakdowns, he decides to run off into the mainland, where he can starve and no longer inconvenience anyone. However, he's found by a wight (glossed in the annotations as "a grown-up Joey who lost or never got his lover and turned into a monster about it"), who initially considers eating him but eventually decides against it. The wight decides to take him in and feed him in the expectation that he will grow up to be the wight's mate. The Joey is conflicted about this, because on the one hand, it's very nice being taken care of by someone who isn't one of his dysfunctional fathers, but on the other hand, he's still got a lot of "wights are scary monsters" built up in his head from when he was in Joey society, and he's not sure he wants to be a scary monster. By the climax, he's almost to the point of metamorphosis when a rescue party finds him while the wight is hunting and brings him back to the village. He lets them implant him with a lover, mostly on inertia rather than because he wants it. Then there's a lot of internal turmoil mediated by the lover's calming presence, which eventually resolves with him seeking out his wight friend in the hopes that they can still find a way to be together even though he'll never be a wight like him.

That is... weird and messed up? Nela is not really sure what to make of any if it? The Joeys are definitely one of the more alien species she's encountered.

She gives it a nihil obstat on the grounds that nothing here is really imitatable for non-Joeys.

A long war-adventure-mysticpower-government-grouptravel novel in which part of the army of a small state from early Aevylmarcher history is magically sent to a fantasy setting which is technologically more advanced than theirs but has lots of social and organizational problems that make it overall less effective, such as being divided into a lot of mostly-tyrannical kingdoms with incompetent appointed or hereditary officials, instead of being federal republics. The protagonists sign on as mercenaries for the government of the (unusually non-tyrannical) kingdom they land on and try to both encourage it to engage in good reforms instead of in bad ones, and to protect it from its enemies via warfare, who are initially portrayed as purely demonic invaders and eventually turn out to have multiple factions and complex internal politics of their own. The main protagonist, the commander of the force, has an adorable romance with a member of the ruling clique of the main kingdom and fights lots of battles and duels and gets involved in complicated politics in which he tries to protect his people while serving the society, but the main focus of the novel is on the logistical difficulties in running a mercenary company, the culture-clash between the protagonists' society and the society they land on, and on the complicated nature of how tactics, strategy, and logistics change based on the technological and social state of the various societies in the setting. Magic is vague and mystical and in the background and mostly used used to create problems, like the protagonists being sent to another world, but has a few reliable effects, which are chronicled extensively. The endnote says that all the countries in the fantasy setting are based on pre-apocalyptic ones, and provides sources - the author is a historian of the relevant period.

A mystery-tension-sailing-bitterending-realtoday short story in which the captain of a cargo transport ship discovers that someone on her ship has anonymously invested a huge sum of money on NO in a prediction market about whether the ship will make it to its destination on time, and attempts to discover who and if they're a saboteur or just a pessimist. The story is mostly focused on the psychological state of the captain and on the captain's attempts to discover which of the crew of sympathetic and likable characters placed the bet and (after sabotage occurs) who the saboteur is. (The perpetrator turns out to be one of the machine operators, who was addicted to gambling, an uncommon but not unheard of trait in the Aevylmarch, and who was in danger of going bankrupt, which is presented as a horrible fate.) The story ends on a bittersweet note, as the captain has made lots of money buying YES on the successful arrival, but her friendship with the saboteur is forever broken, and he is both bankrupt and subject to the law. The cultural endnote says that the city the saboteur is from exiles anyone who borrows money and can't repay it, which would be common knowledge to all Aevylmarchers, and the legal punishment for the sabotage would be fines, whipping, and, for that particular city, exile.)

A horror-romance-smartpower-themepower-closedcircle-deathgame novella about a protagonist who finds machinery horribly traumatic and who makes a living selling horrifyingly beautiful paintings of machine monsters, who ends up trapped in a closed-circle-deathgame where everyone involved has powers based on what they fear. She cooperates with the stored-memory-recreation of an early Aevylmarcher pioneer with a fear of snakes (who was killed in a previous deathgame) in which they both know that the other will eventually plot to kill each other; nonetheless they fall in love, help each other manage their trauma, and ultimately combine their skills to defeat the various open villains participating and achieve their goals; she wins and is able to use foreshadowed elements of the magic system to save him and most of the other sympathetic participants and put an end to the closed-circle-deathgame. An endnote says that the author has generally been open to fanfiction and there is a lot of fanfiction based on this, including two officially licensed prequels; it wasn't the first closedcircle-deathgame novel, but it did enormously boost the popularity of the subgenre.

The working group would like to clarify that the perspective character of the soul-eating book was an attempt to portray what it would be like if you could add pieces of the minds of about a hundred people (and unusually insightful people, at that) onto your own mind, directly making use of their experience in your own thoughts. The experience of the perspective character, as described, is almost certainly impossible for an actual human to experience. (Ozytopians are human, right? They seem to be about the same, in the broad strokes if not in neurotype.) The working group provisionally disendorses that imprimataur.

All books of lies are dangerous (you musn't get complacent) but some are safer than others, and the curators send over all of the relatively-not-dangerous books which are not subject to intellectual property* protections (this is awaiting treaties, which will take at least another few months). They do not send any answer sheets. For their original submission, the curators deliberately selected a book of lies which is rather old and well-tread, because they suspected other worlds would be likely to publicize the answer sheet. The priesthood has produced answer sheets for many other popular books of lies, the contents of which are kept secret on Olam. They would like them to say secret in other worlds because it makes them much easier to keep secret on Olam, because secrets can only be revealed once and the Union is not yet sure how much the governments of other worlds can be relied upon to make good decisions on the behalf of their populations, and because broadly distributing the answers, or 'answers', to a book of lies is sacrilege. They may be willing to share some answer sheets if the Teachingsphere can credibly promise to keep them secret.

*'intellectual property' is a term that would almost never be used in canaanite, 'information-royalty-gratuity' would be the more literal translation.

Olam

Nela understands that this is a metaphor! But being in contact with the logos makes people equally weird. Are people not in contact with the logos in Olam?

The Teachingsphere sends over its screening processes for people whose jobs require them to keep secrets (e.g. spiritual directors, monks who work at children's afterschool centers). If they select someone who scores 1 in 10,000 on these metrics, would that be acceptable?

Alternately, they can avoid having the answer sheets; they are not really sure what the point is. 

A long war-adventure-mysticpower-government-grouptravel novel in which part of the army of a small state from early Aevylmarcher history is magically sent to a fantasy setting which is technologically more advanced than theirs but has lots of social and organizational problems that make it overall less effective, such as being divided into a lot of mostly-tyrannical kingdoms with incompetent appointed or hereditary officials, instead of being federal republics. The protagonists sign on as mercenaries for the government of the (unusually non-tyrannical) kingdom they land on and try to both encourage it to engage in good reforms instead of in bad ones, and to protect it from its enemies via warfare, who are initially portrayed as purely demonic invaders and eventually turn out to have multiple factions and complex internal politics of their own. The main protagonist, the commander of the force, has an adorable romance with a member of the ruling clique of the main kingdom and fights lots of battles and duels and gets involved in complicated politics in which he tries to protect his people while serving the society, but the main focus of the novel is on the logistical difficulties in running a mercenary company, the culture-clash between the protagonists' society and the society they land on, and on the complicated nature of how tactics, strategy, and logistics change based on the technological and social state of the various societies in the setting. Magic is vague and mystical and in the background and mostly used used to create problems, like the protagonists being sent to another world, but has a few reliable effects, which are chronicled extensively. The endnote says that all the countries in the fantasy setting are based on pre-apocalyptic ones, and provides sources - the author is a historian of the relevant period.

Imprimatur for being a secret-textbook about logistics, and for teaching people about politics as it is lived. Nela finds it very interesting-- war sure gets very complicated in worlds where the Teachingsphere can't straightforwardly crush anyone it feels like crushing!

A mystery-tension-sailing-bitterending-realtoday short story in which the captain of a cargo transport ship discovers that someone on her ship has anonymously invested a huge sum of money on NO in a prediction market about whether the ship will make it to its destination on time, and attempts to discover who and if they're a saboteur or just a pessimist. The story is mostly focused on the psychological state of the captain and on the captain's attempts to discover which of the crew of sympathetic and likable characters placed the bet and (after sabotage occurs) who the saboteur is. (The perpetrator turns out to be one of the machine operators, who was addicted to gambling, an uncommon but not unheard of trait in the Aevylmarch, and who was in danger of going bankrupt, which is presented as a horrible fate.) The story ends on a bittersweet note, as the captain has made lots of money buying YES on the successful arrival, but her friendship with the saboteur is forever broken, and he is both bankrupt and subject to the law. The cultural endnote says that the city the saboteur is from exiles anyone who borrows money and can't repay it, which would be common knowledge to all Aevylmarchers, and the legal punishment for the sabotage would be fines, whipping, and, for that particular city, exile.)

Nihil obstat: it ends up showing that gambling addiction is a bad idea, which is something the Teachingsphere approves of, but doesn't provide any sort of means for avoiding gambling addiction. (Of course, that's not the point of the story at all, but an imprimatur isn't about art, and shouldn't be interpreted as 'instead of this story we wish you wrote a totally different and unrelated story.')

A horror-romance-smartpower-themepower-closedcircle-deathgame novella about a protagonist who finds machinery horribly traumatic and who makes a living selling horrifyingly beautiful paintings of machine monsters, who ends up trapped in a closed-circle-deathgame where everyone involved has powers based on what they fear. She cooperates with the stored-memory-recreation of an early Aevylmarcher pioneer with a fear of snakes (who was killed in a previous deathgame) in which they both know that the other will eventually plot to kill each other; nonetheless they fall in love, help each other manage their trauma, and ultimately combine their skills to defeat the various open villains participating and achieve their goals; she wins and is able to use foreshadowed elements of the magic system to save him and most of the other sympathetic participants and put an end to the closed-circle-deathgame. An endnote says that the author has generally been open to fanfiction and there is a lot of fanfiction based on this, including two officially licensed prequels; it wasn't the first closedcircle-deathgame novel, but it did enormously boost the popularity of the subgenre.

Are closed-circle-deathgames a GENRE in Aevylmarch? Why. What do they get out of it. 

It gets a nihil obstat-- the trauma coping stuff is detailed but not quite detailed enough to get an imprimatur, as the author seems much more interested in using one's skills cleverly to defeat villains, and neither magic systems nor closedcircle-deathgames exist in the Teachingsphere-- but the rest of the fanfiction isn't imported because the Ozytopians are wildly uninterested in the genre.

...it turns out that no fewer than ten different Ozytopian cultures have invented closedcircle-deathgames of their own. Nela wants to know if Aevylmarchers would be interested in this.

Yes! Aevylmarcher publishing companies are interested in importing fiction from EVERYWHERE!

Oh no they mean nonfictional ones? There are ethnographies of them and interviews with people who had experienced them. 

WHAT THE SHIT WHAT WHY

Well, they didn't like their enemies very much and wanted them to suffer?

Why do the people in the Aevylmarcher books invent them?

Some ridiculous setting excuse is found that makes it magically necessary, usually!

Probably someone will want to read it, but Aevylmarcher fiction publishers are not the people in question.

(Out of the middle of the pile, not the first book chosen as an ambassador to other worlds, but a quality example of popular fiction:)  

Here are the first three collected volumes of a historical fiction serial!  It's set in a charming temperate-to-northerly coastal village about two hundred years ago, centered around a large marine biology household specializing in invertebrate physiology.  The author is clearly well-informed and very excited about both horseshoe crabs and historic lab equipment, but it's not quite a secret textbook, spending more of its time on the social drama between the household members and their relatives and romantic interests and academic rivals.  (The translator has helpfully included a guide for who is romantically involved and who isn't, since alien signals for that are presumably different and readers might have trouble picking that up.)  The household isn't dedicated-childless but only has two toddlers and three preteens at the time the serial opens:  the first chapter consists of one of the preteens meeting a visiting researcher at the train and showing her around the (lovingly described) village and lab. 

Other plot beats include: 

-a running bit where the toddlers adorably misunderstand or mispronounce things
-people keep forgetting to eat; the household-ops-person is getting tired of rounding them up for meals and installs a Sandwich Basket in the lab
-academic tension over horseshoe crab physiology goes from a simmer to a boil and camps start to form (the translator includes a note clarifying the current state of the field, in case aliens don't have horseshoe crabs)
-another running bit where two teenage members of the household keep talking about having a baby, agreeing that they would be the cutest and smartest and best baby, and then finding a reason to put off actually starting for another month. 
-one of the preteens isn't actually that interested in marine biology, but doesn't want to move out; they start learning how to maintain the boats and put together a supply order, with an eye toward working on household ops when they're older, but it's an open question whether they'll prove to be [organized/reliable/Do Thing] enough to handle it
-a young scientist who recently joined the household feels the need to prove herself before a deadline, she starts staying up late and forgetting to eat more than usual; eventually she makes enough mistakes that she can't keep convincing herself she has everything under control and has to ask for help
-a collecting trip to an outlying island, featuring a picnic and an ill-advised boat race, although everyone escapes with no worse than scrapes and bruises and a cracked rudder
-a constant temperature box breaks in the middle of an important experiment, and everyone who can best handle a disruption to their routine jury-rigs a manual replacement and sets up a rota to monitor it overnight; they get very silly trying to keep each other awake in the wee hours of the morning 

Some other things readers might note:

-no one is making Bad Sex Decisions; in fact, aside from the teenagers who keep procrastinating on having a baby, no one seems to be making any Sex Decisions at all.

-most of the cast is low-key animist in a way that's not particularly remarked on in the text, but shows up in e.g. apologies to broken objects, etc.

-everyone is constantly talking about books and reciting bits of poetry; the translator has included little summaries of the most important ones, and links to the full text when that's made it across in earlier literature piles, and sheet music (often with two or three or a dozen options per song), and the original text of each poem plus a line-by-line gloss and sometimes alternate translations where they weren't satisfied with any single one.

...wow. That's a very sweet book in which absolutely nothing happens. The Teachingsphere books in which absolutely nothing happens don't have that little stuff happening in them. Are Zamboniland books normally this plotless? Everyone is so functional! They argue viciously about horseshoe crabs and no one hits anyone else or self-harms or attempts suicide or breaks other people's possessions or viciously pokes at their opponents' most sensitive points or drinks constantly because they can't bear to be conscious while people disagree with them or even seems tempted to do any of these things! They forget to eat in a normal way and not an eating-disorder way!

It receives a nihil obstat due to the incredible functionality of its characters, and doesn't wind up becoming particularly popular. The Ozytopians feel it is unrealistic. 

Like most Euclidean creative works, the works in this sample were published on CreativeGraph and are freely accessible to everyone; in addition, derivative works are universally permitted and commonplace. Authors, if still alive, receive royalties through various public-goods-funding mechanisms. In addition to the works themselves, CreativeGraph provides statistics on consumption, consumer reactions, and derivative works; weighted-sample links to reviews and derivative works; and links to ExpositionGraph articles and sequences providing plot summaries, historical and cultural background, and (if applicable) information about each work's subsequent cultural impact.

This particular sample includes two works from auth cultural contexts, two from lib cultural contexts, and one with cross-bloc cultural significance and appeal, even though this is unrepresentative (about three-fourths of works on CreativeGraph are lib).

A short story set in a sprawling space-opera mythos that emphasizes interplanetary relations and politics, told from the perspective of a younger, apparently alternate-universe version of 146969 Symmetry, an established character known as a member of a multi-species team of problem-solvers. The story follows them as a young adult on their home planet, where the silduru, a visually distinctive minority group, are horrifically oppressed and treated as subhuman. Symmetry, like everyone else, feels hatred and disgust towards the silduru, and is used to never giving them any consideration, and the idea of doing so would be socially unthinkable—and so they try to ignore the obvious fact that this attitude doesn't comport with their general belief in the moral value of all sentient beings.

Unfortunately for them, they find that they can't stop thinking about it, despite the anguish of doing so and the fear of ostracism from everyone they've ever known. Until the day comes when, upon seeing a silduru in distress, they forcibly override their urge to run away and instead go and help them—at which point it's revealed that there's no such thing as the silduru, the apparent alternate universe is in fact a virtual-reality environment in the original universe, and all of Symmetry's memories are fake. This was a test, the adramjur periksa, which anyone on this planet must pass in order to earn the right to vote and participate in governance; this was Symmetry's fourth attempt, and most never pass at all. Their existing memories (including of the nature of the test, which is well-known) were temporarily suppressed, and the hatred and disgust were artificially induced, in order to judge whether they would correctly discern the morally right course of action and take it, even if the judgment of society and their own emotion-driven intuitions conspired against it. Unusually, Symmetry opts to allow the record of their previous failed attempts to be made public, that others might learn from their mistakes.

The story is accepted as Symmetry's canonical backstory by most subsequent works in the mythos, and led to an explosion of works centered around them and their home planet. The standard of being able to pass the adramjur periksa has become a common metaphor in auth politics and society, as an ethical ideal to hold oneself to.

An alternate-future-history short story anthology, of the kind that aims to convey a general gestalt of what the curator envisions life would be like given the premise—in this case, if 221448 and their far-auth theocracy had successfully spread and conquered the entire world, and invented and deployed a simulated virtual-reality hell, allowing lifetimes of torture to be collapsed into much shorter time periods. Everyone who fails to live up to their duties under the true moral law—which is to say, everyone—is subjected to this punishment. The stories include impressions of children struggling to understand their ostensible moral duties and why their parents sometimes come home broken; of true believers fighting their intuitions in order to wholeheartedly accept what they believe to be their moral desert; and of those who consider or attempt suicide or other acts of defiance, knowing that all their friends and loved ones will be tortured in retaliation.

The linked ExpositionGraph history sequence explains that, in real life, the most intense phase of 221448's moral-demandingness-centric theocracy, when the desirability of building hell was explicit doctrine, lasted only about 2*12^7 blinks (nine months) before the rest of the world learned the full extent of the regime, put together a military coalition, and invaded, putting an end to the theocracy. This was about 5*12^8 blinks (20 years) ago, and it has shaped much of recent global history. (It also notes that 221448's chosen name was Moral-Authority and they named their church the Mutual Enforcers of the Moral Law. Since the war, institutional sources have adopted a convention of not using those names, though they're still sometimes heard in informal contexts.)

A deliberately troperiffic animated series that shifts every three episodes (each about 1*12^3 blinks (10 minutes) long) to become a pastiche of a different genre. It does this while telling a single story throughout, initially centering around a cartographer and their apprentice-filmmaker platonic partner but gradually growing into a huge ensemble cast. The characters travel through the multiverse, fighting and occasionally teaming up with various different antagonists, as they seek to avert a multiverse-wide apocalypse whose nature only gradually becomes known. The musical arc is a particular fan favorite, as is the first villain to be introduced, a self-consciously stereotypical mad scientist motivated primarily by their desire to be recognized as a worthy antagonist.

A historical-fiction musical about the founding and rise of CreativeGraph. Its charismatic visionary founder sought not only to radically increase everyone's access to creative works for consumption, but to spur widespread universal production of them, that everyone might take their part in fulfilling (what they viewed as) the purpose of humanity, and that the resulting culture might be reflective of all its members in an egalitarian fashion. Their joy as CreativeGraph took off turned to dismay as superstar dynamics emerged on a greater scale than ever before, and most consumers remained consumers without contributing. Railing against their creation's users and maintainers, they alienate everyone who had helped them and ultimately die alone and embittered. The final number steps away from their perspective and is a joyful celebration of the explosion of diversity and accessibility, resulting in more people creating new works than ever before in history, that CreativeGraph has brought about and that its own creator could never appreciate.

ExpositionGraph confirms that the musical contains no major factual inaccuracies (though dramatic license is taken in minor details) and that the interpretation of events that it adopts is considered a respectable one among historians, though some disagree with it.

A tabletop game wherein players lay out cards in sequences and loops, and then move game pieces around according to instructions written on the cards. Some cards also instruct the players to maintain additional state. This is, of course, a secret textbook of elementary computer science and programming; the rules are Turing-complete by design. It was originally designed to teach children, and was used extremely widely for that purpose for over 2*12^9 blinks (100 years), with many gradual changes to the rules over that time period. Today, it has largely been superseded by games more carefully designed, using modern technology and modern psychological research methods, to hold children's attention, but it remains a standard teaching tool for remedial education of adults.

Probably some people are 'in contact with the logos', depending on what that means. It's not really a category anyone on the working group recognizes. Maybe the comparative religion team is having more luck?

(They are not.)

The Teachingsphere doesn't absolutely need the answer sheets. They'll probably be fine. And clearly the censors have a decent idea of what things it would be particularly bad to expose their people to. (Some of the books of lies advocate suicide, or risky behavior, or lying to everyone all the time, or doing a fuckton of drugs. Some will definitely not receive a nihil obstat and might not be a good idea to publish at all, by ozytopian standards.) But if they experience any unusually virulent memes, mass psychosis, that kind of thing, it would be good to report that.

The Teachingsphere will definitely report any such behavior! They publish the books of lies carefully, only allowing them to the most stable monks at first.