A long episodic series with an elaborate magic system involving meditation and rituals to build magic power within oneself. The main character is initially clueless but more and more details of how the made-up magic works are introduced over time, and the whole thing is remarkably coherent and sensible even with all the additional detail. His understanding of the underlying mechanics is crucial to most of his successes, except one time where he was saved by blind luck. The protagonist is persecuted and bullied at every turn, robbed in the streets, accused of crimes he didn't commit and propagandized against by a certain political group. (The book stresses that these are all things that are deeply wrong in the society depicted.) He is idealistic but desperate, and his idealism slowly erodes. Eventually, the protagonist takes a risk at a major milestone trying to get more power and dies. The series switches perspective to a prominent rival, who finds the protagonist's research materials and uses them for her own ends, and the rest centers on her at least saying to herself that she wants to change the world for the better... But never actually doing so because it doesn't feel safe. Only when she has a son does she realize she was living comfortably, benefiting from a corrupt system, and though it places them both at immense risk starts fighting back against injustice and corruption.

A novel about a video game designer who has angst about all the video game ideas he has but will never actually implement, because having a cool idea and actually making it reality are two extremely different things. His emotional journey follows along the development of two different games, with peeks into the actual process of game design or programming or art, but most of it centering on character interactions as the protagonist tries to find his place in the team. He has difficulty separating work frustrations from his nonwork time and spends a lot of time dwelling on it. Over time he makes friends with his coworkers, some of whom remain distant or leave, and learns to accept most of his issues.

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS! Its framing device is pretty minimal, the book almost seems to be a textbook in disguise. Or at most, a collection of short stories about what particular vehicles mean to particular people, light and cheery and hopeful and excited. The various characters and their jobs or reasons for being on a train, boat, airplane, or rocketship are pretty clearly mostly set dressing in favor of rambling nerdy rants about how these various vehicles work and what tradeoffs are made in their design and the historical value of particular models and the lovingly researched process of engineering them (with historical context included in the scenes of old-timey engineers discussing things) and what a difference having excellent vehicles makes to individuals in a society and the various situations in which design mistakes happened and a long rant that somehow diverts into tax policy about how much more efficient trains are than cars and much lamenting on how rockets are way too expensive for everyone to get to ride on one.

A narrative-focused-minimal-mechanics video game where the viewpoint/protagonist character is the captain of a magical flying trade boat in a fantasy world. There's a lot of attention paid to ancient navigation methods, to the weather, to food and water preservation, to translation and contact with unfamiliar cultures. Sometimes these issues are handwaved with a new magic item, but not always. Most of the game aside from the nerdy details is about meeting exotic cultures and navigating cultural differences (and the different clever solutions to basic living problems like chores or disease that the different cultures use). You can very easily get into trouble, offend the locals and get worse deals or even get kicked out, if you approach things trying to be polite and friendly the same way in each new culture. There is also the side-plot of accumulating lots of extra characters, romantic partners or just friends, usually with one or more nonhuman features on a mostly humanoid body, like harpypeople, goatmen, catgirls, merfolk, etc. You have to figure out how to alter the ship to accommodate them before you can pass a certain relationship level. You can pick the genders of the side characters and it doesn't seem to change much about them, just a couple of lines and the picture and animations. There are too many side characters for any of them except a couple to be especially fleshed out, so they tend to come across as somewhat flat aside from the color of their home culture. The game is sex-scenes-optional, with a friendly, romantic but non-sexual, and sexual path for each companion.

A drama told entirely through forum posts complete with avatars, usernames, timestamps, and edit histories. A clique of friends forms an interest group on the internet for a made-up MMO video game. At first they enjoy the small and slowly growing community, but then an event in-game makes their forum explode massively in popularity and the original founders are unsure what to do about it. There is much drama about bad behavior on the forums and how much moderation/oversight is too much and ten page debates on minor changes to the posted rules and complaining about the developers' changes to the MMO. One of the group is caught getting advance tips on upcoming changes from a game moderator, and this is seen as a massive scandal and immense violation that everyone is upset about. Eventually the original friend group splits on a violent disagreement about whether develop their own offshoot of the game. To cling to the past nostalgically, or move on?

A novel about a team of a dozen terraforming engineers, set after the heavy lifting of adding oxygen and correcting the temperature and so on is done. They're responsible for building up ecosystems. There's lots and lots of nerdy detail about nutrient flow and niches and metabolic pathways and mutation rates and isolation of clades and stability-against-extinctions, and every member of the team has a distinct personality type and their own favorite forms of life they try to squeeze into as many different places as possible- For example, one woman is quiet and calm in private but plays up an almost megalomaniacal personality in public, except during crises when she goes deadly serious. She is very fond of snakes, and tries to put snakes in as many places as possible on the new planet.

A war novel that is prefaced with a long statement that war is bad, actually, and if two large organized forces were going to war with each other in real life and not simulations and games something would be deeply wrong. Also the book is probably inaccurate in several important ways as to how real wars really work because the author is a soldier who has only ever served in peacetime. The book itself follows the perspective of an infantryman in a ground campaign as they organize, deploy by truck, and then engage the enemy in tactical action, with occasional zoom-outs to logistics and large scale strategy. The two combatants' reasons for fighting are never actually defined and the book doesn't touch on trauma or dealing with violence very deeply. It ends with each individual small unit getting fed up with fighting and ignoring orders to advance until a de-facto peace has emerged.

A man wakes up inexplicable magic powers (teleportation, object creation, and miscellaneous others) and immediately goes to get scientists to test them, worrying he has gone crazy. Then a voice in his head tells him he wasn't supposed to do that, and he wakes up on the same morning with the same magic powers. He loops for a long time, trying lots of different activities until the voice makes a cryptic comment and resets him. Any attempt to do science gets him reset. He gets increasingly frustrated and demanding and slowly stops being able to enjoy the powers due to feeling a lack of control. At first sightseeing and games and consensual sex, then more destructive hobbies like drugs and more dubious kinky sex, and eventually as he concludes he is being maliciously simulated he starts trying to destroy the simulation. The last sentence in the book is the mysterious voice saying, "Okay, I think we're done here. Goodbye."

A fantasy novel set in a world where nothing makes sense, every culture has their own superstitions and all the superstitions seem to be true at once, even contradictory ones. The central protagonist-pair is an asexual man and a trans woman (who manages to use magic to transition, kind of as a side note, roughly halfway through the story, it's not a major focus). The dynamic between this core pair is strong- They're deep and carefully thought out characters. They take lots of notes on local superstitions and travel to new places together and pretend to be husband and wife (or at least a polycule-core-pairing) in most places they visit because lots of places have helpful superstitions about couples. The pretending-to-be-married is held out as a metaphor for not fitting into society, it's kind of awkward. The two are intimate friends, just not in a romantic or sexual way. They avoid danger on the roads and make friends and enemies, and try to do science to superstitions. They eventually piece together that whether you believe something will work has a strong influence on whether it will actually work, and people's superstitions seem to be getting more and more grim and hopeless. They are horrified by the implications and form a secret conspiracy to try and spread more positive, hopeful spiritual beliefs, starting a spiritualist healing cult that has a good initial reception. It stops there with a clear sequel hook.

A surprisingly gripping docudrama novelette about a financial scheme, with a foreword written for alien publication explaining Planet politics briefly. Apparently on Planet, their governments tend to - overlap a lot? For example, if you live in a city you'll likely be under the authority of a transport authority that runs transport for a whole region, a local orderliness group that is an odd combination of law enforcement/health services/emergency response, a building and food service code organization that covers half the continent, and a tax-administration entity that covers the entire world. But every political organ in Planet has in common an extreme 'openness'. Every major decision, all their finances, meeting recordings, and many other things are public and available for anyone to look through, and people do carefully comb through it for signs of corruption and incompetence. There's a long tradition of political units just... Being ignored if they lose the public confidence. Consequently, politics is a very stressful job that often just consists of not breaking anything that already works, and in general moves pretty slowly.

The work itself is a light dramatization (with notes on where it departs from reality) of this one time that it turned out a very expensive ecological intervention that the World Impact Tax had been funding for over a decade not only didn't work, but was actively counterproductive and was ruining a large ocean biome. It had been based on bad science that was obfuscated by a clique of researchers and owners of relevant industries, with the obvious conflicts of interest of money and prestige. The dramatic tracking-back of the bad science plus accusatory court scenes and bungled attempts to cover the whole thing up further makes up the meaty part of the book. When it ends, the scientist cabal and everyone who went along with it were shamed, public confidence in WIT was shaken, and they started a deep rework of their anti-corruption practices, led by the woman who was the main force in uncovering the bad science.

Plastic Heart, A soft sci-fi where almost everyone uses various 'augments' - biological or robotic modifications of their bodies, or even cloned or fully robotic bodies. Everyone is effectively immortal barring the most terrible accidents or thorough and deliberate murder. Nonsentient robots do almost all the work, allowing people to live without working at all if they wish. People are more open sexually than in the past, the book explains as if to justify itself. The book follows an augment technician who only has a few basic augments herself. She gets her business off being one of the best, more than for stellar customer service. She often refuses 'boring' jobs and usually only works on customers with interesting problems - even if she does sympathize with the customers' stories for getting mods. The mods themselves range from brain implants that prevent the bearer from lying or deceiving at all, custom eyes that display high-definition hypnotic patterns, RADAR and jamming equipment stored in a low-profile forearm hollow, all sorts of physical enhancement from muscle to reflexes to armor, and lots and lots of different configurations of extra limbs. Tails, animal ears, private parts, and tentacles are the most popular. There's a lot of sex - one scene at least with most 'clients' and every interestingly exotic augment, usually justified as 'testing' and often discovering lingering issues that need to be fixed, like the new skin feeling weird or tentacle control spasming out. One repeat customer keeps adding and removing more and more exotic mods, changing genders at whim, and eagerly explaining the experiences that are only possible when you have extra senses and extra limbs. As the two fuck after each augment session they follow a cute sexfriends-to-romanticpartners path with the augment tech blushing and nervous for the first time in her life.

The Nature of Joy is about a young woman who works as a shop attendant. It's a boring and very low-demand job, almost painfully generic. The narration supports the theme of mindless genericness, with the store's layout and products seeming to change almost paragraph to paragraph, and the protagonist referring to regular customers with new but similar names every time. There's technically a plot about some friends' school troubles, but mostly it's about her wistful daydreams during the workday. She imagines being swept off her feet by a beautiful man - or woman - or alien foxboy. She imagines being handed a precious artifact by a poisoned spy and crashing headlong into a wild urban fantasy. She imagines becoming a fighter pilot putting her life on the line to protect the planet from aliens, or a brilliant tinkerer dodging jackboots in the catacombs of an old city, or a poet-chef on a quest to find the ultimate ingredient. All these fantasies run together, blending with the actual events of the world and with her friends and customers' conversations, and it's clear that she lives halfway in a fantasy. They urge her to write, to draw, get it all down, she's very creative and it'd be popular. She could write and write and drop the clerk job. But she says- No, that's not the point. Daydreaming is a joy, something done selfishly. If she tried to make money with it, it'd stop being her escape. Boredom is precious to her, that one odd state of mind that's so difficult to maintain where the world isn't quite real and you can almost step into another one - that's where she wants to live. They think she's insane to work the shop clerk job and not take vacations or buy new video games and fancy makeup and art. But they're her friends, and if that is what makes her happy, so be it. After all, joy is in the mind. She does develop over the course of the book, finding new writing-friends, being pushed out of her comfort zone at times when she's dragged to places of drugs and sex and to fancy writing clubs full of people who, to her, are trying too hard to be happy - or to look happy. She scowls and looks bored all the time, and she's happy. She has a few relationships and grows as a person, being more considerate to her friends by the end and actually sharing some of her writing rather than deleting it or keeping it all secret. (If you feel like giving money in exchange for this story, the author likes these particular charities that are specifically aimed at helping troubled teens).

Bleeding Silver, A hybrid graphic novel and text novel, with which scenes get art and which don't seemingly chosen for splash-art value, set in a 'mirror world' that can see the mundane physical world - the 'foundation' - but operates on very different rules. Mirror world people are varied and magical and generally immortal. Unfortunately, any actual contact between the mirror world and the real world has horrible consequences - spawning monsters, causing natural disasters, making people simply drop dead for no reason, etc. Therefore the mirror world must extremely strongly restrict any passage between the two, out of humanitarian reasons to not completely destroy the 'regular' world. The novel follows a man, Sebastian, a lich whose body is made from steel and gemstones, and a normal woman, Clarion, who Sebastian whisked away into the mirror world when it looked like she was going to die. (Foundation to mirror transfer is reasonably safe). It turns out she would have been fine, but now that she's in the mirror world it would be a horrible atrocity to let her go home. Sebastian tries to make her feel welcome in the fantastical mirror world and badly bungles the explanation of where she is and why she can't go home. Clarion is justifiably hurt and accepts his hospitality for a short time but does not get along very well with him and is in deep culture shock without any familiar technology and in a very different society. She manages to completely innocently direly offend someone the first time she goes shopping, and things get worse from there. Clarion doesn't believe sending her home would actually be dangerous- All she has to go on the destructiveness of it is what Sebastian says. Sebastian tries to cheer her up and the book creepily imitates slice-of-life-but-slightly-off for a little while, the tone showing how much she can't be cheered. Clarion eventually gets into contact with a criminal group who know how to send things back to foundation, and sell dollar store magic items there in exchange for valuables, dispersing the negative consequences across a whole city so nobody notices. She starts ingratiating herself and learning what she needs to go home. Meanwhile, Sebastian is wracked with guilt over accidentally kidnapping Clarion and then leaving her to go home and surely hurt people by accident in the process. He reports her to the 'silver circle' which seems to be police of a sort, but they find no trace of her. Clarion returns home and is soon contacted by a secret society in the foundation world, who kidnap her - again - and interrogate her extensively, thinking her to be an opportunistic criminal and definitely lying. She gets more and more angry, and after a mental break she instinctively does magic to return herself to the mirror world - where she falls a thousand feet into a lake. The next part of the novel deals with learning to control her ??magic?? that she has now for some reason, and pretending to be a native to learn more about the mirror world. Sebastian knows she has returned again (justified with some magic worldbuilding) and sets off to go find her - without the silver circle, since they'd just kill her and something weird is going on. When they meet again, Clarion still doesn't trust Sebastian much, but he freely teaches her to control her new magic more efficiently. The big turning point of the book is when they realize some accident of exactly how Sebastian initially summoned her means that Clarion can freely go between baseline and mirror worlds without causing mayhem. The remainder of the book is centered on constructing an underground revolution and steadily summoning more 'striders' who can safely hop worlds while dodging the Silver Circle, with the final climax being a chaotic melee of a chase scene across both worlds, where the leader of the Silver Circle is eventually convinced that Clarion is not sowing destruction every time she leaps, and calls them off. The final part of the book is a series of hopeful scenes of baseline and mirror world people interacting and trading.

A thick fantasy novel about a humble schoolboy in a time loop trying to save the world from an apocalyptic magical threat, with a central looping character whose willpower focus is - to save everyone, all their stories, all the people he doesn't know and will never know - because their loss is simply unacceptable. The magical powers rely on depth of emotion and willpower, and though he constantly attempts to save the world the stress and isolation of looping leads him to despair. He notices himself growing less powerful as he gets wearier, and has a crisis of faith. Will he really be able to save the world? What's the point, if he keeps deleting a year's worth of memories from billions of people? The loop would end if he simply saved as many as he can and fled the planet - a million, two million perhaps. His friends, who he knows far better than they know him thanks to the looping, can't seem to reassure him or understand what he's going through. He could just give up... But that would condemn countless others to oblivion, and break something that should never be broken. That would be *giving up*. He prays, a concept of desperation and even foolishness to Planet. He thinks and thinks. He cries and wallows in his emotions. And eventually, he hits on an insight that lets him bring others into the loop, but only his closest friends, one per loop. After that things seem to slowly get better, as if victory is inevitable - the light at the end of a long tunnel, distant but visible. He's - honestly kind of more miserable than before, subjecting his friends to the same torment, even as they reassure him that this is what they want. Even as the reality of the end becomes clear again and again. Several times, the narrative and tone build up to a great climax - spending a lot more detail on this particular clever solution and why surely we will win this time - only to be forced to loop again. And again. And again. Until, only halfway through the work, nowhere near where one would expect the real climax and in a scene paced just like the past failures- He succeeds, escaping the loop and stopping the world-ending dark miasma before it can consume more than a single city. The rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out side characters' arcs and the main cast's healing and rehabilitation. The final scene is in the same place as the very first scene - a flower garden on a ridge, looking out on a bustling city full of people going about their daily lives, with the boy looking melancholic towards the sunset.