Disquisitiones Arithmeticae

Or, rather, what Astro's just finished listening to, not counting a couple of long Q&A wrap-up episodes, because I literally just finished it a few minutes ago, and I do not know when I will recover.

So, TMA fans, horror aficionados, podcast peeps, you've... you've all already listened to The Silt Verses, right? I mean, surely, right? Because I can't really remember anyone talking about it, except maybe very briefly in passing, but I know it finished up a year ago and maybe I just wasn't paying attention before I very belatedly started listening to it. It still seems sort of astonishing to me, though, because my main reaction to the whole thing is pretty much, "OMG, why isn't the title of this thing on everyone's lips? Why haven't they made up entirely new awards just to give them all to this show?!!!"

Because, geez, you've got top-notch, deeply affecting horror. You've got fantastic characters, complex and flawed and evolving. You've got exceptional worldbuilding, with possibly the best take on the idea that gods are created by humans and need worship and sacrifice to survive that I've ever seen, and, yes, I am not even excluding Sir Terry Pratchett there. You've got incredibly good voice acting. Well, all, right, there's a place or two where you listen to some of the minor characters and think, whelp, those were some acting choices, for sure. But the main cast are incredible, especially Méabh de Brún, who really should just get handed All the Awards Ever. You've got fantastic writing and fantastic production values that work hand in hand, and a format that really, really works for me, blending internal narrative, dialog, and soundscaping a in a way that artfully and artistically conveys to the listener everything we need to know. Which is incredibly important for me as someone whose suspension of disbelief goes SPROING the instant a character starts narrating their own movements out loud or describing things everyone with them can see perfectly well.

And it's incredibly meaty, with themes involving faith, corruption, war, politics, death and how we meet it, ambition, the legacies we leave behind, the difference between reality and the stories we tell about it afterward, capitalism, exploitation, love, defiance, hope, betrayal, cruelty, kindness, the near-impossibility of changing systems when you're bound up inside them, and undoubtedly a whole bunch of other things.

Oh, and if I'm making this post a pitch for those who haven't listened to it yet, I'll first add content warnings for darkness and horror and lots of disturbing stuff. But I'll then add, because I know there are a lot you out there for whom it's likely to be a serious selling point, that this thing has two canonically trans main characters (whose stories are incredibly complex and deep and have nothing whatsoever to do with their gender), that a significant percentage of the people we encounter casually, use they/them pronouns, and that while (rather refreshingly) the show entirely avoids romance tropes when exploring the ways in which the characters love each other, there are certainly queer relationships to be found in the background.

So, yeah. Fantastic stuff. My eyes are still kind of bothering me from how much the final episode made me cry, not gonna lie. I also find that I can't stop thinking about how, to put it without spoilers, the two-part finale here had a surprising number of elements in common with last week's Doctor Who season finale, despite being a very different kinds of storytelling, and, boy, does it say something that one of those two things left me going, "Ugh, OK, whatever, I guess?" at the end, and the other made me cry a lot and then write a rambling Dreamwidth post about it.

I do find, though, that this seems to be one of those things were I don't want fic and fannish stuff for it, because it's super satisfying to me as it is, and I don't want to mess with it at all. Hey, maybe that's the reason, actually, that it doesn't get the kind of attention TMA does, who knows?

We appear to have arrived at June, so here's the usual book round-up for the month of May. Not a fantastic month for fiction this time, I'm afraid, or at least not for fiction written in recent millennia.


( 31. Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell  )

( 32. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder )

( 33. The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman )

( 34. Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events by Brent Spiner )

( 35. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss )

( 36. Weyward by Emilia Hart )

( 37. 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse )

( 38. Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking by Thomas E. Kida )