My Favorite Books That I Read in 2018

Books! Why would you bother living without them? Even slowed down by life and depression, this turned into one of my favorite reading years thanks to some stunning debuts and absolute gems in my backlog. In the post-Christmas haze I've gathered up some scary stories, a Pulitzer winner, a New York Times favorite, and novellas and a lovable killing machine for you. Let's read.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

This is an Epic Fantasy about the real world destroying your adolescent notions of what matters. For the first chunk of the book, Rin throws herself into life at a military academy, exploring connections between drugs and the gods. The worst things in her world are an unfair teacher and her equivalent of a Draco Malfoy bully. But then she graduates and has to serve alongside her classmates in a brutal war with civilian death tolls and a nightmarish parallel to the Nanjing Massacre. The book lets us take Wizarding School tropes for granted and then rips them in half with reality. Hopefully one one reading this ever has to deal with the horrors of war, but Rin's revelation is an extreme version of the experience of so many people who hide from reality inside education systems and then have to confront the world. From this conceit, Kuang creates one of Fantasy’s greatest origin stories, showing us how Rin grows from desperate, to ambitious, to vengeful, to ruthless. We see all of the social pressures and life events that forge her into one of her world's great villains.

Phallus for the Sky - #fridayflash

A gorgeous shot from Icy Sedgwick's photo prompts.

"Hey honey."

"Oh for God's sake, Earth."

"I know you see it. It sure sees you."

"Put that away. It's not even morning. I'm tired."

"I can see the sun behind those clouds! Come on, it's the weekend."

"Where'd the romance go? You're all architecture these days."

"I sent you that shuttle!"

"I know it's the last one, Earth. All your TV satellites are floating in me."

"Have I told you that you look spacious lately?"

"I'm going back to bed."

"I bet a full moon will be out!"

"You're the worst planet I've ever dated. Pluto never needed artistic viagra."

"And look what happened to him! No, baby. I got you figured. You go take a nap. Dream on all this. "

"The single worst planet I've ever..."

Rest and Repel Those Aliens - #fridayflash

It’s so cold out that he has to build a robot. After he’s shoveled the snow, and cut the wood, and the stoked the fires, his bones are still heavy with persistent chill. He’s weary and climbs into bed, beneath layers of sheets and blankets, from which he constructs the robot.

Technically the robot is a military exoskeleton, but there is no time for technicalities because the planet is under siege. There’s a jersey knit sheet over him, full of microfiber transmitters. A heavier quilt lays over that, but he puts his arms over it, because they always get too hot under all the blankets, and because when he makes fists in the quilt, it feels like two flight controllers molded to his hands. There’s another blanket over that so his arms don’t get too cold, and to seal him into the cockpit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is his head, though he can pull the blanket over it if he gets a nightmare.

The beauty of his robot is that it convects his body heat, storing and building it up much better than a snow suit or a single blanket unit. Also, it has hard light lasers that can smash alien ships with armor that’s heat resistant, and that’s wicked. His weary eyelids slide closed and he enjoys a heads up display that targets all the enemy craft hidden in the sunspots.

His robot is so smartly built that he doesn’t feel it take off. It moves through the stratosphere without a whisper, powered by Generation Two Improbability Drive Tech. The invading aliens don’t even have Generation One.

The wind rattles his windows like a hundred tractors driving by. He imagines a hundred enemy space crafts, out-numbering him, but they are out-teched and out-gunned. Just one squeeze of his imaginary triggers fills up the sky with his hard light lasers.

Sometimes he shoots them down. Sometimes he goes up and talks it out, and becomes instrumental in the peace process. Sometimes he falls asleep right away. Saving the world is oddly relaxing.

Bathroom Monologue: The Prime Directive

I was on the first mission that found signs of extraterrestrial life. Pockmarks in a moon’s surface, craters so radioactive our sensors broke. All we had were a few cement structures and garbage, the remnants of life-forms that had warred themselves out of existence before we could even knock.

I wasn’t on the Astra Mission, whatever they called the one that found two previously inhabited planets. Faster-than-light travel brought us all three of those stories inside of one year. I’ll grant you the last one might have been disease, though there’s no proving they didn’t engineer the diseases that did them in. Even if you blame the one extinction on a plague, the Astra and the outlier were both self-inflicted extinction. Never forget the photos from that rift they opened in their own planet. Went down to the tectonic plates. There were skeletons down there.

Hard for science to recover its luster after we found space was a cemetery. There had always been that cruel joke that any life evolved enough for space travel would kill itself off. We don’t want to believe with the outlier, the only lonely heaven-sifters. But it got the Prime Directive passed the Senate, didn’t it? If you find another culture, interfere before it’s too late.