REVIEW: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (4-stars)

Another book from my Hugo nominee reading list: "The Everlasting" is a story about trauma and healing that uses the aesthetics of romantasy, high fantasy and time travel tropes to explore how people respond in different ways to generational trauma and the experience of war.  If you take away all the fantasy trappings, costumes, swords, dragons and fancy gold goblets – you still have a story about personal development and growth that can stand on its own two legs.  The unreality is what makes the emotional reality possible.

To that point, I want to start by addressing the mechanisms and devices in this story – and how they function.  If you want a full summary of the plot points, I recommend you check out the Bookish Goblin review. 

On the surface - this is a portal / time loop fantasy.  Much like the stones in “Outlander,” the traveler provides a sacrifice (blood instead of rubies and diamonds). The time loop just provides a rehearsal space for the characters to explore, practice and try on options that may help them grow past the trauma into agency and true strength.  Some people might see plot holes – but I see space that allows the characters to grow and develop without over-explaining or over contextualizing.  It also shares structural DNA with Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” – a protagonist cycling through iterations of the same events, accumulating experience toward a better outcome – except where Atkinson’s loops feel cosmic and fatalistic, Harrow’s have a villain actively pulling the levers.  Think “Life After Life,” but if Hitler were actually the one in charge of the time leaps.

On the surface - Vivian Rolfe is a dime-store Geillis Duncan using Owen’s blood to force him to participate in repeated time loops so she can improve the scope and scale of her empire. As you go through the book – you’ll see that Vivian’s tragic flaw is her white-knuckle grip on her need to control, contrasted with the desire of pretty much all the other characters to experience personal development and find happiness and community.

Vivian is not simply a villain — she is the fourth traumatized character, and the one who never found her way to integration. She was herself a victim of reproductive violence at the hands of parents who sold her to a man who was supposed to mentor and protect her. The forced loss of Una didn't just wound her; it became the engine of a thousand-year project of control. But in trying to reclaim what was taken, she recreates the same dynamic with her own daughter: Una is parentified, weaponized, and used as a tool to serve Vivian's ends — which is precisely what was done to Vivian. She cannot break the cycle. This is what makes her genuinely tragic rather than merely monstrous: she understands loss and grief as intimately as Owen or Una, but has channeled it entirely outward into empire rather than inward toward integration. The contrast with Owen and Una's arc isn't moral superiority — it's that they were lucky enough to find each other.

This book has a ton of violence – every form of -cide you can name is represented, along with xenophobia, bigotry and ableism. It’s not gratuitous death for shock value but emblematic of the emotional reality of a society built on war and domestic violence. Nobody is just throwing a baby out the window of a moving train or needlessly abusing characters in senseless ways.

Below the surface, there’s a whole complex world of narrative archetypes (thinking of Jung and Campbell here).  Both Una and Owen represent dynamic characters seeking to transform their fates while Vivian and Owen’s father, Mr. Mallory the elder, Owen’s colleagues are more static. Una’s transformation from Red Knight (Warrior) to Green Knight (healer), Owen’s limerence (Lover) to love (Caregiver/Sage) arc. A case could be made for Vivian as the Shadow, but also the time loop representing Shadow work (repetition until integration) with the manuscript as creator/magician and  the ending as “Self” representing integration & possibility. 

There’s a lot more going on in this book than meets the eye in the love, sex and parenting department as well, so let’s talk about those dualities.  Owen brings head-over-heels limerence to his interactions with Una – and she is avoidant.  We’re talking about two people who are war veterans.  They are responding to their trauma in very different ways that represent the two sides of a coin.  Hero-worshipping Owen wants to atone, he wants to please and he wants to do whatever it takes to create balanceOwen begins in pure Tennov territory: idealizing, projecting, self-erasing (calling himself a coward more times than I can count) and confusing caretaking with connection. His shaking hands, and the wound kept open on his left hand through neglect and lack of self-care, reflect this self-erasure in the body as much as in words. But by the end, his love shifts from: “I need you to need me” to “I want you to be free, even if it costs me everything.” 

Una is avoidant – she lives in the woods, she bathes in cold springs instead of hot water in the local bath house, and uses her ambiguous sexuality as a shield against intimacy. Their sex isn’t BDSM or kink but a reflection of their individual trauma responses as soldiers/warriors: Una’s roughness is armor. Their combat responses are equally revealing – Owen claims repeatedly to be a coward but is the best marksman under pressure, what reads as dissociation under threat; Una reacts without a second thought against aggressors. Their sexual intimacy evolves only when they do, across a nine-year gap from Vivian’s trauma engine – not in a single cathartic scene but incrementally, almost imperceptibly, which is how trauma recovery actually works. They don’t become “old marrieds” with “vanilla” sex – they are learning to connect and communicate physically in a way that doesn’t need to serve trauma they no longer choose to carry. 

As the Red Knight, Una is obedient, weaponized and emotionally stunted. Una is devoted to serving her queen, cut off from others emotionally, disconnected from herself physically, disconnected from the community around her.  As the Green Knight, she pens stray sheep, negotiates for an extra blanket for Owen because she knows he sleeps cold, protects dragons, and introduces Owen as the bravest man she knows to knowledge seekers.  She becomes a person capable of care, not just violence.  

This novel traces the untreated combat trauma of three characters: Owen, Una, and Mr. Mallory the elder – without explicitly labeling their emotional, psychological, or physical behaviors (self-harm, alcohol, violence, acquiescence, sleep disturbances) as untreated PTSD. The absence of that clinical language is historically accurate; the condition had no name in this world. But the behaviors are precise and recognizable.

Owen mirrors Una in this transformation – he chooses death over reenacting trauma, peace over glory and refuses to perpetuate war.  He shows soldiers the yew tree and gives them a 100 year leap forward away from the war.  The multiple versions of events or stories are a critical porousness to the growth of the characters.  Owen’s development as a parent is arguably a less messy but more complicated version of his father’s own attempt at reconciling with his deeds as a soldier.  Mr. Mallory the elder picks up baby Owen from the battleground and keeps him, but struggles against a culture of war as an activist and radical, raising Owen to be a scholar.  He suffers and self-medicates with alcohol – a medical reality of untreated combat trauma – but he loves his adopted son purely: “Would prefer to disown you in person, so don’t die. Love, Dad.”  and even loves Owen despite his “nationalist” leanings.  

Una likewise experiences an arc in relation to parenting – while Vivian Rolfe is technically her mother, Una was parentified at a very early age and raised to be a tool to allow Vivian to meet her own ends. Her reservations about becoming a mother are real and deep, amplified by her experiences as a soldier: she has spent her entire adult life as a weapon, trained to hurt rather than protect. And yet during the nine-year break from Vivian’s trauma engine, she appears to be doing it remarkably well – which is itself a quiet triumph the book doesn’t need to announce.

Owen becomes a person capable of love, not just limerence. Una is capable of gentleness and great intimacy.  For both of them – the pinnacle is not the romance or parenthood but refusing to repeat the cycle and accepting themselves and each other, but not letting the past define either. 

And then, of course, we come to the resurrection. That is not a super tidy “happily ever after” – it’s a long period of waiting for Una.  I read this as a metaphor for Owen deciding “I can’t repeat this pattern,” going off for some self-examination and returning by choice to Una’s side. It’s a metaphysical renewal, one that requires patience, work and leaving open the possibility.  Even the final page of the book winks at the possibility that Owen is still using the yew to move through time to drop off manuscript copies and renew library books.  This signals healing and re-entering the “real” world, as a fully integrated person, with intimate relationships with partner and children. 

There are a few other issues I’d like to cover, including the use of names.  The way that names have power and how Owen hides Una’s “real” name reminds me a lot of “A Wizard of Earthsea.”  In fact, so much of the hero’s journey of Una and Owen to integrate their shadow selves echoes LeGuin’s story (including the dragons!).  There’s also a lot of xenophobia or lightly described racism of fair-haired folk against travelers (or “geweth”) with dark, often curly, hair. 

There are a few nods toward normalizing non-heteronormativity:  Gilda & Sylvie’s relationship is sometimes clandestine, sometimes open; Una’s woodcutter father becomes two fathers in a later iteration, and Mr. Mallory the elder lives in a polycule with the barkeep and her husband.  In some versions of the story that Owen creates, he demonstrates conscious erasure of these things to increase general acceptance of a story.  Rather than this being outright erasure, I think it’s more of self-editing that he was doing at that point in the story to make himself more meek, and acceptable to those around him as his form of fitting in to a culture he doesn’t necessarily believe in to avoid the difficult fate of his father.

As any good historian will tell you – there are often many versions of any story.  By the end of the book, Owen is seeding short fables everywhere he goes without creating “Big Story” that can be used to inspire nationalism, but rather inspire a values-based culture.  Owen and Una are free of the trauma engine because they chose to loop on life, connection and possibility rather than external expectations. 

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Limerence

• Psychology Today explainer: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/limerence
• Living with Limerence (accessible deep dive): https://livingwithlimerence.com/what-is-limerence/
• The Marginalian on Dorothy Tennov's original research: https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/11/25/love-and-limerence-dorothy-tennov/

Veterans - PTSD & Suicide Prevention

• National Center for PTSD (VA): https://www.ptsd.va.gov
• PTSD Alliance: http://www.ptsdalliance.org
• Veterans Crisis Line: https://www.veteranscrisisline.net (call or text 988, press 1)
• VA Suicide Prevention: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/suicide_prevention

REVIEW: How to Change Minds: The Art of Influence Without Manipulation by Rob Jolles (2-stars)

TLDR: A sales manual pretending to be a universal communication framework.

I listened to this at 2x speed, which was probably still too slow. The book promises “influence without manipulation,” but what you actually get is a mash‑up of old‑school sales scripts, surface‑level NLP, and a lot of confident hand‑waving about how persuasion “really works.” Full disclosure: I was suckered in by the orange kitten on the cover. It’s the most persuasive thing in the entire book.

Jolles leans heavily on the idea that you must believe what you’re persuading someone toward is “the right thing.” That’s not ethics — that’s just conviction dressed up as moral clarity. He never examines the possibility that your belief might be wrong, or that persuasion isn’t always the appropriate tool.

The examples are… odd. Cigarettes, motorcycles, drunk driving — all treated like objection‑handling scenarios. His drunk‑driving example in particular is where the whole thing collapses. You don’t reason with a drunk person. You take the keys. Full stop. Trying to apply a persuasion funnel to an impaired person is a category error.

And that’s the deeper issue: the book assumes a universal human operating system, but the techniques only make sense in authoritarian or sales‑driven cultures (think Blue/Orange in Spiral Dynamics). Jolles writes as if a framework built for life‑insurance and Xerox sales can be applied everywhere — including modern matrixed organizations and even intimate relationships. It can’t.

He even uses a married couple who aren’t having sex as an example of how to “discuss needs” using his persuasion process. That’s where the book fully jumps the shark. Intimate relationships aren’t sales calls. They involve attachment, trauma, vulnerability, consent — not “ask the right question and they’ll see the light.” Treating a sexual‑intimacy issue like a copier‑sales objection is not just simplistic; it’s inappropriate.

The “never apologize for things outside your control” rule is another miss. He frames it as professionalism, but it reads more like emotional distancing. In real leadership or cross‑functional work, acknowledging someone’s reality is not the same as apologizing for it. He doesn’t seem to know the difference.

If you want a nostalgic tour of old‑school persuasion thinking, this might scratch the itch. If you’re looking for anything remotely applicable to complex organizational communication, modern leadership, or actual human relationships, keep moving.

REVIEW: How to Change Minds: The Art of Influence Without Manipulation by Rob Jolles

RATING: 2-stars

RECIPE: Meyer Lemon–Limoncello Vegan Sourdough Semolina Cake

 Overnight batter · add leaveners tomorrow · bakes in ring molds or a bundt

This cake came together one afternoon when I had Meyer lemons on the counter, a small bottle of homemade limoncello that my neighbor Allison brought me for my birthday in December 2020 — the height of lockdown, and one of those small gifts that somehow perfectly captures a moment, sourdough starter that needed using, and a bundt pan sitting right there. I'd recently come across Maurizio Leo's gorgeous ciambella recipe on The Perfect Loaf (big fan), and it was very much on my mind. His version uses all-purpose flour and eggs — I wanted to make it vegan, and I also wanted to swap in semolina and almond flour for a denser, more custardy crumb.

A word of warning: when you first mix this batter it looks completely wrong. It's extremely liquid — more pancake batter than cake batter, almost crepe-like. Don't panic. That's the point. After 18+ hours in the fridge, the semolina absorbs everything and the batter transforms into something noticeably thicker. The overnight rest is not optional; it's the whole trick.

One more thing: that limoncello has been in my freezer since December 2020, doled out a few tablespoons at a time. Thank you, Allison. It was worth saving.

In the bundt pan, the cake doesn't rise dramatically — it puffs a bit, then settles back down as it cools. The final texture is velvety and smooth, dense in the best way, nowhere near underbaked. Greasing the bundt with coconut oil and a dusting of flour gave the outside a beautiful caramelization that I wasn't expecting and will absolutely be doing again. For my first bake I also layered blueberries in at about three-quarters of the way through filling the pan, then finished with a chocolate ganache and more blueberries on top once it cooled. Highly recommend. Ring molds are next on my list — I think the smaller format will allow the cake to rise higher.

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Ingredients

Wet ingredients — mix tonight

• 1 cup (200 g) sugar
• 1 cup (240 g) vegan unsweetened yogurt
• ½ cup (120 g) sourdough starter, unfed, 100% hydration
• ½ cup (120 ml) neutral oil
• Zest of 2 Meyer lemons
• 3 tbsp fresh Meyer lemon juice
• 2–3 tbsp limoncello
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Dry ingredients — mix tonight

• ¾ cup (90 g) semolina
• ½ cup (50 g) almond flour
• ¼ tsp fine salt

Leavening — add tomorrow

• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda

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Instructions

Tonight — mix and rest

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, yogurt, sourdough starter, oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, limoncello, and vanilla until smooth.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the semolina, almond flour, and salt.
3. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and fold or whisk until just combined.
4. Cover and refrigerate overnight to hydrate the semolina and bloom the lemon flavor.

Tomorrow — add leaveners and bake

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). For a bundt pan/ring mold -- grease generously with coconut oil and dust with flour — this produces a lovely caramelized crust. 
2. Remove the batter from the fridge and whisk briefly to loosen. It will have thickened considerably overnight.
3. Add the baking powder and baking soda and whisk until fully incorporated.
4. Pour about three-quarters of the batter into the prepared pan. If adding blueberries, scatter a handful evenly over the surface now, then pour the remaining batter over the top.
5. Bake 28–40 minutes, checking at 28. The cake will puff during baking, then settle back a little as it cools — this is normal. It's done when a toothpick comes out with moist crumbs (not wet batter).
6. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes before unmolding. If using ganache and blueberries, add them once the cake is fully cooled.

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Optional toppings

• Blueberry layer: at three-quarters fill, scatter a generous handful of fresh blueberries over the batter, then cover with the remaining batter. They sink in slightly and create little pockets of fruit throughout.
• Chocolate ganache: equal parts melted dark chocolate and hot plant milk, stirred smooth. Spread over the cooled cake and top with more fresh blueberries.
• Powdered sugar, dusted simply over the top if you want to keep it unfussy.
• Meyer lemon syrup: equal parts lemon juice and sugar, simmered briefly until slightly thickened, brushed over the warm cake.

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Notes

• Overnight hydration is what gives this cake its silky, custardy crumb — the semolina and almond flour absorb the wet ingredients slowly in the fridge, which you don't get when you bake right away.
• Sourdough starter adds moisture and acidity, which is what activates the baking soda the next morning.
• Limoncello intensifies the lemon aroma without making the cake boozy — don't skip it if you have it.
• The batter looks wrong at first — extremely liquid, like crepe batter. That's fine. After 18+ hours in the fridge it thickens significantly. Trust the overnight rest.
• Rise and settle: this cake doesn't shoot up like a sponge. It rises modestly, then condenses slightly as it cools. The final texture is velvety and smooth — not underbaked, just dense and custardy in the best way.
• Coconut oil + flour for the bundt pan creates a noticeably caramelized outer crust. Worth doing even if your pan is non-stick.
• Ring molds vs. bundt: the bundt works beautifully. Smaller ring molds should bake even more evenly and are easier to portion and transport.

Sunday's Bake - Sourdough Bread

 

Notes on this bake:

500 g ripe starter 

250 g flour 

50 g rye flour 

10-20 g salt

20-40 g water 

Used the big cast iron dutch oven.  Preheated at 450 - put boule into hot dutch oven with a dusting of semolina on the bottom. 20 minutes with lid, checked browning, another 10 minutes and then 15 minutes without lid. 

REVIEW: The Faith of Beasts (The Captive’s War #2) by James S.A. Corey (3-stars)

In The Faith of Beasts, James S. A. Corey continues the story of humans absorbed into the Carryx empire, a vast, indifferent system that does not see them as people but as biological resources to be sorted, assigned, and made useful. The Carryx believe themselves to be the smartest species that has ever existed, and their bureaucracy reflects that confidence: enormous, impersonal, and uninterested in the needs or perspectives of any other species. Humans must adapt to Carryx expectations, learn to be useful, and hide any attempt to build or maintain culture if it impedes with anything that is useful to the Carryx. Within this setting, the book raises questions about how culture survives under constraint, how family or community function when continuity is fragile, how sex and gender operate across species with radically different embodiments, and how the Carryx themselves might relate to other hives beyond the one we see. I'll examine how those questions shape the book’s understanding of survival inside an extractive system.

Although the humans experience disorientation around time, this is not something the Carryx impose intentionally. The Carryx have their own planet, their own (artificial) sunlight cycles, and their own internal logic. Humans are simply placed inside a system that was never designed for them. The result is a continuous background condition: the humans cannot reliably track days or seasons (few of them have views out windows). The narrative never confirms whether the humans have been captive for a year, or ten, or forty. However, we do know that the humans are mostly past reproductive age by the time we get to the second book because the Carryx expect the humans to be a "self sustaining" population - if they die out, they are no use. The humans have no idea if the Carryx have imprisoned other humans, destroyed all other humans, or if they are the last humans in existence. They agree to set up a project to grow human babies in a lab. Babies still take nine months to gestate, but beyond that biological fact, time becomes a blur. This is simply the texture of captivity. When you are absorbed into someone else’s world, you lose the reference points that once told you who you were and how long you had been that person whether you are a human in the Carryx world, or the Spy absorbing multiple humans and their memories and also living in the Carryx world (much like a Russian doll).

Inside that disorientation, the book’s most compelling work is in how it treats culture as something that must be rebuilt quietly and carefully. Dafydd realizes that the lab‑grown babies will have no inherited culture unless the humans create one. The real danger is that the next generation will grow up culturally blank, shaped entirely by Carryx expectations. At the same time, the humans begin to understand the Carryx not through translation devices but through cultural analysis. A choreographer, initially furious at being assigned to menial work, becomes essential once someone points out that if the Carryx communicate through posture and movement, then someone trained in movement is exactly the person who can interpret them. That insight opens the door to understanding the soft Lothar’s “grooming” behavior and eventually the Deep Lothar’s overhead communication network -- the silent but apparently intimate system the Carryx use to pass and discard information. These moments show humans learning to read an alien species from the inside out, using the tools of culture rather than technology.

Family appears in the book as the smallest unit of continuity. It is not treated sentimentally, and the narrative does not rely on a “save the baby” melodrama. Instead, (chosen) family or community becomes the structure through which meaning is transmitted when everything else is unstable. The fear is not that humans will go extinct biologically; it is that the next generation will grow up without any human culture at all and will believe that this slavery is the way things have always been. The human captives somewhat reluctantly begin to coalesce around this sense of purpose to create a culture and future for these new humans born in captivity.

This connects the book to other works that explore continuity under pressure: Old Man’s War, where memory of family and loved ones center identity when bodies are interchangeable; Mickey7, where clones are replaceable but relationships are not; Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood, where the human family is dismantled because it resists assimilation; The Handmaid’s Tale, where reproduction becomes a political battleground; Foundation, where the Genetic Dynasty tries and fails to manufacture family; and Murderbot, where personhood emerges through chosen relationships. Across these works, family is the mechanism that carries meaning when systems treat bodies as tools.

At this point, it is useful to pause on Lilith’s Brood, because it sits very close to what Corey is doing and also very far from it. The Oankali, like the Carryx, see humans primarily as a resource: a set of genes, traits, and capacities that can be folded into their own long project. They are also convinced they know better than humans what should happen to humanity. But where the Oankali frame this as a “trade” — your genes and autonomy in exchange for survival and transformation — the Carryx do not bother with that language. There is no pretense of mutual benefit, no narrative of uplift. The Carryx do not ask whether humans consent to being used; they do not even recognize humans as people in the same sense they recognize themselves. That difference makes the Carryx feel colder than the Oankali, even though both operate from the assumption that their own perspective is the only one that matters.

This connects to a broader point about survival inside an extractive system. Nothing expands forever — not populations, not cultures, not civilizations. When fiction fixates on continuity or the next generation, it is rarely just about biology. It is about meaning. It is about the fear that whatever we are — our culture, our values, our sense of self — will not survive the pressures we are living under. In The Faith of Beasts, the Carryx are not trying to erase humans; they are trying to extract value from them. Humans are sorted, assigned, and used according to Carryx priorities. The danger is not extinction but absorption and becoming nothing more than a resource within someone else’s system.

In some ways, the Carryx bureaucracy reads like capitalism taken to its logical, pan‑galactic extreme — an all‑consuming, efficiency‑driven, extraction‑oriented system that treats every species as raw material. Not malicious, not sadistic, just utterly convinced of its own rightness and its own superiority and entirely goal focused: eliminate the Deathless Enemy. Everything else is incidental, including the lives, cultures, and histories of other peoples, even entire planetary ecosystems. The Carryx do not torment; they optimize. They do not rule through fear; they rule through process. Their indifference is the horror, not their intent.

It has the same cold logic as a market that expands until it touches everything, and then keeps expanding because it cannot imagine doing anything else. At the same time, there is something of Brazil in the Carryx world: the scale, the indifference, the way the machinery of the system becomes more real than the people inside it. The Carryx don’t torment humans; they simply don’t notice them except as inputs. The nightmare isn’t cruelty - it’s bureaucracy without limit, purpose, or external check.

The Carryx also maintain order within their own ranks through ritualized maiming. If a Carryx offends or violates protocol, an arm is broken — swiftly, without ceremony, and without lingering attention. It is not cruelty; it is procedure. Characters notice the scar tissue and hardened bands on the arms of various Carryx, physical records of past reprimands. The speed and indifference of these punishments underline how the Carryx understand discipline: not as moral correction, but as a mechanical adjustment to keep the system functioning. Even their own bodies are treated as tools to be corrected when they deviate.

Human sexuality in the book is fluid and unremarkable. Jessyn talks about relationships with men and women. Several men have had romantic and sexual relationships with each other. None of this is treated as unusual. And yet the narrative voice remains committed to a binary gender framework that feels out of place against that backdrop. Characters are still described with "he or she," even in contexts where "they" would be the obvious choice, especially in a future where bodies can be modified, inhabited, or entirely replaced. The world of the story contains species that can change sex, a Swarm that can transition across bodies, and multiple peoples with different forms of individuality — yet the prose itself stays anchored to a binary that feels outdated for 2026, let alone a far-future setting.

The Carryx push further than human fluidity. The subjugator-librarian is explicitly described as having been female, having had children, and then giving that up to take on her current role. Sex, for the Carryx, is functional and mutable, something they can change when their social position requires it. The Swarm goes further still. It does not just inhabit bodies; it reshapes them. It transitions from Jellit to Else to Clae, altering physical form over a few days with enough calories. It is effectively a transsexual, pansexual, and panspecies entity, capable of becoming almost anyone.

And yet, the Swarm never attempts to inhabit a Carryx body, even though the Carryx are not telepathically linked and such an infiltration might reveal far more than taking over humans. We know from Livesuit that the nanites are human created technology, originally designed to interface with human physiology and cognition. Surely the humans responsible for that technology had other species in captivity. If they were willing to use it on humans why not develop nanites to occupy other species and improve their spying and intelligence-gathering and end this neverending conflict sooner? The book does not explain why the Swarm limits itself to humans, and that absence stands out in a story so concerned with knowledge, power, and survival. This ties directly into the identity questions in books like Old Man’s War and Mickey7: if memory can be copied and bodies replaced, what exactly is the “you” that survives? If the Swarm is a copy of the memories of the humans it has assimilated, who is the Swarm? Does the Swarm have an identity?

The question of personhood also runs through the way the Carryx and the Swarm are written. The Carryx do not pretend to uplift humans; they sort, assign, and use. Dafydd becomes the collaborator who believes he is buying humans time, and he is not wrong, but it is unsettling to watch him internalize Carryx logic. When he breaks a man’s arm to prevent a work stoppage, he is not being gratuitously cruel; he is accurately predicting what the Carryx would do and trying to forestall something worse. The Carryx even ask him about the human soul. They have never observed evidence of one. Dafydd explains it as a cultural idea meant to comfort people afraid of death, and the Carryx dismiss it as irrelevant. To them, humans are biological machines with interesting problem‑solving capabilities.

The narrative point of view reinforces the limits of what can be known. The book uses a selective omniscient perspective. We get insight into the Carryx, the humans, and the Swarm — but not into the Lothar, the Deep Lothar, or the other species in the Carryx empire. We learn a great deal about Carryx hive politics — the Sovran, the daughter‑challenges, the bureaucratic logic— because the narrator lets us see it. The humans, however, do not know any of this. They are interpreting behavior from the outside, and captivity means living inside a system whose rules you cannot see. Meanwhile, the Lothar remain opaque. We do not know how they think or organize themselves. The Deep Lothar are even more mysterious. The same goes for the rest of the species the Carryx have absorbed. The humans are surrounded by other peoples, but they do not share language, culture, or history. They are all trapped in the same empire, but not together.

The Carryx themselves invite comparison to a supercolony, but with important differences. Dafydd eventually realizes that the palace world might not be the original hive. The Sovran they are dealing with could be a daughter who flew off and formed a splinter hive. This implies there may be other Carryx colonies, other Sovrans, other hive structures operating elsewhere in the galaxy. The structure echoes the Argentine ant supercolony that runs up the Pacific coast, where ants from different nests recognize each other as kin and cooperate, while ants from other species are treated as enemies. The Carryx succession system complicates that analogy: queens kill or are killed by their daughters. That raises questions the book never answers. What happens when two Carryx hives encounter each other? If queens fight to the death within a lineage, does that logic extend to unrelated Sovrans? Would two hives merge? Would they battle? Would they even recognize each other as kin? Do they already communicate across hives in ways the humans never see? The possibility of multiple hives -- each with its own Sovran, its own history, its own daughter‑line -- makes the Carryx feel less like a monolith and more like a fractal empire whose true shape is still hidden.

The Swarm sits at the intersection of all of these questions. It was supposed to be a weapon, but once it begins living among the humans, it becomes something else. It shifts bodies, expresses preferences, and pushes back when Dafydd tries to control it. It is not just a tool, and that is precisely the problem. The humans want it to be a weapon. The Carryx want it to be a threat they can contain. The Swarm wants something neither side fully understands. This ambiguity connects to the identity questions raised in Corey’s story “Livesuit,” where assimilation and memory continuity blur the line between person and instrument.

What stays with me is not just the brutality of the Carryx system, but the range of responses to it. Some species simply go with the flow — like the snail‑creature who watches a planet‑killing aurora and finds it "interesting" rather than devastating. Humans, by contrast, keep trying to make meaning inside the machinery. Jessyn and Garral build alliances, connect with human children and a soldier left behind on a planet victimized by a recent Carryx attack. On the palace world, Dafydd and the Deep Lothar conduct a low‑key trust experiment by typing messages into a floating word processor and never hitting "send," while the humans talk about songs and ethics for babies born in captivity. Rickar has a conversation with a subset of the Swarm that makes clear it has its own agenda, even as some parts of it are losing the thread of the human memories it carries. And then Rickar dies. The book gives him a memorial. I didn't grieve him.

That points to a structural tension the series hasn't fully resolved. The selective omniscient narrator pulls you up to the system level — the Sovran's politics, the daughter-challenges, the cold logic of Carryx bureaucracy — while keeping you at arm's length from the characters who are supposed to make you feel the cost of that system. Ironically, the Carryx sections often land harder than the human ones, because the narrator actually lets you inside Carryx logic. The humans get less of that treatment. Their arcs — managing illness, discovering love — are legible and earned, but they illustrate the book's themes more than they surprise you with who these people turn out to be. The worldbuilding is meticulous. The universe the series constructs is genuinely strange and worth thinking about. But a third book will need to find a way to make you inhabit these characters rather than just witness what happens to them.

A note on Murderbot: Martha Wells achieves what this series is reaching for by the simplest possible means — locking you inside a consciousness that is funny, defensive, unexpectedly tender, and working things out in real time. You don't observe Murderbot surviving. You survive with it. That difference turns out to matter enormously.

Further Reading

• Captive's War wiki project on GitHub-- https://github.com/JonathanGupton/captive_war/tree/master

• Old Man’s War — John Scalzi

• Mickey7 — Edward Ashton

• Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis Trilogy) — Octavia E. Butler

• The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood

• Foundation (especially the Genetic Dynasty arc) — Isaac Asimov

• The Murderbot Diaries — Martha Wells

• Livesuit (short story) — James S. A. Corey

REVIEW: The Faith of Beasts (The Captive’s War #2) by James S.A. Corey

RATING: 3-stars

Project Update: Stained Glass Poppies

 Foil nearly done - will finish foil and solder next week:

Proposal: Adapting Gamestorming 2.0 for Zoom-based Graduate Level Cybersecurity Courses

What would Gamestorming 2.0 look like if you stripped away the “game” language and applied the underlying facilitation principles to a Zoom‑based graduate‑level Cybersecurity & Audit course?

Starting from three realities:

1. Students need entry points, not “fun.”
2. Zoom requires simpler, more intentional structures.
3. The TA should not have to juggle 3 rounds of breakout rooms.

... I identified several frameworks that would work in this type of educational setting:

RECIPE: Morel Supper with Farro and Roasted Vegetables

Anna came over for a slice of my chocolate–quince bundt cake and casually handed me a paper bag full of late‑spring Sierra morels that she and Rene had foraged. I haven’t met Rene yet, but he clearly did heroic work out there because the bag was packed. With that many morels, the direction of dinner was obvious: they were going to be the foundation of a farro‑based roast vegetable dish with plant‑based chicken folded in at the end.

This was also my first time cooking with “Just Meat” chicken, and it was a surprise in the best way. I browned it in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat until the edges charred and crisped. The pieces stayed tender inside and the irregular shapes worked perfectly with the roasted vegetables and farro. The whole dish came together exactly the way I wanted: earthy, bright, textural, and built around the generosity of friends who show up with morels.

INGREDIENTS

Farro base (Instapot):

• 1 cup farro
• 2 cups water
• 1 quart dry-ish morels, cleaned and coarsely chopped
• 1–2 tablespoons black truffle olive oil (if you have it)

Roasted Veggies:

• 1 large head of cauliflower, broken into small florets (grocery‑store large; it barely fit my 14" Wagner skillet)
• 4–5 large carrots, peeled and cut into thick coins
• 1 large red onion, halved, cut into 3/4" wedges, then halved again
• 1 serrano chile, seeded & chopped
• 1 head garlic, peeled & coarsely chopped
• 3–5 tablespoons capers, depending on the size of the cauliflower
• Olive oil (regular or flavoried if you prefer)
• A note about EVOO: I love infused olive oils! I used garlic infused EVOO on the cauliflower and onions, a black truffle infused EVOO to dress the farro and morels, and a smoked olive wood EVOO in the dressing. Experiment with flavors that you like to bring out the different flavors.

• 1 package “Just Meat” chicken (or your preferred plant‑based chicken)

• Lemon herb salt or a mix of lemon thyme, basil, and dill
• Bragg's aminos or coco aminos, to taste (for salt)
• Pistachios, whole raw shelled, toasted and coarsely chopped

INSTRUCTIONS

Pre-heat the oven to 450°F for 10-15 minutes, then drop the oven to 400°F.

Cook the farro in the Instant Pot with 2 cups of water on the "rice" setting. When it finishes, leave it on “keep warm.” Stir in the chopped morels and 1–2 tablespoons of black truffle olive oil. Put the lid back on. The morels will soften and absorb the extra moisture from the farro, and the herbs will bloom gently in the warmth.

Roast the veggies: I used three cast iron skillets in parallel because that’s what I had in the oven already from baking bread, and cast iron gives you the kind of direct heat that really caramelizes vegetables. If you don’t have that many skillets, you can roast things serially, or use a regular sheet pan set on top of a preheated pizza stone to mimic the extra heat.

NOTE: Roast the carrots, cauliflower, and onions/garlic/chile separately. They all have different water contents and different shapes, and if you pile them together you’ll end up steaming instead of roasting.

• Skillet 1: Spread the carrots in another pan with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast at 400°F until caramelized and tender.
• Skillet 2: Red onion, chopped serrano, and a few smashed garlic cloves with olive oil and spread them in a skillet. Roast until the onions are softened and juicy with some char on the edges.
• Skillet 3: In a separate skillet, toss the cauliflower with olive oil (about 1 tablespoon is enough if you toss well).
• Halfway through roasting, add the capers to the cauliflower pan so they can toast and crisp slightly.

Toast the pistachios in the toaster oven 1–2 minutes at a time, checking frequently. You can always toast more but not less, and burned pistachios will make you very sad. Coarsely chop once cooled.

Sautée the “Just Meat” chicken in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat. Let it brown and char on the edges, then flip and cook until heated through and still tender.

When everything is done, fold the roasted vegetables and the cooked chicken into the farro and morels in the Instapot or large mixing bowl. Add the Bragg's aminos and dried herbs. Add the pistachios and drizzle with the Meyer lemon–mustard–maple vinaigrette.

Serve warm or at room temperature. It keeps beautifully and is even better the next day with the vinaigrette:

MEYER LEMON–MUSTARD–MAPLE VINAIGRETTE

• Zest of 1 Meyer lemon (removed with a peeler)
• Juice of 2 Meyer lemons
• About 3 tablespoons maple syrup
• Olive oil (regular or flavored)
• (optional) vinegar, cook's choice if a sharper dressing is preferred

Combine everything in a wide‑mouth quart mason jar and blend with an immersion blender until fully emulsified (not to a mayo, just smooth).

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson (3 stars)

 I just finished the 2025 Wonder Woman Hugo nominee and, by Hecate, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The artwork is fantastic and the portrait-style alternate covers scattered through the book are gorgeous. Visually it’s everything you’d expect from a Hugo finalist.

The story is basically Greek mythology with Diana pasted in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a traditional Wonder Woman narrative. Persephone shows up. Diana eats a single pomegranate seed “out of love,” which binds her to spend one month a year in the Underworld. I couldn’t quite tell if that was meant to be for her mother’s sake or just part of the general mythic logic the book is following.

They also changed her backstory so that she sacrificed her right arm to cast a spell. The reveal comes late, but it’s actually one of the more interesting choices. She’s an amputee, a witch, and still a powerful warrior. The book doesn’t treat the missing limb as a tragedy. It treats it as a mythic cost, which is a very different framing than superhero stories usually take.

Prometheus even shows up, which is when I finally gave up pretending this was a Wonder Woman story at all. He gives Diana some of his blood to forge the Nemesis lasso, and he also creates a zombie Pegasus. Yes, really. It still has feathery wings, but the body is a black skeletal shape, and Diana “feeds” it with magic like it’s some kind of Underworld rescue horse. At that point the book wasn’t even pretending to be DC canon. It was just doing its own mythic thing and letting Diana tag along.

Steve, the love interest barely registers as a character. He’s rescued (alive) in the Underworld for reasons that never quite gel. After defeating the enemy to live on Earth as we know it as an incarnation of Medusa - she appears "stuck" and Steve, the Wonder Woman Whisperer, steps up to remind her she’s actually Diana and she transforms back. They otherwise have zero chemistry.

The part that actually worked for me was the relationship between Diana and Circe. In this version Circe is her adoptive mother, not a villain, and the story keeps circling back to that bond. There’s a line about how you learn to love a child by raising it, and that feels like the real heart of the book. Everything else — the battles, the romance, the transformations — is secondary to that relationship.

I kept waiting for Athena to show up, since she’s the one who sprang from Zeus’s head, not Artemis or Diana. But the book isn’t interested in Athena at all. It’s interested in Circe, in chosen family, in the idea that Diana is who she is because someone loved her into being.

The ending is pure Greek myth. Diana shows mercy, tries to avoid killing, does what she has to do, rescues her mother, and leaves the Underworld. Then the story just stops. No epilogue, no wrap-up, no superhero-style resolution. The quest is over, so the tale ends.

I liked parts of it. The art is stunning and they have alternate covers sprinkled throughout that are stylistically different portraits of Wonder Woman. The adoptive-mother theme is lovely. The disability reveal is handled with more grace than I expected. But the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash. Some readers will love this version of Diana as a mythic heroine. Others will miss the clarity and grounding of a more traditional Wonder Woman story. It’s ambitious, uneven, and definitely memorable.

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson

RATING: 3 stars

QUILTS: red & pink

 I really liked this cute fabric and didn't want to cut it up too small so did an ad hoc pattern instead of a traditional pattern to showcase the cartoon beaver-in-love fabric along with various pink and red-and-white fabrics:

Tony loves helping!

Eclipse and Tony helping

Twin quilt over the door: