All Updates
Every story, chapter, dispatch, and dossier — in order of release.
You Can Date the Repairs by Hand
A Fringe freighter carries four generations of fixes, and every one of them is somebody deciding how much to trust the system. There's a scar down the forward flank of the Null Margin that no paint covers. It's crazed and iridescent, the plating burned and burned again where a Fl…
Best Cozy LitRPG: Where to Start and Why
The shelf people reach when they're burned out on everything else. Four books, what each is actually for, and who should walk past the whole thing. Ask a cozy LitRPG reader how they found the shelf and you'll usually get a story about burning out on something else. That's worth k…
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen Nev's back was against the tree as she slid down into a squat, hugging her knees. Her eyes stayed on me, but her shaking shoulders felt like betrayal. She was the strong one, the stoic. I heard Mom move behind me and waved my hand at her. "I'll handle this, Mothe…
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve "I turned one down," Harko said, ten steps later, his footfalls crunching on loose stone. "What?" He kept his eyes on the walkway. "I was offered a designation. Analyst. I declined it." "Why? Am I the only one who wanted a designation? I mean, obviously Nev took on…
Three Hundred Years Before Anyone Had a Stat Line
Human space reached five hundred light-years on jump drive and paper charts, with no way to send a word faster than a ship. This is the map of it. For three centuries the fastest way to send a message was to hand it to a captain. A death in the family, a cancelled contract, a col…
The LitRPG subgenres, explained.
Cultivation, dungeon core, cozy, kingdom-building, VRMMO, system apocalypse. What each shelf actually promises, and which one fits what you already like. The genre has a naming problem, and it costs you a month. Someone tells you they love LitRPG. So you go find LitRPG. What you …
Books Like Silo
Books like Silo: what to read now that season three is over Ten episodes, one finale, and season four is the last one. Three novels that do what Silo does, sorted by which part of it kept you watching. Season three of Silo wrapped on September 4, which leaves everyone in the same…
She Spent Fourteen Years Not Looking
Meet Senna, who inherited a ship, a debt, and an alien overlay she decided she could go around. The Null Margin came to Senna from her mother, best asset and worst debt in the same envelope, and it still runs. Barely, and with the mechanical personality of a grudge. She has been …
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven Nev and I finally got a hot meal, and we ate it across from each other without speaking. Mom saw the tension, tried to defuse it. My summons to the major kept me from giving in to her attempts at conversation. I stood at attention, alone with Major Ferran. She sat …
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Ten
The panels dropped and so did our sense of isolation. Work lights flooded the cavern with an actinic glare. A red beacon by the lift shaft began to strobe. "Kes?" It was Harko. "Where the hell have you three been?" At least we didn't just stand still on their monitors this time. …
Where the Integration Reaches
Overview and historical notes regarding humankind's territory within the Integration.
Calloway Tower
Background — An office tower where decisions about distant moons are made by people who will never stand on one. Floor 22 is where the deciding happens.
Veldrath Residence Spire
Background — A residence that is also an administrative capital, which is the ordinary condition of 'Garch architecture and the thing outsiders most often fail to account for.
Sagittarius Arm Settlements
Background — Vethari space as human records describe it, which is to say from the outside, at distance, and with the traffic patterns better documented than anything else.
Vethari Home System
Background — Two Architect sites in one system, held by a civilization that had them for centuries before humans had any. Human assessment of the system is secondhand and this record does not pretend otherwise.
Interarm Gap
Background — The reason the map has edges. Whatever exists on the far side of the gap is not reachable by anything human space currently operates.
Kaspar Corridor
Background — A transit route with one event attached to its name. Everyone who uses it knows what happened, and the corridor is still the way through.
Deep Fringe
Background — Far enough out that both the Integration and the institutions built on it become theoretical. People who want that condition go looking for it.