Instead of novels, this second post will focus on things I've found online. As such, this is not a place of honor, no esteemed deeds are commemorated here, honestly a portion of what I read is kind of trash. But some of it's tasty trash.
I'm always open to recommendations. If there's something you think I should read, let me know in the comments or by whatever other route is convenient for you.
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North of Reality / Greater Reality Area
Should you read it?: Yes.
About: A series of vignettes about weird people/places/things/ideas. My favorite thing about them is that they all follow a kind of internal logic perpendicular to the logic of the real world. The author cites Pataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal as an inspiration, which I suspect has something to do this - it is (intentionally) difficult to get a straight answer to the question "what is pataphysics?", but I think it may share this property of seeming to construct its own unstated alien rules.
Anyway, all the individual stories are very short, and they're well worth a try. I'd recommend starting with North of Reality and exploring via the links rather than going in chronological order. If you click on the highlighted text it contains asides.
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Pact / Pale
Should you read it?: I enjoyed these but cannot really recommend them. Honestly, reading Pale non-serially would probably be a surreal experience.
About: I am in it for the magic system. Pactverse magic operates on a few core principles:
- Wizards cannot lie, nor can magical beings, thus a lot of magic is really making deals with goblins and bogeymen &c.
- The universe is made up of animistic spirits.
- Patterns have power. If something is repeated enough it will progress from social convention to spirit-enforced fact.
There is, uh, a lot beyond that. Enough that there are detailed excerpts from in-universe notes and textbooks. This is a great example of magic that, while "soft", has a lot of detail to dig into. It's my personal catnip.
On the other hand... well, these are wildbow stories and have his typical flaws. The pacing is terrible, there's a lot of really pointless angsting, you probably know the deal.
Also: Plea to the Moon Mother, incomplete at 7 chapters long, and the only pactverse fanfic I know to be worth a damn. Reconfigures the setting to be about Siberian folklore and a now-outdated conception of AI, and is extremely evocative, for what little is there. It's been removed from Ao3, but I can provide an archived copy upon request.
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Blood is Mine / My Delerium Alcazar
Should you read it?: I may biased on these, they're perfectly shaped to appeal to me specifically. I do still recommend them.
About: A pair of illustrated (sprite) stories which I think were operated as quests. Usually game archives kind of suck to read through, but these are an exception to the rule. The first bit of Blood is Mine also makes it look like it's going to be a cheap horror cliche, but seriously, don't let that stop you.
Now that we've gotten those disclaimers out of the way... the characters are great. The setting is great, it's an urban sci-fi-fantasy blend with cosmic scope and a bunch of interesting paranormal phenomena. The author has this habit of using recurring phrases which is just, chef's kiss, it gives them this amazing feeling of significance and gravity.
Unfortunately BiM ended with a summary of what the remaining plot would've been, and I doubt MDA is ever going to be continued. In spite of that both are still pretty great.
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Squiggle's Creative Extrapolation Essay - Not a book, but I'm putting it here anyway.
Should you read it?: Since you're reading an RPG blog you are probably in the right target demographic.
About: A short post which outlines a ~formulaic way of coming up with worldbuilding tidbits. It's a bit focused on magic systems, but the same process could be applied to whatever else you like.
This is a pretty good formula, as those go. I think it's handy in the same way a spark table might be - fun to play around with for a bit and see if anything interesting pops out.
Also: If you like this, you could check out Recursive Magic Systems, which is much longer and denser but also has merit.
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Upon the Mirror Sea
Should you read it?: Sure, it's a solid story.
About: A story about Gibson cyberspace you access using DMT, which is also wired into the collective unconscious. It's a little fond of its psychedelia, but if you can bear with that it's a good read and has some stealable ideas.
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Dictionary of Mu
Should you read it?: There's no narrative, it's a setting encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia is good, your honor.
About: Recommended to me by Kyana of noise sans signal. It's a sword & sorcery setting on a red, dying planet that hates you. Intended to be a supplement to Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, so there's a lot of emphasis on demons, which are shadows of dead history - things that have either been completely eradicated, or which are set to become that way, like oceans or the written word.
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Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy At Utmost North
Should you read it?: I'm not sure I would play it, but it's definitely worth a read.
About: A game about an order of doomed knights in the icy utmost north, who wield starlight swords and hold back demons which emerge from the sun and the festering ancient Mistake. It's a storygame built around a set of ritual phrases, but even if you're not into that sort of thing, it's well worth looking at for the setting and backstory alone.
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Bridge to eQualia
Should You Read It?: If the theme resonates with you. I quite liked it.
About: A short detective story about escaping into fictional worlds.
Also: I hear the same person recently wrote this thing which I have not read but intend to get to at some point.
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Sword Interval
Should You Read It?: I read this a loooong time ago, probably around 6 or 7 years, but I remember it fondly.
About: An extraordinary rarity: a webcomic with decent pacing that has actually concluded. Let's see if I can dredge some details out of my memory... monsters are becoming increasibly common, there's a creature called the Hierophant that's trying to end the world. There's a... government organization?... killing one child every few years and each time it causes a natural disaster. And there are witches who each use a body part as the source of their magic, hair, blood, teeth, etc.
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Chasing Sunlight
Should You Read It?: Nope.
About: A pastiche of sunless sea which has a pretty solid hook: humanity is in a lightless world surrounded by eldritch nonsense. Civilization is made possible by zint-light, whose ultimate source is a monarch that seems not entirely human himself. The protagonist saw sunlight on an expedition to the far east and is obsessed with returning.
Unfortunately, the execution is poor. The writing is clumsy, it suffers from mediocre eldritchness syndrome, and the plot is extremely formulaic: The expedition enters a place, it blows up, they make a narrow escape, repeat until the end.
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There is no Antimemetics Division
Should You Read It?: Yes, but skip the sequel.
About: I think this one is pretty well-known, but for anyone unfamiliar, it's an SCP story about self-censoring information. Not the strongest ending (for some reason {the omnipresent mind-extinguishing anomaly turns out to be a guy who is shootable?}), and the sequel declines dramatically in quality and focus. That said, everything up to that point is genuinely very good.
Also: I believe it now has a published version stripped of SCP elements, the quality of which I cannot speak to given that I've only read the original.
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Ra
Should You Read It?: Tentatively, yes. It's by the same author as antimemetics, if that affects your calculus one way or the other.
About: This is another one I read ages ago, and I don't know how it'd hold up if I reread it today. That said, it made an impression at the time.
Basically, magic is discovered in the 1970s, it seems to be harnessed via a combination of industrial equipment and wizards with staffs, there's an akashic plane made of black glass you can get shunted into when you work with high-energy spellcraft, there's a science fiction conspiracy having to do with how all this came about.
Also: Same guy wrote Fine Structure, which imo is not really worth it, but some people disagree.
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The Dark Wizard of Donkerk
Should You Read It?: Solid 4/5.
About: My personal pick from Alexander Wales, who is probably better-known for having written Worth the Candle*. The high point is the interaction between magic systems. If you've seen me banging my drum about how those work better when there are multiple that interlock, this is one example of how that might look in practice.
*: Unfortunately that one's been stubbed. If you want to see it I think your best option is to plug this into the wayback machine. Though there are some extras still available.
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12 Miles Below (it's stubbed, so another wayback machine special).
Should You Read It?: Probably not.
About: The protagonist is part of a clan who lives on the frozen surface of the earth; below that surface there are 12 levels of subterranean architecture occupied by increasingly dangerous killer robots. He gets trapped in the first stratum and matters slowly escalate until it's a save the world plot.
It's weird how things that are released serially like this can become a part of your life. I think I started this one around my freshman year of college, and kept reading it more or less as it came out until it finally wrapped up a couple months ago. Makes it stick in your mind in a way that would be impossible for an ordinary novel.
For all that... I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I can recommend it in good faith.
I have good things to say about it. The setting was interesting enough, it had some crafting, which I think objectively tends to be a slight negative but appeals to me personally, and it's okay at the save-the-world plot, when it finally got there. The story does meander, but not too terribly for a serial written across 5+ years.
It's just that, you know, the prose kind of sucks. Five years of bad prose is a lot to wade through.
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The Top 9 Trends To Bring Back In 2022!
Should you read it?: Yes, if you've read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If you haven't, read that first and come back to this a few weeks later.
About: A short but funny and imaginative fanfic of the aforementioned novel by Susanna Clarke, framed as a modern clickbait listicle.
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