Tag: 2026 Retrospectives

The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter

Lekan was self-impressed, condescending, and the single best argument against making firstborns heirs to anything.

So your eyes are open. You see the world for what it is. Is it enough? The world as it is?”

Tau was frustrated and had been bold with his umgondisi. He tempered his answer and lowered his eyes, out of respect. “You know it isn’t,” he said, wanting to say much more.

“And perhaps it never will be. But, while we breathe, the best of us never stop trying to make it better, even if just by a little.”

I’ve been a soldier for most of my life and I’ve learned hard lessons. Fight for too long and you lose sight of the things you started the fight for. Fight for too long and you lose anyway.”

Tau sneered. “What then? Surrender? That’s your answer? Surrender, when the fight becomes hard?”

“No. Fight for what’s right, but never forget that fighting can also be done without violence. It can be done as it is now, with words, ideals, people seeking a better path, together.” Jayyed put his hands on Tau’s shoulders. “You can’t imagine a world where we work as hard at peace as we do at war?”

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Vera should be content. And she is, really. But she’s also kind of–dare she say it–bored. Sometimes, all an old lady wants is a murder to solve. Is that too much to ask for ?

Jump by DL Orton

“Love has a way of slipping in through the side door—usually while you’re fixing the hinges.”

“I’m fine.”

“Nobody’s fine,” I say. “We all fake it in shifts.”

“If I fake any harder, I’ll need a union break.”

Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman

But did they really deserve that? All of them? The soldiers, the gamers, yes. But what about the children? And the old folks who’d never done anything wrong? That was the problem with war. It was impossible to color within the lines.

What could they have possibly done for us? …We were a cause to them. And causes were these floating nebulous things that lived on screens and online forums. A ribbon one could put on their profile picture. They were something one could wear like a pair of sunglasses or a new jacket. A way to present themselves to the world. A way to say, “Look at my halo. Look at how much I care.”

I thought of my grandmother, and what she’d said that day she died. I didn’t understand it at the time, I was pretty sure I’d never understood it until just now. “The closer we are to the end, the more we need to embrace our happiness.”

Banners of Wrath by Michael Michel

“Governance is a lot of hard decisions and cold food. In the end, you sacrifice such comforts in the hope that all the hard work amounts to something. Riches and power are one type of freedom. A warm meal and an hour undisturbed, another, more desperate kind…Never forget, we work to ensure the mantle of rule remains in the hands of those who appreciate the latter kind of freedom.”

“I—I can’t.” He wrung his hands together. “You fight them. You have Darkhorn. I’m just a kid. ”

“We’re all kids at first, and then one day we aren’t. We look around and find it is we who must fight. We who must do what others are too afraid to do, because if we don’t the good of this world slips through our fingers until there’s nothing left but the ashes and dried blood of the innocent.”

Death may be the price of warriors, but grief is the price of the ones they leave behind.

Barodane scratched his beard. In the month and weeks it had taken them to voyage across the turgid waters of the Sea Forest, he’d given up shaving. Any man who held a knife that close to an artery with the sea bucking underfoot was either mad or so dumb they deserved to die.

“Tyrants oft arrive in velvet slippers but they always leave in iron-shod boots.”

Hate made an odd bedfellow for love. Nevertheless, the motto brought peace to her heart. It was like cleaning a pot before cooking in it. If she didn’t do the dirty work of scrubbing first, whatever rotten or molding thing that had been there would soil the next.

All she desired were clean memories. Stainless images of love.

“Old women like me need plenty of rest. Sleep though…” Thruna tapped a fingertip against her own temple. “Brain knows the next nap could be the last, so it keeps me vigilant.

It wasn’t ideal, but so few things in life were. For as long as he could remember, he’d been trying to force that truth to be different, stepping over a passing moment of joy to hunt the great mythical beast of happiness.

And missing it. Missing it every time.

Regret, he decided, was the greatest curse of man and the cruelest gift of the gods.

“You are here to make trouble?”

“No, sir. No trouble.”

The taller guard arched an eyebrow. “You reek of trouble.”

“So my mother used to say.” Hymobi raised a palm. “I assure you, that smell is merely my armpits. Nothing a bath won’t cure.”

First Do No Harm by S. J. Rozan

…the question becomes—”

“What was O’Brien hiding?” I finished.

“Took the words—”

“Right out of your mouth.”

“Do you think he was—” Bill stopped but I didn’t pick it up. “Hey, I thought you were reading my mind.”

“I left. It was dark and spooky in there.”

“I thought this was a hospital. I thought everyone was in the business of saving lives, not their own butts.”

“In the business,” Elliott said. “Start from there.”

Robert B. Parker’s Big Shot by Christopher Farnsworth

Hanrahan blinked twice at Jesse. He didn’t get the joke. Or pretended not to. A lot of people reacted that way to Jesse’s sense of humor.

Molly would have told him that was a sign he wasn’t all that funny, but Jesse didn’t really tell his jokes for any outside audience.

Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief by T. Kingfisher

Algol wasnt a bad sort, really. He was bigger than usual for a goblin, a whopping four foot ten, with broad, knotty shoulders and enormous feet. He had the ocher-gray skin of a hill goblin, and he wasnt all that bright—but then, he was a goblin officer.

Smart goblins became mechanics. Dim goblins became soldiers, Really dim goblins became officers.

His clothes were odd. Elves usually looked immaculate. It was how you could tell chey were elves. You could cut an elf’s leg off, and he would contrive to make it look as if two legs were unfashionable. Elves were just like that. It was one of their more annoying traits.

Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby. They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.

There were cattle in the town square. Some of the humans had died when the cattle crushed them. It was a mess, a horrible mess, which was a laughably ineffective word for the scene before them.

At least if she thought of it as mess, she didn’t have to think of it as people.

Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan

Just as how the seaman finds a barrel to save himself in the rough seas, I keep myself afloat with stories. Books may not solve all my problems, but at least they prevent me from sinking into the abyss.

There are how-to books out there introducing ‘hacks’ to increase reading speed, and when we’ve just made up our minds to get into the habit of reading, it’s easy to fall into the impatience of wanting to read quickly and read more. But reading is about understanding the world and ourselves, not finishing as many books as possible. We aren’t reading to become faster, but to feel and understand more.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

“I have never understood potatoes,” Sissix said. “The whole point of a potato is to cover it with salt so you don’t notice how bland it is. Why not just get a salt lick and skip the potato?”

Sethi was a quiet place. Out of the way. Modestly prosperous. Uncomplicated. No gaming hubs or prefab stores. There wasn’t even a real shuttle dock, just a wide, unattended area suitable for landing small spacecraft and supply drones. Looking around, Rosemary understood why a young adult would want to leave such a place, and why an elder would want to come back.

Jenks knew a thing or two about time. It was hard to be a tunneler and not pick up some of the basics. Time was a malleable thing, not the measured click that clocks would have you believe. Whenever the ship punched, Ohan had to be sure they came back out in the right time, as if it were all mapped out backward and forward and side to side, an infinite number of stories that had already been written. Time could crawl, it could fly, it could amble. Time was a slippery thing. It couldn’t be defined. And yet, somehow, he knew with absolute certainty that this was the longest ten minutes of his life.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)

Well, here we are at the beginning of another year, trying this post again. I wonder how far into the year I’ll get this time before getting distracted from it.

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man.

Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Home is where, when you go there and tell people to get out, they have to leave.

There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands.

It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror?

The touch of another person’s hands.

Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch and reassure us through our very first crisis, and guide us into our very first shelter from pain. The first thing we ever learn is that the touch of someone else’s hand can ease pain and make things better.

That’s power. That’s power so fundamental that most people never even realize it exists.

Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light.

There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect. A hundred million things had to happen, to all come together at the same time, for such moments to come into existence — so many things that it beggars imagination to think that they could possibly have happened by random chance. This was one of them.

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Destroying what someone else cherished never brought back what you yourself had lost. All it did was spread grief like a contagion.

People said that a single day without a dear friend could feel like three autumns.

She observed him from inside the lean-to. He was one of those people who has eyes that look like eyes, and a nose like a nose. Nondescript.

Chen’s teeth gleamed like those of a predator that would devour you without even spitting out the bones.

The Governor was obviously the kind of person who received as much spiritual contentment from berating others as a cold man does from a bowl of soup.

She dismounted awkwardly and went over to Xu Da as he lifted the Prince of Radiance from his horse. Xu Da wore a ginger look that she understood perfectly. There was something about the child that provoked unease. It was like seeing someone’s knee bending the wrong way. Even now, despite everything that had happened inside and outside Bianliang, the Prince of Radiance still wore that same graceful smile.

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher

Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even ff only in principle—there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it.

That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in a very confusing world. If you don’t know where your feet are planted, you’ve got no way to know where you’re heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That’s also part of being human.

But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal.

It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take i from you very easily there.

It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate.

It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them.

It’s where you sleep, safe.

It’s where you relax.

It’s where you dream.

Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future.

It’s where the books are.

And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.

Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

War leaves you precious little time to be human. It’s one of the more horrible realities about it.

“What’s going to happen after this, do you think?”

“I don’t,” she said. “Because I’m doing today first.”

I snorted quietly.

Murphy squeezed back. “Harry. You can’t fix tomorrow until it gets here.”

“Which is weird, because you can screw it up from decades away.”

I’m not saying pain is what defines us as human beings. But it is, in many ways, what unites us. We all recognize other people in pain. Damned near all of us are moved to do something about it when we see it. It’s our common enemy, though it isn’t, really, an enemy. Pain is, at least when our bodies are working properly, a teacher. A really tough, really strict, and perfectly fair teacher.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.

Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.

The Law by Jim Butcher

Planet Earth isn’t a fair place. It’s unfair in a broad variety of different ways, some worse than others, but it isn’t fair. Not for anybody. And that’s pretty much the fairest thing about it.

My knuckles ached to meet his nose.

Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by L.M. Chilton

The moment I agreed to a dinner party, I knew my thirties had officially arrived, and the slow, inevitable countdown to death had begun.

Lit by Tim Sandlin

I’ve never seen a real battle- ax in person, but I know they are frequently compared to a woman’s demeanor and if I ever do come upon one in a museum or a camp where people are pretending to be Vikings, I would expect it to have an edge like Mimi’s chin.

I was all set to fall in love with a stranger obsessed with death. I’d been in love with a woman obsessed with Leonard Cohen, which is almost the same thing.

I considered correcting his word choices, but the kid seemed to be thinking. He was reading a book. Anyone who reads a book is better than anyone who doesn’t.

Here’s one of those truths you should get from books before some idiot burns them. If you are going to love someone, you need to take seriously what they take seriously. And vice versa. If your wife (or husband) thinks your strongest concerns are silly, or worse, stupid, you’re sunk. Get a dog.

Here’s the thing about loving. It’s an incredible risk. You give your every thought and desire to a person you hardly know and you are almost bound to lose. Even non- romantic love is dangerous, but romantic love, the kind based on mutual trust and feeling, is crapshoot roulette. It either kills you or wears you out. But then, a life without love is a waste. I’m not good at waste. It makes me antsy.

“I don’t see anyone committing murder over books.”

What kind of person would think so little of books? “Sunny, I am aghast you would say that. Books are sacred. To destroy one is a cardinal sin.”

Annotating a book on its pages is not a heck of a lot better than burning it.

Twelve Months by Jim Butcher

“You can’t pick a favorite,” I said. “They’re books. They’re pieces of someone’s mind and soul. They’re almost friends.” I started back down the stairs again. “Sometimes a poet speaks best to what’s happening to you. Sometimes it’s a philosopher. Sometimes it’s a storyteller.”

“We’re here to help,” he said.

Four words. None of them long.

The truly important words never are.

Gentleness is power that chooses to restrain itself. That is under control. Gentleness is someone strong who makes the choice to be careful with that strength.

“That merely indicates his stupidity,” spat Mother Winter.

“Stupidity,” Mab mused. “Courage. The only difference is the outcome!“

The Troubled Deep by Rob Parker

She shook her head. She was by now so jaded that cynicism was not just a way of dealing with things, but not it was a character quirk so embedded it had become a central psychological pillar.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee

We Americans like to put our culture into disposable containers. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we treat our past. We discard villages, towns, even cities, when they grow old, and we are now in the process of discarding our recorded history, not in a shredder, but by rewriting it as romance. We are eager to watch docu-dramas on television; we prefer to read a history of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of Mad Anthony Wayne’s last mistress. Now there is nothing wrong in reading historical fiction—perhaps two-thirds of the world’s classics are written in that form. But these are impatient days; more than ever it seems that we want anything but the real thing: we are afraid that the real thing might be dull, demanding, and worst of all, lacking in suspense.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)