gensplosion!

FANDOM: Star Trek: The Next Generation
FIC LINK: Quantum Entanglement
AUTHOR LINK: killer_quean
RATING/WARNING(S): Teen | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~1400 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Guinan, Ro Laren

FIC SUMMARY: Guinan and Ro Laren's friendship: across timelines, worlds, and depths of memory.

RECCER'S NOTES: Star Trek has so many alien races yet so little fanfiction tries to understand an alien perspective. This short piece, written for the Rarewomen exchange, explores Guinan's perception of the universe via her relationship with another outsider, Ro Laren. Killer Quean comes up with an interesting possible answer to the question of what friendship might mean to a being who perceives alternate timelines. The piece's three parts overlay each other, using repetition to underscore the differences & similarities between the timelines. The final part is particularly strong, with the best description of assimilation I've read.

FANDOM: The Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff (Eagle of the Ninth series)
FIC LINK: A Siren Call
AUTHOR LINK: Riventhorn
RATING/WARNING(S): PG | none
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~4,600 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Honoria

FIC SUMMARY: Helping her great-nephews, Flavius and Justin, recalls a winter twelve years before when Honoria also found herself caught up in a rebellion.

RECCER'S NOTES:

The Silver Branch is the sequel to the better-known Eagle of the Ninth, following Marcus Aquila's descendants in Roman Britain. Honoria is one of several vivid minor characters, the elderly & idiosyncratic matriarch of the Aquila family. Riventhorn's characterisation of her is perfect, shrewd, proud, brusque yet loyal & loving in her own inimitable fashion, with a lovely dry humour. The story foregrounds friendships between women & the behind-the-scenes networking of Romano-Britain. There's an interesting & realistic original character, and she & all the major characters are women who have left their youth behind. Subjects touched upon include female aging & that fanfiction taboo the menopause -- without the slightest hint of issuefic. Apart from the frame, the story is set more than a decade before the novel opens, during an uprising against Rome's rule, and gives a window into a part of Romano-British history that Sutcliff doesn't cover. No canon knowledge is necessary.

FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
FIC LINK: Stumbling on the Fields of Praise
AUTHOR LINK: Dipenates, Dipenates
RATING/WARNING(S): ~PG-13 | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~725 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Riley Finn

FIC SUMMARY: In Sunnydale, no one went to church. Which was kind of ironic, because there was so little that was truly bad in Huxley, Iowa and yet he could count the people who hadn’t gone to church on one hand.

RECCER'S NOTES:

Riley is probably the second most despised Buffy character, behind only Kennedy, and there's so little Riley-centric fanfiction that doesn't make him into a monster. This insightful study builds from the fact he's only the only Buffy character shown attending church, and takes a serious look at what the Buffyverse might do to an ordinary person with religious faith. A quiet gem.

FANDOM: Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
FIC LINK: Nothing But One of Your Nine Lives
AUTHOR LINK: russian_blue
RATING/WARNING(S): Teen | Character death
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~1800 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Tybalt

FIC SUMMARY: Tybalt has a secret.

RECCER'S NOTES: This is a perfect example of the 'crack premise taken straight' micro-genre. Tybalt, 'Prince of Cats', inexplicably finds he can't die. His evolving reactions to his situation feel very believable, from questioning the philosophical implications to finding a reason to wish to continue living. Russian Blue uses his series of 'deaths' to paint a vivid picture of Verona before and during the play. Though the premise is dark, there's a ray of hope for him at the end that the play doesn't offer.

FANDOM: Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold)
FIC LINK: Kindred Instruments
AUTHOR LINK: ollipop
RATING/WARNING(S): General audiences | No authorial warnings; Jackson Whole ethics
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | 4500 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Lotus Durona, Lilly Durona, Vasa Luigi Bharaputra

FIC SUMMARY: They know just as much about Lotus as she knows about herself. They know her aptitudes, her weaknesses. They have tweaked the neurochemical bath on her copies, for maximum effect. They are her, improved. She is them, unedited. She hates them.

Lotus Durona: Nature or nurture?

RECCER'S NOTES: A chilling piece that unpacks Lotus's defection to House Bharaputra. Ollipop skillfully fleshes out the villain PoV to gain the reader's sympathies for Lotus, and the story also explores the complex ethics of Jackson's Whole in a much more nuanced fashion than canon. The canonical pairing of Lotus/Baron Bharaputra forms one strand, but it's not a shippy fic; coming of age as one of a set of clones in the ultimate dysfunctional family is at the heart of the story.

FANDOM: Spirited Away
FIC LINK: Tales of the Bathhouse
AUTHOR LINK: Littlerhymes
RATING/WARNING(S): General | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | 4000 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Lin, Kamaji, Yubaba, OCs

FIC SUMMARY: Three stories of the bathhouse and its inhabitants.

RECCER'S NOTES: Spirited Away is an anime film by Hayao Miyazaki which inspires some wonderful fanfiction, but nearly all of it homes in on the major ship. This charming story instead focuses on minor & original characters and uses a set of tales within a tale to give a fuller picture of life in the bathhouse as well as the backstory of some of its inhabitants. As it's set after the film, there's a hint of Haku's future, too.

FANDOM: The Lord of the Rings
FIC LINK: The Strange Case of the House at Hollinport (rtf download)
AUTHOR LINK: The Burping Troll
RATING/WARNING(S): Unrated | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~13,500 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Original characters, [mystery]

FIC SUMMARY: From his hospital bed, a man recalls inheriting his uncle's house in the town of Hollinport. Taking up residence was only the first step of a dark and terrifying journey. A Gothic encounter with Shadow that is not, after all, quite vanquished from the world ... A classic horror must-read!

RECCER'S NOTES: Set in the Fourth Age, the story kicks off from the quotation 'There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.' It's written in a very convincing pastiche of a Poe or Lovecraft short story, yet eventually comes to mesh perfectly with Tolkien's canon. Russ has a gift for atmosphere, and there's great slow-building tension as the mystery unfolds. I wrote back in 2004 that this is 'one of the most unusual LotR-inspired fiction I've ever encountered,' and it stands up very well to rereading a decade later.

FANDOM: Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)
FIC LINK: Mother Tongue
AUTHOR LINK: elle_dritch
RATING/WARNING(S): General | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | 6,700 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Apple, Tenar, Ged, Spark

FIC SUMMARY: The women of Earthsea: falling, flying, stealing, speaking. Post-Tehanu.

RECCER'S NOTES: Earthsea is a series of fantasy novels by Ursula Le Guin, which introduced the wizarding boarding school a good three decades before Ms Rowling, and made the main characters dark-skinned long before it was fashionable. It's one of the fandoms of my heart, and if you're interested, you can read my fandom summary & find many more recs at the late lamented crack_van.

Le Guin revisited the rather masculine world of her original trilogy in Tehanu, a novel about the heroine, Tenar, after (most of) the adventure's over, and how to find the magic in everyday life. A lot of more recent fanfiction is set around this novel and embraces its female-centric vision of Earthsea. 'Mother Tongue' is a good example, a quiet coda that reads like the novel's missing final chapter. It focuses on Tenar's adult daughter Apple, a very minor character in the original, and brings her to life as she tries to understand her mother's unusual choices. Apple makes a wonderful outside PoV on the main characters, and elle_dritch gives her interesting thoughts on chosen vs birth families and the nature of manhood.

FANDOM: Frontier Wolf (Rosemary Sutcliff)
FIC LINK: Not the Emperor's Bodyguard
AUTHOR LINK: bunn
RATING/WARNING(S): General | None
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | ~1600 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Julius Gavros, Hilarion

FIC SUMMARY: Julius Gavros arrives at Castellum in charge of the Third Ordo Frontier Wolves. It's not really the job that he'd hoped for...

RECCER'S NOTES:

Apologies for the hiatus in my recs; I'll try to be more energetic for the remainder of the month!

Frontier Wolf is a novel in Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth series about members of the Aquila family in Roman Britain. Since the film The Eagle the FW fandom's taken flight, but gen is particularly hard to find. Bunn here takes a charismatic minor character and explains how such a competent & intelligent man came to end up in a punishment posting at the back end of the Empire. The long-abandoned fort is carefully created in sight and sound and smell to imbue the piece with a wonderful sense of place. Bunn's work is always based on impeccable historical research and her author's notes make an interesting read. No canon knowledge is required to appreciate the story.

FANDOM: Watership Down
FIC LINK: Bright Moon, Who Goes Farther Still
AUTHOR LINK: hossgal
RATING/WARNING(S): PG | No authorial warnings; death, but not of canon characters
WIP?/WORD COUNT: Complete | 16,400 words
MAIN CHARACTERS: Hyzenthlay

FIC SUMMARY: Who is the teller, and who is the one whose tale is told?
The wind twists, turns into what it had once been;
Who is the foundling, and who is the seeker bold?
The rain flows down the hills and becomes the sea again.

RECCER'S NOTES: Watership Down was written back in the 1960s and has been criticised in fandom & outside for the way it treats females. Hossgal's ambitious story is a much more successful attempt to address the gender problem than Richard Adams's own Tales from Watership Down. Her braided novella gives us the does' perspective on the events of Watership Down, as well as a more female-centric take on rabbit mythology. The two strands weave together perfectly as the tale builds to its climax, which never fails to move me. The story features Efrafan world-building, brilliant original characters, doe psychology & mythological adventures that fit perfectly into the original. (There's a little Hyzenthlay/Blackavar but it's a minor component.) A real treasure.