Robotnik
ROBOT, n. I wish I was writing about this word at a moment when I was reading books about robots, because I love it when these newsletters cohere and also I really want to read the sequels to this, but I am a chaotic and easily distracted creature. So what happened is that I saw a tweet go by where somebody said “robot” came to English from Czech and I decided to find out about that.
“Robot” is a rare word where we can date its origin exactly. We know its author, Czech playwright Karel Capek, and its first usage in English: the 1923 translation of Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”).
“Robot” comes from Czech “robotnik,” which means [checks notes] “forced worker.” Yikes. “Robota” is Czech for “forced labor.” It doesn’t bode well for our present or future human-robot relations that we chose to name them this.
As I said, I didn’t read anything with robots in it. But I have read a few books! In small-r romance, I read
Big Boy (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, novella) by Ruthie Knox. I had seen many trusted friends and reviewers rave about this work of short fiction, but what I really needed to hear to make me click “buy” was “it has trains in it.” The “Big Boy” of the title is a steam locomotive and one protagonist works at a railroad museum. I am an easy mark for anything with trains in it. That said, I would have been an easy mark for anything with writing this good. The depth of character and feeling in this is astounding for how short it is. It handles a long story timeline (a year) in a small number of pages, and you should absolutely check out this post from Close Reading Romance about that. Content warnings: grief, death of several family members, caring for an elderly relative in decline, sex.
The Threefold Tie (m/m/f, all cis and bi, historical, novella) by Aster Glenn Gray. This is an emotional but sweet story of two Civil War comrades/lovers reuniting after the war when one of them has married—and both of them are in love with his wife, but also each other. It’s lovely and also it taught me about the utopian religious Oneida Community, which was an interesting historical tidbit. Content warnings: some brief war flashbacks with hospital stuff, sex.
Sanctuary (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, erotic) by Rebekah Weatherspoon. This has a small suspense element—one protagonist is a lawyer and a former client is trying to kill her, so she needs to hide at a friend’s farm for a few days—but the overall mood is “What if you moved to an idyllic apple farm run by a small group of cool, talented, compassionate people and then you had a lot of hot kinky sex with someone you were slowly falling in love with?” and it was exactly what I wanted. Sanctuary indeed. Rebekah Weatherspoon also writes incredible one-liners: “He smells so good, like fresh earth and sunshine and uncompromised ethics.” The best. Content warnings: murder, violence, prejudice against and mistreatment of sex workers, sex, BDSM.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho, which is a perfect, poignant, heartwarming wuxia-inspired fantasy novella about a nun who joins a group of bandits. There’s a hint of romance in it, too, but it’s much more of a fantasy story, and it is all around delightfully queer. A major character is transmasc and there is worldbuilding inclusive of trans people.
I also read an advanced copy of Power Play, the forthcoming book in my friend K. R. Collins’s series about Sophie Fournier, a talented professional hockey player who is the first woman in what was formerly a men’s league. These books are such a wonderful example of found family and I love returning to the world and hanging out with the characters again. And naturally as a romance-focused reader, I am dying for Sophie to figure herself out and kiss Elsa, but the burn is very, very slow.
I didn’t read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke this week, but I couldn’t talk about reading it back in February because it was on the list for the Tournament of Books. So this is just a paragraph to say that you should absolutely read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which feels like a Jorge-Luis Borges short story—specifically “The Library of Babel” but also a little bit “On Exactitude in Science”—but transformed into a novel with a main character you can get to know and love. (I love Borges, but endearing characters are not his thing.) Said main character, who may or may not be named “Piranesi,” wanders the infinite halls of a fantastical house, mapping the rooms and cataloguing their wonders—monumental statues, flood tides, birds, bones—in his journal. The historical Piranesi was an artist and an architect of the 18th century known for his illustrations of grand, imaginary prisons, like the one below. They are certainly an inspiration for Piranesi’s House.
Piranesi’s The Gothic Arch. This black and white image depicts many massive staircases, arches, and columns populated by tiny human figures.
The book’s “Piranesi” is dedicated to and awed by his explorations, but lonely and often hungry and cold. The book tells the story of discovering not only the House, but also another world beyond the House. It has such a profound sense of wonder and it asks so many good questions about learning and knowing and seeing the world, but it’s also a tense unfolding mystery with a terrible violence at its heart. Hat tip to the Tournament of Books commenters who crystallized for me that this book is about going to graduate school in the humanities. Oh my God. I wandered through so many halls.
That’s all for this week’s newsletter. If you need me, I’ll be wandering from room to room saying “thank you” frequently and audibly to every device in my House.
