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What Smack Said #28
You get a holiday, and YOU get a holiday! 
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Still November! Barely. I hope everyone had a good Thanks/Friendsgiving, or whatever else you choose to celebrate. Mine was lovely and calm and honestly everything I could have hoped for.
The drafting on this journey-to-fake-Paris novella is going well. I'm fitting it in around paid work and trying to stay mindful of my limits. I'll be able to devote more time to it after my current paid gig wraps up next week.
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I read a lot of good books in November. Lots of offbeat, mixed genre stuff by both independently (i.e., self-published) and traditionally published authors, both recently published and a little older. My favorite, though, was The Dred Chronicles by Ann Aguirre, published back in 2013. It's a science fiction trilogy that takes place on a prison ship for inmates who have been given lifetime sentences in a society that has banned the death penalty. That means the ship, named
Perdition, is full of the worst of the worst criminals. Serial killers, mass murderers, and—in one specific instance—a man who was created as a science experiment to be a super soldier.
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Life on
Perdition is unregulated by the planet-side powers that be, so it tends to be short and brutal. The powers that be occasionally send up shuttles with new inmates and minimal supplies but make no effort to maintain control over the people already there. The ship is divvied up between five territories, each ruled by an autocrat of one kind or another. One is a self-styled god, another the handmaiden of Death, and a third practices cannibalism. The trilogy follows Dred (short for Dresdemona), who took over the territory she'd been living in and renamed it Queensland a mere six months before the first book opens.
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These books are just
fun. Everyone is a badass, expects to be stabbed in the back at every turn, and frequently ends up bloody all the way up to their elbows. Dred wears chains around her arms and legs as a cross between armor and long-range weapons that she can unwind and use as whips. She was sentenced to life in a planet-side prison for being the most prolific female serial killer (who only killed bad guys) ever, but then she kept starting prison riots, so the powers that be gave up on trying to study her and sent her to
Perdition instead.
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And I mean, really. Set aside the fact that there's some delicate and extremely satisfying emotional development amongst Dred and the other major characters: chains as armor
and weapons? I wish I'd thought of it first. Especially when, in later books, we discover that they're also a coping mechanism. The man who ruled Queensland before her kept Dred chained to his janky metal throne, and she wears them to reclaim her autonomy.
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She might rule Queensland, but coups and assassinations are a constant threat; so is the creeping suspicion that
Perdition is literally falling apart and will only be able to sustain life for so much longer. One of the blurbs praising the series used the phrase "high-octane," and I can't come up with anything more accurate.
The Dred Chronicles are high action, high stakes, and perfectly paced. I read them twice.
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