Ian Pierce

  • Books I’m Enjoying, May 2026

    May is nearly over, but that’s no excuse not to do a Books I’m Enjoying post! It’s hard to believe that it’s almost summer and that 2026 is nearly half over. At the same time, with all the ongoing goings-on, it feels like it’s been 2026 for almost a decade. At least, I felt like I’ve aged a decade in that time. 

    That being said, books continue to come out and remain great, so let’s get into some of them! 

    Destroy All Humans, They Can’t Be Regenerated by Katsura Ise and Takuma Yokota

    When I was in elementary school, I got really into Magic: The Gathering, as many people do. I credit MtG for introducing me to algebra, at least when I realized that the X in mana costs didn’t mean ten. And while I don’t play Magic frequently these days (the onslaught of Universes Beyond slop has really turned me off the game), every few years my love of the game returns, like some childhood virus that lingers in my system, occasionally flaring into a disgusting Magic rash. Does this mean that Magic is like shingles? I don’t know. This metaphor makes sense in my head. 

    Anyway, this manga brings back all the nostalgia for that time for me, at least the good aspects of elementary school. Set in 1998, the main characters, Emi and Hajime, are middle schoolers obsessed with Magic who form a friendship despite being academic and social rivals. The art is cute and winsome, and the scenes between the MCs toe the line between funny and heartfelt, often on the same page. I love the rivals-to-friends-to-lovers story arc that Emi and Hajime are going down, and it’s great to see a manga with genuine appreciation for the game and the connections that it makes. I’d be curious, however, if the scenes with card games make any sense to non-Magic players. I understand what’s going on in them because I understand the rules and strategies, but would a normie? 

    Daemons of the Shadow Realm by Hiromu Arakawa

    Hiromu Arakawa is a manga legend. She created Fullmetal Alchemist, which so many otaku consider to be one of the greatest manga and anime of all time, and if she just retired after FMA to bask on her laurels, I would understand. But in recent years, she’s created a new series about two siblings, Yuru and Asa, raised in a hidden mountain village that comes under attack from the modern world, and who command paired daemons. Daemons of the Shadow Realm has all the shonen action and compelling magic that characterizes FMA, set in an alternate modern-day Japan. Fans of the Elric brothers will not be disappointed! (I think? It feels weird to talk about books as if I’m writing a review column for Kirkus, but maybe that’s what this is? Ah well. Es lo que hay.) 

    Beyond the Clouds: The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Nicke

    I swear I’ve been reading more than just manga lately! This series, however, is something special. It’s about a ten-year-old winged girl named Mia who falls from the sky, then awakens in an industrial city called Yellow Town with no memory and no ability to get back to the sky. Fortunately, an engineer boy named Theo constructs a mechanical wing for her. But when she starts manifesting bizarre magic powers, they leave Yellow Town on a quest to learn how to control Mia’s magic. Nicke’s art is lush and appealing, her steampunk-inspired setting feels so real you could jump into it, and the adopted sibling relationship between main characters Theo and Mia gives all of the feels. If you like early Ghibli films like Laputa and Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, this should hit you just right. I assume. 

    (By the way, interesting fact, in Spanish, Laputa was renamed to Lapita, because la puta means something obscene. Being bilingual is fun!)

    Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

    See? I can read books without pictures in them – although Mervyn Peake was, in addition to being a transformative writer, an illustrator of great talent. His black-and-white line drawings accompany the text, and they are just as haunting and unsettling as the words, putting Peake in a category with other dark fantasy authors/illustrators like Clive Barker and Brom. 

    The Gormenghast books are difficult to describe. They lie at the boundary between fantasy, gothic horror, and surrealism. Ostensibly, they’re about Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of the castle of Gormenghast, but at the same time the series is about Gormenghast, with the motley cast of characters (wicked Steerpike, doomed Fuschia, darkly comic Doctor Prunesquallor and his spinster sister Irma, among many others) acting almost as personas within the psyche of the castle itself. This isn’t an original observation – any gothic tale from Castle of Otranto onwards is as much about setting as it is character – but it’s reinforced by the madness that the oppressive setting places on Titus and his household. The Gormenghast books were a huge influence on my literary hero Michael Moorcock, who I would like to be when I grow up, and I can definitely see a connection between the grotesques of Titus Groan and the emotionally-warped weirdos that populate the Elric books. 

    Tapping the Dream Tree and Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint

    I’ll finish with these two contemporary fantasies by Charles de Lint, both set in his magical realist city of Newford. The first is a selection of short fiction that blends urban life with fantasy in de Lint’s inimitable way, and the second is a novel about a website called the Wildwood that has magical properties. I was especially fascinated with Spirits in the Wires because it depicts an older version of the internet that has been lost to time: an era without social media companies and online megastores dominating every aspect of our online lives, a time of webrings and animated GIFs and MUDs, an age when you could just spin up a website with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and a server to host it on. It’s a vision of the web, in short, that’s much like the internet that I knew when I was a kid, a boundless resource that may have been irrevocably destroyed by some of the worst people in history. 

    As an aside, I bought my copy of Spirits in the Wires at the Half Price Books in Lynnwood, and somebody had marked it up in a few places with ballpoint pen. Whoever did this made various grammar corrections, as if trying to show that they were so much smarter than the author. What’s worse, they didn’t even correct the grammar in the right way. It’s perfectly acceptable to use the objective case with comparisons (like more girly than me rather than more girly than I), especially in casual speech, and anyone still sticking to those archaic syntactic rules makes me think of a purse-lipped spinster English teacher with her glasses on a chain, sneering down her nose at her students who have the temerity to split an infinitive or use they as a singular pronoun. Did the existence of more contemporary grammar than was acceptable in 1920 send this person into such paroxysms that they had to write their “corrections” in ink, then donate it to a used bookstore where it could no longer offend them? 

    At least there weren’t that many comments and this wasn’t a library book. There is a special place in hell for people who ink commentary in library books, alongside those who defile innocence and people who talk in the theater. 

  • PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: “Faerie Stories”

    Ten years ago today, I started querying for my first book. Literally: I keep track of every query I’ve ever sent, every response I’ve received, and the first queries I sent, for a post-apocalyptic novel called Wither, were mailed on May 27, 2016. It’s been a very long time since I started my journey. There have been times that I’ve gotten close to having an agent, but for that decade, my dream of seeing my work in print has been just that: a dream.

    Until today.

    I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, but I can finally announce it: my contemporary fantasy short story, “Faerie Stories”, will be published in the Winter 2026 edition of Illustrated Worlds Magazine! It’s a small publication with a fairly small readership, at least for now, but I’m hoping that this can be the start of something amazing! I’m so thankful to Jennifer Cox, the editor of Illustrated Worlds, for seeing something in this piece, and I’m so excited for what comes next! In the not-too-distant future, I’ll finally have achieved my dream of being a Publicated Authorist™.

    Now on to the next story!

    ~ Ian

  • plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

    At Miniature World in Victoria, they have a room that’s full of incredibly elaborately detailed dollhouses that were constructed over the course of decades by couples who are no longer alive. These dollhouses represent a lifetime of love and labor. They are literally the culmination of these couples’ lives together. But when these couples pass away, their children are faced with a dilemma. Obviously they can’t throw the dollhouses away – that would dishonor their parents’ memories and all the work they put in. But who in the world has room in their house or garage for a gigantic, fantastically-crafted dollhouse? So these dollhouses go to Miniature World, where they linger, memories of the love that dead couples share, until they are entirely forgotten.

    I feel like those couples sometimes when I work on my Big Project, the story that I’ve been making for over a decade now. It started as an outline in college, then became a half-finished novel manuscript, and now it’s a narrative game in an episodic Life is Strange sort of manner. I’ve worked on it off and on for so many years that I can practically see the locations, the design of the characters, all the way down to the UI. This is my own Miniature World dollhouse, only it’s the work of one person, who so far has had to do programming, character design, and write every word of dialogue and every description.

    I did a draft of the script that was well over 150,000 words, then scrapped it to rewrite it in Ink, an open-source markup language developed by Inkle Studios, makers of Heaven’s Vault. This language is useful for my purposes because it has Unity integration, which other narrative game engines like ren’Py and VN Maker don’t allow. My dream is to someday assemble a team and make this game for real. Until then, though, I’m simply tinkering, building this mad dollhouse bit by bit.

    I guess this makes me sort of crazy, I guess. I think all creative people have to be a little crazy. And I will admit, my mental health, she has not been so good since I’ve been unemployed. I’m thinking of getting out of Seattle for a while, at least until the current economic scenario isn’t completely shittered up. I know this place is my home, but still…

    In any case, that’s just an update on what I’ve been doing. I also did a count recently and found that I’d written eight short stories this year, and it’s only May. Perhaps working with my Resnick writing group has kickstarted my imagination in that regard. Or maybe I’m getting better at writing short fiction. Either way, I view this as a positive. It’s been my dream for years to have a short fiction collection one day. Perhaps this is a step towards that goal!

  • now’s the time for all the people to get together

    I hope all my allosexual friends out there are having a good First of May so far! My asexual friends as well. It’s nice to be inclusive!

    ~ Ian

  • the men that don’t fit in

    I wanted to show my dad some of the poetry of Robert Service, a.k.a. “the Bard of the Yukon”, because his poems so often celebrate the beauty of the solitary life in the wilderness. I downloaded a copy of The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses from gutenberg.org, and after reading through the poems again, I was struck by one particular verse. It’s called “The Men That Don’t Fit In”, and I’ll reproduce it below, because the poem’s in the public domain and no one can stop me.

    “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
    A race that can’t stay still;
    So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
    They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain’s crest;
    Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don’t know how to rest.

    If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
    But they’re always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
    They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!”
    So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake.

    And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
    It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
    And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
    Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

    He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
    Life’s been “a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
    Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
    He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
    He’s a man who won’t fit in.”

    I wonder how many of the gold miners in the Klondike (and in California, and in Australia, and in every gold rush there was in history) were neurodivergent. They definitely weren’t people who had happy, stable, settled lives. In the days of the Oregon Trail, about one out of every ten pioneers died on the trip to the Northwest. The reward, when they reached the end, was to be cut off from all their family and friends back East, possibly for a lifetime, while they scrabbled in a wilderness devoid of material comforts, far from the madding crowd.

    What would make a person choose to leave all of that behind and go on a trip that they would never return from, that carried a ten percent mortality rate? I expect that the reason was that the slim prospect of something in Oregon was much better than what they had back East. Many of them, probably, didn’t have to worry about leaving friends and family behind because they had no friends and family. They didn’t leave jobs and housing and a stable life because they didn’t have those things. They left, in short, because they had nothing to lose.

    I resonate with those people, and with the men that Service wrote about. I’ve struggled to find work for my whole adult life, lost friendships because of the other person’s intolerance and rigidity. And I think that if I wrote stories that were more commercial, more in line with what the publishing world wants, I would be published by now.

    But my brain doesn’t work like that. That statement isn’t a humblebrag, by the way. So much of my life, my childhood training, my neuroses, are about pretending to be “normal”, whatever the standard definition of “normal” is, and falling short. It’s not that I don’t try. It’s that a “normal” brain is as alien to me as my brain is to the average neurotypical.

    How many people like me have there been throughout history? Sure, some of them struck it rich, but how many of them died alone in the wilderness, lost to history, just a pile of weathered broken bones? How many of them would have survived if their brains had worked in a different way?

    It makes me wonder. I don’t know the answer. All I know is that if it weren’t for the men and women who don’t fit in, neurotypicals would be lost without us.

    ~ Ian (listening to the soundtrack for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine by Ryan Ike)

  • down here near the poison stream our god has gone insane

    On Monday I had a sustained panic attack that lasted for nearly an hour. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, the whole enchilada, if an enchilada can be made of cortisol and tears. I stayed on the phone with my parents for that whole time while they tried to calm me down. It worked, eventually, but the whole time I wanted to die, to have my throat close up and suffocate me, just because that would end the pain.

    I’m sure you can guess why I felt that way. It’s not every day that the president of your country threatens an entire 3000-year-old civilization with extinction just so he and his shitty friends can game the stock market. But that’s where we are. That’s where the last fifty years have led us, ever since billionaires used Ronald Reagan as a shill to sell Americans on the scam that if we let them exist without paying their fair share to the society that sustains and enables them, it will benefit us in the long run.

    We are building dystopia brick by brick, one that combines the surveillance of 1984 with the medicated numbness of Brave New World, and for what? So a handful of people can become trillionaires? So that moneyed pedophiles can escape accountability for raping underage girls? So we can cram AI that no one wants or likes into every physical objects? So boomers can die in their giant air-conditioned houses, surrounded by wealth that my generation will never know, like Egyptian pharaohs in their lavish tombs?

    I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the constant emotional trauma that these brigands force into my mind. I know this blog post is a rant, and that’s fine. Sometimes you need a place to rant. But if the next fifty years are going to be as exploitative and dehumanizing as the last fifty, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get off this elevator bound for the abyss right now.

    ~ Ian (listening to New Day Symptoms by Final Gasp)

  • drops of jupiter in your haaaair

    Wednesday was a gray, tempestuous day here in Seattle, just as we like it. What better occasion would there be, therefore, to ride the new 2 Line Crosslake Connector for the Link: the final piece of the ST2 light rail expansion, and the first ever floating rail bridge in the world?

    Overall, the train is an excellent addition to our transit landscape! I saw people coming home from a Mariners game, got some books at Half Price Books in Redmond, and snagged some great pictures.

    On a final note: it was just recently announced that Sound Transit has such a budget shortfall that they are not going to complete the ST3 expansion as Seattle voters approved it. That means that there will be no trains to Ballard, West Seattle, or Tacoma. This infuriates me for so many reasons.

    The biggest, however, is this: there are so many billionaires whose companies are destroying Seattle for working and disabled Seattleites. If Bezos wanted, he could simply write a check to Sound Transit for the expected budget shortfall and do something – anything – to redress the damage he’s done. But he doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t even live in Seattle. All his focus is on disassembling historic bridges so his big boat can get out of the harbor and shutting down Venice for his fancy celebrity wedding.

    I tell you what, if Bezos’ next penis-shaped rocket explodes with him aboard, scattering his component atoms across the mesosphere, I won’t be shedding any tears.

    ~ Ian

  • no kings day, santa cruz, march 28, 2025

    As an aside to this whole post, I’m going to say it was incredibly frustrating to see that the vast majority of protestors in Santa Cruz (about 90%) were boomers. Millennials and zoomers are the largest age demographic in the US, and we were extremely few and far between. It is pathetic to see older people willing to stand up and fight for the future of our country when the people who will inherit it show such unbelievable apathy. There are a bunch of criticisms of young people (or not that young anymore, in the case of older millennials) that are completely invalid, but it’s true that millennials believe that putting out a Twitter hashtag constitutes activism, and that zoomers will do whatever the influencers that their TikTok algorithm serves them will tell them to do.

    Nonviolent protests in Minneapolis got ICE to stand down and back off. In my city, the current mayor was elected by only a couple hundred votes. If I and a few hundred people decided not to vote that day, Seattle wouldn’t have our most progressive mayor in a generation.

    Cynicism is not wisdom, and memes are not action. My generation needs to learn that, because not caring will only end with us being crushed by oligarchs and techno-feudalists, and ensure that the future looks like a boot, stamping on a human face, forever.

  • mountain stars

    I’m in California right now, but I thought I’d check in. I was up in the mountains skiing for a little while, which was weird, because the highs were in the low seventies, so it was like skiing on Slurpees for most of the time. But even so, I had fun. It was typical spring skiing: guys in shorts, girls in bikinis, guys in Spider-Man costumes… the usual shenanigans. The only problem was that the weather was like what it is at the end of April, not the middle of March. So it goes!

    I tried to take some pictures of the stars while I was up there. I think they turned out pretty good! At least, they were pretty good for a basic iPhone camera.

    It’s nice to be able to see stars. Back home, the night sky is shrouded in clouds most nights and light pollution the rest of the time, so seeing some actual spacelights is a welcome treat

    Writing continues apace. I’m almost done with a draft of a novel. Gonna ship that out to beta readers soon and start querying it by this summer. I’ve also written a few short stories that I’m going to submit after revisions. My hope is that 2026 will be the Year When It Finally Happens™. Unfortunately, I wanted that about 2025, and while the Resnick award was cool, I’m still not a Publicated Authorist, as I call it. My fear is that I’m going to think that this year will be the Year When It Finally Happens™ until there are no years left. I don’t think that’s a writer thing, though. It’s a human thing.

  • Books I’m Enjoying, March 2026

    Been a while since we’ve done one of these, eh? It’s kind of hard to do a “Books I’m Enjoying” column when I haven’t been enjoying much of, well, anything. Even so, I’ve been reading, because books, art, and music are three of the only reasons to keep living in such a dehumanized world. Sorry to be a downer, but that’s just how it be sometimes. Anyhow, let’s get into the books!

    Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Tad Williams

    Big book is big! This four-book fantasy trilogy came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and was hugely influential for its time, inspiring writers like George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss to write their own series with a heavier focus on psychological introspection and nuanced characters. I can understand how this series inspired them. Other series coming out at the same period like Wheel of Time and The Belgariad tend to have characters that might charitably be described as “archetypes” and more cruelly as “having the overall depth of puddles”. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn has similar medieval European trappings as those other series, but even though the characters might appear on the surface to fall into the typical tropes of “orphaned boy with a destiny”, “beautiful, virtuous princess”, “wicked magic-using priest”, and “mysterious immortals with strange magical powers”, they possess a level of interiority that must have been a genuine shock at the time. You only have to look at the nuance of the relationship between Prince Josua and his consort Vorzheva to know that Williams was years ahead of his time. 

    A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

    I don’t characterize this as the greatest science fiction novel of all time. To my mind, that still has to be The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. But A Fire Upon the Deep is pretty close. It has a galaxy where the laws of technology function different depending on what region you’re in, canine aliens with hive minds and a medieval level of technology, a mission to rescue two children stranded on a perilous world, and a mysterious alien intelligence that theatens the entire galaxy. It’s also fascinating to see this novel’s depiction of the internet. Most novels describing computer networks in the late 80s and early 90s focused on the ways that the internet would connect people and allow them to share ideas. The forum wars leading to actual genocide in this book seem much more akin to how social media has warped humanity in the 21st century. It’s not for nothing that Vinge characterizes the web as the “Net of a Million Lies”. 

    In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan

    Sarah Rees Brennan wrote what might be my favorite fantasy novel in years, Long Live Evil, which was her adult debut. I’ve been working her way through her back catalog, including this splendid YA fantasy. It’s a portal fantasy similar to Harry Potter, but while Harry has all the personality of a plank of wood, In Other Lands’ protagonist Elliot is a snarky, charming asshole whose vast intelligence hides a great well of insecurity. Plus, there are plenty of queer characters; a fascinating, misandrist elven culture; and lots of Bisexual Yearning™. Brennan may just be one of my favorite current fantasy writers, along with Tamsin Muir, Holly Black, and V.E. Schwab. 

    Monolithic Undertow, Harry Sword

    This book is half musical history and half philosophical text exploring the permutations of what author Harry Sword refers to as “the drone”: that sustained, atonal, reverb-heavy hum that lies at the foundation of so much doom metal and post-rock. Monolithic Undertow covers all the genre’s greatest hits – Black Sabbath, Sleep, Electric Wizard, Melvins, Earth, Sunn 0))) – but expands his examination across genres and cultures, from Indian ragas and Moroccan folk music to the Velvet Underground and krautrock, all the way to the watery noises we hear in the womb and the sonic resonance of the cosmic microwave background. If you’re at all interested in experimental or heavy music, this book is a total mind-expander. 

    It’s nice to be able to talk about something good. Haruki Murakami pointed out in Novelist as a Vocation that only about five percent of the population are active, regular readers. But as long as we exist, there will always be books for us. 

    ~ Iann 0))) (listening to No Obligation by the Linda Lindas)

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