Crossworks: Fic and Art Crossover Exchange

What I've recently finished reading:

In eyeball, The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Time-loop novel about a medieval historian and the lady knight he's obsessed with, in an alternate world that is not quite our England; one of you called it "sort of Arthuriana" and I guess it is, though that sort of is important. In a way it reminded me of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August as much of the novel is the characters gradually figuring out that these same things are happening again, and then trying to take advantage of this knowledge to make the next loop better. Unfortunately, in this case the source of the time loop has very clear, firm aims, and does not want to be thwarted by the mere pawns acting out the story that is destined to be enshrined in the country's lore. I liked it a lot, especially as the layers unfolded, though actually I was most interested in the villain of the piece and would like to have had more of that story!

In audio, All These Worlds by Dennis E. Taylor, the third Bobiverse book. I'm really liking these, although they could use some closer editing to avoid repetition of things we already know. It's an interesting inversion of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "How can we see the other as a person?" in that the viewpoint characters, the Bobs, are cloned brain patterns from a now-dead engineer which run on computers installed in spaceships; though within the narrative they are unquestionably people, other humans don't necessarily see them that way. And yet as they are enabling and directing the expansion of humanity into space, they're the segment of humanity making first contact with the other sentient species of the galaxy, and they're the ones who have to handle the related decisions. The structure of these books, with the multiplicity of Bobs and their storylines, means that all the different cases can be handled: the Stone Age civilization, the early-industrial civilization, the possibly advanced civilization that no longer exists, the advanced civilization that presents a terrifying threat. And as some humans fight against the idea that the Bobs are human, some Bobs work to reclaim as much of their humanity as possible. There are some deep philosophical questions one can tease out of these books - but I don't think that's the author's intent, and they are enjoyable reads just as fun science fiction.

What I've recently finished watching:

We enjoyed the Netflix "nature documentary" miniseries The Dinosaurs; quotes are because I think it's basically all CGI. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it's a dramatic tour of prehistory, from the first proto-dinos to the asteroid that ended it all. It does a good job of telling individual "stories" of the various dinosaurs looking for mates, protecting their young, and doing their best to eat and not be eaten.