Review: Forever and a Day, by Haley Cass

Series:	Those Who Wait #1.5
Publisher:	Haley Cass
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	979-8-5902-5966-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	101

Forever and a Day is a coda to Haley Cass's self-published sapphic romance novel Those Who Wait. There is no point in reading it unless you have already read and enjoyed the full book and wanted more of a denouement. Given that Those Who Wait is a romance novel, it is definitionally not a spoiler to reveal that Sutton and Charlotte ended up together. This novella is seven scenes sketching out the next few years of their lives, interspersed with press clippings and social media commentary. These tie up loose ends, give the characters a bit more time together, throw in one more conflict and resolution, add one more sex scene, and stick a few exclamation points after the happily ever after. I am the sort of person who likes long denouements in stories, so I'm the target audience for this sort of sequel that's essentially additional chapters to the book. (The funniest version of this I've read is Jacqueline Carey's Saints Astray.) They are usually not great literature, since there are good reasons for not including these chapters in the book. That is exactly what this is: a few more chapters of the characters being happy, entirely forgettable, and of interest only to people who want that. Cass does try to introduce a bit of a plot via some light family conflict, which was sweet and mostly worked, and some conflict over having children, which was very stereotyped and which I did not enjoy as much. I thought the earlier chapters of this novella were the stronger ones, although I do have to give the characters credit in the later chapters for working through conflict in a mature and fairly reasonable way. It does help, though, when the conflict is entirely resolved by one character being right and the other character being happily wrong. That's character conflict on easy mode. I was happy to see that Sutton got a career, although as in the novel I wish Cass had put some more effort into describing Sutton's efforts in building that career. The details are maddeningly vague, which admittedly matches the maddeningly vague description of Charlotte's politics but which left me unsatisfied. Charlotte's political career continues to be pure wish fulfillment in the most utterly superficial and trivialized way, and it bothered me even more in the novella than it did in the novel. We still have absolutely no idea what she stands for, what she wants to accomplish, and why anyone would vote for her, and yet we get endless soft-focus paeans to how wonderful she will be for the country. Her opponents are similarly vague to the point that the stereotypes Cass uses to signal their inferiority to Charlotte are a little suspect. I'm more critical of this in 2025 than I would have been in 2015 because the last ten years have made clear the amount of damage an absolute refusal to stand for anything except hazy bromides causes, and I probably shouldn't be this annoyed that Cass chose to vaguely gesture towards progressive liberalism without muddying her romance denouement with a concrete political debate. But, just, gah. I found the last chapter intensely annoying, in part because the narrative of that chapter was too cliched and trite to sufficiently distract me from the bad taste of the cotton-candy politics. Other than that, this was minor, sweet, and forgettable. If you want another few chapters of an already long novel, this delivers exactly what you would expect. If the novel was plenty, nothing about this novella is going to change your mind and you can safely skip it. I really liked the scene between Charlotte and Sutton's mom, though, and I'm glad I read the novella just for that. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: The Last Soul Among Wolves, by Melissa Caruso

Series:	The Echo Archives #2
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	August 2025
ISBN:	0-316-30404-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	355

The Last Soul Among Wolves is urban high fantasy with strong mystery vibes. It is a direct sequel to The Last Hour Between Worlds. You need the previous book for some character setup (and this book would spoil it badly), but you don't have to remember the first book in detail. Only the main plot outcomes are directly relevant and the characters will remind you of those. Kembrel Thorne is a Hound, the equivalent of a police detective in the medieval-inspired city setting of this series, but this book does not open with an official assignment. Instead, she has been dragged by her childhood friend Jaycel Morningrey as company for a reading of the will of old lady Lovegrace, reclusive owner of a gothic mansion on an island connected to the city by an intermittent sandbar. A surprise reunion with her gang of childhood friends ensues, followed by the revelation that they are all in serious trouble. Shortly after Kem left the group to become a Hound, the remaining four, plus several other apparently random people, got entangled with a powerful Echo artifact. Now that Lovegrace has died, one of them will inherit the artifact and the ability to make a wish, but only one. The rest will be killed at decreasing intervals until only the winner is left alive. The Last Hour Between Worlds was fae fantasy built around a problem that was more of a puzzle than a mystery. The Last Soul Among Wolves is closer to a classic mystery: A cast of characters are brought together and semi-isolated in a rural house, they start dying, and it's up to the detective to solve the mystery of their death before it's too late. In this case, the initial mechanism of death is supernatural and not in doubt the challenge instead is how to stop it from happening again but Kem's problems quickly become more complicated. As mystery plots go, this is more thriller than classical despite the setting. There are a few scenes of analyzing clues, but Kem is more likely to use the time-honored protagonist technique of throwing herself into danger and learning what's going on via the villain monologues. As readers of the previous book would expect, Rika Nonesuch is here too, hired by another of Kem's old friends, and the two navigate their personal feelings and the rivalry between their guilds in much the way that they did in the Last Hour Between Worlds. As in the first book, there is a sapphic romance subplot, but it's a very slow burn asexual romance. The best part of this series continues to be the world-building. The previous book introduced the idea of the Echoes and sent the characters exploring into stranger and stranger depths. This book fleshes out the rules in more detail, creating something that feels partly like a fae realm and partly like high fantasy involving gods, but diverges from both into a logic of its own. The ending satisfyingly passes my test of fantasy mysteries: Resolving the mystery requires understanding and applying the rules of the setting, which are sufficiently strange to create interesting outcomes but coherent enough that the reader doesn't feel like the author is cheating. There are some hissable villains here, but my favorite part of this book was the way Caruso added a lot of nuance and poignancy to the Echoes rather than showing them only as an uncanny threat. That choice made the world feel deeper and richer. It's not yet clear whether that element is setup for a longer-term series plot, but I hope Caruso will develop the story in that direction. It felt to me like Caruso is aiming for an ongoing series rather than a multi-volume story with a definite ending. She avoids a full episodic reset Rika, in particular, gets considerable character development and new complications that bode well for future volumes but it doesn't feel like the series is building towards an imminent climax. This is not a complaint. I enjoy these characters and this world and will happily keep devouring each new series entry. If you liked The Last Hour Between Worlds, I think you will like this. It doesn't have the same delight of initial discovery of the great world-building, but the plot is satisfying and a bit more complex and the supporting characters are even better than those in the first book. Once again, Caruso kept me turning the pages, and I'm now looking forward to a third volume. Recommended. The third book in the series has not yet been announced, but there are indications on social media that it is coming. Rating: 7 out of 10

I haven't posted a book haul in forever, so lots of stuff stacked up, including a new translation of Bambi that I really should get around to reading. Nicholas & Olivia Atwater A Matter of Execution (sff)
Nicholas & Olivia Atwater Echoes of the Imperium (sff)
Travis Baldree Brigands & Breadknives (sff)
Elizabeth Bear The Folded Sky (sff)
Melissa Caruso The Last Hour Between Worlds (sff)
Melissa Caruso The Last Soul Among Wolves (sff)
Haley Cass Forever and a Day (romance)
C.L. Clark Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf (sff)
C.L. Clark Fate's Bane (sff)
C.L. Clark The Sovereign (sff)
August Clarke Metal from Heaven (sff)
Erin Elkin A Little Vice (sff)
Audrey Faye Alpha (sff)
Emanuele Galletto, et al. Fabula Ultima: Core Rulebook (rpg)
Emanuele Galletto, et al. Fabula Ultima: Atlas High Fantasy (rpg)
Emanuele Galletto, et al. Fabula Ultima: Atlas Techno Fantasy (rpg)
Alix E. Harrow The Everlasting (sff)
Alix E. Harrow Starling House (sff)
Antonia Hodgson The Raven Scholar (sff)
Bel Kaufman Up the Down Staircase (mainstream)
Guy Gavriel Kay All the Seas of the World (sff)
N.K. Jemisin & Jamal Campbell Far Sector (graphic novel)
Mary Robinette Kowal The Martian Conspiracy (sff)
Matthew Kressel Space Trucker Jess (sff)
Mark Lawrence The Book That Held Her Heart (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee Moonstorm (sff)
Michael Lewis (ed.) Who Is Government? (non-fiction)
Aidan Moher Fight, Magic, Items (non-fiction)
Saleha Mohsin Paper Soldiers (non-fiction)
Ada Palmer Inventing the Renaissance (non-fiction)
Suzanne Palmer Driving the Deep (sff)
Suzanne Palmer The Scavenger Door (sff)
Suzanne Palmer Ghostdrift (sff)
Terry Pratchett Where's My Cow (graphic novel)
Felix Salten & Jack Zipes (trans.) The Original Bambi (classic)
L.M. Sagas Cascade Failure (sff)
Jenny Schwartz The House That Walked Between Worlds (sff)
Jenny Schwartz House in Hiding (sff)
Jenny Schwartz The House That Fought (sff)
N.D. Stevenson Scarlet Morning (sff)
Rory Stewart Politics on the Edge (non-fiction)
Emily Tesh The Incandescent (sff)
Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples Saga #1 (graphic novel)
Scott Warren The Dragon's Banker (sff)
Sarah Wynn-Williams Careless People (non-fiction) As usual, I have already read and reviewed a whole bunch of these. More than I had expected, actually, given that I've not had a great reading year this year so far. I am, finally, almost caught up with reviews, with just one book read and not yet reviewed. And hopefully I'll have lots of time to read for the last month and a half of the year.

Review: Those Who Wait, by Haley Cass

Publisher:	Haley Cass
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	979-8-9884929-1-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	556

Those Who Wait is a stand-alone self-published sapphic romance novel. Given the lack of connection between political figures named in this book and our reality, it's also technically an alternate history, but it will be entirely unsatisfying to anyone who reads it in that genre. Sutton Spencer is an English grad student in New York City. As the story opens, she has recently realized that she's bisexual rather than straight. She certainly has not done anything about that revelation; the very thought makes her blush. Her friend and roommate Regan, not known for either her patience or her impulse control, decides to force the issue by stealing Sutton's phone, creating a profile on a lesbian dating app, and messaging the first woman Sutton admits being attracted to. Charlotte Thompson is a highly ambitious politician, current deputy mayor of New York City for health and human services, and granddaughter of the first female president of the United States. She fully intends to become president of the United States herself. The next step on that path is an open special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. With her family political connections and the firm support of the mayor of New York City (who is also dating her brother), she thinks she has an excellent shot of winning. Charlotte is also a lesbian, something she's known since she was a teenager and which still poses serious problems for a political career. She is therefore out to her family and a few close friends, but otherwise in the closet. Compared to her political ambitions, Charlotte considers her love life almost irrelevant, and therefore has a strict policy of limiting herself to anonymous one-night stands arranged on dating apps. Even that is about to become impossible given her upcoming campaign, but she indulges in one last glance at SapphicSpark before she deletes her account. Sutton is as far as possible from the sort of person who does one-night stands, which is a shame as far as Charlotte is concerned. It would have been a fun last night out. Despite that, both of them find the other unexpectedly enjoyable to chat with. (There are a lot of text message bubbles in this book.) This is when Sutton has her brilliant idea: Charlotte is charming, experienced, and also kind and understanding of Sutton's anxiety, at least in app messages. Maybe Charlotte can be her mentor? Tell her how to approach women, give her some guidance, point her in the right directions. Given the genre, you can guess how this (eventually) turns out. I'm going to say a lot of good things about this book, so let me get the complaints over with first. As you might guess from that introduction, Charlotte's political career and the danger of being outed are central to this story. This is a bit unfortunate because you should not, under any circumstances, attempt to think deeply about the politics in this book. In 550 pages, Charlotte does not mention or expound a single meaningful political position. You come away from this book as ignorant about what Charlotte wants to accomplish as a politician as you entered. Apparently she wants to be president because her grandmother was president and she thinks she'd be good at it. The closest the story comes to a position is something unbelievably vague about homeless services and Charlotte's internal assertion that she wants to help people and make real change. There are even transcripts of media interviews, later in the book, and they somehow manage to be more vacuous than US political talk shows, which is saying something. I also can't remember a single mention of fundraising anywhere in this book, which in US politics is absurd (although I will be generous and say this is due to Cass's alternate history). I assume this was a deliberate choice and Cass didn't want politics to distract from the romance, but as someone with a lot of opinions about concrete political issues, the resulting vague soft-liberal squishiness was actively off-putting. In an actual politician, this would be an entire clothesline of red flags. Thankfully, it's ignorable for the same reason; this is so obviously not the focus of the book that one can mostly perform the same sort of mental trick that one does when ignoring the backdrop in a cheap theater. My second complaint is that I don't know what Sutton does outside of the romance. Yes, she's an English grad student, and she does some grading and some vaguely-described work and is later referred to a prestigious internship, but this is as devoid of detail as Charlotte's political positions. It's not quite as jarring because Cass does eventually show Sutton helping concretely with her mother's work (about which I have some other issues that I won't get into), but it deprives Sutton of an opportunity to be visibly expert in something. The romance setup casts Charlotte as the experienced one to Sutton's naivete, and I think it would have been a better balance to give Sutton something concrete and tangible that she was clearly better at than Charlotte. Those complaints aside, I quite enjoyed this. It was a recommendation from the same BookTuber who recommended Delilah Green Doesn't Care, so her recommendations are quickly accumulating more weight. The chemistry between Sutton and Charlotte is quite believable; the dialogue sparkles, the descriptions of the subtle cues they pick up from each other are excellent, and it's just fun to read about how they navigate a whole lot of small (and sometimes large) misunderstandings and mismatches in personality and world view. Normally, misunderstandings are my least favorite part of a romance novel, but Sutton and Charlotte come from such different perspectives that their misunderstandings feel more justified than is typical. The characters are also fairly mature about working through them: Main characters who track the other character down and insist on talking when something happens they don't understand! Can you imagine! Only with the third-act breakup is the reader dragged through multiple chapters of both characters being miserable, and while I also usually hate third-act breakups, this one is so obviously coming and so clearly advertised from the initial setup that I couldn't really be mad. I did wish the payoff make-up scene at the end of the book had a bit more oomph, though; I thought Sutton's side of it didn't have quite the emotional catharsis that it could have had. I particularly enjoyed the reasons why the two characters fall in love, and how different they are. Charlotte is delighted by Sutton because she's awkward and shy but also straightforward and frequently surprisingly blunt, which fits perfectly with how much Charlotte is otherwise living in a world of polished politicians in constant control of their personas. Sutton's perspective is more physical, but the part I liked was the way that she treats Charlotte like a puzzle. Rather than trying to change how Charlotte expresses herself, she instead discovers that she's remarkably good at reading Charlotte if she trusts her instincts. There was something about Sutton's growing perceptiveness that I found quietly delightful. It's the sort of non-sexual intimacy that often gets lost among the big emotions in romance novels. The supporting cast was also great. Both characters have deep support networks of friends and family who are unambiguously on their side. Regan is pure chaos, and I would not be friends with her, but Cass shows her deep loyalty in a way that makes her dynamic with Sutton make sense. Both characters have thoughtful and loving families who support them but don't make decisions for them, which is a nice change of pace from the usually more mixed family situations of romance novel protagonists. There's a lot of emotional turbulence in the main relationship, and I think that only worked for me because of how rock-solid and kind the supporting cast is. This is, as you might guess from the title, a very slow burn, although the slow burn is for the emotional relationship rather than the physical one (for reasons that would be spoilers). As usual, I have no calibration for spiciness level, but I'd say that this was roughly on par with the later books in the Bright Falls series. If you know something about politics (or political history) and try to take that part of this book seriously, it will drive you to drink, but if you can put that aside and can deal with misunderstandings and emotional turmoil, this was both fun and satisfying. I liked both of the characters, I liked the timing of the alternating viewpoints, and I believed in the relationship and chemistry, as improbable and chaotic as some of the setup was. It's not the greatest thing I ever read, and I wish the ending was a smidgen stronger, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a few reading days. Recommended. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

Publisher:	Penguin Books
Copyright:	2023, 2025
Printing:	2025
ISBN:	979-8-217-06167-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	429

Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat, non-profit executive, member of Parliament, and cabinet minister. Politics on the Edge is a memoir of his time in the UK Parliament from 2019 to 2019 as a Tory (Conservative) representing the Penrith and The Border constituency in northern England. It ends with his failed run against Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. This book provoked many thoughts, only some of which are about the book. You may want to get a beverage; this review will be long. Since this is a memoir told in chronological order, a timeline may be useful. After Stewart's time as a regional governor in occupied Iraq (see The Prince of the Marshes), he moved to Kabul to found and run an NGO to preserve traditional Afghani arts and buildings (the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about which I know nothing except what Stewart wrote in this book). By his telling, he found that work deeply rewarding but thought the same politicians who turned Iraq into a mess were going to do the same to Afghanistan. He started looking for ways to influence the politics more directly, which led him first to Harvard and then to stand for Parliament. The bulk of this book covers Stewart's time as MP for Penrith and The Border. The choice of constituency struck me as symbolic of Stewart's entire career: He was not a resident and had no real connection to the district, which he chose for political reasons and because it was the nearest viable constituency to his actual home in Scotland. But once he decided to run, he moved to the district and seems sincerely earnest in his desire to understand it and become part of its community. After five years as a backbencher, he joined David Cameron's government in a minor role as Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. He then bounced through several minor cabinet positions (more on this later) before being elevated to Secretary of State for International Development under Theresa May. When May's government collapsed during the fight over the Brexit agreement, he launched a quixotic challenge to Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party. I have enjoyed Rory Stewart's writing ever since The Places in Between. This book is no exception. Whatever one's other feelings about Stewart's politics (about which I'll have a great deal more to say), he's a talented memoir writer with an understated and contemplative style and a deft ability to shift from concrete description to philosophical debate without bogging down a story. Politics on the Edge is compelling reading at the prose level. I spent several afternoons happily engrossed in this book and had great difficulty putting it down. I find Stewart intriguing since, despite being a political conservative, he's neither a neoliberal nor any part of the new right. He is instead an apparently-sincere throwback to a conservatism based on epistemic humility, a veneration of rural life and long-standing traditions, and a deep commitment to the concept of public service. Some of his principles are baffling to me, and I think some of his political views are obvious nonsense, but there were several things that struck me throughout this book that I found admirable and depressingly rare in politics. First, Stewart seems to learn from his mistakes. This goes beyond admitting when he was wrong and appears to include a willingness to rethink entire philosophical positions based on new experience.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein's. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy.

This quote comes from the beginning of this book and is a sentiment Stewart already expressed in The Prince of the Marshes, but he appears to have taken this so seriously that it becomes a theme of his political career. He not only realized how wrong he was on Iraq, he abandoned the entire neoliberal nation-building project without abandoning his belief in the moral obligation of international aid. And he, I think correctly, identified a key source of the error: an ignorant, condescending superiority that dismissed the importance of deep expertise.

Neither they, nor indeed any of the 12,000 peacekeepers and policemen who had been posted to South Sudan from sixty nations, had spent a single night in a rural house, or could complete a sentence in Dinka, Nuer, Azande or Bande. And the international development strategy written jointly between the donor nations resembled a fading mission statement found in a new space colony, whose occupants had all been killed in an alien attack.

Second, Stewart sincerely likes ordinary people. This shone through The Places in Between and recurs here in his descriptions of his constituents. He has a profound appreciation for individual people who have spent their life learning some trade or skill, expresses thoughtful and observant appreciation for aspects of local culture, and appears to deeply appreciate time spent around people from wildly different social classes and cultures than his own. Every successful politician can at least fake gregariousness, and perhaps that's all Stewart is doing, but there is something specific and attentive about his descriptions of other people, including long before he decided to enter politics, that makes me think it goes deeper than political savvy. Third, Stewart has a visceral hatred of incompetence. I think this is the strongest through-line of his politics in this book: Jobs in government are serious, important work; they should be done competently and well; and if one is not capable of doing that, one should not be in government. Stewart himself strikes me as an insecure overachiever: fiercely ambitious, self-critical, a bit of a micromanager (I suspect he would be difficult to work for), but holding himself to high standards and appalled when others do not do the same. This book is scathing towards multiple politicians, particularly Boris Johnson whom Stewart clearly despises, but no one comes off worse than Liz Truss.

David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn't reveal it.

And finally, Stewart has a deeply-held belief in state capacity and capability. He and I may disagree on the appropriate size and role of the government in society, but no one would be more disgusted by an intentional project to cripple government in order to shrink it than Stewart. One of his most-repeated criticisms of the UK political system in this book is the way the cabinet is formed. All ministers and secretaries come from members of Parliament and therefore branches of government are led by people with no relevant expertise. This is made worse by constant cabinet reshuffles that invalidate whatever small amounts of knowledge a minister was able to gain in nine months or a year in post. The center portion of this book records Stewart's time being shuffled from rural affairs to international development to Africa to prisons, with each move representing a complete reset of the political office and no transfer of knowledge whatsoever.

A month earlier, they had been anticipating every nuance of Minister Rogerson's diary, supporting him on shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no pretence of a handover no explanation of my predecessor's strategy, and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was Groundhog Day. Dan Rogerson was not a ghost haunting my office, he was an absence, whose former existence was suggested only by the black plastic comb.

After each reshuffle, Stewart writes of trying to absorb briefings, do research, and learn enough about his new responsibilities to have the hope of making good decisions, while growing increasingly frustrated with the system and the lack of interest by most of his colleagues in doing the same. He wants government programs to be successful and believes success requires expertise and careful management by the politicians, not only by the civil servants, a position that to me both feels obviously correct and entirely at odds with politics as currently practiced. I found this a fascinating book to read during the accelerating collapse of neoliberalism in the US and, to judge by current polling results, the UK. I have a theory that the political press are so devoted to a simplistic left-right political axis based on seating arrangements during the French Revolution that they are missing a significant minority whose primary political motivation is contempt for arrogant incompetence. They could be convinced to vote for Sanders or Trump, for Polanski or Farage, but will never vote for Biden, Starmer, Romney, or Sunak. Such voters are incomprehensible to those who closely follow and debate policies because their hostile reaction to the center is not about policies. It's about lack of trust and a nebulous desire for justice. They've been promised technocratic competence and the invisible hand of market forces for most of their lives, and all of it looks like lies. Everyday living is more precarious, more frustrating, more abusive and dehumanizing, and more anxious, despite (or because of) this wholehearted embrace of economic "freedom." They're sick of every complaint about the increasing difficulty of life being met with accusations about their ability and work ethic, and of being forced to endure another round of austerity by people who then catch a helicopter ride to a party on some billionaire's yacht. Some of this is inherent in the deep structural weaknesses in neoliberal ideology, but this is worse than an ideological failure. The degree to which neoliberalism started as a project of sincere political thinkers is arguable, but that is clearly not true today. The elite class in politics and business is now thoroughly captured by people whose primary skill is the marginal manipulation of complex systems for their own power and benefit. They are less libertarian ideologues than narcissistic mediocrities. We are governed by management consultants. They are firmly convinced their organizational expertise is universal, and consider the specific business of the company, or government department, irrelevant. Given that context, I found Stewart's instinctive revulsion towards David Cameron quite revealing. Stewart, later in the book, tries to give Cameron some credit by citing several policy accomplishments and comparing him favorably to Boris Johnson (which, true, is a bar Cameron probably flops over). But I think Stewart's baffled astonishment at Cameron's vapidity says a great deal about how we have ended up where we are. This last quote is long, but I think it provides a good feel for Stewart's argument in this book.

But Cameron, who was rumoured to be sceptical about nation-building projects, only nodded, and then looking confidently up and down the table said, "Well, at least we all agree on one extremely straightforward and simple point, which is that our troops are doing very difficult and important work and we should all support them." It was an odd statement to make to civilians running humanitarian operations on the ground. I felt I should speak. "No, with respect, we do not agree with that. Insofar as we have focused on the troops, we have just been explaining that what the troops are doing is often futile, and in many cases making things worse." Two small red dots appeared on his cheeks. Then his face formed back into a smile. He thanked us, told us he was out of time, shook all our hands, and left the room. Later, I saw him repeat the same line in interviews: "the purpose of this visit is straightforward... it is to show support for what our troops are doing in Afghanistan". The line had been written, in London, I assumed, and tested on focus groups. But he wanted to convince himself it was also a position of principle. "David has decided," one of his aides explained, when I met him later, "that one cannot criticise a war when there are troops on the ground." "Why?" "Well... we have had that debate. But he feels it is a principle of British government." "But Churchill criticised the conduct of the Boer War; Pitt the war with America. Why can't he criticise wars?" "British soldiers are losing their lives in this war, and we can't suggest they have died in vain." "But more will die, if no one speaks up..." "It is a principle thing. And he has made his decision. For him and the party." "Does this apply to Iraq too?" "Yes. Again he understands what you are saying, but he voted to support the Iraq War, and troops are on the ground." "But surely he can say he's changed his mind?" The aide didn't answer, but instead concentrated on his food. "It is so difficult," he resumed, "to get any coverage of our trip." He paused again. "If David writes a column about Afghanistan, we will struggle to get it published." "But what would he say in an article anyway?" I asked. "We can talk about that later. But how do you get your articles on Afghanistan published?" I remembered how the US politicians and officials had shown their mastery of strategy and detail. I remembered the earnestness of Gordon Brown when I had briefed him on Iraq. Cameron seemed somehow less serious. I wrote as much in a column in the New York Times, saying that I was afraid the party of Churchill was becoming the party of Bertie Wooster.

I don't know Stewart's reputation in Britain, or in the constituency that he represented. I know he's been accused of being a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and to some extent this is probably true. It's hard to find an ambitious politician who does not have that instinct. But whatever Stewart's flaws, he can, at least, defend his politics with more substance than a corporate motto. One gets the impression that he would respond favorably to demonstrated competence linked to a careful argument, even if he disagreed. Perhaps this is an illusion created by his writing, but even if so, it's a step in the right direction. When people become angry enough at a failing status quo, any option that promises radical change and punishment for the current incompetents will sound appealing. The default collapse is towards demagogues who are skilled at expressing anger and disgust and are willing to promise simple cures because they are indifferent to honesty. Much of the political establishment in the US, and possibly (to the small degree that I can analyze it from an occasional news article) in the UK, can identify the peril of the demagogue, but they have no solution other than a return to "politics as usual," represented by the amoral mediocrity of a McKinsey consultant. The rare politicians who seem to believe in something, who will argue for personal expertise and humility, who are disgusted by incompetence and have no patience for facile platitudes, are a breath of fresh air. There are a lot of policies on which Stewart and I would disagree, and perhaps some of his apparent humility is an affectation from the rhetorical world of the 1800s that he clearly wishes he were inhabiting, but he gives the strong impression of someone who would shoulder a responsibility and attempt to execute it with competence and attention to detail. He views government as a job, where coworkers should cooperate to achieve defined goals, rather than a reality TV show. The arc of this book, like the arc of current politics, is the victory of the reality TV show over the workplace, and the story of Stewart's run against Boris Johnson is hard reading because of it, but there's a portrayal here of a different attitude towards politics that I found deeply rewarding. If you liked Stewart's previous work, or if you want an inside look at parliamentary politics, highly recommended. I will be thinking about this book for a long time. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Publisher:	Fairwood Press
Copyright:	July 2025
ISBN:	1-958880-27-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	472

Space Trucker Jess is a stand-alone far-future space fantasy novel. Jess is a sixteen-year-old mechanic working grey-market jobs on Chadeisson Station with a couple of younger kids. She's there because her charming and utterly unreliable father got caught running a crypto scam and is sitting in detention. This was only the latest in a long series of scams, con jobs, and misadventures she's been dragged through since her mother disappeared without a word. Jess is cynical, world-weary, and infuriated by her own sputtering loyalty to her good-for-nothing dad. What Jess wants most in the universe is to own a CCM 6454 Spark Megahauler, the absolute best cargo ship in the universe according to Jess. She should know; she's worked on nearly every type of ship in existence. With her own ship, she could make a living hauling cargo, repairing her own ship, and going anywhere she wants, free of her father and his endless schemes. (A romantic relationship with her friend Leurie would be a nice bonus.) Then her father is taken off the station on a ship leaving the galactic plane, no one will tell her why, and all the records of the ship appear to have been erased. Jess thinks her father is an asshole, but that doesn't mean she can sit idly by when he disappears. That's how she ends up getting in serious trouble with station security due to some risky in-person sleuthing, followed by an expensive flight off the station with a dodgy guy and a kid in a stolen spaceship. The setup for this book was so great. Kressel felt the need to make up a futuristic slang for Jess and her friends to speak, which rarely works as well as the author expects and does not work here, but apart from that I was hooked. Jess is sarcastic, blustery, and a bit of a con artist herself, but with the idealistic sincerity of someone who knows that her life is been kind of broken and understands the value of friends. She's profoundly cynical in the heartbreakingly defensive way of a sixteen-year-old with a rough life. I have a soft spot in my heart for working-class science fiction (there isn't nearly enough of it), and there are few things I enjoy more than reading about the kind of protagonist who has Opinions about starship models and a dislike of shoddy work. I think this is the only book I've bought solely on the basis of one of the Big Idea blog posts John Scalzi hosts. I really wish this book had stuck with the setup instead of morphing into a weird drug-enabled mystical space fantasy, to which Jess's family is bizarrely central. SPOILERS below because I can't figure out how to rant about what annoyed me without them. Search for the next occurrence of spoilers to skip past them. There are three places where this book lost me. The first was when Jess, after agreeing to help another kid find his father, ends up on a world obsessed with a religious cult involving using hallucinatory drugs to commune with alien gods. Jess immediately flags this as unbelievable bullshit and I was enjoying her well-founded cynicism until Kressel pulls the rug out from under both Jess and the reader by establishing that this new-age claptrap is essentially true. Kressel does try to put a bit of a science fiction gloss on it, but sadly I think that effort was unsuccessful. Sometimes absurdly powerful advanced aliens with near-telepathic powers are part of the fun of a good space opera, but I want the author to make an effort to connect the aliens to plausibility or, failing that, at least avoid sounding indistinguishable from psychic self-help grifters or religious fantasy about spiritual warfare. Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 failed on the first part but at least held the second line. Kressel gets depressingly close to Seth territory, although at least Jess is allowed to retain some cynicism about motives. The second, related problem is that Jess ends up being a sort of Chosen One, which I found intensely annoying. This may be a fault of reader expectations more than authorial skill, but one of the things I like to see in working-class science fiction is for the protagonist to not be absurdly central to the future of the galaxy, or to at least force themselves into that position through their own ethics and hard work. This book turns into a sort of quest story with epic fantasy stakes, which I thought was much less interesting than the story the start of the book promised and which made Jess a less interesting character. Finally, this is one of those books where Jess's family troubles and the plot she stumbles across turn into the same plot. Space Trucker Jess is far from alone in having that plot structure, and that's the problem. I'm not universally opposed to this story shape, but Jess felt like the wrong character for it. She starts the story with a lot of self-awareness about how messed up her family dynamics were, and I was rooting for her to find some space to construct her own identity separate from her family. To have her family turn out to be central not only to this story but to the entire galaxy felt like it undermined that human core of the story, although I admit it's a good analogy to the type of drama escalation that dysfunctional families throw at anyone attempting to separate from them. Spoilers end here. I rather enjoyed the first third of this book, despite being a bit annoyed at the constructed slang, and then started rolling my eyes and muttering things about the story going off the rails. Jess is a compelling enough character (and I'm stubborn enough) that I did finish the book, so I can say that I liked the very end. Kressel does finally arrive at the sort of story that I wanted to read all along. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the path he took to get there. I think much of my problem was that I wanted Jess to be a more defiant character earlier in the novel, and I wanted her family problems to influence her character growth but not be central to her story. Both of these may be matters of opinion and an artifact of coming into the book with the wrong assumptions. If you are interested in a flawed and backsliding effort to untangle one's identity from a dysfunctional family and don't mind some barely-SF space mysticism and chosen one vibes, it's possible this book will click with you. It's not one that I can recommend, though. I still want the book that I hoped I was getting from that Big Idea piece. Rating: 4 out of 10

Review: Echoes of the Imperium, by Nicholas & Olivia Atwater

Series:	Tales of the Iron Rose #1
Publisher:	Starwatch Press
Copyright:	2024
ISBN:	1-998257-04-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	547

Echoes of the Imperium is a steampunk fantasy adventure novel, the first of a projected series. There is another novella in the series, A Matter of Execution, that takes place chronologically before this novel, but which I am told that you should read afterwards. (I have not yet read it.) If Olivia Atwater's name sounds familiar, it's probably for the romantic fantasy Half a Soul. Nicholas Atwater is her husband. William Blair, a goblin, was a child sailor on the airship HMS Caliban during the final battle that ended the Imperium, and an eyewitness to the destruction of the capital. Like every imperial solider, that loss made him an Oathbreaker; the fae Oath that he swore to defend the Imperium did not care that nothing a twelve-year-old boy could have done would have changed the result of the battle. He failed to kill himself with most of the rest of the crew, and thus was taken captive by the Coalition. Twenty years later, William Blair is the goblin captain of the airship Iron Rose. It's an independent transport ship that takes various somewhat-dodgy contracts and has to avoid or fight through pirates. The crew comes from both sides of the war and has built their own working truce. Blair himself is a somewhat manic but earnest captain who doesn't entirely believe he deserves that role, one who tends more towards wildly risky plans and improvisation than considered and sober decisions. The rest of the crew are the sort of wild mix of larger-than-life personality quirks that populate swashbuckling adventure books but leave me dubious that stuffing that many high-maintenance people into one ship would go as well as it does. I did appreciate the gunnery knitting circle, though. Echoes of the Imperium is told in the first person from Blair's perspective in two timelines. One follows Blair in the immediate aftermath of the war, tracing his path to becoming an airship captain and meeting some of the people who will later be part of his crew. The other is the current timeline, in which Blair gets deeper and deeper into danger by accepting a risky contract with unexpected complications. Neither of these timelines are in any great hurry to arrive at some destination, and that's the largest problem with this book. Echoes of the Imperium is long, sprawling, and unwilling to get anywhere near any sort of a point until the reader is deeply familiar with the horrific aftermath of the war, the mountains guilt and trauma many of the characters carry around, and Blair's impostor syndrome and feelings of inadequacy. For the first half of this book, I was so bored. I almost bailed out; only a few flashes of interesting character interactions and hints of world-building helped me drag myself through all of the tedious setup. What saves this book is that the world-building is a delight. Once the characters finally started engaging with it in earnest, I could not put it down. Present-time Blair is no longer an Oathbreaker because he was forgiven by a fairy; this will become important later. The sites of great battles are haunted by ghostly echoes of the last moments of the lives of those who died (hence the title); this will become very important later. Blair has a policy of asking no questions about people's pasts if they're willing to commit to working with the rest of the crew; this, also, will become important later. All of these tidbits the authors drop into the story and then ignore for hundreds of pages do have a payoff if you're willing to wait for it. As the reader (too) slowly discovers, the Atwaters' world is set in a war of containment by light fae against dark fae. Instead of being inscrutable and separate, the fae use humans and human empires as tools in that war. The fallen Imperium was a bastion of fae defense, and the war that led to the fall of that Imperium was triggered by the price its citizens paid for that defense, one that the fae could not possibly care less about. The creatures may be out of epic fantasy and the technology from the imagined future of Victorian steampunk, but the politics are that of the Cold War and containment strategies. This book has a lot to say about colonialism and empire, but it says those things subtly and from a fantasy slant, in a world with magical Oaths and direct contact with powers that are both far beyond the capabilities of the main characters and woefully deficient in in humanity and empathy. It has a bit of the feel of Greek mythology if the gods believed in an icy realpolitik rather than embodying the excesses of human emotion. The second half of this book was fantastic. The found-family vibe among a crew of high-maintenance misfits that completely failed to cohere for me in the first half of the book, while Blair was wallowing in his feelings and none of the events seemed to matter, came together brilliantly as soon as the crew had a real problem and some meaty world-building and plot to sink their teeth into. There is a delightfully competent teenager, some satisfying competence porn that Blair finally stops undermining, and a sharp political conflict that felt emotionally satisfying, if perhaps not that intellectually profound. In short, it turns into the fun, adventurous romp of larger-than-life characters that the setting promises. Even the somewhat predictable mid-book reveal worked for me, in part because the emotions of the characters around that reveal sold its impact. If you're going to write a book with a bad half and a good half, it's always better to put the good half second. I came away with very positive feelings about Echoes of the Imperium and a tentative willingness to watch for the sequel. (It reaches a fairly satisfying conclusion, but there are a lot of unresolved plot hooks.) I'm a bit hesitant to recommend it, though, because the first half was not very fun. I want to say that about 75% of the first half of the book could have been cut and the book would have been stronger for it. I'm not completely sure I'm right, since the Atwaters were laying the groundwork for a lot of payoff, but I wish that groundwork hadn't been as much of a slog. Tentatively recommended, particularly if you're in the mood for steampunk fae mythology, but know that this book requires some investment. Technically, A Matter of Execution comes first, but I plan to read it as a sequel. Rating: 8 out of 10

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. Python team forky is open! As a result I m starting to think about the upcoming Python 3.14. At some point we ll doubtless do a full test rebuild, but in advance of that I concluded that one of the most useful things I could do would be to work on our very long list of packages with new upstream versions. Of course there s no real chance of this ever becoming empty since upstream maintainers aren t going to stop work for that long, but there are a lot of packages there where we re quite a long way out of date, and many of those include fixes that we ll need for 3.14, either directly or by fixing interactions with new versions of other packages that in turn will need to be fixed. We can backport changes when we need to, but more often than not the most efficient way to do things is just to keep up to date. So, I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions (deep breath):

• aioftp
• aiosignal (building on work by IanLucca)
• audioop-lts
• celery
• djangorestframework
• djoser
• fpylll
• frozenlist
• git-repo-updater
• ipykernel
• klepto
• kombu
• multipart
• netmiko (sponsoring work by Eduardo Silva; contributed supporting fix upstream)
• pathos
• ppft
• pydantic
• pydantic-core
• pydantic-settings
• pylsqpack
• pymssql
• pytest-mock
• pytest-pretty
• pytest-repeat
• pytest-rerunfailures
• python-a2wsgi
• python-apptools (sponsoring work by Kathlyn Lara Murussi)
• python-asgiref
• python-asyncssh
• python-bitarray
• python-bitstring
• python-bytecode
• python-channels-redis
• python-charset-normalizer
• python-daphne
• python-django-analytical
• python-django-guid
• python-django-health-check
• python-django-pgbulk
• python-django-pgtrigger
• python-django-postgres-extra
• python-django-storages
• python-holidays
• python-httpx-sse
• python-icalendar
• python-lazy-model
• python-line-profiler
• python-lz4
• python-marshmallow-dataclass
• python-mastodon
• python-model-bakery
• python-oauthlib
• python-parse-type
• python-pathvalidate
• python-pgspecial
• python-processview
• python-pytest-subtests
• python-roman
• python-semantic-release
• python-testfixtures
• python-time-machine
• python-tokenize-rt
• python-typeguard
• python-typing-extensions
• python-urllib3
• pyupgrade
• requests (fixing CVE-2024-47081)
• responses
• zope.deferredimport
• zope.schema
• zope.testrunner

That s only about 10% of the backlog, but of course others are working on this too. If we can keep this up for a while then it should help. I packaged pytest-run-parallel, pytest-unmagic (still in NEW), and python-forbiddenfruit (still in NEW), all needed as new dependencies of various other packages. setuptools upstream will be removing the setup.py install command on 31 October. While this may not trickle down immediately into Debian, it does mean that in the near future nearly all Python packages will have to use pybuild-plugin-pyproject (note that this does not mean that they necessarily have to use pyproject.toml; this is just a question of how the packaging runs the build system). We talked about this a bit at DebConf, and I said that I d noticed a number of packages where this isn t straightforward and promised to write up some notes. I wrote the Python/PybuildPluginPyproject wiki page for this; I expect to add more bits and pieces to it as I find them. On that note, I converted several packages to pybuild-plugin-pyproject:

• billiard
• lazr.config
• python-timeline
• zope.sqlalchemy
• zope.testing

I fixed several build/test failures:

• aiosmtplib
• blinker
• ipykernel
• ipyparallel
• quart

I fixed some other bugs:

• austin: binutils now has a libsframe-dev package, please add an explicit build dependency
• python-django-pgbulk: Missing dependency on python3-typing-extensions (contributed upstream)
• python-maturin: Upcoming rust-which update

I reviewed Debian defaults: nftables as banaction and systemd as backend, but it looked as though nothing actually needed to be changed so we closed this with no action. Rust team Upgrading Pydantic was complicated, and required a rust-pyo3 transition (which Jelmer Vernoo started and Peter Michael Green has mostly been driving, thankfully), packaging rust-malloc-size-of (including an upstream portability fix), and upgrading several packages to new upstream versions:

• rust-serde
• rust-serde-derive
• rust-serde-json
• rust-smallvec
• rust-speedate
• rust-time
• rust-time-core
• rust-time-macros

bugs.debian.org I fixed bugs.debian.org: misspelled checkbox id uselessmesages , as well as a bug that caused incoming emails with certain header contents to go missing. OpenSSH I fixed openssh-server: refuses further connections after having handled PerSourceMaxStartups connections with a cherry-pick from upstream. Other bits and pieces I upgraded libfido2 to a new upstream version. I fixed mimalloc: FTBFS on armhf: cc1: error: -mfloat-abi=hard : selected architecture lacks an FPU, which was blocking changes to pendulum in the Python team. I also spent some time helping to investigate libmimalloc3: Illegal instruction Running mtxrun generate, though that bug is still open. I fixed various autopkgtest bugs in gssproxy, prompted by #1007 in Debusine. Since my old team is decommissioning Bazaar/Breezy code hosting in Launchpad (the end of an era, which I have distinctly mixed feelings about), I converted Storm to git.

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for The comedy of computation, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love obsolescence , a book published in Stanford University Press

The Comedy of Computation is not an easy book to review. It is a much enjoyable book that analyzes several examples of how being computational has been approached across literary genres in the last century how authors of stories, novels, theatrical plays and movies, focusing on comedic genres, have understood the role of the computer in defining human relations, reactions and even self-image. Mangrum structures his work in six thematic chapters, where he presents different angles on human society: How have racial stereotypes advanced in human imagination and perception about a future where we interact with mechanical or computational partners (from mechanical tools performing jobs that were identified with racial profiles to intelligent robots that threaten to control society); the genericity of computers and people can be seen as generic, interchangeable characters, often fueled by the tendency people exhibit to confer anthropomorphic qualities to inanimate objects; people s desire to be seen as truly authentic , regardless of what it ultimately means; romantic involvement and romance-led stories (with the computer seen as a facilitator for human-to-human romances, distractor away from them, or being itself a part of the couple); and the absurdity in antropomorphization, in comparing fundamentally different aspects such as intelligence and speed at solving mathematical operations, as well as the absurdity presented blatantly as such by several techno-utopian visions. But presenting this as a linear set of concepts that are presented does not do justice to the book. Throughout the sections of each chapter, a different work serves as the axis Novels and stories, Hollywood movies, Broadway plays, some covers for the Time magazine, a couple of presenting the would-be future, even a romantic comedy entirely written by bots . And for each of them, Benjamin Mangrum presents a very thorough analysis, drawing relations and comparing with contemporary works, but also with Shakespeare, classical Greek myths, and a very long etc tera. This book is hard to review because of the depth of work the author did: Reading it repeatedly made me look for other works, or at least longer references for them. Still, despite being a work with such erudition, Mangrum s text is easy and pleasant to read, without feeling heavy or written in an overly academic style. I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is certainly not a technical book about computers and society in any way; it is an exploration of human creativity and our understanding of the aspects the author has found as central to understanding the impact of computing on humankind. However, there is one point I must mention before closing: I believe the editorial decision to present the work as a running text, with all the material conceptualized as footnotes presented as a separate, over 50 page long final chapter, detracts from the final result. Personally, I enjoy reading the footnotes because they reveal the author s thought processes, even if they stray from the central line of thought. Even more, given my review copy was a PDF, I could not even keep said chapter open with one finger, bouncing back and forth. For all purposes, I missed out on the notes; now that I finished reading and stumbled upon that chapter, I know I missed an important part of the enjoyment.

23 years ago I was in a bad place. I'd quit my first attempt at a PhD for various reasons that were, with hindsight, bad, and I was suddenly entirely aimless. I lucked into picking up a sysadmin role back at TCM where I'd spent a summer a year before, but that's not really what I wanted in my life. And then Hanna mentioned that her PhD supervisor was looking for someone familiar with Linux to work on making Dasher, one of the group's research projects, more usable on Linux. I jumped.

The timing was fortuitous. Sun were pumping money and developer effort into accessibility support, and the Inference Group had just received a grant from the Gatsy Foundation that involved working with the ACE Centre to provide additional accessibility support. And I was suddenly hacking on code that was largely ignored by most developers, supporting use cases that were irrelevant to most developers. Being in a relatively green field space sounds refreshing, until you realise that you're catering to actual humans who are potentially going to rely on your software to be able to communicate. That's somewhat focusing.

This was, uh, something of an on the job learning experience. I had to catch up with a lot of new technologies very quickly, but that wasn't the hard bit - what was difficult was realising I had to cater to people who were dealing with use cases that I had no experience of whatsoever. Dasher was extended to allow text entry into applications without needing to cut and paste. We added support for introspection of the current applications UI so menus could be exposed via the Dasher interface, allowing people to fly through menu hierarchies and pop open file dialogs. Text-to-speech was incorporated so people could rapidly enter sentences and have them spoke out loud.

But what sticks with me isn't the tech, or even the opportunities it gave me to meet other people working on the Linux desktop and forge friendships that still exist. It was the cases where I had the opportunity to work with people who could use Dasher as a tool to increase their ability to communicate with the outside world, whose lives were transformed for the better because of what we'd produced. Watching someone use your code and realising that you could write a three line patch that had a significant impact on the speed they could talk to other people is an incomparable experience. It's been decades and in many ways that was the most impact I've ever had as a developer.

I left after a year to work on fruitflies and get my PhD, and my career since then hasn't involved a lot of accessibility work. But it's stuck with me - every improvement in that space is something that has a direct impact on the quality of life of more people than you expect, but is also something that goes almost unrecognised. The people working on accessibility are heroes. They're making all the technology everyone else produces available to people who would otherwise be blocked from it. They deserve recognition, and they deserve a lot more support than they have.

But when we deal with technology, we deal with transitions. A lot of the Linux accessibility support depended on X11 behaviour that is now widely regarded as a set of misfeatures. It's not actually good to be able to inject arbitrary input into an arbitrary window, and it's not good to be able to arbitrarily scrape out its contents. X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet. We're seeing that happen now, though - Gnome has been performing a great deal of work in this respect, and KDE is picking that up as well. There isn't a full correspondence between X11-based Linux accessibility support and Wayland, but for many users the Wayland accessibility infrastructure is already better than with X11.

That's going to continue improving, and it'll improve faster with broader support. We've somehow ended up with the bizarre politicisation of Wayland as being some sort of woke thing while X11 represents the Roman Empire or some such bullshit, but the reality is that there is no story for improving accessibility support under X11 and sticking to X11 is going to end up reducing the accessibility of a platform.

When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.

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I have been a very happy user of my two SK-8845 keyboards (one at my office, one at home) since I bought them, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. What are they, mind you? ) The beautiful keyboard every Thinkpad owner knows and loves. And although I no longer use my X230 laptop that was my workhorse for several years, my fingers are spoiled. So, both shift keys of my home keyboard have been getting flaky, and I am basically sure it s a failure in the controller, as it does not feel to be physical. It s time to revisit that seven year old post where I found the SK-8845. This time, I decided to try my luck with something different. As a Emacs user, everybody knows we ought to be happy with more and more keys. In fact, I suppose many international people are now familiar with El Eternauta, true? we Emacs users would be the natural ambassadors to deal with the hand species: So it kind-of sort-of made sense, when I saw a Toshiba-IBM keyboard being sold for quite cheap (MX$400, just over US$20) to try my luck with it: This is quite an odd piece of hardware, built in 2013 according to its label. At first I was unsure whether to buy it because of the weird interface it had, but the vendor replied they would ship a (very long!) USB cable with it, so As expected, connecting it to Linux led to a swift, errorless recognition: Within minutes of receiving the hardware, I had it hooked up and started looking at the events it generated However the romance soon started to wane. Some of the reasons:

• We cannot forget it is a Piece of Shit Point Of Sale keyboard. It is not intended to be a creative interface. So, the keys are ~75% the size of regular keys. My fingers have a hard time getting used to it, I keep hitting wrong keys. I know I am holding it wrong and my muscle memory can be retrained (and I was very happy when I had the tiny 9 Acer Aspire One) but still, it is not pleasant.
• I exclusively use keyboards with a trackpad (as those found in most laptops) because I found that constantly moving my hand to the mouse and back produced me back ache. Within an hour of typing in this keyboard, the old back ache I was happy not to ever have again came back to me.
• The pointer device has a left and a right button, but neither middle nor scroll buttons. I could generate middle clicks by setting middle emulation enabled, but the buttons are separated it requires clicking with both thumbs, which is unelegant, to say the least. I remapped some of the spare keys to be mouse buttons 1 5, and it worked for middle click, but not for scroll events. Maybe I could tweak it a bit more but I didn t in the end.

Anyway I m returning it I found an SK-8845 for sale in China for just MX$1814 (~US$90), and jumped for it They are getting scarce! Nowadays it s getting more common (and cheaper) to find the newer style Thinkpad keyboards, but without a trackpad I don t think I should stockpile on keyboards, but no, I m not doing that Anyway, so I m sticking to a Thinkpad keyboard, third in a row.

Toolboxes and Hammers Be YouEveryone has a story. We all started from somewhere, and we re all going somewhere.Ten years ago this summer, I first heard of Ubuntu. It took me time to learn how to properly pronounce the word, although I m glad I learned that early on. I was less fortunate when it came to the pronunciation of the acronym for the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. I had spent time and time again breaking my computer, and I d wanted to start fresh.I ve actually talked about this in an interview before, which you can find here (skip to 5:02 6:12 for my short explanation, I m in orange):https://medium.com/media/ad59becdbd06d230b875fb1512df1921/hrefI ve also done a few interviews over the years, here are some of the more recent ones:https://medium.com/media/83bda448d5f2a979f848e17f04376aa6/hrefAsk Noah Show 377Lastly, I did a few talks at SCaLE 21x (which the Ubuntu community donation funds helped me attend, thank you for that!):https://medium.com/media/0fbde7ef0ed83c2272a8653a5ea38b67/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/4d18f1770dc7eed6c7a9d711ff6a6e89/hrefMy story is fairly simple to summarize, if you don t have the time to go through all the clips.I started in the Ubuntu project at 13 years old, as a middle school student living in Green Bay, WI. I m now 23 years old, still living in Green Bay, but I became an Ubuntu Core Developer, Lubuntu s Release Manager, and worked up to a very great and comfortable spot.So, Simon, what advice would you give to someone at 13 who wants to do the same thing? Here are a few tips * Don t be afraid to be yourself. If you put on a mask, it hinders your growth, and you ll end up paying for it later anyway.
* Find a mentor. Someone who is okay working with someone your age, and ideally someone who works well with people your age (quick shoutout to Aaron Prisk and Walter Lapchynski for always being awesome to me and other folks starting out at high school.) This is probably the most important part.
* Ask questions. Tons of them. Ask questions until you re blue in the face. Ask questions until you get a headache so bad that your weekend needs to come early. Okay, maybe don t go that far, but at the very least, always stay curious.
* Own up to your mistakes. Even the most experienced people you know have made tons of mistakes. It s not about the mistake itself, it s about how you handle it and grow as a person.Now, after ten years, I ve seen many people come and go in Ubuntu. I was around for the transition from upstart to systemd. I was around for the transition from Unity to GNOME. I watched Kubuntu as a flavor recover from the arguments only a few years before I first started, only to jump in and help years later when the project started to trend downwards again.I have deep love, respect, and admiration for Ubuntu and its community. I also have deep love, respect, and admiration for Canonical as a company. It s all valuable work. That being said, I need to recognize where my own limits are, and it s not what you d think. This isn t some big burnout rant.Some of you may have heard rumors about an argument between me and the Ubuntu Community Council. I refuse to go into the private details of that, but what I ll tell you is this in retrospect, it was in good faith. The entire thing, from both my end and theirs, was to try to either help me as a person, or the entire community. If you think any part of this was bad faith from either side, you re fooling yourself. Plus, tons of great work and stories actually came out of this.The Ubuntu Community Council really does care. And so does Mark Shuttleworth.Now, I won t go into many specifics. If you want specifics, I d direct you to the Ubuntu Community Council who would be more than happy to answer any questions (actually they d probably stay silent. Nevermind.) That being said, I can t really talk about any of this without mentioning how great Mark has become.Remember, I was around for a few different major changes within the project. I ve heard and seen stories about Mark that actually match what Reddit says about him. But in 2025, out of the bottom of my heart, I m here to tell you that you re all wrong now.See, Mark didn t just side with somebody and be done with it. He actually listened, and I could tell, he cares very very deeply. I really enjoyed reading ogra s recent blog post, you should seriously check it out. Of course, I m only 23 years old, but I have to say, my experiences with Mark match that too.Now, as for what happens from here. I m taking a year off from Ubuntu. I talked this over with a wide variety of people, and I think it s the right decision. People who know me personally know that I m not one to make a major decision like this without a very good reason to. Well, I d like to share my reasons with you, because I think they d help.People who contribute time to open source find it to be very rewarding. Sometimes so rewarding, in fact, that no matter how many economics and finance books they read, they still haven t figured out how to balance that with a job that pays money. I m sure everyone deeply involved in this space has had the urge to quit their job at least once or twice to pursue their passions.Here s the other element too I ve had a handful of romantic relationships before, and they ve never really panned out. I found the woman that I truly believe I m going to marry. Is it going to be a rough road ahead of us? Absolutely, and to be totally honest, there is still a (small, at this point) chance it doesn t work out.That being said I remain optimistic. I m not taking a year off because I m in some kind of trouble. I haven t burned any bridge here except for one.You know who you are. You need help. I d be happy to reconnect with you once you realize that it s not okay to do what you did. An apology letter is all I want. I don t want Mutually Assured Destruction, I don t want to sit and battle on this for years on end. Seriously dude, just back off. Please.I hate having to take out the large hammer. But sometimes, you just have to do it. I ve quite enjoyed Louis Rossmann s (very not-safe-for-work) videos on BwE.https://medium.com/media/ab64411c41e65317f271058f56bb2aba/hrefI genuinely enjoy being nice to people. I want to see everyone be successful and happy, in that order (but with both being very important). I m not perfect, I m a 23-year-old who just happened to stumble into this space at the right time.To this specific person only, I tell you, please, let me go take my year off in peace. I don t wish you harm, and I won t make anything public, including your name, if you just back off.Whew. Okay. Time to be happy again.Again, I want to see people succeed. That goes for anyone in Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Canonical, you name it. I m going to remain detached from Ubuntu for at least a year. If circumstances change, or if I feel the timing just isn t right, I ll wait longer. My point is, I ll be back, the when of it will just never be public before it happens.In the meantime, you re welcome to reach out to me. It ll take me some time to bootstrap things, more than I originally thought, but I m hoping it ll be quick. After all, I ve had practice.I m also going to continue writing. About what? I don t know yet.But, I ll just keep writing. I want to share all of the useful tips I ve learned over the years. If you actually liked this post, or if you ve enjoyed my work in the Ubuntu project, please do subscribe to my personal blog, which will be here on Medium (unless someone can give me an open source alternative with a funding model). This being said, while I d absolutely take any donations people would like to provide, at the end of the day, I don t do this for the money. I do this for the people just like me, out of love.So you, just like me, can make your dreams happen.Don t give up, it ll come. Just be patient with yourself.As for me, I have business to attend to. What business is that, exactly? Read Walden, and you ll find out.I wish you all well, even the person I called out. I sincerely hope you find what you re looking for in life. It takes time. Sometimes you have to listen to some music to pass the time, so I created a conceptual mixtape if you want to listen to some of the same music as me.I ll do another blog post soon, don t worry.Be well. Much, much more to come.

Review: Beyond Pain, by Kit Rocha

Series:	Beyond #3
Publisher:	Kit Rocha
Copyright:	December 2013
ASIN:	B00GIA4GN8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	328

Beyond Pain is a science fiction dystopian erotic romance novel and a direct sequel to Beyond Control. Following the romance series convention, each book features new protagonists who were supporting characters in the previous book. You could probably start here if you wanted, but there are significant spoilers here for earlier books in the series. I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for. Six has had a brutally hard life. She was rescued from an awful situation in a previous book and is now lurking around the edges of the Sector Four gang, oddly fascinated (as are we all) with their constant sexuality and trying to decide if she wants to, and can, be part of their world. Bren is one of the few people she lets get close: a huge bruiser who likes cage fights and pain but treats Six with a protective, careful respect that she finds comforting. This book is the story of Six and Bren getting to the bottom of each other's psychological hangups while the O'Kanes start taking over Six's former sector. Yes, as threatened, I read another entry in the dystopian erotica series because I keep wondering how these people will fuck their way into a revolution. This is not happening very quickly, but it seems obvious that is the direction the series is going. It's been a while since I've reviewed one of these, so here's another variation of the massive disclaimer: I think erotica is harder to review than any other genre because what people like is so intensely personal and individual. This is not even an attempt at an erotica review. I'm both wholly unqualified and also less interested in that part of the book, which should lead you to question my reading choices since that's a good half of the book. Rather, I'm reading these somewhat for the plot and mostly for the vibes. This is not the most competent collection of individuals, and to the extent that they are, it's mostly because the men (who are, as a rule, charismatic but rather dim) are willing to listen to the women. What they are good at is communication, or rather, they're good about banging their heads (and other parts) against communication barriers until they figure out a way around them. Part of this is an obsession with consent that goes quite a bit deeper than the normal simplistic treatment. When you spend this much time trying to understand what other people want, you have to spend a lot of time communicating about sex, and in these books that means spending a lot of time communicating about everything else as well. They are also obsessively loyal and understand the merits of both collective action and in making space for people to do the things that they are the best at, while still insisting that people contribute when they can. On the surface, the O'Kanes are a dictatorship, but they're run more like a high-functioning collaboration. Dallas leads because Dallas is good at playing the role of leader (and listening to Lex), which is refreshingly contrary to how things work in the real world right now. I want to be clear that not only is this erotica, this is not the sort of erotica where there's a stand-alone plot that is periodically interrupted by vaguely-motivated sex scenes that you can skim past. These people use sex to communicate, and therefore most of the important exchanges in the book are in the middle of a sex scene. This is going to make this novel, and this series, very much not to the taste of a lot of people, and I cannot be emphatic enough about that warning. But, also, this is such a fascinating inversion. It's common in media for the surface plot of the story to be full of sexual tension, sometimes to the extent that the story is just a metaphor for the sex that the characters want to have. This is the exact opposite of that: The sex is a metaphor for everything else that's going on in the story. These people quite literally fuck their way out of their communication problems, and not in an obvious or cringy way. It's weirdly fascinating? It's also possible that my reaction to this series is so unusual as to not be shared by a single other reader. Anyway, the setup in this story is that Six has major trust issues and Bren is slowly and carefully trying to win her trust. It's a classic hurt/comfort setup, and if that had played out in the way that this story often does, Bren would have taken the role of the gentle hero and Six the role of the person he rescued. That is not at all where this story goes. Six doesn't need comfort; Six needs self-confidence and the ability to demand what she wants, and although the way Beyond Pain gets her there is a little ham-handed, it mostly worked for me. As with Beyond Shame, I felt like the moral of the story is that the O'Kane men are just bright enough to stop doing stupid things at the last possible moment. I think Beyond Pain worked a bit better than the previous book because Bren is not quite as dim as Dallas, so the reader doesn't have to suffer through quite as many stupid decisions. The erotica continues to mostly (although not entirely) follow traditional gender roles, with dangerous men and women who like attention. Presumably most people are reading these books for the sex, which I am wholly unqualified to review. For whatever it's worth, the physical descriptions are too mechanical for me, too obsessed with the precise structural assemblage of parts in novel configurations. I am not recommending (or disrecommending) these books, for a whole host of reasons. But I think the authors deserve to be rewarded for understanding that sex can be communication and that good communication about difficult topics is inherently interesting in a way that (at least for me) transcends the erotica. I bet I'm going to pick up another one of these about a year from now because I'm still thinking about these people and am still curious about how they are going to succeed. Followed by Beyond Temptation, an interstitial novella. The next novel is Beyond Jealousy. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Cascade Failure, by L.M. Sagas

Series:	Ambit's Run #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2024
ISBN:	1-250-87126-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	407

Cascade Failure is a far-future science fiction adventure with a small helping of cyberpunk vibes. It is the first of a (so far) two-book series, and was the author's first novel. The Ambit is an old and small Guild ship, not much to look at, but it holds a couple of surprises. One is its captain, Eoan, who is an AI with a deep and insatiable curiosity that has driven them and their ship farther and farther out into the Spiral. The other is its surprisingly competent crew: a battle-scarred veteran named Saint who handles the fighting, and a talented engineer named Nash who does literally everything else. The novel opens with them taking on supplies at Aron Outpost. A supposed Guild deserter named Jalsen wanders into the ship looking for work. An AI ship with a found-family crew is normally my catnip, so I wanted to love this book. Alas, I did not. There were parts I liked. Nash is great: snarky, competent, and direct. Eoan is a bit distant and slightly more simplistic of a character than I was expecting, but I appreciated the way Sagas put them firmly in charge of the ship and departed from the conventional AI character presentation. Once the plot starts in earnest (more on that in a moment), we meet Anke, the computer hacker, whose charming anxiety reaction is a complete inability to stop talking and who adds some needed depth to the character interactions. There's plenty of action, a plot that makes at least some sense, and a few moments that almost achieved the emotional payoff the author was attempting. Unfortunately, most of the story focuses on Saint and Jal, and both of them are irritatingly dense cliches. The moment Jal wanders onto the Ambit in the first chapter, the reader is informed that Jal, Saint, and Eoan have a history. The crew of the Ambit spent a year looking for Jal and aren't letting go of him now that they've found him. Jal, on the other hand, clearly blames Saint for something and is not inclined to trust him. Okay, fine, a bit generic of a setup but the writing moved right along and I was curious enough. It then takes a full 180 pages before the reader finds out what the hell is going on with Saint and Jal. Predictably, it's a stupid misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with one conversation in the second chapter. Cascade Failure does not contain a romance (and to the extent that it hints at one, it's a sapphic romance), but I swear Saint and Jal are both the male protagonist from a certain type of stereotypical heterosexual romance novel. They're both the brooding man with the past, who is too hurt to trust anyone and assumes the worst because he's unable to use his words or ask an open question and then listen to the answer. The first half of this book is them being sullen at each other at great length while both of them feel miserable. Jal keeps doing weird and suspicious things to resolve a problem that would have been far more easily resolved by the rest of the crew if he would offer any explanation at all. It's not even suspenseful; we've read about this character enough times to know that he'll turn out to have a heart of gold and everything will be a misunderstanding. I found it tedious. Maybe people who like slow burn romances with this character type will have a less negative reaction. The real plot starts at about the time Saint and Jal finally get their shit sorted out. It turns out to have almost nothing to do with either of them. The environmental control systems of worlds are suddenly failing (hence the book title), and Anke, the late-arriving computer programmer and terraforming specialist, has a rather wild theory about what's happening. This leads to a lot of action, some decent twists, and a plot that felt very cyberpunk to me, although unfortunately it culminates in an absurdly-cliched action climax. This book is an action movie that desperately wants to make you feel all the feels, and it worked about as well as that typically works in action movies for me. Jaded cynicism and an inability to communicate are not the ways to get me to have an emotional reaction to a book, and Jal (once he finally starts talking) is so ridiculously earnest that it's like reading the adventures of a Labrador puppy. There was enough going on that it kept me reading, but not enough for the story to feel satisfying. I needed a twist, some depth, way more Nash and Anke and way less of the men, something. Everyone is going to compare this book to Firefly, but Firefly had better banter, created more complex character interactions due to the larger and more varied crew, and played the cynical mercenary for laughs instead of straight, all of which suited me better. This is not a bad book, particularly once it gets past the halfway point, but it's not that memorable either, at least for me. If you're looking for a space adventure with heavy action hero and military SF vibes that wants to be about Big Feelings but gets there in mostly obvious ways, you could do worse. If you're looking for a found-family starship crew story more like Becky Chambers, I think you'll find this one a bit too shallow and obvious. Not really recommended, although there's nothing that wrong with it and I'm sure other people's experience will differ. Followed by Gravity Lost, which I'm unlikely to read. Rating: 6 out of 10

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. OpenSSH OpenSSH upstream released 9.9p2 with fixes for CVE-2025-26465 and CVE-2025-26466. I got a heads-up on this in advance from the Debian security team, and prepared updates for all of testing/unstable, bookworm (Debian 12), bullseye (Debian 11), buster (Debian 10, LTS), and stretch (Debian 9, ELTS). jessie (Debian 8) is also still in ELTS for a few more months, but wasn t affected by either vulnerability. Although I m not particularly active in the Perl team, I fixed a libnet-ssleay-perl build failure because it was blocking openssl from migrating to testing, which in turn was blocking the above openssh fixes. I also sent a minor sshd -T fix upstream, simplified a number of autopkgtests using the newish Restrictions: needs-sudo facility, and prepared for removing the obsolete slogin symlink. PuTTY I upgraded to the new upstream version 0.83. GCC 15 build failures I fixed build failures with GCC 15 in a few packages:

• icoutils (contributed upstream)
• kali
• parted
• python-setproctitle
• vigor

Python team A lot of my Python team work is driven by its maintainer dashboard. Now that we ve finished the transition to Python 3.13 as the default version, and inspired by a recent debian-devel thread started by Santiago, I thought it might be worth spending a bit of time on the uscan error section. uscan is typically scraping upstream web sites to figure out whether new versions are available, and so it s easy for its configuration to become outdated or broken. Most of this work is pretty boring, but it can often reveal situations where we didn t even realize that a Debian package was out of date. I fixed these packages:

• cssutils (this in particular was very out of date due to a new and active upstream maintainer since 2021)
• django-assets
• django-celery-email
• django-sass
• django-yarnpkg
• json-tricks
• mercurial-extension-utils
• pydbus
• pydispatcher
• pylint-celery
• pyspread
• pytest-pretty
• python-apptools
• python-django-libsass (contributed a packaging fix upstream in passing)
• python-django-postgres-extra
• python-django-waffle
• python-ephemeral-port-reserve
• python-ifaddr
• python-log-symbols
• python-msrest
• python-msrestazure
• python-netdisco
• python-pathtools
• python-user-agents
• sinntp
• wchartype

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

• cssutils (contributed a packaging tweak upstream)
• django-iconify
• django-sass
• domdf-python-tools
• extra-data (fixing a numpy 2.0 failure)
• flufl.i18n
• json-tricks
• jsonpickle
• mercurial-extension-utils
• mod-wsgi
• nbconvert
• orderly-set
• pydispatcher (contributed a Python 3.12 fix upstream)
• pylint
• pytest-rerunfailures
• python-asyncssh
• python-box (contributed a packaging fix upstream)
• python-charset-normalizer
• python-django-constance
• python-django-guid
• python-django-pgtrigger
• python-django-waffle
• python-djangorestframework-simplejwt
• python-formencode
• python-holidays (contributed a test fix upstream)
• python-legacy-cgi
• python-marshmallow-polyfield (fixing a test failure)
• python-model-bakery
• python-mrcz (fixing a numpy 2.0 failure)
• python-netdisco
• python-npe2
• python-persistent
• python-pkginfo (fixing a test failure)
• python-proto-plus
• python-requests-ntlm
• python-roman
• python-semantic-release
• python-setproctitle
• python-stdlib-list
• python-trustme
• python-typeguard (fixing a test failure)
• python-tzlocal
• pyzmq
• setuptools-scm
• sqlfluff
• stravalib
• tomopy
• trove-classifiers
• xhtml2pdf (fixing CVE-2024-25885)
• xonsh
• zodbpickle
• zope.deprecation
• zope.testrunner

In bookworm-backports, I updated python-django to 3:4.2.18-1 (issuing BSA-121) and added new backports of python-django-dynamic-fixture and python-django-pgtrigger, all of which are dependencies of debusine. I went through all the build failures related to python-click 8.2.0 (which was confusingly tagged but not fully released upstream and posted an analysis. I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures:

• cython
• dask
• deepdish
• hickle (contributed upstream)
• mdp (contributed upstream)
• mypy
• pillow
• pynput
• python-fonticon-fontawesome6
• python-persistent (contributed upstream)
• python-srsly

I dropped support for the old setup.py ftest command from zope.testrunner upstream. I fixed various odds and ends of bugs:

• django-memoize: autopkgtest must be marked superficial
• extra-data: extra-data: please add autopkgtests (to add coverage for python3-numpy)
• fpylll: missing dependency on numpy abi
• python-box: autopkgtest must be marked superficial
• python-hdmedians: missing dependency on numpy abi
• python-legacy-cgi: missing requirement: openstack-pkg-tools
• python-tzlocal: doesn t run any tests during the build or as autopkgtest
• requests: will FTBFS during trixie support period (contributed supporting fix upstream)
• setuptools-scm: project was renamed from setuptools_scm to setuptools-scm

Installer team Following up on last month, I merged and uploaded Helmut s /usr-move fix.

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. If you appreciate this sort of work and are at a company that uses Debian, have a look to see whether you can pay for any of Freexian s services; as well as the direct benefits, that revenue stream helps to keep Debian development sustainable for me and several other lovely people. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Python team We finally made Python 3.13 the default version in testing! I fixed various bugs that got in the way of this:

• dnarrange (contributed upstream)
• docker-compose
• ionit (contributed upstream)
• nbclassic
• pymilter
• pyspf (contributed upstream)
• python-django
• python-handy-archives
• sinntp
• wireless-regdb

As with last month, I fixed a few more build regressions due to the removal of a deprecated intersphinx_mapping syntax in Sphinx 8.0:

• jupyter-console (contributed upstream)
• python-ewmh (reviewed patch from a contributor)
• python-gplearn (contributed upstream)

I ported a few packages to Django 5.1:

• django-sitetree (thanks to an Ubuntu patch)
• python-django-parler (thanks to an Ubuntu patch

I ported python-pypump to IPython 8.0. I fixed python-datamodel-code-generator to handle isort 6, and contributed that upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools:

• cerealizer
• pyinotify
• pyspf
• python-holidays

I removed the old python-celery-common transitional package from celery, since nothing in Debian needs it any more. I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures:

• awesomeversion
• django-graphiql-debug-toolbar
• django-iconify
• flask-sqlalchemy (contributed upstream)
• freezegun
• napari (somewhat inconclusive, but I contributed fixes upstream to napari and npe2)
• pyglet
• python-construct-classes
• python-django-guid
• python-pyfakefs
• python-ring-doorbell
• recommonmark
• spectral-cube
• sphinx (helped with an upstream fix)
• sphinxcontrib-openapi (contributed upstream)
• sqlfluff
• terminator (contributed upstream)
• trac-wikiprint
• vcr.py (investigated and reported findings upstream, confirming that disabling these tests in the Debian packaging seems reasonable for now)

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

• buildbot
• cloudpickle
• dask (fixing a Python 3.13 failure and working around a build failure due to sphinx-book-theme
• distributed (fixing a Python 3.13 failure; also contributed a fix upstream)
• importlib-resources (fixing a test failure on s390x and a test failure on all architectures)
• isort
• nbconvert
• psycopg3
• pydantic
• pydantic-settings
• pydoctor
• pypandoc
• python-argcomplete
• python-cai
• python-colormap (fixing a build failure with poetry-core 2.0, for which I contributed a fix upstream)
• python-django-guid
• python-easydev (fixing a build failure with poetry-core 2.0)
• python-holidays
• python-launchpadlib
• python-limits
• python-model-bakery
• python-openapi-schema-validator
• python-pathvalidate
• python-pyftpdlib
• python-quart-trio
• python-urllib3 (contributed a test fix upstream)
• python-telethon
• python-webob (fixing CVE-2024-42353)
• responses
• restrictedpython (fixing CVE-2024-47532 and CVE-2025-22153)
• sqlfluff
• vcr.py (fixing a build failure with python-urllib3 2.3.0
• xonsh (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)

Rust team I fixed rust-pyo3-ffi to avoid explicit Python version dependencies that were getting in the way of making Python 3.13 the default version. Security tools packaging team I uploaded libevt to fix a build failure on i386 and to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools. Installer team I helped with some testing of a debian-installer-utils patch as part of the /usr move. I need to get around to uploading this, since it looks OK now. Other small things Helmut Grohne reached out for help debugging a multi-arch coinstallability problem (you know it s going to be complicated when even Helmut can t figure it out on his own ) in binutils, and we had a call about that. I reviewed and applied a new Romanian translation of debconf s manual pages. I did my twice-yearly refresh of debmirror s mirror_size documentation, and applied a contribution to improve the example debmirror.conf. I fixed an arguable preprocessor string handling bug in man-db, and applied a fix for out-of-tree builds.

Review: The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #4
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1999
Printing:	August 2001
ISBN:	0-8125-7759-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	406

The Sky Road is the fourth book in the Fall Revolution series, but it represents an alternate future that diverges after (or during?) the events of The Sky Fraction. You probably want to read that book first, but I'm not sure reading The Stone Canal or The Cassini Division adds anything to this book other than frustration. Much more on that in a moment. Clovis colha Gree is a aspiring doctoral student in history with a summer job as a welder. He works on the platform for the project, which the reader either slowly discovers from the book or quickly discovers from the cover is a rocket to get to orbit. As the story opens, he meets (or, as he describes it) is targeted by a woman named Merrial, a tinker who works on the guidance system. The early chapters provide only a few hints about Clovis's world: a statue of the Deliverer on a horse that forms the backdrop of their meeting, the casual carrying of weapons, hints that tinkers are socially unacceptable, and some division between the white logic and the black logic in programming. Also, because this is a Ken MacLeod novel, everyone is obsessed with smoking and tobacco the way that the protagonists of erotica are obsessed with sex. Clovis's story is one thread of this novel. The other, told in the alternating chapters, is the story of Myra Godwin-Davidova, chair of the governing Council of People's Commissars of the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, a micronation embedded in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Series readers will remember Myra's former lover, David Reid, as the villain of The Stone Canal and the head of the corporation Mutual Protection, which is using slave labor (sort of) to support a resurgent space movement and its attempt to take control of a balkanized Earth. The ISTWR is in decline and a minor power by all standards except one: They still have nuclear weapons. So, first, we need to talk about the series divergence. I know from reading about this book on-line that The Sky Road is an alternate future that does not follow the events of The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. I do not know this from the text of the book, which is completely silent about even being part of a series. More annoyingly, while the divergence in the Earth's future compared to The Cassini Division is obvious, I don't know what the Jonbar hinge is. Everything I can find on-line about this book is maddeningly coy. Wikipedia claims the divergence happens at the end of The Sky Fraction. Other reviews and the Wikipedia talk page claim it happens in the middle of The Stone Canal. I do have a guess, but it's an unsatisfying one and I'm not sure how to test its correctness. I suppose I shouldn't care and instead take each of the books on their own terms, but this is the type of thing that my brain obsesses over, and I find it intensely irritating that MacLeod didn't explain it in the books themselves. It's the sort of authorial trick that makes me feel dumb, and books that gratuitously make me feel dumb are less enjoyable to read. The second annoyance I have with this book is also only partly its fault. This series, and this book in particular, is frequently mentioned as good political science fiction that explores different ways of structuring human society. This was true of some of the earlier books in a surprisingly superficial way. Here, I would call it hogwash. This book, or at least the Myra portion of it, is full of people doing politics in a tactical sense, but like the previous books of this series, that politics is mostly embedded in personal grudges and prior romantic relationships. Everyone involved is essentially an authoritarian whose ability to act as they wish is only contested by other authoritarians and is largely unconstrained by such things as persuasion, discussions, elections, or even theory. Myra and most of the people she meets are profoundly cynical and almost contemptuous of any true discussion of political systems. This is the trappings and mechanisms of politics without the intellectual debate or attempt at consensus, turning it into a zero-sum game won by whoever can threaten the others more effectively. Given the glowing reviews I've seen in relatively political SF circles, presumably I am missing something that other people see in MacLeod's approach. Perhaps this level of pettiness and cynicism is an accurate depiction of what it's like inside left-wing political movements. (What an appalling condemnation of left-wing political movements, if so.) But many of the on-line reviews lead me to instead conclude that people's understanding of "political fiction" is stunted and superficial. For example, there is almost nothing Marxist about this book it contains essentially no economic or class analysis whatsoever but MacLeod uses a lot of Marxist terminology and sets half the book in an explicitly communist state, and this seems to be enough for large portions of the on-line commentariat to conclude that it's full of dangerous, radical ideas. I find this sadly hilarious given that MacLeod's societies tend, if anything, towards a low-grade libertarianism that would be at home in a Robert Heinlein novel. Apparently political labels are all that's needed to make political fiction; substance is optional. So much for the politics. What's left in Clovis's sections is a classic science fiction adventure in which the protagonist has a radically different perspective from the reader and the fun lies in figuring out the world-building through the skewed perspective of the characters. This was somewhat enjoyable, but would have been more fun if Clovis had any discernible personality. Sadly he instead seems to be an empty receptacle for the prejudices and perspective of his society, which involve a lot of quasi-religious taboos and an essentially magical view of the world. Merrial is a more interesting character, although as always in this series the romance made absolutely no sense to me and seemed to be conjured by authorial fiat and weirdly instant sexual attraction. Myra's portion of the story was the part I cared more about and was more invested in, aided by the fact that she's attempting to do something more interesting than launch a crewed space vehicle for no obvious reason. She at least faces some true moral challenges with no obviously correct response. It's all a bit depressing, though, and I found Myra's unwillingness to ground her decisions in a more comprehensive moral framework disappointing. If you're going to make a protagonist the ruler of a communist state, even an ironic one, I'd like to hear some real political philosophy, some theory of sociology and economics that she used to justify her decisions. The bits that rise above personal animosity and vibes were, I think, said better in The Cassini Division. This series was disappointing, and I can't say I'm glad to have read it. There is some small pleasure in finishing a set of award-winning genre books so that I can have a meaningful conversation about them, but the awards failed to find me better books to read than I would have found on my own. These aren't bad books, but the amount of enjoyment I got out of them didn't feel worth the frustration. Not recommended, I'm afraid. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Moose Madness, by Mar Delaney

Publisher:	Kalikoi
Copyright:	May 2021
ASIN:	B094HGT1ZB
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	68

Moose Madness is a sapphic shifter romance novella (on the short side for a novella) by the same author as Wolf Country. It was originally published in the anthology Her Wild Soulmate, which appears to be very out of print. Maggie (she hates the nickname Moose) grew up in Moose Point, a tiny fictional highway town in (I think) Alaska. (There is, unsurprisingly, an actual Moose Point in Alaska, but it's a geographic feature and not a small town.) She stayed after graduation and is now a waitress in the Moose Point Pub. She's also a shifter; specifically, she is a moose shifter like her mother, the town mayor. (Her father is a fox shifter.) As the story opens, the annual Moose Madness festival is about to turn the entire town into a blizzard of moose kitsch. Fiona Barton was Maggie's nemesis in high school. She was the cool, popular girl, a red-headed wolf shifter whose friend group teased and bullied awkward and uncoordinated Maggie mercilessly. She was also Maggie's impossible crush, although the very idea seemed laughable. Fi left town after graduation, and Maggie hadn't thought about her for years. Then she walks into Moose Point Pub dressed in biker leathers, with piercings and one side of her head shaved, back in town for a wedding in her pack. Much to the shock of both Maggie and Fi, they realize that they're soulmates as soon as their eyes meet. Now what? If you thought I wasn't going to read the moose and wolf shifter romance once I knew it existed, you do not know me very well. I have been saving it for when I needed something light and fun. It seemed like the right palette cleanser after a very disappointing book. Moose Madness takes place in the same universe as Wolf Country, which means there are secret shifters all over Alaska (and presumably elsewhere) and they have the strong magical version of love at first sight. If one is a shifter, one knows immediately as soon as one locks eyes with one's soulmate and this feeling is never wrong. This is not my favorite romance trope, but if I get moose shifter romance out of it, I'll endure. As you can tell from the setup, this is enemies-to-lovers, but the whole soulmate thing shortcuts the enemies to lovers transition rather abruptly. There's a bit of apologizing and air-clearing at the start, but most of the novella covers the period right after enemies have become lovers and are getting to know each other properly. If you like that part of the arc, you will probably enjoy this, but be warned that it's slight and somewhat obvious. There's a bit of tension from protective parents and annoying pack mates, but it's sorted out quickly and easily. If you want the characters to work for the relationship, this is not the novella for you. It's essentially all vibes. I liked the vibes, though! Maggie is easy to like, and Fi does a solid job apologizing. I wish there was quite a bit more moose than we get, but Delaney captures the combination of apparent awkwardness and raw power of a moose and has a good eye for how beautiful large herbivores can be. This is not the sort of book that gives a moment's thought to wolves being predators and moose being, in at least some sense, prey animals, so if you are expecting that to be a plot point, you will be disappointed. As with Wolf Country, Delaney elides most of the messier and more ethically questionable aspects of sometimes being an animal. This is a sweet, short novella about two well-meaning and fundamentally nice people who are figuring out that middle school and high school are shitty and sometimes horrible but don't need to define the rest of one's life. It's very forgettable, but it made me smile, and it was indeed a good palette cleanser. If you are, like me, the sort of person who immediately thought "oh, I have to read that" as soon as you saw the moose shifter romance, keep your expectations low, but I don't think this will disappoint. If you are not that sort of person, you can safely miss this one. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: The House That Fought, by Jenny Schwartz

Series:	Uncertain Sanctuary #3
Publisher:	Jenny Schwartz
Copyright:	December 2020
Printing:	September 2024
ASIN:	B0DBX6GP8Z
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	199

The House That Fought is the third and final book of the self-published space fantasy trilogy starting with The House That Walked Between Worlds. I read it as part of the Uncertain Sanctuary omnibus, which is reflected in the sidebar metadata. At the end of the last book, one of Kira's random and vibe-based trust decisions finally went awry. She has been betrayed! She's essentially omnipotent, the betrayal does not hurt her in any way, and, if anything, it helps the plot resolution, but she has to spend some time feeling bad about it first. Eventually, though, the band of House residents return to the problem of Earth's missing magic. By Earth here, I mean our world, which technically isn't called Earth in the confusing world-building of this series. Earth within this universe is an archetypal world that is the origin world for humans, the two types of dinosaurs, and Neanderthals. There are numerous worlds that have split off from it, including Human, the one world where humans are dominant, which is what we think of as Earth and what Kira calls Earth half the time. And by worlds, I mean entire universes (I think?), because traveling between "worlds" is dimensional travel, not space travel. But there is also space travel? The world building started out confusing and has degenerated over the course of the series. Given that the plot, such as it is, revolves around a world-building problem, this is not a good sign. Worse, though, is that the quality of the writing has become unedited, repetitive drivel. I liked the first book and enjoyed a few moments of the second book, but this conclusion is just bad. This is the sort of book that the maxim "show, don't tell" was intended to head off. The dull, thudding description of the justification for every character emotion leaves no room for subtlety or reader curiosity.

Evander was elf and I was human. We weren't the same. I had magic. He had the magic I'd unconsciously locked into his augmentations. We were different and in love. Speaking of our differences could be a trigger. I peeked at him, worried. My customary confidence had taken a hit. "We're different," he answered my unspoken question. "And we work anyway. We'll work to make us work."

There is page after page after page of this sort of thing: facile emotional processing full of cliches and therapy-speak, built on the most superficial of relationships. There's apparently a romance now, which happened with very little build-up, no real discussion or communication between the characters, and only the most trite and obvious relationship work. There is a plot underneath all this, but it's hard to make it suspenseful given that Kira is essentially omnipotent. Schwartz tries to turn the story into a puzzle that requires Kira figure out what's going on before she can act, but this is undermined by the confusing world-building. The loose ends the plot has accumulated over the previous two books are mostly dropped, sometimes in a startlingly casual way. I thought Kira would care who killed her parents, for example; apparently, I was wrong. The previous books caught my attention with a more subtle treatment of politics than I expect from this sort of light space fantasy. The characters had, I thought, a healthy suspicion of powerful people and a willingness to look for manipulation or ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we discover here that this is not due to an appreciation of the complexity of power and motive in governments. Instead, it's a reflexive bias against authority and structured society that sounds like an Internet libertarian complaining about taxes. Powerful people should be distrusted because all governments are corrupt and bad and steal your money in order to waste it. Oh, except for the cops and the military; they're generally good people you should trust. In retrospect, I should have expected this turn given the degree to which Schwartz stressed the independence of sorcerers. I thought that was going somewhere more interesting than sorcerers as self-appointed vigilantes who are above the law and can and should do anything they damn well please. Sadly, it was not. Adding to the lynch mob feeling, the ending of this book is a deeply distasteful bit of magical medieval punishment that I thought was vile, and which is, of course, justified by bad things happening to children. No societal problems were solved, but Kira got her petty revenge and got to be gleeful and smug about it. This is apparently what passes for a happy ending. I don't even know what to say about the bizarre insertion of Christianity, which makes little sense given the rest of the world-building. It's primarily a way for Kira to avoid understanding or thinking about an important part of the plot. As sadly seems to often be the case in books like this, Kira's faith doesn't appear to prompt any moral analysis or thoughtful ethical concern about her unlimited power, just certainty that she's right and everyone else is wrong. This was dire. It is one of those self-published books that I feel a little bad about writing this negative of a review about, because I think most of the problem was that the author's skill was not up to the story that she wanted to tell. This happens a lot in self-published fiction, particularly since Kindle Unlimited has started rewarding quantity over quality. But given how badly the writing quality degraded over the course of the series, and how offensive the ending was, I do want to warn other people off of the series. There is so much better fiction out there. Avoid this one, and probably the rest of the series unless you're willing to stop after the first book. Rating: 2 out of 10

Review: Dark Matters, by Michelle Diener

Series:	Class 5 #4
Publisher:	Eclipse
Copyright:	October 2019
ISBN:	0-6454658-6-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	307

Dark Matters is the fourth book in the science fiction semi-romance Class 5 series. There are spoilers for all of the previous books, and although enough is explained that you could make sense of the story starting here, I wouldn't recommend it. As with the other books in the series, it follows new protagonists, but the previous protagonists make an appearance. You will be unsurprised to hear that the Tecran kidnapped yet another Earth woman. The repetitiveness of the setup would be more annoying if the book took itself too seriously, but it doesn't, and so I mostly find it entertaining. I thought Diener was going to dodge the obvious series structure, but now I am wondering if we're going to end up with one woman per Class 5 ship after all. Lucy is not on a ship, however, Tecran or otherwise. She is a captive in a military research facility on the Tecran home world. The Tecran are in very deep trouble given the events of the previous book and have decided that Lucy's existence is a liability. Only the intervention of some sympathetic Tecran scientists she partly befriended during her captivity lets her escape the facility before it's destroyed. Now she's alone, on an alien world, being hunted by the military. It's not entirely the fault of this book that it didn't tell the story that I wanted to read. The setup for Dark Matters implies this book will see the arrival of consequences for the Tecran's blatant violations of the Sentient Beings Agreement. I was looking forward to a more political novel about how such consequences could be administered. This is the sort of problem that we struggle with in our politics: Collective punishment isn't acceptable, but there have to be consequences sufficient to ensure that a state doesn't repeat the outlawed behavior, and yet attempting to deliver those consequences feels like occupation and can set off worse social ruptures and even atrocities. I wasn't expecting that deep of political analysis of what is, after all, a lighthearted SF adventure series, but Diener has been willing to touch on hard problems. The ethics of violence has been an ongoing theme of the series. Alas for me, this is not what we get. The arriving cavalry, in the form of a Class 5 and the inevitable Grih hunk to serve as the love interest du jour, quickly become more interested in helping Lucy elude pursuers (or escape captors) than in the delicate political situation. The conflict between the local population is a significant story element, but only as backdrop. Instead, this reads like a thriller or an action movie, complete with alien predators and a cinematic set piece finale. The political conflict between the Tecran and the United Council does reach a conclusion of sorts, but it's not that satisfying. Perhaps some of the political fallout will happen in future books, but here Diener simplifies the morality of the story in the climax and dodges out of the tricky ethical and social challenge of how to punish a sovereign nation. One of the things I like about this series is that it takes moral indignation seriously, but now that Diener has raised the (correct) complication that people have strong motivations to find excuses for the actions of their own side, I hope she can find a believable political resolution that isn't simple brute force. This entry in the series wasn't bad, but it didn't grab me. Lucy was fine as a protagonist; her ability to manipulate the Tecran into making mistakes fits the longer time she's had to study them and keeps her distinct from the other protagonists. But the small bit of politics we do see is unsatisfying and conveniently simplistic, and this book mostly degenerates into generic action sequences. Bane, the Class 5 ship featured in this story, is great when he's active, and I continue to be entertained by the obsession the Class 5 ships have with Earth women, but he's sidelined for too much of the story. I felt like Diener focused on the least interesting part of the story setup. If you've read this far, there's nothing wrong with this entry. You'll probably want to keep reading. But it felt like a missed opportunity. Followed in publication order by Dark Ambitions, a novella that returns to Rose to tell a side story. The next novel is Dark Class, in which we'll presumably see the last kidnapped Earth woman. Rating: 6 out of 10