Time passes. Black Cross doesn't call. Eventually, eleven rolls around. 

And it finds Vi enjoying the night air at a table in front of the il'ka, sipping a mocha, wearing a golden sundress and a pair of flats she could run in if needed, bag over her shoulder.

Snow arrives a few minutes later, wearing a backpack and a haggard expression.

She manages a smile at Violet, though. 

"Hey. Can we please skip to the back, it's been a long day and I'm not in the mood for conversation."

Violet nods and smiles gently at Snow, standing to greet her. "Absolutely. Got a bottle of massage oil with your name on it. Figure you've probably been run ragged today. Want me to get you a mocha on our way back?"

"No thanks, the place is probably busy enough already. But yeah, let's head in. A massage sounds wonderful."

Vi nods, holds the door, and leads Snow in, getting out her phone to pay at the backroom door.

There's a reading circle in the front, one of them sitting on a table, reading quietly from a familiar-looking book while two dozen onlookers sit in the nearby sofa pits and listen.

Black Cross hurries over, taps Vi's phone against her payment terminal, and passes her a key. "One's just opened up. Have fun." She gets the door to the back with her bracelet.

And back they go with a smile, Violet leading the way to room one, and pulling the massage oil out of her otherwise-empty bag once they're inside.

As the private room's door shuts behind them, Snow takes off her pack and sets it on the ground with a heavy thunk. 

"Before you get massage oil all over your hands, I have the full set. I had to buy them all myself to get them for you, one copy per customer. No way a "preorder" was going to work. I could probably make a pretty penny selling them on auction since they're all first editions, but for you they're the listed price, which comes to around three hundred bucks. l just have to make do with the fact I bought them at an employee discount." She smiles slightly. "Let me just get out my phone and we can settle up, alright?"

She reaches down, unzips the bag, and there they are, all ten alien books in their black bindings with silver trim. She pulls out her phone from next to them and taps at it. 

"You should get a payment request in just a second."

Out comes Violet's phone, which promptly emits a quiet ping, and with a quick flutter of her fingers across the screen, distinctly more than that amount zipping across the payment network into Snow's account.

"There we go. I'll just transfer these over into my bag, and then we can get on with soothing those aching muscles."

She starts moving books over, carefully, one at a time.

"What hurts worst?"

She blinks at her phone, then smiles. "Um. My legs. Please."

Vi finishes setting the books neatly in her bag, closes it and Snow's bag up, and then turns to Snow with a smile.

"Okay, let's see about making your night a little better."

With a gentle push, she lays Snow face-down on the bed, then sits on the edge and unlaces the girl's sneakers. She pulls those off, followed by the socks, and sets them out of the way. Then she turns around, gets up on her knees at the foot of the bed, and pours some warming, lavender-scented massage oil in one hand. She rubs it between her palms to warm it up, and gets to work on Snow's left calf, starting with some gentle, exploratory kneading to feel out where the knots are.

And from there, Snow's night proceeds to get much better.

Back in the present, Elm rubs his tired eyes, scrolls down to the latest book in the file, and clicks. The hour is getting late, but for this he's working overtime. 

Anything more in the slush pile?

The Nature of Joy is about a young woman who works as a shop attendant. It's a boring and very low-demand job, almost painfully generic. The narration supports the theme of mindless genericness, with the store's layout and products seeming to change almost paragraph to paragraph, and the protagonist referring to regular customers with new but similar names every time. There's technically a plot about some friends' school troubles, but mostly it's about her wistful daydreams during the workday. She imagines being swept off her feet by a beautiful man - or woman - or alien foxboy. She imagines being handed a precious artifact by a poisoned spy and crashing headlong into a wild urban fantasy. She imagines becoming a fighter pilot putting her life on the line to protect the planet from aliens, or a brilliant tinkerer dodging jackboots in the catacombs of an old city. All these fantasies run together, blending with the actual events of the world and with her friends and customers' conversations, and it's clear that she lives halfway in a fantasy. They urge her to write, to draw, get it all down, she's very creative and it'd be popular. She could write and write and drop the clerk job. But she says- No, that's not the point. Daydreaming is a joy, something done selfishly. If she tried to make money with it, it'd stop being her escape. Boredom is precious to her, that one odd state of mind that's so difficult to maintain where the world isn't quite real and you can almost step into another one - that's where she wants to live. They think she's insane to work the shop clerk job and not take vacations or buy new video games and fancy makeup and art. But they're her friends, and if that is what makes her happy, so be it. After all, joy is in the mind. She does develop over the course of the book, finding new writing-friends, being pushed out of her comfort zone at times when she's dragged to - the alien equivalent of il'ka, which mostly seems to be about drugs and porn? - and to fancy writing clubs full of people who, to her, are trying too hard to be happy - or to look happy. She scowls and looks bored all the time, and she's happy. She has a few relationships and grows as a person, being more considerate to her friends by the end and actually sharing some of her writing rather than deleting it or keeping it all secret. (All proceeds, this one notes, will go to 'troubled teen' type charities).

Plastic Heart, A soft sci-fi where almost everyone uses various 'augments' - biological or robotic modifications of their bodies, or even cloned or fully robotic bodies. Everyone is effectively immortal barring the most terrible accidents or thorough and deliberate murder. Nonsentient robots do almost all the work, allowing people to live without working at all if they wish. People are more open sexually than in the past, the book explains as if to justify itself. The book follows an augment technician who only has a few basic augments herself. She gets her business off being one of the best, more than for stellar customer service. She often refuses 'boring' jobs and usually only works on customers with interesting problems - even if she does sympathize with the customers' stories for getting mods. The mods themselves range from brain implants that prevent the bearer from lying or deceiving at all, custom eyes that display high-definition hypnotic patterns, RADAR and jamming equipment stored in a low-profile forearm hollow, all sorts of physical enhancement from muscle to reflexes to armor, and lots and lots of different configurations of extra limbs. Tails, animal ears, private parts, and tentacles are the most popular. There's a lot of sex - one scene at least with most 'clients' and every interestingly exotic augment, usually justified as 'testing' and often discovering lingering issues that need to be fixed, like the new skin feeling weird or tentacle control spasming out. One repeat customer keeps adding and removing more and more exotic mods, changing genders at whim, and eagerly explaining the experiences that are only possible when you have extra senses and extra limbs. As the two fuck after each augment session they follow a cute sexfriends-to-romanticpartners path with the augment tech blushing and nervous for the first time in her life.

There's a new Grapeverse book going around, Shattering Cascade, about a world with ubiquitous mind control and a diplomat from the anti-mind-control faction rescuing an outcast from the pro-mind-control faction and struggling to connect with them in a way that is both feasible and ethical while helping them to recover from catastrophic psychological damage.

Oof, The Nature Of Joy is sure why there's the Sky/Earth division. The topic is familiar to him - a lot of people try to be Earths who just aren't suited to the role - but it's still painful to see it reflected back again in an alien culture. The alien il'ka??? is clearly seriously not a good place, wow, what the fuck, who deliberately fucks up their mental state, it's one thing to have to go on psych meds but that really does not seem to be the point here. It does seem to be portrayed as bad in the book but that doesn't really explain why places like that exist! Do you want to have a psychotic break?

It's a clear look at an alien culture, but what he sees is kind of disturbing. Maybe pile. It'd probably be controversial, and he doesn't want to cause diplomatic issues. 

Plastic Heart, on the other hand, is really something. The world it depicts isn't so far off - they've been doing integrated prosthetics in the last few years in Anadyne, it's been a goal for a long time but they're finally starting to really exist. He's even heard of a few wealthy people doing hobby projects on the same technology, working on extensions rather than replacements. The "the world is more sexually open" doesn't seem super necessary to him, but then maybe the aliens are more closed about these things. Whatever the case, the enhanced sex scenes are cleverly realized, and the sex-friends-to-lovers plot will sell well. Yes pile. 

Finally, there's Shattering Cascade, which, woof. This sure speaks to cult dynamics in Anadyne. Fortunately Beautiful-level charisma is rare in the real world, but the casual throwing-aside of people and the painful rehabilitation afterwards out of the goodness of a stranger's heart speaks to something real and true. This should see publishing. Yes pile. 

Spinrock has submissions.

This 719pg novel opens upon a girl living on a sidewalk. Her descriptions of the world are abstract, ghostly, and clinical — enough so to make it unclear if she understands what objects around her are. She thinks of herself as a particle settled in the guts of a monolithine purgatory, looking on its mechanisms with awe and fear while refusing to engage with them.

Each pain of homelessness is depicted with intimate detail: the strident elements, the utter personlessness, the nestled-up fear of others, the soundless scream of boredom.

Rather than knowing a langauge, she possesses a unique translation magic. The author seems to take satisfaction in exploring the tics and limits of the ability as they arise. She does not speak, but her stream of consciousness is lucid and charming.

The novel makes an abrupt tone-shift thirty thousand words in. Walking on the beach at midnight, she is abruptly caught in the fringes of a selkie's love-inducing song. Her own magic renders her uniquely vulnerable to it, unspooling every tight-packed subliminal and thread of subversion.

It is a momentous and world-shattering event, the girl's psyche rewriting itself from the first line to the last over the course of a minute. The format abandons prose in favor of desperate adulent poetry, rapidly decaying before crescendoing in transition to graphic novel.

(The visual world doesn't appear true to its textual descriptions. Ordinary life is vivid and dense. Every blade of grass is carved in spindly ink, each closet and window painstakingly shaded.)

The selkie departs before so much as noticing her victim, but the vagrant discovers that the sea monster is also a noblewoman who lives in a manor. She seeks an audience, pleads to be her servant, and receives a gracious acceptance.

Thereon, they engage in slice of life activities such as quiet nighttime walks, buying the vagrant glasses and knitting her clothes, brainwashing new slaves, and abusing their magic for political capital.

The girl finds herself ensconced in deep happiness. The city has lost its cruel majesty: it has been reduced to her backlight. When she is in a panel it tends to gravitate to and center on her. Her muscles grow toned and her face sharpens.

Much of the remaining plot is fixed on the details of doing chores in the dark. The vagrant talks to everything inanimate. She greets the air, compliments the pleasantries of kitchensmoke, seeks the perspective of a splinter on a broom, and develops her routine to step on each floor tile equally.

She spends time improving her housekeeping skills. She learns to mend wood and glass and marble and porcelain. For laundry and dishes, she learns the local magic (purity through water) - a schoolchild's skill that she eluded. She is tireless and diligent, with a singularity of conviction in her work to make angels blush. Any and all events she treats as a life or death scenario.

In parallel to the slice of life plot, the world seems to be decaying. Aesthetic and genre conceit seem to bleed into the world. 

Roses frame the panels where the monster smiles prettily, then fall down around her. Feathers rain from the sky when the girl is happy - she notices and examines them, but seems unable to consider looking up for a source. When she and the selkie are alone, she is small enough to fit in a palm and interacts with the world as though that size. When there's a timeskip, she has no memory of anything that happened during it.

While scrubbing a floor, the girl's glasses fall off her face and she appears to notice the readership, which prompts a total collapse of psyche. She is only comforted by two full hours of high intensity lovesongs. Afterwards she behaves like it never happened, but it is left unclear whether she has raised a facade or if the event was excised from her memory somehow.

Soon after it becomes clear that her magic is not translation, but the ability to see the world for what it truly is. The world was never ending: her power to perceive the bones of meaning was simply growing in strength.

After nervously skirting around the readership, she seems to decide they are another of her objects. She will turn to speak with them on occasion, or close her eyes as though to listen intently. Irregularly, she will ask a favor: usually for them to please wait just a sliver while she goes into another room? She is uniformly obeyed in this.

During one of these moments of privacy, she tells her master about what she has seen. The selkie proposes a trade summit with their observers, who respond to the request via the publishing website.

The readership apologetically sanctions the sea monster, but asks if she would like to meet them for lunch to discuss how to be a more tradeable-with agent. It doesn't know all that much decision theory, but can make suggestions like "less rape!"

They design an avatar which is then instantiated in the world, and the author goes to distant lengths (described in an appendix) to make its depicted behavior true to their character. They take tea with the sea monster and her vagrant handmaiden, and it goes really well! The selkie hires the readership as a slave and they thereafter become a participant in the novel's slices of life.

The readership takes the form of an androgyne voyeur of a maid, who can be seen in many panels demurely escorting the protagonist from fifteen paces back. For her part, she continues to treat them as inanimate.

The last pages follow the protagonist folding warm linens, bent over and keenly focused to match corners with atomic precision. The readership sits next to her, rolling their thumb around between the points of a conflux of floor tile lines as they stare at their friend intently.

—it actually appears to be an in-progress serial rather than a novel, last updated two days ago.

This 185pg graphic novel is about a girl who just moved into a new home and is unpacking her belongings. The first panels follow her sunny demeanor and the small joys she takes in mundane activities.

A tone-shift comes when she works through a mental block preventing her from noticing that she is working through an indefinite reservoir of brown cardboard boxes.

Horrified, she wanders around her house aimlessly, noticing for the first time that there are no doors or ways to contact another being. Beyond the mental block, it is distinct that the sunshine filtering through the curtains during the first idyllic pages was in truth the impassive shine of a featureless white plane.

After a psychological breakdown, she returns to the boxes, taking things out and putting them away in the correct rooms. Her house shifts as she fills rooms with others' belongings, and she attempts to discern and satisfy its preferences off this minimal information. Her depressive stupor is broached when she stumbles across a box with apparently otherworldly contents.

She spends the next while tiptoeing across the tops of an endless range of boxes attempting to guess whether their contents are useful by the bruises of their corners, tape used, logos, handwriting or lack thereof, the crinkles of the cardboard, how much give there is to her weight, and a thousand similar minute tells compiled into hunches and intuitions. Her thoughts are conveyed by circles and lines upon which text is written, lending her the appearance of traversing a spiderweb.

After batshit guesswork and laborious sifting, she comes to possess multiple magic items: one of which lets her fly and skim boxes faster, and another which allows her to speak to her house. The climax of the novel is an intense conversation in which she bargains for the house to have doors. It agrees if she swears up and down on all she cherishes that she will return to it after a reprieve for her mental health. She does not return.

She is left indefinitely scarred by her experience, unable to understand what happened to her or why, unable to find her husband, and very homeless. She is taken in by a public shepherdess with a flock of eight. Unable to connect with her peers there, she nonetheless finds shreds of content under her guardian's guiding hand.

This 11k poetry is about a neurotic teenage boy stored in a computer in an underground warehouse under the care of a kindly artificial intelligence.

He has a lot of concerns. Nuclear strikes, alien contact, rival artificial intelligence, errors in his guardian, entropy, deceit, incentives that would lead his guardian to discard him or run him at negligible pace, philosophical and existential issues, black swan events he cannot imagine, and so on.

The Intelligence speaks to him softly and at length about the technical points of each technomagically impressive and astronomically expensive precaution it has taken to shield him from each hypothetical risk.

Eventually his anxieties are stymied and drained, and he is left dazed at how much the Intelligence cares about and has spent on him. He decides that the Intelligence has earned his undying loyalty. He vows to value it and protect it with matching competence and fervor, despite having considerably less power to do so.

This 162pg shounen novel is about a cadre of five magical girls. They spend most of their plainclothes time touching each other's hands, crying while looking into each other's eyes, and working out how to spend the most time possible together at parties they're paid to attend.

The world around them is sculpted in their image, reflecting their images in its statues and echoing their motifs in its architecture. The citizenry frequently pedestalizes or worships them. Even the art depicts them softly, as one might frame saints or local politicians.

The plot takes the form of cosmological mystery. The characters don't understand how magic could have emerged from first principles or why it exists in the form that it does, or even a lot of its object-level intricacies. Despite applying their full resources intelligently to the problem, they don't make a lot of progress.

When one does transform, it takes a full double splash page and typically lasts for only a few panels while she systematically dismembers the obstacles in her path. When those obstacles are people, no one seems to have moral reservations about this, though some appear shocked or grossed out.

At one point, their leader makes a political agreement with the State, including a vow to maximize disutility for the State if it were to betray its terms — which it promptly does six chapters later. She is utterly brokenhearted and confused and keeps pursuing improbable lines of possibility, like that they might have faked breaking their agreement.

Eventually she comes to terms and spends a scene meditating, during which she ritually mutilates her utility function. By sheer force of will, she rejects all goals and desires save instilling regret in her malefactors.

The novel climaxes in a debate where the other girls try to convince her that the agreement wasn't valid, that the State is incapable of bargaining with something so much smaller than it, that the State actually did keep the bargain, that she ought not and must not enact retribution. In turn, the leader attempts to marshal their aid to minimize the number of timelines in which this happens.

They fail to sway her and don their offices. The ensuing fight is densely-packed and difficult-to-follow — it can be understood by studying the panels carefully and recalling previously established details of magic, or simply reading the visual metaphors that take up the margins. The group kills their leader at exorbitant cost to themselves and an appreciable fraction of expected GDP growth. Shortly thereafter ends the first book in the series.

This 91pg novel is about people who lose their magic should their dignity, pride, or honor ever be impinged. Most of them have it crushed out of them in childhood, but a few manage to retain it, usually through grooming for succession.

The characters of the book are scions of the upper-class that spend most of their time attempting to disable their peers through duels and cunning plots.

The protagonist stands head-and-shoulders above the rest at rendering others mortal. She seems to take a nearly sexual glee at luring them into gaffes, setting them up to temptation, and humiliating them in duels.

As the story progresses, the flaw she uses to depower each rival is successively smaller. It is not long before the blemish is so faint that no sane person would ever notice or care were it not for magical implications.

Eventually the protagonist meets someone similar to her but perhaps ten percent more competent, and is promptly stripped of her abilities. She is never seen again, the perspective switching to follow her conqueror for a brief time before the book ends.

Spinrock's data dump.

This 719pg novel opens upon a girl living on a sidewalk.

... Okay, he's into it. He was not previously aware that he ran this Devotary, he's supposed to be a good Eravian, but that sure the hell is a real argument. Even if it's unfinished, it's worth publishing. It's clever with lots of twists that are deeply ingrained with the deeper mystery, the prose is clear and clarion, and the illustrations are gorgeous. There's going to be reflections from this, for sure. Yes pile.

This 185pg graphic novel is about a girl who just moved into a new home and is unpacking her belongings.

... Why does this resonate so strongly? It's like someone wrote Watchmaker's Heart but in the horror genre. He's fascinated despite himself, and puts it firmly on the Yes pile. 

This 11k poetry is about a neurotic teenage boy stored in a computer in an underground warehouse under the care of a kindly artificial intelligence.

Well this one is clearly Devotary material. It's all about protecting and keeping-safe and service and love. And the vow is blatantly Keeper/Kept. It'll sell. Yes pile. 

This 162pg shounen novel is about a cadre of five magical girls.

Yikes! Stylish and also dangerous! Particularly that ritual mutilation of the utility function. Again, recalls some shit that cults pull. He's not going to publish this one, it'd cause a diplomatic incident. No pile. 

This 91pg novel is about people who lose their magic should their dignity, pride, or honor ever be impinged.

That's a lot of pleat. It's like a kinkbuilding exercise based on degradation. It's pretty unique and there'll definitely be a market for it. It does cut off a bit abruptly, but that's part of the live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword themes. Hmmm. Maybe pile. 

Bleeding Silver, A hybrid graphic novel and text novel, with which scenes get art and which don't seemingly chosen for splash-art value, set in a 'mirror world' that can see the mundane physical world - the 'foundation' - but operates on very different rules. Mirror world people are varied and magical and generally immortal. Unfortunately, any actual contact between the mirror world and the real world has horrible consequences - spawning monsters, causing natural disasters, making people simply drop dead for no reason, etc. Therefore the mirror world must extremely strongly restrict any passage between the two, out of humanitarian reasons to not completely destroy the 'regular' world. The novel follows a man, Sebastian, a lich whose body is made from steel and gemstones, and a normal woman, Clarion, who Sebastian whisked away into the mirror world when it looked like she was going to die. (Foundation to mirror transfer is reasonably safe). It turns out she would have been fine, but now that she's in the mirror world it would be a horrible atrocity to let her go home. Sebastian tries to make her feel welcome in the fantastical mirror world and badly bungles the explanation of where she is and why she can't go home. Clarion is justifiably hurt and accepts his hospitality for a short time but does not get along very well with him and is in deep culture shock without any familiar technology and in a very different society. She manages to completely innocently direly offend someone the first time she goes shopping, and things get worse from there. Clarion doesn't believe sending her home would actually be dangerous- All she has to go on the destructiveness of it is what Sebastian says. Sebastian tries to cheer her up and the book creepily imitates slice-of-life-but-slightly-off for a little while, the tone showing how much she can't be cheered. Clarion eventually gets into contact with a criminal group who know how to send things back to foundation, and sell dollar store magic items there in exchange for valuables, dispersing the negative consequences across a whole city so nobody notices. She starts ingratiating herself and learning what she needs to go home. Meanwhile, Sebastian is wracked with guilt over accidentally kidnapping Clarion and then leaving her to go home and surely hurt people by accident in the process. He reports her to the 'silver circle' which seems to be police of a sort, but they find no trace of her. Clarion returns home and is soon contacted by a secret society in the foundation world, who kidnap her - again - and interrogate her extensively, thinking her to be an opportunistic criminal and definitely lying. She gets more and more angry, and after a mental break she instinctively does magic to return herself to the mirror world - where she falls a thousand feet into a lake. The next part of the novel deals with learning to control her ??magic?? that she has now for some reason, and pretending to be a native to learn more about the mirror world. Sebastian knows she has returned again (justified with some magic worldbuilding) and sets off to go find her - without the silver circle, since they'd just kill her and something weird is going on. When they meet again, Clarion still doesn't trust Sebastian much, but he freely teaches her to control her new magic more efficiently. The big turning point of the book is when they realize some accident of exactly how Sebastian initially summoned her means that Clarion can freely go between baseline and mirror worlds without causing mayhem. The remainder of the book is centered on constructing an underground revolution and steadily summoning more 'striders' who can safely hop worlds while dodging the Silver Circle, with the final climax being a chaotic melee of a chase scene across both worlds, where the leader of the Silver Circle is eventually convinced that Clarion is not sowing destruction every time she leaps, and calls them off. The final part of the book is a series of hopeful scenes of baseline and mirror world people interacting and trading.

One of the earliest stories of the nations of (what is now) the Global Alliance, written down before contact with their extraterrestrial benefactors. It is an epic poem in three parts. Part one follows a capricious river-goddess as she alternately provides for and torments the people of the villages along her banks. In one of her rages, she pulls a town metalworker down beneath the water and he nearly drowns; in the next, she is depicted as pregnant; in her next calm period, she gives the baby to the metalworker she had nearly drowned.

(Without cultural context, readers may or may not put together that “pulling the metalworker under the water” was tasteful concealment of a rape scene.)

The second piece of the epic jumps ahead to when the metalworker’s baby has grown into a young girl. He has just passed away from smallpox and she is crying over his dead body. Desperate for any way to bring her father back, she consults with the town elders, who eventually reveal to her a route to the land of the dead. They warn her that the journey will be dangerous, but she presses on. The girl kills monsters on her journey to the underworld; annotations mention that different versions of the epic include different fantasy creatures here, and it is traditional for new adaptations to add their own. At the climax of the second part, she has to pick her real father out from two imposters, charismatic shapeshifting monsters who had escaped her on her journey. She figures out which one is her real father by asking trivia questions about metalworking; the monsters are stumped but her father answers correctly. She returns to the village in triumph.

The third part again skips ahead in time; the girl has grown into an adult woman, developed divine powers like her mother’s, started a family of her own, and made journeys up and down the river uniting the villages in an alliance. The alliance is building canals to control the floods and protect themselves from the river-goddess’s rage. Finding herself constrained, the river-goddess tries to assassinate her daughter; all three generations of the family–the metalworker, his daughter, and her children–make their stand against her together. The girl and the goddess have a battle of wills with hydrokinesis, her family backs her up with ordinary weapons, and ultimately they prevail in the fight over the goddess. The defeated goddess repents of her actions and signs a contract with the alliance, promising protection from other gods and monsters in exchange for the alliance’s correct ritual practice and sacrifice. An epilogue of sorts describes the growth of the alliance over the next few generations, with them accumulating wealth, building cities, and educating their children, all thanks to the actions of their heroes, who saved them from the whims of capricious nature.

A classic novel controversial in its day. It is set in a period when humanity’s alien benefactors had pulled back a little, out of fear of humanity wiping itself out with their technology. The protagonist is an aspiring politician, in a country whose government is considered too repressive to get to trade with the aliens directly, though of course a rising tide lifts all boats. He hopes to rise through the ranks, reform his government to fit the aliens’ standards, and bring new prosperity to his country. The novel flips between detailing his progress on the campaign trail and a relationship he is conducting with a woman through correspondence, falling in love with her without ever seeing her face. He finally meets his girlfriend and finds out that she is an infamous anti-government terrorist–one of the youngest of a group that carried out several brutal attacks during a failed rebellion a decade ago, and the only one to successfully escape execution and go into hiding.

He is horrified, but she cries and begs him to give her another chance; she deeply regrets what she did in the war and just wants to stay out of politics now, as reforming the government isn’t worth any more bloodshed. The protagonist grapples with divided loyalties as his campaign advances. He has to choose between his dream of a political career and his girlfriend. In the end, he wins the race, but he never gives his acceptance speech–he has fled the country with his girlfriend to build a new life in a new place. An epilogue, a decade later, shows the protagonist and his wife reading news of their old country, which has reformed enough to resume trade with the aliens; they are hopeful that someday they will be able to return and show their children their old home.

(Cultural context notes at the end explain that execution is no longer practiced in the modern day, though euthanasia is offered if wanted to those whose crimes were so heinous they must be exiled to an island or imprisoned; while the aliens have relaxed their standards enough to trade with humans who do it, humans’ own moral standards have advanced to the point where any politician who proposed bringing back the death penalty would be voted out.)

Bleeding Silver, A hybrid graphic novel and text novel, with which scenes get art and which don't seemingly chosen for splash-art value, set in a 'mirror world' that can see the mundane physical world - the 'foundation' - but operates on very different rules. 

This one is alright. The creepy slice of life is sure creepy, and the worldbuilding kind of is deus ex machina-y... And honestly though, why doesn't the mirror world just bring everyone across? Presumably it's too risky, but then what's up with Clarion being brought across? Overall it's a bit muddy. Maybe pile. 

One of the earliest stories of the nations of (what is now) the Global Alliance, written down before contact with their extraterrestrial benefactors.

Well that's fun. Tasteful. The goddess is clearly the villainess here, something that fortunately the writers seem to agree with him on. This will probably find an audience with people who are interested in finding out about the Global Alliance. There might be a formal response to this from Anadyne, even. Worth publishing. Yes pile. 

A classic novel controversial in its day.

Well, this is a bit contrived, though the effects of the alien contact are interesting. Overall it doesn't really stand out to him; it seems like a pretty standard blackrom* novel, if a bit milquetoast. Of course she's reformed and not in any way manipulating him. Honestly he feels like the author wasn't using the premise to its full potential. No pile. 

Porn! It’s a dystopian sci-fi series about a colony on a far-future terraformed Red Planet...

Well that sure is a case of values dissonance right there. Kinky and also morally questionable. There'd sure be a fanclub for this but he absolutely doesn't want it associated with his company. No pile.

*Heart's inhabitants aren't literally Homestucks but they sure do have the concept of attraction based on mutual envy and frustration.

A story about a woman with a degenerative disease and her sports career - written both as a sentimental drama about the pain of infirmity, of loss and the stress of going through a series of medical procedures, and also as an inspirational tale of a whirlwind tour of the handicap* system common amongst sports in hearthome, where different aspects of her failing skills are prioritized and exalted differently as her legs give out and her spine starts giving her more and more problems. Midway through the novel, she finds a treatment that grants her a path to recovery, and so she gains more and more function as she wistfully progresses back through the system, sometimes finding herself less useful to her team, sometimes more, as she progresses through the cycle of recuperation and adjustment. 

*lit. "Equality-beneath-the-goddess"