Further selections from the working group (likewise certified for accuracy) include the following.

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. This book is more than a hundred years old, set in the Union of that time. It alternates perspective between the two main characters, a boy and girl who meet as children, become friends, slowly fall in love as they grow older, get married as young adults, and build a life together. Romance, as depicted in this story, is primarily composed of friendship, trust, and some understated lust, which culminates in joyous, certain-as-the-sun-rises love. This is not to say that they don't have disagreements, but all are resolved amicably. There is some explicit sexual content, almost entirely after they get married, but it's considered to be moreso pornography-that-makes-you-cry than pornography-that-makes-you-aroused. Their comings-of-age include of course increasing knowledge and sexual awakening, but the story also places great emphasis on seizing one's agency and the way the couple grows into each other, simultaneously adapting to their relationship and the world around them to together form an integrated whole.

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). The magic system works in such a way that it is possible (albeit difficult) for even the lowliest mortal beings to ascend to great power (and for even the greatest to be usurped). The story follows a woman of great ambition and deadly cleverness. After the spillover of a battle between two mid-level entities destroys most of her hometown, she becomes determined to gain the power necessary to control her fate in a chaotic world. The first act tells the story of her quest, the trials she undergoes, the stratagems she employs, the people she meets, the fantastical locations she visits, the entities she slays. Most of her victories are the result of her intelligence and strategic acumen (or, perhaps, her lack of mistakes). Notably, she does not at any point use deception to get ahead, although there are plenty of situations where it seems advantageous to do so, and several occasions on which she would gain from dishonoring agreements she has made. The second act begins as she nears the peak of power. At this point, she becomes more contemplative, stepping back from her schemes to gain power that she might think about how to use the power she has gained. She comes to realize that, despite the unending struggle and change, the nature of that struggle is constant. ("What did you expect? That you would climb to the top, seize power, and find waiting for you a switch to flip and fix the world? This world runs in cycles of cycles, and if it were easy to break them it would have happened already. When everything changes, nothing changes.") So she seeks a way to undermine those patterns, to make way for a world which is less chaotic and truly different. But—she decides—despite the constraints of the ecology they all participate in, everyone makes their own choices, and there is no reason it is impossible for them to make different ones. In the third act, she brings her vision into reality, persuading and bargaining for people to change their behavior, to work together to build something better. The costs of her honor are repaid many times over, as she alone has the credibility to make this plan succeed. What makes the difference is helping others to see the truth, to recognize the fundamental stupidity of collectively choosing to create a world rent by conflict. Over many thousands of years, the forces of coordination creep forward, and eventually overcome those of conflict. Peace at last.

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid* team and play together. At first, they aren't very good: unskilled, uncoordinated, and prone to blunders. As the book goes on, they learn from their mistakes, get better, and eventually become one of the better teams in the region. The story focuses most on the camaraderie and friendship between them, as well as the humor they share together and find in their situation—despite numerous losses, they do not become dispirited, instead joking about their ineptitude. The incompetence only enhances its effectiveness as an ode to boyhood friendship. Almost as an afterthought, the story offers detailed insight into the tactical dynamics and competitive landscape of kravmabid—the narrator often describes the characteristics of skilled play as an ironic contrast to what the boys are actually doing—as well as what it feels like from the inside to slowly get better at something by experimenting and learning from your mistakes.

*This is a sport on Olam, combining hiking, navigation, tracking, archery, and martial arts into a sort of multiday wilderness wargame. It was originally developed for training soldiers, and has since evolved into a more fun recreational activity. Play is dominated by maneuver, team coordination, stealth, and tracking.

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist. He is often inconsiderate, and treats the people close to him poorly, but is exceptionally good at justifying his actions to himself. Since the entire book is from his—often warped—perspective, readers may initially believe that he is in the right, and underestimate the depth of his shortcomings. Eventually, he upsets someone in a way, and to a degree, that he cannot explain away, and for practically the first time is actually confused about why they feel as they do. He carries this confusion with him for several weeks, ruminating over it until he is eventually forced to conclude that he is responsible, and has very deeply fucked up. This triggers a long process of introspection, and attempts to change. Slowly, haltingly, with great difficulty, he is able to see through some of the illusions that have afflicted him, and comes to understand himself and others better. He repairs some of his relationships, and at the books end, makes a heartfelt apology to the person he has wronged the most (their reaction is not shown).

There is a certain someone who has been reading alien books and not sharing.

She makes a pointed comment to Snowblossom between meetings of the Council of Reflections, and would you look at that now she has a flash-chip in her hand. 

Wonderful. 

Now, officially piracy is not condoned by the Anadyne government and it's a serious crime to leak confidential diplomatic documents, however.

Obviously she can't entrust this to any random staffer, and it would be foolish to just dump the whole thing to the net. She doesn't have enough time to analyze the whole thing personally - she has duties - but neither is she stupid enough to potentially cause a diplomatic incident that might be traced back to her. And letting it lie fallow is a crime against the Four Knowings, which is the kind that counts. 

Fortunately, she has contacts.

Here's a crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. 

Death-battle genre, that's a blast from the past. The massive-crossover-but-not-really is kind of strange - on Heart you'd just use public domain characters - but sure, whatever. This one seems like it doesn't have a real protagonist, which is a shame, because it means the plot sort of meanders and doesn't really... go anywhere. He gets that that's kind of the aesthetic, but this genre was a fad on Heart and he doesn't really judge that it has staying power, despite the magic-building. No pile. 

Here's a fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. 

The deuteragonist of this one, on the other hand, hits a particular Great Reflection pretty much squarely on the head. Abusive parents, supernatural abilities, paranoid, competent, slow to let down her guard. The shortened lifespan is an interesting inversion of how that one usually goes. The alien star is also really cute and protection-worthy. This should sell. Yes pile.  

Here's a series of relatively short novels about magical girls whose powers each revolve around conjuring and manipulating some class of ordinary manufactured objects, and who must fight monsters that appear in extradimensional fake nightmares to survive. 

Oh, this one is in conversation with - wait a second, aliens. He was about to say that this is obviously inheriting from that one anime with the lich magical girls, but the aliens don't have that, surely? Spooky coincidence. The ordinary-object powers and the sadistic magical girl in the second book will sell well, even though she's kind of played for horror. That's kind of expected, given the source m- He'll just shut up now. Yes pile.

A bildungsroman about a teenage girl who desperately wants to be an ICU nurse but cannot reliably perform tasks which those around her occasionally observe to require much lower executive function than being any kind of nurse...

This is a pretty frank look at the plight of many Skies. It'll be sympathetic to a lot of people. The alien talk therapy is distinctly Eravian in style - in Anadyne there'd be spiritual counsellors involved for this sort of thing - but it's a good look at the way aliens do it. This package doesn't seem to have come with a world label - he'll have to talk to his boss about getting that sorted out. Yes pile. 

A romance novel set in a world where everyone is magical beings who have a very specific body type which is probably the author's fetish; it includes bird wings and bug eyes and unconventional arrangements of body fat. The book is about a boy and a nonbinary magical being spending about the first third of the book in will-they-won't-they relationship development and then the latter two-thirds being adorably romantic together and supporting each other as they work through their personal issues. 

Okay, you do you, author, but nobody here is attracted to that description.* It doesn't stand out to him as being particularly quality for its genre; there are a lot of works where people go through will-they-or-won't-they for a while before settling into romantic life. No pile. 

An educationalfictionpiece about a pair of engineers in a science fiction setting who have to fix the space station they live on using a lot of technology that is postulated to exist, the workings of which aren't gone into excessive detail about but the mechanics of working with which are; they use complicated calculus to determine what the problem is and how they should fix it, and probability theory to determine how likely various possible solutions are to work, and various other fields of math to handle other aspects of the situation, and also to solve non-crisis-related problems during slower parts of the book. It is mentioned offhand at several points that the two engineers are queerplatonic metamours both married to a botanist but the botanist doesn't get a lot of screentime and the book focuses much less on the romantic aspects of the situation than with the engineers' friendship and the space station crisis.

The aliens are polyamorous. Yay! But otherwise this is a textbook in disguise, a genre that many Eravians love but that'll go over like a lead balloon in Anadyne most likely. It's also weird how this "marriage" thing is apparently nonexclusive - not analogous to Keeper/Kept, then. He'll put it in the maybe pile for now. 

*All generalizations are false.

A traditional isekai novel, with the main character having an even more traditional harem aura, with the main focus of the book being after the "Demon Lord" was defeated of the endeavour of trying to transmit the body of literature they discovered, and the awkwardness of going through the publishing industry with a relatively fixed product. It's very focused on the experience of loneliness after the rush of a simple love, and wistfully wrought. 

Cute, but not competitive. It's creative-angst genre and it's not Watchmaker's Heart. It won't sell. No pile. 

The seminal work of the temple - the words of the goddess incarnate, or so they say. 

This is so above his pay grade. He'll flag this to his boss and get them to bring it up with the diplomatic corps. He sets the book aside and keeps reading.

A thick fantasy novel about a humble schoolboy in a time loop trying to save the world from an apocalyptic magical threat, with a central looping character whose willpower focus is - to save everyone, all their stories, all the people he doesn't know and will never know - because their loss is simply unacceptable. 

This would be Devotary work - as in, devotary work for a Devotary sect - in Anadyne. It's strong even for that. You can really feel the misery and pain dripping off it, and the ultimate anticlimactic success is wonderful and clever. The after-tragedy is well-written and the characters are firmly fleshed out and the stance that "Everyone deserves saving" will be immensely popular. Yes pile.   

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. 

Awww. This one is very adorable and also well-written. There's a lot less sex than there would be in a Heart equivalent, but that just makes the few scenes that are there hit harder. "Marriage", again, seems to translate roughly to Keeper-and-Kept, but less of a D/S relationship? The alien culture is oddly shared between worlds in some ways. This one should definitely find an audience. Yes pile. 

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). 

This is a sweeping epic, and rarely for the genre, actually justifies the scale. This story can't be told at a smaller scale, it has to work with organizations and leadership, and it's a very interesting meditation on truth that's in conversation with the Storytellers in Anadyne. It's also just a ripping good read. The themes are deep, the action is strong, the plots are cunning. The protagonist is similar to a few Great Reflections and will appeal well to people searching for their enra.* He sees a definite future for this one at market. Yes pile. 

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid team and play together.

This one is also very cute. The main characters being all boys is unusual, and worth taking a look at; the team sport is a little bit weird, being as it is adapted from warfare, but then archery is quite popular on Heart so this will appeal to the people who do that as a foreign culture's approach to it. The ineptitude of the team helps to keep it light and reduce the comparisons to real war. Overall this has potential. Yes pile.  

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist.

This one could be useful to a few people Elm knows. He quietly folds that thought away; what's his critical reaction? His critical reaction is that the unreliable narration is done well, the redemption arc is clever and will appeal to the public, and the seeking-of-truth is going to be popular in both Anadyne and Eravia. There is some risk that it'll be taken as a commentary on Liar, but then he's Eravian and not Anadician so he can publish that kind of thing. Yes pile.

*Lifepath or vocation. 

A second batch of stories come from Piecemeal, identified as being picked by the author of Reinvention (who clearly has gotten advice from some PR people)

A hubris-paean story is set in a pocket world, the Black Below, outside the reach of the tyrants of the universe, hidden in the shelter of three immobile gods of secrets and bindings, life and health, and curiosity and paradox (respectively). The surroundings of the life god have been conquered and monopolized by an immortal aristocracy who (very politely) execute anyone who lives beyond their dictated maximum lifespan, a law which they all cheat by giving up their names (but not their identities or social ties) and permanently joining the half-ghostly eternal council that advises the nominal ruler. A daughter of one of these rulers is offered true immortality like her father and his line, but defies them by giving it away to a rival country's admiral purely to spite her father and his ways, and they slowly assemble a team of revolutionaries from many backgrounds, unified in their desire to overthrow the ghost councilors and their figurehead, and spread life eternal to all the world, and then to take the fight to the tyrants above. They fail, and the epilogue shows them dispersing across the pocket world to hide.

A second part shows a new protagonist learning of the attempt, which had been imperfectly suppressed from public attention by the aristocracy. They set out to find the lost revolutionaries and prepare a second attempt, learning from the failures and ready to try again. They criss-cross the Black, finding both the people and the relics of the first attempt, and making other allies who can harness the power of the other gods of the Black or advance technology for use against the tyrants. They find all the Seven Who Fell, who nickname them the 'New Marshal', but cannot rally them all to their banner; some were crippled by the loss, and the later chapters show the Marshal struggling to to re-ignite the spark of life for a few who have lost hope. The second book ends as a war council begins, the Marshal looking around at the faces of those they've brought together, and the fierce determination they've managed to impart.

Translator's notes state that this was an unfinished trilogy; the third part took long enough to write that fanfiction filled the gap, and the author ended up publishing their plot outline rather than writing book three herself. This was popular enough that it was a popular trend to do it on purpose, mostly within the hubris-paean genre. Reinvention's author notes that one of their very first writing projects was one of the many continuations of the Black Seven trilogy, but it's not work they are willing to publish because they were completely inexperienced and so the craft of the writing is shoddy. Neither author nor translator has any other continuation they are willing to recommend in its place, though there are a dozen public-domain versions which are prominent enough to be mentioned in the encyclopedia entry for the series.

This trilogy's first book, Night's Hand, starts as three intertwined superhero stories. A hooded detective called Shuffle tracks down crime across his city with a mix of detective work, mystically-accurate hunches, and disregard for propriety and law, tracking the structure of the criminal crews and publicly exposing the links between the 'Admirals' who lead them and their public personas as philanthropists. An ancient king wakes in the urban era and saves his city-state from several disasters; he rapidly rescues the passengers of a crashing ship before its engines rip it apart, holds up a breaking bridge with his bare hands while it evacuates, and fights a small army of 'metal men' - slightly-steampunk robots; he gives an interview as he tries to understand the way his country has changed since he reigned, and a newspaper calls him 'a royal waste of space, but also a royal absence of vices', and he picks up the nickname 'Royal'. A woman who calls herself 'Storm-Eyes' appears from a thunderstorm, flying through a cluster of cities tracking drug cartels and rigged gambling rings with her speed and supernatural senses, proving impossible to lie to and extremely difficult to deceive or mislead. They interleave as they each find links between the problems they face and an international network which seems to be run with someone who can influence the minds of those around them, and the three collaborate on a bust to roll up the network and catch the mastermind. As they restrain him, he shrugs and declares "I am just an instrument"; moments later his body goes slack and comatose, and starts to disintegrate before their eyes.

The second book, Sun's Crown, follows them as they try to find whoever controlled the 'instrument'; they find several other masterminds, all of whom disintegrate the same way, and others who control more armies of metal men. As they investigate, they find evidence that these conspiracies are older than they thought, and the further they look, the older it seems to be. They ultimately find that it is as old as Royal, and that the 'prophet' who has declared that the king would return in the future is weak with age but alive. He tries to make common cause, but to Royal's despair, Shuffle and Storm-Eyes are suspicious and successfully demonstrate he's a tool of the same conspiracy. The confrontation between them successfully convinces Royal mid-fight, and he turns to confronting his 'patron', who is maneuvered into bragging about his backers controlling all of history. They defeat him, but he vanishes like the others and they are again left with questions about who, exactly, they have declared themselves against.

The third book is Truth's Winds, and its cover does not give away the genre (because they have a nice matched set of books and don't want to spoil it from book one) but the title page unsurprisingly marks its genre as hubris-paean. The hero trio prepare for war, recruiting many more minor superpowered people. They descend into hidden foundations of cities the world over, ruins of ancient empires (which conceal outposts of their enemy much less ruined than they appear), and a base which is sunken inside a massive caldera, nearly sunk into the planet's mantle. Ultimately, they turn and ascend into space, purging first a base on Earth's moon and then the headquarters, a massive station disguised as a moon of Venus, where they find the human-like aliens who have been puppeting their civilization from its beginnings. Despite losses, they are victorious, and end on an optimistic note -  they are left with a wealth of advanced scientific knowledge, which they will be able to use to improve humanity's lives and to travel the stars.

A thriller/romance novel set during a cold war between two fictional early-modern states which had a brief but very messy total war when the monarchy controlling the region collapsed, about a generation before the novel is set. Their confederation-alliances have imposed strict demilitarization of the entirety of their border regions ever since, but they still engage in a cold war. The Meritocracy of Pernik is nominally minarchist, in practice oligarchic-plutocratic and controlled primarily by families who were lesser nobility or major guildmasters in the predecessor state. The Vratsa Citizenry is an idealistic direct/liquid democracy* with socialist tendencies which broke sharply from the predecessor's power structures. Also depicted is Ohridski Independent, a university-microstate which stayed out of the war and is neutral ground; the protagonists first met while both students attending the university. The two viewpoint characters trade off perspective, and each switch is made when they meet face to face, whether in the DMZ, in the university's grounds, or another neutral country. The Perniki is the daughter of an aristocratic family who transitioned into the capitalist class smoothly, but are old-fashioned and sideline her due to lingering sexism; she manages an internal affairs bureau and a private security firm for her family. She is not particularly loyal to her country but is attached to the privileges of wealth and status. The Vratsan is also from an old family, but is a committed partisan for the democratic ideals of his country. He is a known field agent, though his service record is classified; comments from his counterpart imply that she has seen the sealed record anyway, and that he is the most highly decorated agent they have.

The action chapters cover espionage, sabotage, and assassinations; the Vratsan side shows him committing them personally, while the Perniki chapters show her making arrangements for others to act or actively directing response when part of her agency is targeted. The meetings involve a lot of trading barbed comments and hinting at knowledge of each other's actions, frequently joking about offers to defect, but also reminiscing about their history at school and romantically-charged comments about each other's competence and accomplishments. There is also a varying degree of implication that they're having sex off-screen, ranging from "meeting for coffee in the afternoon, next chapter picks up leaving town in the morning" to "leaves their hotel room keys under the dinner check when they leave the table"; nothing is shown on-screen. The last few chapters break from the pattern by having a female-lead portion end when she is in the direct line of fire from an unexpected operation she thinks is the male lead - the remainder of the book interleaves the two viewpoints as she acts personally against a follow-up attack, and both protagonists realize they're possibly going to kill their counterpart by morning. She realizes the intended target is a corrupt wing of her family's private police, and when his actions start to blare a meeting of grossly corrupt silencing of whistle-blowers, she hesitates for long enough to lose control, and while she coordinates 'damage control', she's internally conflicted about whether she regrets failing or not. The final meeting has the male lead arrive at her personal residence; she congratulates him on successfully inciting a run on the bank that is the keystone of her family's holdings, removing most of their wealth and power. He accepts it half-heartedly and states he knows she was almost in a position to prevent it, and says that he's unsure whether he wants to apologize for putting her on the spot. She's non-committal, but with some heat declares that she's not going to keep the house much longer, with the power shifting as much as it is. He kisses her hand**, hands her a manila folder, and leaves. She opens it and finds a passport and set of documents tailored for her, along with tickets and itinerary for travel to a neutral country and a destination she recognizes as the barony of a cousin branch of the male lead's family who's maintained their title and holdings. A three-sentence epilogue describes a view from a window of the barony's seat, the warmth of a fire in the room, and a bedside table next to the window, where the passport rests on top of a rumpled blouse and skirt.

*The translator notes that this is a very flattering and somewhat anachronistic depiction of democracy for the time period; the sophistication of its mechanisms are unrealistic, as liquid democracy wasn't tried at this scale for another half-century, and most democracy in the time period was substantially more corrupt and dysfunctional, exclusionary, or both, than is seen here. The author is an ideologue for liquid democracy and other direct-democracy-family forms of government and has admitted she wrote the story partially as a vehicle for her views. However, it was well-researched; though the succession crisis and particulars of the secession are fiction, Ohridski Independent is directly based on a real historical university in the region, and like several other universities, its student government at the time is one of the known examples of small-scale attempts at liquid democracy.
**More overtly/standardly romantic than anything they have done on-screen at any earlier point.

A hubris-paean story is set in a pocket world, the Black Below, outside the reach of the tyrants of the universe, hidden in the shelter of three immobile gods of secrets and bindings, life and health, and curiosity and paradox (respectively).

This one is clearly in conversation with that one with the submarine capt- aliens, he really has to stop doing that. In any case it's been done, down to a lot of the details like the triumvirate of gods and the immortal ruling council that executes people who grow too old. Nobody's going to believe this one is from aliens. No pile. Not even considering the fact it's unfinished. 

 This trilogy's first book, Night's Hand, starts as three intertwined superhero stories.

This trilogy, on the other hand, is solid and original. The trio of superheroes are well-realized and the ancient king's confusion about the modern world is a nice character note. The secret cabal of aliens controlling the modern world from the beginning is a little... That premise doesn't really happen on Heart, because it sounds a bit too much like psychosis symptoms. He's pretty divided on whether that makes it original, controversial, or just unpleasant. The first two books are solid, but that ending... 

He marks the trilogy "Maybe" in the file and keeps going. 

A thriller/romance novel set during a cold war between two fictional early-modern states which had a brief but very messy total war when the monarchy controlling the region collapsed, about a generation before the novel is set. 

This one is like that one in the same genre with the time-travelers, but it's more grounded in a historical setting, and the tease and implication are going to inspire so much fanfiction. It's subtle, clever, and remarkably deep; it stands up to the comparison, it's clearly its own. The interplay of honor and ethics and love fighting each other in the female lead is carefully-drawn, and the world is well-realized and strong. This one is going to be extremely popular among Suns. It might be a little too subtle for the Skies, but the fanfiction will fill that in. Yes pile. 

The first Violet Ink hears of alien literature is a few weeks ago. She’s briefly told that interdimensional contact was made and packages sent over, and she writes a converter for an alien file format. She mentions it briefly to her polycule — her Kept, Fox Box, and two more Skies, Lively Ember and Black Cross — over dinner.

"Heard something interesting from the boss today. We've made contact with aliens."

"Yeah, there was a press release that got picked up on the il'ka's TV. Apparently contact's pretty limited still, but we're hopeful that relations will go peaceably."

"That's super cool. Was there anything more, X? I've been busy with the latest upgrades to Foxy's ears, so we've been in all day doing testing..."

"It was really small. Lots of speculation, obviously, but not much fact. They did say that it was more than one alien polity. The guess is that we're being introduced to an intergalactic community, but nobody knows for sure."

Foxbox's ears (which are mounted to her skull by an unobtrusive headband mostly hidden in her silver hair) perk up sharply and twitch. She grins and leans against Violet and kisses her cheek. "Super exciting."

Violet snuggles Foxy close, kisses the top of her head, and nods. "Very."

She turns to Liv, "No real details, though. I have some doubts about intergalactic, given that I've got a file format to write a converter for, but I haven't seen any more chatter than usual about mysterious lights in the sky, and I've heard nothing from Explorer's people about signals to analyze from the radio telescopes."

She takes a bite, chews, swallows, then continues, "Feels like it's more 'just around the corner' than that, like there wasn't an interstellar distance being crossed."

"Now isn't that an interesting idea. An alien file format, huh? So they've got computers. And we're getting digital data somehow directly..."

"They'd better not hack my ears."

X giggles. "Unlikely and you wouldn't expect it."

"I wonder if they have tentacles and squid eyes or if they have three nostrils or..."

(The polycule speculates for a while, both anxious and excited, and finally go to bed together for the night.)

The next time it comes up, Violet is working on a patch for a piece of server-cluster software, when she gets a message. The Sanctified is going to hold a press conference during the evening’s shirasanmi rights broadcast, two days from now. She looks up from her desk, turns to her Kept to check whether Foxy’s in a call or not.

And then just stops and smiles sappily, watching her ears twitch as she works on some paperwork for a client.

She rolls her chair over, wraps her arms around her, and kisses her on the cheek. “Guess what, love.~”

"You wanna fuck? You're in the middle of work, love, please don't let me distract you..."

But she's grinning.