skywaterblue

So that I can close tabs and also mark which ones to leave feedback on, as the comment tab hasn't been working at all for me.

Pern

This year brought a bumper crop of Pern fics, interestingly a lot of femmeslash between Mirrim and Menolly. And Stinging As a Well-Aimed Dart is one of those, from Mirrim's perspective. There's a lovely bit on Pernese girls playing Mirrim-fights-Thread games and of course, a firelizard flight to provide the Pern universe's version of Pon Farr. The author does a lovely job balancing the fanon tendency to make the dragons sassier, while still making Path sound as Pernese dragons should do.

I also really enjoyed The Ballad of Mirrim and Menolly's Ride, which is not femmeslash but rather an adventure fic in which the two girls fight an unexpected Threadfall, and Path keeps accidentally betweening them to worse and worse alternate universes in an attempt to warn Pern. The idea that you can between to an alternate universe is one I haven't seen done before and the author chose some really interesting ones to explore.

Perspective is a short fic which peers into Pern's very far future. I enjoyed this one because the author obviously has the same problem with the dragons as I do.

Fifty Years After the Fair is a story of Benden Weyr in the First Pass - a time period with interesting characters established by Anne McCaffery but sort of forgotten and/or ruined by her son's continual attempts to inherit the franchise. This one I feel is a very Pern story, compressed for Yuletide: it's generational, following the children and granchildren of one of the background goldriders. And it also features some unusual plot twists - family resentments over who Impresses and what color, abrupt deaths due to Thread and other maladies, basically things which should occur more often in the series but do not.

His Dark Materials

like gold to ayery thinnesse beate I enjoyed very much and I was surprised by that - I very rarely enjoy Will/Lyra reunion fics because most of them are silly tosh. But this one is quite clever in that it features adult Will and Lyra, both of whom have had interesting careers. And I quite like the indomitable spunk in which an adult Lyra, having suddenly arrived on our Earth, set about to finding Will again. The author revels in the little details which make up the massive change between going from a mid-Edwardian universe, to ours with google and airports and national ID cards. There are two sequels for your instant gratification as well.

By far my favorite though, and possibly going to be my favorite of the year, was Dinosaurs in the Architecture. The main character is a young woman with a paleontologist father, whose daemon has inadvertently settled as a dinosaur. In a world where the Church has forced Darwin into exile, this spells problems for our heroine. I adore this, as I adore all long looks at Lyra's world and the concept of having your soul on the outside. If I didn't know better I would think I knew the author for this. Dinosaurs! Angels! Quasi-Victorian Steampunk Adventure!

Young Wizards

But Rather Darkness Visible, the one that Aria got, is a crossover between Doctor Who and Young Wizards... which is actually canon for that universe! (No, really. These two characters have in canon met.) In this one, Dairine is tasked with having a friendly chat with Ten post-Waters on Mars. It's quite lovely and smooshes the two canons together effortlessly. What I wouldn't give to see the Tenth Doctor greet a wizard-on-errantry with "Dai stiho" onna telly.

I also liked and the city stood in its brightness for the lovely vignettes, and the errand Dairine is sent to run is the Wizardry series at its best: cutting edge science fiction.

Finally, I really really enjoyed A Matter of Choice in which Dairine notices something off with her Twilight-obsessed schoolmate and enlists Ronan's help in a brief battle for her soul. But not in the way that you would think! Twilight is surprisingly not bashed in this story as silly, but rather something bittersweet. It broke my heart, a little.