Otter's Rock

The main Remix just went live, and here are some recs.

First off, the story written for me is awesome, you should all read it.  What You Know (The Devil in the Details Remix) is a Deep Space 9 story about the whole Sisko family dealing with the knowledge of what the Prophets did to ensure that Benjamin Sisko was born.  A very haunting look at the things the show didn't consider which takes my story and amps it to the next level.

Buffy
One Who Lights the Darkness (The Bedtime Story Remix) When you're the slayer, what do you do when there's a monster under your bed?  Remix of 5 Scoobies Who Didn't Curse The Darkness And On Who Lit A Candle.  I love the different reactions to monsters and beds. On its own, it is a great remix. It's also a great remix concept, taking the whole Scoobies-at-night idea and giving it a twist.

Avengers
The Captain and the Man of Iron, a Saga by Thor Odinsson, beta by Loki Laufeyjarson (Steve Rogers Must Die: the In Tony Stark’s Arms Mix) The title says it all.

Buffy/Doctor Who
Watching the Watchers (the Oncoming Storm Remix) Ethan Rayne and the 9th Doctor.  A storm, a Doctor, and a judicious application of chaos.

Harry Potter
About Her (Candlelight Mix) .  Luna had always taken a shine to fantastic things, and Cho definitely counts as one of the most fantastic.  I love the way the author writes an adult Luna, it's just pitch-perfect.

Stargate SG-1
The First Rule of Anthropology (The Missed Chances Remix).  Nine years after Daniel leaves the SGC, the Stargate goes public.

Star Trek
Second Star to the Right (The Chartered Remix) Spock was drowning and Nyota didn't know how to save him.

X-Men movieverse
Homeschooling for Mutants (a Midnight's Child Remix).  Magneto sets Pyro a reading assignment. Unlike past literature assignments, it turns out to be relevant to his interests.  I love the way the author shows us the power of literature, and why all these people are doing what they do.

teh_helenables just posted an awesome Ronon and Teyla ficlet called The Pegasus Conditioning.  It's short but wonderful, you should all go read!

I have to rec the fic I got from medie.  It's everything my little TTH drabble series wanted to be when it grew up. It is awesome.  The original is an Angel/Dark Knight crossover, where Gunn moved to Gotham and became an assistant DA who moonlights as a demon-fighter, and then Batman gets turned into an actual bat.  Gotham (the Just When You Think You're Out Remix) is about 1000x more awesome.  Kara!  Zatanna!  Stephanie Brown as a slayer!  More bat!Batman!  Demons in the ceiling!  Seriously, it's awesome, and you must read it.

Written for me: Batman Beyond
Birth of a Lioness.  Six months after Terry started working for Mr. Wayne the second time, Commissioner Gordon brought Matt home from school.  I like the way this shows Mary McGinnis's awareness that what is best for Gotham is not necessarily what is best for her family.

( Whole buncha recs: Back to the Future, Batman Beyond, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Blue Beetle, Calvin and Hobbes, Caprica, Casablanca/Indiana Jones, Chinese Mythology, A Chorus Line, Chronicles of Narnia, Damar, Disney Princess Superheroes, Joan of Arcadia, Justice League, Mary Poppins, Mary Russel, Muppet Show, Philadelphia Story, Pleasantville, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Temeraire, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Tin Man, Vorkosigan Series, Watchmen, West Side Story )

The Remix Duello is open!  (Basically, you say what fandoms you're willing to write, and get assigned a story and have to remix it whatever it is.)

I wrote: A Collection of E-mails from the SGC Archives (the Wanky Wormhole Remix).  It's about Wormhole X-treme, and its fandom.  When highly intelligent and motivated people get bored, things happen.

The fic written for me is In Battle's Fury, Silence (the Meditations on the Past Remix) by skieswideopen , a remix of my fic Pale Battalions.  Teal'c goes to war in the name of Apophis.  This is a beautiful fic, and compliments the original well.

Other great fics to check out:

That I Would Be Good (The Live To Tell Remix) by lls_mutant.  On New Caprica, a Two took an interest in Felix Gaeta. The difference between a Two and an Eight meant a huge difference in the way Gaeta's life turned out.  Creepy in just the right way, and realistic about Stockholm Syndrome, and yet ultimately hopeful.  Very well done.

Mnhei'Sahe (The Rihannsu Remix) by medie.  About Sulu, and the Romulan Commander (TOS).  Very well written, a Sulu who's out of his depth but still smart and savvy, and a wonderfully well-written Romulan Commander.  Bonus, the author uses Diane Duane's version of Romulans, which I love.

Naming of Parts (The Strange Charm Remix) by naraht. One fresh October morning when the wind was whipping the dark blue water of the fjord into whitecaps, Stenak arrived at the spaceport in Trondheim and realized that she had learnt the wrong language.  About language, and cultural differences, and the difference between tolerance and acceptance.
naraht 

So, I'm driving the Doctor Who van on crack_van this month, and I'm having a devil of a time narrowing it down to only twelve stories to rec.  I thought I had it all figured out, but then I found an awesome new story that I have to rec, and have reluctantly decided that this means, in the interests of variety, that I can only rec one of the two River Song stories I was planning to rec.  (Alas.)

The two stories are:
Children of Time by iamshadow , in which a linear story is told from River's point of view about her growing up and first meeting the Doctor, but it's mostly about her and growing up and her older brother (who, by a startling coincidence is Jack Harkness).
Not One Line by rickmaniack101, in which a linear story is told from the Doctor's (but not River's) POV in which all his subsequent meetings with her (and falling in love, and marrying her) are chronicled in the order he experienced them.

Both stories are wonderfully written, tug at the heart strings (thought for different reasons), and favorites of mine.

Remix Redux is open!  A lovely story was written for me.  Autumn (the Ashes and Roses Remix) is a remix of Summer Experience.  It's a good story, that incorporates some of the head canon for that 'verse that I mentioned in a comment on my DW, and the anony mouse got Sarah Connor's voice perfectly.  Go read and review!

So, I have done my good deed for the week.  For those of you who have never heard of him, Macedon was arguably the greatest Star Trek fanfic writer of the 1990s, before he gafiated.  He was one of the big names on alt.startek.creative, not only as a writer but also as a moderator and mentor.  His writing is some of the best stuff you'll find, but alas, his website was on a free hosted AOL site that went down a couple of years ago.  Someone rescued it--yay! ... but they uploaded it onto geocities.  (Oops.)  His stuff was still available if you knew where to find it on trekiverse.org (which is ancient, creaky, and cumbersome).  In the hopes of preserving his fic in useful function for posterity, I have uploaded it all to AO3.

Macedon came to my attention because he writes great Vulcans.  In particular, Wisdom and Beauty.  If you have any interest in Vulcans at all, you absolutely must read this story.  It is a story of a Vulcan/Human bonding in the 24th century and the details and richness of the story. Vulcan comes alive. The society, the planet, the people. They are irrevocably threaded through this story in a masterful way.  No canon characters appear, but the whole story is so incredibly well done that it doesn't matter.  (Warning, there is a graphic description of a rape, and the psychological after-effects.)

Then I read his Jeu-Parti series.  Macedon's greatest gift is the ability to take an idea, a theme, a moral (or a set of them, for his longer works) and make them come to life in the lives and thoughts of his characters. He explores issues realistically, without ever becoming preachy or moralistic or filled with platitudes, and he does it because everything (plot, theme, world-building, etc.) flows naturally from the lives of his characters. He makes every character he writes (original or not) be realistic, three-dimensional, and fascinating.  Jeu-Parti is the three-part story of Jake Sisko, the son of Commander Benjamin Sisko, and his relationship with a Vulcan named Salene. But it's also about more than that. It's about choosing to be different, about choosing to pursue your dreams at the expense of normality, about dealing with society's disapproval, about friendship, about love, about family, about mental illness, about the difficulty of building a relationship--friendship or other--across cultural lines.  If you don't like slash, you can read the first story without any qualms; each story stands on its own, and the first one is pure friendship. But I would still encourage you to try the other two stories. They're definitely worth reading.

And, you know, Voyager is my least favorite Star Trek series, but I loved his other work, and so I decided to try the eight part "braided novel" he wrote with Peg Robinson, Talking Stick/Circle.  And was in awe.  The story is too sprawling (in the grand sense) in scale and reach to reduce to a mere synopsis; let us just say that this is Voyager unfettered and red in tooth and claw, such as Paramount with its nice tidy pander-to-the-demographics mentality could only dream of producing.  This is what the show could have been if they had allowed the characters to be real, flawed, but still courageous people. This is what the show could have been if they had allowed it to actually deal seriously with issues instead of platitudes. The writing is awesome, the characters and plot will grip you, and if it doesn't make you think, you have no brain. There are not words to describe the awesomeness of this series. When I read it, I stayed up all night to read the whole thing despite having to work in the morning because it was just that incredible.

Among the many issues that the TV series ignored or glossed over that this series does not:
1) the fact that Chakotay is an Indian from a tribe that has somehow managed to keep its identity as a tribe despite the fact that the Federation has screwed it over almost as much as the US did back in the white settlement of the West.
2) the fact that Janeway and most of the Starfleet officers, enlightened and culturally sensitive as they may be, still carry the backpack of privilege, still look at the world through that lens.
3) the fact that the Maquis are not Starfleet, and have their own identity and pride, and that is very different from Starfleet identity and pride.
4) the fact that religion isn't just a nice bit of local color for the Indian character, but a true and deep faith.

I cannot rec Macedon's fic highly enough.  Go and read.  You won't regret it.

If you are a fan of the Vorkosigan series, you absolutely must go read Forward Momentum by bracketyjack now.  (And if you've never read the Vorkosigan series, you need to go read it and then go read Forward Momentum.)

In this story, set post-Winterfair Gifts and AU before Diplomatic Immunity, bracketyjack takes LMB's famous dictum for coming up with character-centered plots (figure out the worst possible thing you can do to a character and then do it to him or her) and takes it absolutely opposite (figure out the best possible thing you can do and then do it).  It works surprisingly well when combined with a note-perfect depiction of (almost) all characters and the Vorkosiverse in general, particularly underlying thematic and historical aspects of it.  (Okay, I didn't quite like the way she handled Ivan.  But he was such a minor bit-player in this story that it didn't bother me much.)  bracketyjack calls this novel the companion-piece to a scholarly essay he/she has written about the Vorkosigan books, and I believe it; there is an astonishing amount of meta packed into a lot of places, mostly moments of clarity and analysis from people who are, after all, exceptionally smart and perspective and have enough pieces of enough puzzles to put much together when they decide to.

Here's my comment to the story: