“Out here, you had an unimpeded view up to a pocket of Ninth sky. It was soupy white where the atmosphere was pumped in thickest, and thin and navy where it wasn’t. The bright bead of Dominicus winked benignly […]
She parked herself on one of the destroyed humps of rubble in the dead centre. The lamps made lacklustre any real light. They explosively birthed malform shadow all around. The shades of the Ninth were deep and shifty; they were bruise-coloured and cold. In these surrounds, Gideon rewarded herself with a little plastic bag of porridge. It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible.”
i just caught up with wd!steven au and now bc of all the tlt art ur posting i cant help but think about the similarities between wd!steven and gideon's parental situations...
You know. I have also. Uhm. Noticed some similarities. So that’s…. fun? 😂
Hi, Chekhov! How well would you say Gideon the Ninth works as a stand-alone novel? My Queer book club was looking for suggestions and I thought "hey, this might be a great way to finally read that thing I have been meaning to read" but I don't want to ask them to read an entire series, you know?
Yes, but only if everyone is cool with being REALLY upset for the foreseeable future.
Narratively is Gideon good as a stand-alone book? Technically.
In terms of story, is Gideon a good book to read if you never intend to read the other books?
No.
You will be very angry. For a long time. Until you read the other books.
Reading Gideon the Ninth is like traipsing through the forest towards a cliff’s edge. And at the end of the book, you fall off the cliff. And if you stop there, in your mind…. you will forever be falling from that cliff, because you’re afraid to hit the bottom.
But you have to. You have to hit the bottom. Because there’s interesting stuff down there. And even though it hurts, the story continues beyond the cliff.
There are two schools of thought on the locked tomb series; there are the people who took tazmuir at her word when she said gideon had a longsword and drew it as such; then there are the people who know what a longsword is and know that the thing gideon swings is at the bare minimum a fucking claymore.
gentle reminder for those that belong to the former school of thought
It’s standard practice on the Ninth for luggage trunks to be capable of fitting one adult skeleton