Maybe a month or two ago, more or less, the announcement of a TV show by Amazon based on The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells caught my attention enough to make me decide to read the first one via audiobook. I love it! The main character, a part-organic construct (like a robot with organic components including a cloned human brain) who calls itself Murderbot, is highly introverted and is very autistic-coded. It hates eye contact, it has powerful social anxiety, and despite what it calls itself, it doesn't actually like killing (though it is very good at killing), and its favorite activity is watching thousands of hours of entertainment media downloaded from the feed. In the first book, it hacks its governor module to free itself from its slavery, but continues to do its job anyway, just watching entertainment media in its spare time, or even sometimes as it's doing its job. Its favorite series is something called "Sanctuary Moon." (I use it/its pronouns for it here because that's what it uses. Though it is definitely male-presenting. But it has no genitals. It's a SecUnit, not a SexUnit. Sec=Security)

Anyway, it's a very good series, each book short enough that the audiobooks are over in three hours, and until a couple days ago, I thought Martha Wells was a new author. But her name was oddly familiar to me the whole time, and a couple days ago I figured out why: she's the same author who wrote a book I read in or around high school, called "City of Bones," which was one of my favorites at the time because the fantasy world was a rare one that took place not in a "medieval Europe" type fantasy world, but was inspired by various Arabian / Muslim cultures with maybe a touch of ancient Egypt thrown in, IIRC. What I loved so much about that book was that it was new, inventive, it had a non-standard setting, and the main character was an artificial human species that had been created to survive the harsh new environment. See, something happened to that world that rendered most of it a desert, and when it happened, the survivors weren't sure they would be able to adapt, so they made this new species. Surprise to them, both species survived and flourished anyway. This new species of humans were marsupials where both sexes have pouches for the babies (or maybe just the men?), they needed less water, and they could always sense true north. There may have been other changes, but it's been so long since I read it. All I remember of the plot was that the main character, one of the marsupial people, was an artifacts smuggler who put artifacts in his pouch sometimes even though it hurt him to do that. Oh and something where some of the artifacts he found had been involved in whatever had turned most of the world into a desert, and he was instrumental in preventing it from happening again, I think? I may need to re-read it.

For whatever reason, even though I adored that book, I never read anything else Martha Wells wrote until finding the Murderbot Diaries, didn't even go looking for anything else she wrote, and I don't recall why. I didn't realize she was the same author who wrote City Of Bones until I looked her up on Goodreads and found that she was a prolific fantasy author before switching to scifi to write the Murderbot series, and spotted City Of Bones on the list. So now I'm planning to look at her other books and find one to read once I get through both Murderbot Diaries and another series I'm reading, "The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Series" by Theodora Goss.

Now THAT series is basically "many of the classic scifi books from the beginning of scifi are all true and all take place in the same world." The first book starts out focusing on Mary Jekyll, daughter of Doctor Jekyll. We eventually meet daughters of such characters as Mr. Hyde, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein, Van Helsing, and others. One of these introduced me to an obscure classic story about a scientist's daughter who spends so much time around poisonous plants that she becomes poisonous herself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappaccini%27s_Daughter Oh, and Sherlock Holmes is in the series as well, along with Irene Norton nee Adler. I do wonder if we'll also be meeting people from Sir Doyle's other stories, like Professor Challenger from "The Lost World."

I'm currently on the second book in that series, "European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman." Book one was "The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter."

Just finished writing 90% of a very exciting chapter, will have to do part two tomorrow or something, as the chapter ended at a cliffhanger.