Book Recommendations June 2025

Otherland - We love every Fantasy Trope

Every couple of weeks, a confused-looking person gets lost in our glorious halls, looks around with a frown and pulled down corners of their mouth and always thinks it’s necessary to tell the (un)suspecting employee standing behind the cash machine, that they don’t like all this „weird fantasy stuff“. This always awakens the dragon in me, I do a little magic and lo and behold: the person leaves with an Otherland bag.
But where are the roots of the prejudice that genre literature is trivial? Perhaps it's because of the flooding of a particularly hackneyed genre trope, that has the mass media holding in a firm grip. Twilight, Sarah J. Maas and lots and lots of hideous covers with two people looking deep into each other's eyes while one of them holds a sword. Have you guessed it?

Yeah baby, you’ve got it: Enemies to Lovers.

My mission for today's newsletter is to find a few exceptions even in this trope that won’t suck and even if it took some convincing, each and every one of my colleagues came up with something. But then most of them gave me more Lovers to Enemies things...somehow none of us is really into that trope, I guess. Let's start with THE standard work: Enemy mine. The 1985 movie is based on a short story by Barry B. Longyear and describes the cautious rapprochement between a human and a lizard-alien. A good read, and not at all cheesy. Personally, I was always hoping for a kiss between Brienne and Jamie in George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire", but tbh I felt more or less repulsed, when they showed it in the incredible awful last season of the Series. The deep friendship between the two of them was probably far more loving for me than a bad sex scene. I've also grown quite fond of Nina and Matthias in „Six of Crows“ by Leigh Bardugo. All the bickering and snickering…and the slow burn Romance, Yes that convinced me!

A whole book about Enemy to Lovers that is really really good is „This is how you loose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Not only is it well written, but it uses time travel and small, intelligently placed messages from the two protagonists, who aren't actually allowed to love each other.

It has long been a fact that Ursula K. Le Guin was incapable of producing anything bad. In the Earthsea Chronicles, or more precisely the Tombs of Atuan, there is a subtle rapprochement between Ged and Tenar without any annoying label being imposed.

Joe Abercrombie also has a knack for breathing new life into fantasy tropes, but where exactly the Enemies to Lovers thing takes place I'll keep a secret, just read the whole everything! 

If you're going through a breakup and would rather see your ex-partner's head on a pike, I recommend the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. Definitely a lasting way to break up with someone.

And that's it for now, because that's all I can think of.

Have fun with the novelties!
Yours (loving) Esther, from the Otherland

Book Recommendations May 2025

50 Shades of Otherland

With spring, color is finally returning to our dull lives! However, here in the Otherland we have less of a problem with the world turning 50 shades of Gray (pun intended), as we are surrounded by book spines in every color printers can produce. And guess what's the shelf with most of the clown colors? You've guessed wrong, it's Horror! Here, the Emperor of horror - Stephen King - is especially beautifully dressed in all the colors of the rainbow. Perhaps so that the dark content is no longer so overwhelming? Or does it have exactly the opposite effect of making it even worse?

Lovecraft presents us with a particular uncanny color (in the freudian "unhomely" sense), in the short story "The Color out of space". Here he describes something that we cannot even imagine, namely a color that does not exist. Wow. Only literature is capable of doing something like that. If you still feel like playing Twister with your brain afterwards, Tom recommends "The Case Against Reality" by Donald D. Hoffman. Here the author explains to us that the colors we see are not real at all. Great. Nope, I'll just close my eyes and boom, problem solved. That's why they call me the Solvem Probler. Speaking of funny, some say that Terry Pratchett might be more hilarious and, in keeping with today's theme, you can pick up his "Colors of Magic" right away! In fantasy, by the way, color is a popular tool not only to hide symbolism, but also to establish new systems of magic. My personal favorite here is Brent Weeks and his Lightbringer series. He presents us with a new word for magic: "chromaturgy" and delivers directly: the red spectrum has a lot to do with fire, blue can be used more (or less) for shooting, while green mages can create particularly hard armor, among other things. And what white and black can do is also pretty cool. But magic has its price and practitioners can literally see it when they look in the mirror - If the color bursts the iris, they lose their minds. Speaking of eye color, Caro immediately thinks of Sarah J. Maas. In "A Court of Thorns and Roses", the eye color of EVERY character is ALWAYS mentioned. And they have ALWAYS the color of a gemstone. Whew. Jasper Fforde's "Red Side Story" and "Shades of Grey" are both more political. Similar to Michael Marshall Smith's "Only Forward" or Pierce Brown's "Red Rising", colors are used in these dystopias to divide and oppress people into evil systems. Prettier than brown, but just as shitty. Incidentally, the yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist classic "The Yellow Wallpaper" is particularly ugly. It's so hideous that the protagonist slowly but surely loses her mind. Just like me, when I try to read Sarah J Maas.
While we're on the subject of yellow, Caro's current favorite "Viriconium" also deserves praise. The color "gamboge" (a deep yellow pigment extracted from the gum resin of the Garcinia tree) is used a lot here, although the city that gives the book its title is actually called Pastel City because of its pastel-colored towers:

"About him rose the Pastel Towers, tall and gracefully shaped to mathematical curves, tinted pale blue or fuchsia or dove-grey."

Wow, how picturesque. Brandon Sanderson's "Tress of the Emerald Sea" is also particularly colorful. The protagonist comes from the emerald green sea and surrounding the world itself are moons of different colors, from which sand trickles down to fill the seas of sand, which are also of different colors. Certainly pretty to look at, but the color changes the properties of the sand, which can be deadly. Attention Indiana Jones Flashback!

So now let the King inspire you, rebel against the greyness of the big city and dig out your most colorful piece of clothing, we're waiting for you here - with lots of colorful recommendations!

Rainbow greetings from the Otherland,
yours Esther (rocking the frog-green tracksuit today!)

Book Recommendations March 2025

Otherlanders unite!

Yeah, it's Spring but I'm still hibernating. Unfortunately, I have to go to work, so that's not possible. But when I get home, I like to curl up on the couch with a glass of wine and immerse myself in my new obsession: true crime. Awww, lemme guess, I'm not alone in this? ;) At the moment, my favourite goosebump-inducers are dangerous cults and sects. I'll just say Jonestown Massacre. Yeah, I do admit having an uncomfortable gut feeling and a pinch of shame, but since that's the fashion right now, I've put together a few hair-raising cults from the fields of SF, fantasy and horror for you as well. If you're in the mood for sunshine, just skip this introduction and wait until April. In the second trilogy of Glenn Cook's "The Black Company", "The Stranglers" are up to mischief. Incidentally, this cult is loosely based on the real "Thuggee Cult" from India, which formed in the 19th century and is said to worship the Hindu goddess Kali. "The Stranglers" worship "Kina", who is also - how surprising - a goddess of destruction. China Mieville's "Kraken" is a somewhat easier read - here an pickled specimen of the titular eight-armed creature is stolen from a museum. This is a consequence of a veritable underground war between various occult sects. One of them worships squids, sees a Danish historian as their apostle, and considers the stolen specimen to be a God. Okay. In the first chapter of Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!" the author does what he does best: makes us laugh uncontrollably. He introduces so many weird cults and sects that you might accidentally stumble into the wrong top-secret meetings - especially since they all live next door to each other. In Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood", the two main characters immerse themselves in a radical environmental group that has religious tendencies and calls itself "The Gardeners", although technically no one is brainwashed here, so it's difficult to define it as a cult. Sometimes the boundaries are blurred, as with the extremely popular "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler. It's actually about a young woman who struggles through apocalyptic America and tries to retain her humanity. She achieves this by founding a new religion, which is beautiful in itself, but definitely has cult tendencies.

In Emma Newman's "Planetfall" and "After Atlas", the cult "The Circle" leaves Earth in search of God, and in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange World", a man returns to Earth from Mars, takes a close look at all religions and then founds his own church, in which polyamorous sex is considered a top priority. The book is quite explicit for its year of publication, 1961, but has not aged particularly well. Few writers have used cults and sects with as much relish as Lovecraft. He not only presents us with the cannibalistic de La Poer family cult and the classic Chthulhu cult (ah, here we go again with the Great Old Ones...), but there are also witch cults and voodoo groups. It's almost like he's tampering with everything that makes a good cult, isn't it? "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin is a CULT classic (pun intended), but I'd be spoiling it if I said why. And the superb "Last Days" by Brian Evenson follows a kidnapped detective deep into the depraved turmoil of a cult that believes amputations bring you closer to God. Wasn't there a strange bit in one of the "Eragon" books where a couple of weirdos did the same thing? Finally, I recommend Katherine Dunn's wonderfully dark "Geek Love". Because strange cults can sometimes form within a family.

So, enough gloom for now, spring is here and we need to gather all our strength for the sunshine and happiness that awaits us the day after tomorrow. Then there will finally be endless fun and optimistic introductions again!

Stay strong my friends,

Esther from the Otherland

(not a cult)

Book Recommendations February 2025

Next Station: Otherland

I'm currently using public transport in Marseille, southern France, experiencing my first real culture shock. Imagine, the bus is packed but nobody insulted me yet? Nobody stepped on my foot? I didn't have an elbow/ walking stick/knife in my ribs??? Someone just SMILED ??!!! France somehow seems to handle this whole transportation thing better than oh-so-efficient Germany. The question of how to get from A to B drives humans around since they first crawled out of the primordial ooze. But our beloved SF/fantasy authors don't look back, they look to the stars and dream up all kinds of transportation. We start with Wolf's favorite spaceships: The "Millenium Falcon" from Star Wars and "The Galactica" from Battle Star Galactica.
In Corey's Expanse series, pretty physics go-getters like the "Rockhopper" scurry through space: little propulsion, but plenty of time for daring slingshot maneuvers. Caro loves "the Lexx" from the TV series of the same name. It looks like a dragonfly - or like a pretty bumped-up genitalia, har har.
I'm blushing, beam me up, Scotty! Although I've been feeling quite uneasy about beaming ever since I read Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt". I don't want to experience eternity after all. The Farcasters in Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" offer a compromise, they're like beam portals. Speaking of portals: Everyone knows "Stargate", but do you know "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson? Here, the protagonist is drawn into the consciousness of an inhabitant of the dying Earth.
If you suffer from claustrophobia, I would dodge space elevators. You should avoid the Luna trilogy by Ian McDonald, "Elevator to the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke and Lavie Tidhar's "Central Station". If you’re a fighter and battle your fears heads on you can simultaneously tackle your fear of heights in "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" by Roald Dahl.
Technology takes us far, the DB takes us nowhere, but it would be nice to have a fully developed rail network like in China Mièville's "Railsea"...although there are quite different dangers lurking there than no coffee in the board restaurant. And if you're really tough, you should embark on the brutal journey into the heart of dystopia in “Snowpiercer". If, like me, you watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" too early and have been calling Swabians "landlubbers" ever since, you should read "The Bone Ships" by RJ Barker and "The Adventures of the Pirate Amina al-Sirafi" by Shannon Chakraborty. Ships are simply a great means of transportation, as long as you don't throw up over the railing. Finally, here are some of the strangest objects of transportation in SF and Fantasy: A giant flying peach in "James and the Giant Peach". Gliding boards in Simon Weinert's "Tassilo" (actually not so strange until you've read the book! At this point, a big recommendation for this wonderful pearl of German Weird Fiction). And if that’s too small, why not move a whole castle? In Diana Wynne Jones' "Howl’s Moving Castle", not only does a whole house wander around, but it also has portals INSIDE. And if that's not enough, you should just throw everything overboard and become part of a MOVING CITY à la Mortal Engines by Philip Reeves. That in turn makes my entire text absurd.

Have fun with the novelties in January,
Esther from the Otherland

One more thing on my own behalf:
Dear Otherlanders,
I'm looking for a small 1-2 room apartment in Berlin starting in April, where I can build myself a permanent nest. My maximum budget is 600 euros. District doesn't really matter, but preferably near the Otherland ;). If a little elf whispers something to you, send us a carrier pigeon (email)!
All the best,
Esther