The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke

I read this last night! It's about 320 pages, and I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, although, you know, that's 4 stars as a YA romance book, NOT 4 stars as a sci-fi book. As a sci-fi book I'd probably give it 2/5.

The premise: Cat is five years old when her father, a cyberneticist, brings home a human-looking android named Finn. Finn is one of a kind, and as Cat grows up, she falls in love with him, but refuses to admit it, because she can't be with an android. The book follows her from age five to probably her mid-40s, when she has a son of her own and both her parents are dead.

As most of the focus is on Cat, we see detailed portraits of her high school days, her college friends and adventures as a fiber artist, her time as a "vice girl" selling cigarettes, her unhappy marriage to an AI engineer, her divorce, her pregnancy, etc etc. Our glimpses of Finn are always from Cat's POV; we don't see his inner thoughts or motivations. Since Cat is a particularly incurious narrator, this means that for much of the book, we really don't know a single damn thing about Finn!

The journey takes Cat from a 5-year-old who refuses to believe Finn is an android, to a young adult who fiercely reminds herself and him that he can't feel anything while also using him for sex, to a more mature adult who understands the ways she's used and hurt Finn and now sees him fully as a person.

( The Good )

( The Bad )

This is a minor thing, but in a worldbuilding sense, it bugged me. It's established that Finn can't eat or drink, but he can taste things. Later, we learn that he's just a mess of wires and circuit boards inside a human-shaped cell. He doesn't have replica organs or human anatomy or anything like that. We ALSO learn that when he hears a new word or phrase, he repeats it back in the voice of whoever said it, via recording equipment. Well, since he doesn't have vocal cords, presumably everything he says is emitting from a speaker. Why does he move his lips at all? He doesn't need to. It's little stuff like that that bugged me on a sci-fi level, but like I said at the start, this isn't really a sci-fi novel at all. It's YA romance, and in terms of YA romance, it's quite good.

March 2023 Fics

I totally forgot to do this!

Total fics: 16 (and wow, I was happily adding fics all the way up till April 10 before I caught myself and deleted them from this list). Of these, my favorites are the Thomas and Will Riker fics, "A Bridge of Brass" and "Conjoined" :) My favorite title is "Then Fall, Caesar".

TNG:

Have you ever walked out of a mall into a huge parking area and realized you forgot where you parked your car? - a quick Riker/OFC drabble, the first in a series of drabbles based off a Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction compilation vid. Each drabble's title is taken from a question Frakes delivers in the compilation, and each drabble features Riker somehow.

Have you ever gone mountain biking? - a Riker/Picard humor drabble

What do you want to be when you grow up? - a gen drabble with some Riker/Picard feels

What's the right tip? - a Riker/Troi humor drabble

You call a plumber to your house lately? - a gen angst drabble lol focusing on Riker as a kid abandoned in Alaska

Worf's Warlike Battle of the Arms - a short Worf/Riker oneshot where Worf hosts an arm-wrestling competition, Riker joins in, and sexual tension abounds.

A Bridge of Brass - an 8K gen oneshot where Will and Thomas Riker are trapped on the space station together during "Second Chances" and must spend eight years there, slowly losing track of who's who.

Phantom Pain - a 7K Riker/Troi oneshot that takes place after "The Host" and dissects Riker's trauma response to hosting Odan and his complicated feelings re: sex with Beverly.

Parallels - a 1K gen oneshot from Guinan's POV, focusing first on Tasha Yar, whom Guinan never met, and then on Ensign Ro, who to Guinan sounds a lot like Tasha. But everyone loved Tasha, and everyone hates Ro, and no one except Guinan seems to see the similarities.

Live - this is actually an 85K multichap (my NaNoWriMo from last November), but I posted a new chapter in March, so it's on the list! In this fic, Riker's father Kyle is arrested on Risa for raping a child, and at the trial, Riker's shipmates start to question certain mysteries surrounding Riker's childhood and his own treatment at Kyle's hands. This is a remix of miloowen's fic, "A Million Sherds".

Conjoined - a 25K oneshot and sequel to "Bridge of Brass", following Thomas and Will Riker after they're rescued. The pairings are Will Riker/Deanna Troi and Thomas Riker/Worf.

Star Trek: Picard:

How superstitious are you? - a Beyond Belief drabble focusing on Riker's grief for Thad

Safe and Sound - a Geordi & Riker oneshot where, months after the Titan's near-death experience with that nebula, Geordi receives the message from Riker where he apologizes for putting Geordi's daughter in danger. At the time of the recording, Riker assumed death was imminent. In reality, he and Sidney both made it out alive.

Seinfeld:

Tortured By a Wild and Wilful God - a horror oneshot, 3K, about the Seinfeld gang getting dropped into a malevolent woods, where natural forces pick them off one by one. Basically I had a nightmare where Elaine had to mercy-kill George and I thought it was really funny, so I wrote it as a fic.

Thrawn (Legends Trilogy)

Then Fall, Caesar - a short gen oneshot written for the Ides of March, focusing on Rukh's thoughts after he betrays Thrawn and tries to escape the Chimaera alive.

T.E. Lawrence/Lawrence of Arabia:

The Old Man - a 20K multichap that I worked on in November of 2021 for NaNoWriMo. The full draft is actually well over 60K, but I've been awful at editing and posting it. I finally remembered to post a new chapter in March.