A very brief summary of this guide is available at the very bottom.
This guide is not for beginners that are just starting out. I assume you have basic navigational understanding of Software Inc's menus. I won't be going into detail where exactly each button is, and what each menu is for. For example, when I say "check the balance of XYZ company", I assume you know that you need to open up the "All Companies" menu, and click on "Chart". I highly recommend playing the game as intended before manipulating stocks - that's where the most of the fun lies!
The software Inc stock market is broken.
I originally came across this video on manipulating the stock market. I decided to try it out myself. After around 3 hours of gameplay, i managed to generate 218 million in company value within 10 years without actually releasing any software (and another 70 million in the next 2 years simply in stock value and dividends).
Behold, Asset Manager Inc! Just your casual multi-hundred million dollar company in an empty garage.
It's actually pretty simple, I managed to accomplish this on my first attempt. There are game mechanics which we can exploit, and the extremely high predictability of the revenue of companies simply by watching short term trends makes decision making rather risk free. So here we go!
What are Stocks?
From my understanding, stocks are a percentage of a company you can own. They initally cost money to purchase, and when the company grows, so does your stock value. For example, if you've bought $100 in stocks, and the company value doubles, your stock will now be worth $200. tada, $100 profit!
In addition, dividends are a % of profit the company pays you, as a stock owner. For example, if you own 50% of a company, then when they earn 1 million dollars, they'll pay you 500k in dividends. If there are multiple stock owners, the dividends simply get split among the stock owners based on what % of shares they own.
Before the game:
Your character can literally have any skill, any traits, any specializations. His sole purpose is to sit on the picnic table next to Garage Inc until his buttocks leave an indent on the wood over the course of 10 years (or vice versa, lmao).
Pick one day per month - you're gonna be speeding through the months.
Pick impossible mode. Don't worry if you struggle on easier modes making a software company - All the software development debuffs are useless if there is no software development to debuff in the first place. It is also because you cannot buy stocks with borrowed money. In very hard mode, all starting money is borrowed so you cannot immediately invest and that's no fun! In Medium or hard mode, the starting money is so little, the start will be very slow. Hence, Impossible mode is actually easier than Easy mode with this playstyle - the 100k starting funds gives you a lot to work with.
The starting time does not matter. Throughout examples in this guide, I picked 2010 simply because I never have before, I always pick 1980 when I actually make a software company.
Pick garage Inc - you're not gonna be making any company and you want to save as much as possible on rent.
Early Game: Starting up Software Asset Manager Inc.
Set your team arrival time to 8am and departure time to 9am - This is so that your founder clocks in and clocks out ASAP so you can skip to the next month ASAP too. You can have him arrive at 3 am if you're feeling evil!
Don't buy any furniture. They have maintenance costs. The founder is perfectly busy sitting on the picnic bench.
Invest in your first company. Ideally, you'd want either a bankrupting company, or a new startup.
Bankrupting company: The trick here is to buy all the stock available of a company that is one month before bankrupting. When they bankrupt and you have stock, their products (IP) transfer to your ownership. Then, you can sell the IP of that product (usually for 1.5 million to 3 million), and bam! millions of dollars of profit!
You'll want to buy the stock of the company for as low as possible so you maximize you net profit. Ensuring you purchase it right before they go bankrupt is the way to go. It's very easy to see, sort by lowest company worth, and checking the charts of the lowest net worth companies can easily show you trends.
https://preview.redd.it/to0vivd8k5xc1.png?width=667&format=png&auto=webp&s=6ef56b6283b54a13a400943a64340fd7638c61ae
Here, Bohn Corp is losing 4 million a month (Balance in Oct 2021 was 44 million). Since they have 40 million, I can expect them to go bankrupt 10 months later. hence, the stock price will be lowest 9 months later, and that's when I should buy it.
It's important to watch trends like you're a Hawk and the graph is your prey. Although stable and predictable, they frequently change. Bohn Corp here might release a new product and start making money again. Watch it closely!
After they go bankrupt and you acquire the IP, people usually won't be instantly interested in buying it - you'll have to wait a couple months. Make sure to try to trade it every month by clicking the "Trade IP" button.
Though this is a risky maneuver. A couple things could go wrong:
1: Nobody wants to buy the IP. usually it takes a few months to a year for someone to become interested. In one case where I acquired a Phone OS IP, nobody was interested in it. Then, 2 years later, someone finally bought it for 300k only.
2: May result in a net loss. As mentioned in the point above, I sold the IP for 300k, but bought the stock of the bankrupt company for 600k. Net loss of 300k, which, in case you can't tell, is a bad investment.
3: Sell IP, but money goes to original lead designer. I have no clue why the game does this. You can sell an IP for 3 million and get absolutely nothing in return. But it happens, and the game will give you a prompt saying that "some or all money will go to Greedy McGreedface". Grrrr.
Kickstarting our operations!
Here, I got very lucky - A company was about to bankrupt right when i started and I bought all their shares for 34k in January. After acquiring their IP, I sold it for 2.5 million immediately, which I then invested 1 million in stocks elsewhere. I got very lucky here that a company was going bankrupt so soon AND selling the IP so soon, this is the exact kind of kickstart an Asset Manager Inc. needs.
New Startup: A new company will be created by the game every time a company goes bankrupt. Hence, it's super convenient - you can get the IP of a bankrupt company and sell it, then reinvest it into the new startup that replaces the bankrupt company soon after.
A new startup will release a product the month following their founding, and their product ALWAYS succeeds. Like, hundreds of thousands of active users kind of success. I assume this is to prevent new companies from immediately going bankrupt again and constantly generate new companies. This is the mechanic we need to exploit.
Each month, the startup will list 0.4% of their shares to investors. Buy those shares every month. At this stage, they should cost next to nothing - a few thousand probably.
Then in the following month, as their product sells, the company grows. You, as a shareholder, start receiving dividends. Keep buying the 0.4% shares every month. The shares will get more and more expensive as the company grows - buy as much as you can. The value of the shares you hold will continue to compound, and your dividends will continue to grow. This generates a passive income stream for you. Leeching off of the profits of other companies and holding the moral standards we uphold close to our hearts.
Shares of a startup company - very little, but also very cheap!
But beware: A new startup may not do well for very long. Once their initial product dies out, growth could stagnate. In that case, your money is better off invested in another company so that you can keep getting dividend payouts. Sell those shares and find another small, growing company.
https://preview.redd.it/vxamvs8mk5xc1.png?width=655&format=png&auto=webp&s=580be5c032730be557f914bfdf6feddd76a150d5
For example, here, SemiSexam Digital did very well initially, but stopped growing in June. Time to dump this company and invest in another!
Keep repeating this process, until you have enough money to go into the second stage below. Don't worry about tax reports or getting an accountant to write them: Just pay the tax and the fine that comes with it. I don't think it's worth the effort.
Mid Game: Stocks, Dividends, Graphs, Short term trends and all those god dang numbers
By this stage you should have a couple million invested in growing, startup companies. This stage is all about investing those few million wisely in other places and continuously compounding it.
Earning money with Stocks is easy. there is one rule, and one rule only.
Company balance goes up = good\. That's. fucking. it.* (But there's an asterisk, of course there's exceptions. I'll come back to this later.)
I'm sure you've heard of the whole "buy low, sell high" thing. But surprise surprise, this is a video game and doesn't apply here. As long as the balance of the company you are investing in goes up, buying any number of stock will turn you a profit.
At this stage, small startups and bankrupting companies isn't going to make full use of your money. Any money that sits in your bank account idle is lost potential profit. You'll want your bank account near empty at all times to make full use of your wealth.
Look for decent sized companies - companies that are around the 6th or 7th one down the list, sorting by ascending net worth. Check their balance. What's the recent trend?
Losing money:
https://preview.redd.it/ufm5mjd0m5xc1.png?width=665&format=png&auto=webp&s=81c656922768ac088f3e4fd8f0c641d0926838a8
Simply ignore these companies. Buying their stock will simply cause your stock to lose value and thus money.
Stable/Hovering:
https://preview.redd.it/9ri4z7wdm5xc1.png?width=657&format=png&auto=webp&s=8413aa8d6e4c63aac9e743a39724f4b17727cc71
These are worth your attention. But first, try to determine why they are stable. Low sales + low bills? High sales + high bills? Salaries? Distribution?
Then, judge whenever they will grow soon. check the product releases calendar. Do they have an upcoming product to be released?
https://preview.redd.it/ehb7ctb0n5xc1.png?width=1451&format=png&auto=webp&s=6dc9ff35027a89a6c93df27e383b9ff78dd2e907
Here, Mabin Interactive has an upcoming product, but it's going to release a year later. Ideally, you'll want their next release to be within 1-3 months so you get dividend payouts ASAP. We will keep an eye on this company and note down November 2022.
https://preview.redd.it/w6m28bxjn5xc1.png?width=886&format=png&auto=webp&s=b80aa74c71eea7d328c3e2ac35a69b623393b5a4
SharkBalp Productions here is stable in the past 3 months. They have 2 games to release next month! Their 2 games might do well and they might grow. BUT DO NOT BUY THEIR STOCK YET. What you want to do is to keep a close eye on this company. Fast forward 2 months and observe whenever their game does well.
https://preview.redd.it/1u27w8q5o5xc1.png?width=665&format=png&auto=webp&s=4754cfe7c02a06594abe1b1cb91b4de2bc0fd862
Yikes, turns out their 2 games didn't sell very well. Their Balance dropped, in fact. Good thing we didn't buy their stock!
It should go without saying that if a game does do well, and you see their company balance spike up, Buy as much stock as you can.
Growing companies:
https://preview.redd.it/842wlj39p5xc1.png?width=815&format=png&auto=webp&s=e94ec3f84fecbbbb806ae69558b20e66d8a5ff30
Look at UninWare here. Straight up like a hill. You can see that I have already invested 24.5 million in them, and the value of my shares went up by 2.3%, earning me around 500k in stock value ON TOP OF the dividend payouts. That's a good investment. However, you may have noticed that I didn't receive any dividends this month. That's because, as you can see on the graph, their balance stopped increasing. Which brings me to the next section of the mid-game:
Shocks and sudden fluctuations: What the hell happened?!?!
Throughout this entire guide, I've been talking about short term trends. But those can change drastically in a short amount of time. It's important that you, as an investor, figure out why.
Did their sales drop? Why's that? Their product stopped selling? Why's that? Did a competitor release a rival product? Did it run out of stock? Did their Bills suddenly increase? Hiring costs? Salaries? Figure out why. Why why why why why.
Next, determine if the company will recover from it quickly. Is it because their game ran out of stock? That's okay, next month they'll restock the game and it'll sell just as nicely. No action needed.
Did it drop for absolutely no reason, and you can't figure out why? Well, that's a red flag. You're gonna want to keep a close eye on that company. See if they stop growing the next months. If they do, it's time to sell all your stock on this company and cash it out before it loses value.
Example:
https://preview.redd.it/9zxof9cir5xc1.png?width=825&format=png&auto=webp&s=40d3e95eb7965860ba3d0d36b0fc57c981932603
UninWare here has stopped giving me dividends. Why's that? Well, that's because their balance stopped increasing. Why's that? As you can see from the graph, the dark blue line, representing sales, plummeted ten million! Uh oh! Why's that? Well let's check their products shall we?
https://preview.redd.it/gnecmx9qr5xc1.png?width=1304&format=png&auto=webp&s=5760a7b8b80ed1937174e3ad8d34ff71e794c876
Aha. See that? In stock: 0. That's a good sign, It means their product is very popular, 3 million Active users! We might even want to buy even more of this company's shares and leech off their profits like a blood sucking vampire!
Example 2:
https://preview.redd.it/f748az3ot5xc1.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=07426f8cfa05ec6dce5e5b59c848f92650c46ea8
SkipEnive Ltd. here is about to go goddamn bankrupt. Why's that? As you can see on their chart, Their sales plummeted and they bought a bunch of stock. Why's that? Turns out, their Console OS ran out of stock. That's okay, but looking at the short term trends, they weren't growing even when the product was still in stock. Trends indicate they won't grow at all in the future. Not a good investment, don't buy their stock.
The same applies vice versa. When a company you've invested in suddenly gives you even more dividends, FIGURE. OUT. WHY. Is it because they released a new product and it's wildly successful? Then it's probably worth redirecting all your funds into that one company and get them sweet sweet dividends. Is it because another company bought a crap ton of their shares? Then it's probably not worth buying more shares because this doesn't accelerate their growth in any way.
In some particular cases, a company might stop growing, and you sell your shares in response. However, a few months later, they start growing again. That's okay, simply reinvest into them. You've avoided the risk of them potentially starting to go downhill and dragging you down with them.
Keeping all the windows of companies you have invested in is a great way to keep track of this. When a company starts paying you $0 dividends, your attention is needed. When your monthly dividends drops from 300k to 50k in a month, your attention is needed.
These principles are the Very Core of your money leeching operations. In the mid-game, it's all about managing where you are investing your assets. Any company that is doing good, you invest. Any company that is not doing good, you drop your stocks quicker than the downvotes on a controversial post in ControversialOpinions. Redirect funds, watch trends. This, is Asset Manager Inc., baby.
Remember the * I put next to the golden rule company value goes up = good? here are the exceptions. Every company, during tax season, including yours, will take a hit from tax season in March. A decrease in company balance is perfectly reasonable during this disgusting month. But here's the thing, taxes apparently don't account for dividend payouts, so even if company balance decreases during March, you still get dividend payouts! If you've invested wisely, tax season should be no problem. Just make sure you don't go bankrupt from the slap in taxes - unfortunately you're gonna need to sell some stock to pay the money you owe the government.
There are also a few exceptions on a case by case basis - perhaps the company bought/sold some stock, hiring costs went up etc. But these don't affect the gameplay too much.
Late Game: Putting entire companies under the rule of your thumb and stocks.
At this stage, you're messing with the big boys now. You've got tens of millions invested in companies. Monthly dividend payouts are in the hundreds of thousands. There's nothing much different in the late game, all the rules and skills I've mentioned in the mid-game section still apply. The range of companies you are able to invest in simply goes up.
You'll probably want to ignore startup companies and bankrupting companies here. Startup companies, although highly successful, sell so little stock it's not worth your time, attention and funds. a few thousand in dividends, although it got you up on your feet in the early game, is nothing compared to the hundred million you own right now. Same goes with bankrupting companies: the potential 1 million dollars of profit from selling IPs simply no longer outweighs the attention you need to monitor which companies are failing and the risks which I listed above.
Now, since you've got a strong foothold, it's time to start thinking about optimization. Numbers going up simply aren't good enough, why settle for that when you can have them go up FASTER?!
https://preview.redd.it/d8sh8trcw5xc1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=f7f0a9aafdf98a4f40f546dd0edc9d189b332cc3
In my current playthrough, I have all my money on two companies: UninWare, and Stole Studios. Pay attention to the precise value of my dividend payouts and the respective stock value.
We can whip out a calculator and find out the % payout of my investment. For Stole Studios, the amount of dividends as a percentage of my total investments is 273,546/255,529,900 = 0.107%. So for every 100 dollars I invest in Stole Studios, I'm getting 0.107 dollars in dividends.
For Uninware, it's 25,095/24,676,860 = 0.102%. So my assets are better invested in Stole Studios - I can get 0.005% more payout in dividends. And that's exactly what I've done, I've bought every share I can in Stole Studios.
This is a bad example though: You'll want the % dividend payout to be around 0.5%, the higher the better. 2 months ago, I was receiving 1.3 million in dividends from Stole Studios which equates to 0.510% dividend payout. Their growth has recently slowed: I should figure out why, and judge whether its worth redirecting my funds and invest in another company.
You could either invest in a lot of growing companies and reduce the risk of one particular company stopping growing by spreading out your investments, or invest in one single company doing very well. I suggest putting all your eggs in one basket and invest in one good company, as trends are highly predictable and you can always sell the shares when they stop growing. of course, that's up to you to decide.
And there you have it! Running a software company on nothing but a bank account that barely exists and a picnic bench with 10 years worth of butt imprints on it. Here's a summary of everything I've mentioned:
Before the game:

• Your founder can have any traits or specializations. He won't be doing anything anyway.
• Pick one day per month
• Pick impossible mode
• Pick whatever starting time you want
• Pick Garage Inc for your starting map

Early Game: Kickstarting everything

• Have your founder work 1 hour per day only
• Invest in either:
  • a bankrupting company: buy their stocks right before they bankrupt and sell the IPs you acquire
  • A new startup: Buy all their shares you can and exploit their guaranteed success

Mid game: stabilizing your wealth and keep growing

• Golden rule: Company value goes up = good
• Check the recent trend of their balance - is it going up, stable, or going down?
• Figure out why: are they gonna keep losing money like this?
• Judge if they will start growing later. If so, invest!
• Fluctuations and Shocks:
  • Figure out why! Why Why Why Why Why! What the hell caused the shock?
  • Judge whether the shock is temporary, or a sign of stalling growth. Redirect assets accordingly.

Late game: Optimization!

• calculate your dividends as a % of your share value: direct more resources accordingly.
• Continue to follow mid-game principles

And that's the entire guide. Phew, that took way longer than I expected to write! 3500 words holy crap! Hopefully a few people come across this and find it handy. Anyway, this is Wang, wishing you risk-free investments and high dividend payouts as you earn your wrongful place at the top of the software companies.
Thank you for reading!

PAY PACKAGES: $3642 weekly gross on 48 HRS ($45 HR + $67.50 OT/ Holiday + $1302 per diem) $2634 weekly gross on 36 HRS ($37 HR + $55.50 OT/ Holiday + $1302 per diem)
START DATE: 4/22
SHIFT: PM
LENGTH: 8 - 13 weeks
CERTS Req'd: ACLS & BLS through AHA*
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I know this is a little late, but I finished the last book at around midnight right before the April 1 deadline, and then I needed to go to bed, and then needed a day to write all this up. So here it is, better posted late than never.
I’ve participated in Fantasy Bingo for a few years now, but for the first time this year I decided to do a themed card. I’d seen some other people’s themed cards and thought it looked fun. Some people’s themes were downright impressive.
And so I said to myself, I’m going to do a card with nothing but translations.
And then, when I started planning out my card and saw that the whole thing was dominated by two or three languages, I modified my theme: All translations, with one language per square. No repeats. If you use Spanish for one square, you can’t use any more books translated from Spanish.
In hindsight, this might have been a mistake. Some languages have a lot of translated material to work with, and some languages have one obscure fantasy book that only special collection college libraries have in their catalog. I found myself not picking the translations I was most interested in, but based on how to best fill the more restrictive squares. There really aren’t that many fantasy series that get translated, nor does there seem to be much of a market for translated superheroes, and Book Club had only read translations from three languages when bingo kicked off, though now I believe that number is up to 4. (Though it’s entirely possible I missed a book at some point when scrolling through the goodreads list.) So while, for instance, Our Share of Night was the most interesting newly released translation last year (for me personally,) I needed to save Spanish for the Book Club square, because the only historical book club selections I was seeing that were also translations were translated from Spanish, Polish, and Russian, and I needed Polish for the Sequel square and would likely need Russian for the Bottom of the TBR square, since the only translations that had been on my TBR list for long enough to fit were from Russian, Spanish, and Japanese, and I needed Japanese for the Superhero square and the Spanish book was the same as the Spanish Book Club book…
You can see how this quickly added a layer of difficulty beyond just finding 25 different languages that had a fantasy book already translated into English that also fit a square on the card.
Another layer of difficulty was my realization that publishers will call anything magical realism. Truly, if a book is translated from another language and there’s an extended metaphor drawn from folklore, or if said folklore is treated as serious and real by the characters and forms a key part of how they interpret the world, then it will be labeled magical realism. Even if no creatures from folklore actually, unambiguously appear or do anything that can’t be reasonably explained by the reader without folklore. I had so many squares that I had to come up with a back-up for because my initial selection turned out to not be speculative enough to count in my mind. I did end up keeping some books that were right on the line as a judgment call, but I discarded anything that did not have any speculative elements at all, or whose only speculative elements were that the book was set in a made-up country or that the characters sincerely believed in their folklore.
Still, it was a good challenge, and pulling it off felt like a real achievement.
Title w/ a Title: The King of the Copper Mountains by Paul Biegel (Dutch)
So this actually wasn’t by first choice for this square. I was going to use **A Letter to the King*\* instead, but unfortunately, despite being listed as a fantasy book when I was initially looking into it, it didn’t really have much in the way of speculative elements. I thought I was good as gold when I saw the magic powers in the Netflix show based off that book, but it turns out Netflix added the magic powers, and no one in the books does any magic. So I ended up reading The King of the Copper Mountains as a last-minute back-up instead. It’s cute enough, but definitely meant for a younger audience, which I knew going in.
Superheroes: Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi (Japanese)
This was a difficult square, but I think Sailor Moon is close enough to count as a super hero. This one had a little bit of a slow start - it takes a while to gather people up and introduce them, but I guess sometimes you just need to take your time. I think I would have enjoyed this more a few years ago, but it was still perfectly enjoyable now.
Bottom of the TBR: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian)
I’ve been meaning to read this one for a long time now, but never seemed to get around to it. It didn’t end up being at all what I’d expected- I’d heard a lot of praise for its themes, for it’s connection to the Soviet Era, but not about the humor. I listened to this one on audiobook, and the narrator did a pretty good job differentiating each character with a speaking role. Overall pretty enjoyable.
Magical Realism: Red Ants by Pergentino José (Sierra Zapotec)
So technically I think this one might have been translated into English from the Spanish translation of the original Sierra Zapotec - my copy of the book wasn’t super clear whether it was translated directly from the original version or not - but since it was originally written in Sierra Zapotec that’s what I’m counting it as. This was a collection of magical realism short stories, which on the whole were pretty enjoyable to read. They were very short - I don’t think there was a single one longer than maybe six pages - so there wasn’t a whole lot of time for complex development or characterization, but the writing was vivid and many scenes were haunting even when it wasn’t really clear what was going on.
YA: Mountain of the Moon by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (Bengali)
This one is right on the cusp of not being speculative enough. However, right towards the end, there is an encounter with a creature that doesn’t really exist, a sort of mythical creature, and I decided it was enough to count. This was a fun adventure-style book, though definitely written for a younger audience and requiring quite a suspension of disbelief. I’m not convinced that it’s humanly possible to cross the distances the characters claim to have crossed in the time they claim to have done it through the biomes they described - hey, perhaps that should be the speculative element.
This book is a ‘kumar-sahitya’ novel, a genre of Bengali literature that is a sort of a mix between adventure story, travelogue, and light fantasy-thriller aimed at a younger (but not too young) audience. I made the executive decision that this was close enough to YA, as the audience age range is about the same, as far as I can tell. Since this one was originally published in the 1930s, I expected it to feel more dated than it did; while some attitudes and ideas about Africa were certainly a bit dated, they were nowhere near as dated as they could be, and the text itself didn’t show its age as clearly as I would have expected. Perhaps that is the result of translation choices, with the translator opting to go for a more timeless tone; I don’t know enough about Bengali literature to compare.
Mundane Jobs: Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan (Indonesian)
This one is another maybe-magical realism one that I decided was magical-realism-enough to count. As far as I could tell, the white tiger that lives inside our protagonist is both metaphorical and physically real.
This book is one of those books that seems to be moving slowly and not doing a lot until all of a sudden it all snaps together. It opens with a certain sense of urgency- a young man has just committed a violent murder, and it is not entirely clear why. Then the novel seemingly decides to set that mystery aside and slowly introduce us to our main character’s mother, father, sisters, extended family, girlfriend, girlfriend’s family and extended family until you want to scream ‘yes, these families are full of disappointments and problems but what are we even building towards here? Then, on the very last page, it all finally snaps together so perfectly that retroactively that long, slow middle feels genius and necessary.
Published in the 00s: The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk (Estonian)
This is another one that I’d heard about and had been intending to check out for a while now but never really got around to. I enjoyed this one; it did a good job developing ideas about tradition and modernity and forcing them out of their dichotomy with each other. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending section, which I would describe as a crescendo of senseless though perhaps thematically-appropriate violence, but I definitely can’t fault it on thematic grounds.
Angels and Demons: Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga by D.O. Fagunwa (Yoruba)
This book wasn’t my favorite, but I’m hesitant to bad-mouth it too much. It was first published in the ‘30s, like Mountains of the Moon, and draws heavily on a sort of syncretism between Christianity and traditional West African thought and myth. As such, I feel like I’m missing a lot of context while reading this one. However, I must say that sometimes our hero’s adventures felt a bit pointless and all of the women characters were treated pretty terribly. On the other hand, it certainly wasn’t boring, which is a point in its favor.
Short Stories: Creative Surgery by Clelia Farris (Italian)
This was a fun, short little collection; the two stand-out stories were one about what a young man is willing to sacrifice to protect the ancient burial ground he lives on and the titular story, featuring appropriately horrifying surgery. No one in that last story is passing their ethics classes.
I’d originally picked out a different collection for this square, a collection of short stories translated from a variety of Filipino languages. Unfortunately, while that collection was recommended to me on a list of translated FANTASY books, less than half of the stories were speculative, and fewer than half of those were unambiguously speculative.
Horror: Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Swedish)
God this was a bleak book. Good, but bleak. I could feel the hard gray concrete-ness of the story’s setting permeate every section that I read. Truly there was no beauty to be found in the setting- the only beauty in this entire book comes from the (somewhat rare) scenes where people trust another person and have that trust vindicated. And honestly, I feel like that worked really well for this story. I would definitely recommend it, though with the caveat that it’s not the right choice if you’re looking for a light, fun pick-me-up read.
Self-Published/Indie: When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (Catalan)
This book book was just the right length for what it was. Each chapter focused on one character in or with a connection somehow to a family living in a small village in the Pyrenees, and is not-quite self-contained. Things are just connected enough to keep the book from being just interconnected short stories. One of the things I liked a lot about this book was the broad definition of ‘person with connection to the family.’ There were bits from the POV of the mountains, from the POV of a deer in the forest nearby, and a bit from the POV of the weather. The writing is gorgeous, which pairs well with the decidedly non-human narration of the non-human POV sections and makes the creative POV choices stand out even more. If you like fantasy and are looking for something with smaller stakes and less charging off to fight a dragon, I can recommend this book.
Set in the Middle East: The Emperor Tea Garden by Nazlı Eray (Turkish)
I don’t entirely feel that I got this one, even though it was a fun read. For a while I thought the narrator was in fact two different people, and I’m still not entirely convinced that they weren’t. I didn’t much care for any of the characters, which put a little bit of a damper on my enjoyment.
This was another one where the book I finally chose for the square was an emergency back-up because my planned choice didn’t end up being speculative enough for me to feel that it counted.
Published in 2023: No Edges: Swahili Stories by Various Authors (Swahili)
This collection was both more and less entertaining than I had expected, which is sort of par for the course with short story collections like this. Some stories were more fun than others. On average I’d give it three stars.
Multiverse: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (German)
I don’t know how much of my enjoyment of this book was because it is a genuinely fun, entertaining read with plenty of adventure and interesting creatures and inventive settings and how much was because I read it on the heels of two mildly disappointing books and two extremely disappointing books, one of which was quite possibly the worst book I’ve read in the past decade (and which, unfortunately, will be reviewed further down this post). I needed a win after that disappointing streak, and The Neverending Story delivered.
POC Author: The Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Gikuyu)
This book was incredible. I’d heard it praised often before, so I came in with high expectations, but it met those expectations beautifully, and now I’m going around recommending it to my IRL book club and my coworkers and my mom. I’ve never seen a book balance its tone between comedy and fear so perfectly for so long- not once over the nearly 800 pages did it swerve too far into one side or the other.
Book Club: Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer (Spanish)
Ever since I learned that Ursula K. Le Guin translated this book I’ve been meaning to read it. I’ve heard it praised often on this sub, and the title was intriguing. Thankfully, it met all of my expectations. Each story had both fun and inventive bits and real meat that you could chew on without getting bogged down. It’s rare for what is essentially a collection of stories, albeit all linked by their shared setting, to be this consistently good from story to story.
Novella: The Employees by Olga Ravn (Danish)
This was a weird one. The author’s background is in poetry, and you can really see it in how abstract much of this book is. There might not even be a single named character. It’s supposedly a sort of found-footage-type book in the form of interviews conducted by a company with their human and humanoid employees aboard a spaceship of some sort. However, we don’t see the questions, only the responses, and while some people are clearly interviewed more than once and time clearly passes, each interview is labeled only with a number- no name, no context, nothing at all. The numbers appear to be chronological, proceeding from interview #1 to interview #2 to #20 to # 131 and so on, but it’s impossible to tell if they’re truly chronological or just roughly chronological, and some numbers are missing. However, despite all this, there are some really neat, hit-you-upside-the-head lines, and the author still managed to create a sense of rising tension.
Mythical Beasts: Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila (Finnish)
This was a fun one. It switches back and forth between a woman who needs to catch a specific pike fish or she will die and the detective trying to track her down for her suspected role in a murder. All along the way are a variety of fabulous, creepy creatures and witchcraft.
I’d never read anything from the ‘Finnish Weird’ subgenre before, mostly because their summary blurbs never seem that interesting to me, but I might have to give some more of them a try after Fishing for the Little Pike.
Elemental Magic: Thunderbird by Sonia Nimr (Arabic)
This book had so many problems, but I am reluctant to judge it too harshly because I suspect they are not really the fault of the book itself. At first, as I was reading, I asked myself what editor would ever agree to publish something so weirdly paced. Basic information about the premise and how the speculative elements functioned was still being revealed at the ⅔ point, our heroine accepted her magic time-travel quest with maybe three chapters and twenty pages left to go, thematic elements were introduced to early or too late, things that should have been short subplots went on for far too long relative to the length of the book- the list of structural weirdnesses went on and on.
Then, I had an aha-moment. This book wasn’t translated by a recognizable commercial publisher or an indie publisher that deals with international literature, but by a Center for Middle East Studies affiliated with some university, and it had a “sequel” that had the exact same name with a ‘book 2’ appended to the end. I began to suspect that this had been translated not as a Middle Grade fantasy novel but as a piece of literature by a Palestinian author that discusses Israel-Palestine relations, and that the pervasive structural issues and abrupt ending that didn’t resolve anything were because the grant money to pay the translator ran out before the book did, hence it being split up into multiple pieces in the translation process. I can’t rag on a book for having terrible, nonsensical structure and no real resolution if those issues are only issues because I’m only reading the first third or so of the book.
On a side note, it was nice to see a Middle Grade book where the main character goes to their parents/parental figures and tells them about the frightening and unprovable supernatural things that are happening to them and have said parental figures believe them immediately and start taking practical steps to help them.
Myths and Retellings: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatian)
God I hated this book. I hated this book so much that when I was thinking back over my year of reading back in December, I initially thought this had been a bad year for me, with too many disappointing and uninspiring books. Then I realized that actually, this one book was just bringing down my entire perception of the year; I kept getting bored or frustrated and putting it down ‘just for a moment,’ and then before I knew it it was due back at the library, and then I’d have to check it out again and restart from where I’d left off, which meant that I ended up reading it over the course of several months, a little bit at a time. Because it was so spread out, it felt in retrospect like I’d had several months of unenjoyable reads. For a while I wasn’t even sure if this was speculative enough to count- there’s only a moment or two of blink-and-you-miss-it magic. However, it must have been speculative enough for the Otherwise Award judges, because it won in 2010. (How??? How did this garbage win any kind of award??? Was 2010 just a really bad year for books related to gender and/or sexuality in speculative fiction? Did it run unopposed???) Also, I felt true despair at the idea of slogging through the whole book only to not count it, so I elected to count it.
Queernorm: Little Mushroom: Revelations by Shisi (Chinese)
This is technically part two of a single book, which was split into two books when it was translated into English. I wish it hadn’t been split, since I think some of the character and relationship development in this book would have hit harder and made more sense if there wasn’t a big gap dividing the first half from the second half like that. However, I did still enjoy myself.
Some ideas from this one reminded me of ideas from the first Three Body Problem book, which now leaves me curious whether these ideas are just more common in Chinese sci-fi or if this book actively took inspiration from the Three Body Problem. Or maybe the Three Body Problem was just such a big hit that some of its ideas have become pervasive in Chinese sci-fi publishing. I guess I’ll just have to read more Chinese sci-fi to find out.
Coastal/Island: Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre (French)
One of the most interesting things about this book was how different its zombies were from the zombies I’m used to. These ones were much more rooted in voodoo and the history of slavery than the zombies I come across in other fantasy books. In fact, these zombies aren’t even that much of a danger to other people; the primary danger is to the zombified person’s own spiritual well-being. It ended up not becoming a new favorite, but reading it was still a valuable exercise.
SUBSTITUTION- Non-Human Character: Walking Practice by Dolki Min (Korean)
I was initially turned off from this book by the description- I wasn’t really interested in watching an alien hunt and eat people. However, I saw it getting some praise on this sub, and as the Bingo deadline loomed I needed something short. I’m glad I ended up reading this one- it was a lot more entertaining than I had expected.
Robots: R. U. R. by Karel Čapek (Czech)
This work was the first to use the word ‘robot’, and could debatably be called the first ever robot story (though of course, stories of artificial, debatably-alive creatures predate it.) That is part of why I picked it- I was curious about the first robot story.
I can see how this would have been incredibly compelling to see live on stage when it was first written; however, since then other authors have done much more interesting and thought-provoking things with the subject, so this felt unfairly boring. I suspect it would have been better as it was meant to be experienced- as a stage play- but I’m not sure that would have been enough to make up for the simple fact that robots are not a new idea that can carry a story by itself anymore.
Sequel: The Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski (Polish)
This one was much like the first book in the series. I think I enjoy the style and pacing of this series, where only the important scenes necessary to move the plot along are included- there’s not much in the way of connective tissue scenes or and-now-it’s-going-to-take-fifty-pages-to-get-to-the-city sections; anything that can be skipped over is skipped over. This makes things a little more disjointed, and definitely makes it harder to keep track of how much time has passed, but in return it makes each scene feel high-impact and important, as well as nearly self-contained.
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