This post expresses my desires. Give Me The Weird

Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis - pitch-perfect noir mystery set in dystopian Heaven, also there are time slips

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin - super Jewish historical fiction featuring the Spanish Inquisition, star-crossed lovers, and Caribbean piracy, as narrated by an African Grey parrot

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin - New York City becomes self-aware and embodied in the minds of select, random people, is instantly attacked by Lovecraftian entity, starts with battle against tentacle monster that’s won with an umbrella and an antique taxi to give you some idea.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn - alien first contact in medieval Germany, features quantum drives, the synchronicity of medieval philosophy and scientific knowledge, a battle against the town down the mountain, and the Black Death

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire - found family, telepathy, time travel, alchemy, deconstruction of portal fantasies, ancient Greek ideas about math, music, and the nature of the universe, and also a spin on Frankenstein

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik - alternate Regency England where they have a dragon air force (but so does Napoleon). Continue the series to get international travel and the dragons unionizing to get their “human” rights.

Among Others by Jo Walton - epistolary boarding school coming of age novel that doubles as a classic SF rec list and also there are fairies and the MC can do magic

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - science fiction with super-advanced nanotech where everyone lives in gated community-countries based on Aesthetic™ and also there’s an orphan girl who gets a talking book (made by Neo-Victorians) that changes her life

Child of a Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica - new adult portal fantasy about a nature photographer, with coming-of-age vibes, magic, a water world where almost everyone lives on tall ships, and ecological themes

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - mystery novel set in a 1980s with rampant literary fandom, cloned dodos, an apparent national dislike of toast, featuring a detective who’s tasked with rescuing Jane Eyre from a terrorist who wants to erase it from history, and that’s only skimming the surface of the weirdness

These sound great

taking this opportunity to suggest a movie that people think I made up when I describe it:

The Frisco Kid, a 1979 road trip buddy comedy Western starring Gene Wilder as the Maria von Trapp of rabbis in the shtetl. He’s too much of a free spirit! The other rabbis don’t know what to do with him! So when a synagogue in San Francisco needs a rabbi, they send him to America, where he is robbed and left by the side of the road almost immediately.

It is at this point that he meets Harrison Ford, an incompetent train robber, who is like ‘this weird little man is completely pure and innocent and absolutely going to die unless I look after his dumb ass.’ This was after the release of A New Hope but before filming Empire Strikes Back, so I guess he was just in a weird place career-wise.

He and Gene Wilder become best friends as they make their way to San Francisco, with various hijinks along the way. The scene with the Native Americans starts out cringeworthy but the payoff makes up for it, somewhat. I still kind of can’t believe it’s a real movie.

THIS MOVIE IS THE BEST

Remember when Persona 5 came out, and then people got upset because the game required you to acknowledge on starting the game that it was a work of fiction without any direct connection to reality.

And that if you refused to do so, the game would kick you out entirely.

People got actually honest to god MAD over the idea that they were expected to treat fiction like fiction.

There was at least one big name professional “journalist” who claimed he couldn’t get past the first minute of P5 because it refused to proceed until he admitted that this was a work of fiction and he was apparently incapable of doing that.

This is such a bizarre concept to me because media is inherently passive--you choose to watch, to read, to play, etc. A movie or a book or a game can't "violate" your consent, because you can stop anytime things become uncomfortable. You are in control of your experience. If you can't acknowledge fiction as fiction, maybe you shouldn't be interacting with it.