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Andy Best

Andy Best

@andybest.bsky.social

260 followers 240 following 1.5K posts

Writer and musician. Current thing: fantasy novel Aertelis is live and 'wide', including all library services. UBL: https://books2read.com/u/bz9BOE Blog: write.as/aertelis/ My stuff is at andrewbest.net

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Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · Mar 14

Do you want a character-driven adventure echoing classic Sword & Sorcery film and TRPGs, but also the literary style, worldbuilding and themes of the New Wave writers like Moorcock and Le Guin?

I've got you covered. And it's wide + available to libraries.

UBL: books2read.com/u/bz9BOE
#booksky
📚💙

Andy's fantasy novel is finally available, and it's wide at all APPS and available for libraries.

Sword and Sorcery. Inspired by the New Wave fantasy of Moorcock, McCaffrey and le Guin. Existential journey in unfamiliar lands. Action, quest and adventurers. A standalone story.

“Everything decays, but the glass’steel decayed at a rate so slow as to be invisible on the scale of a single lifetime. In the sword she saw visions of her home. Her home so far away, deep down in the reflection of her elven eyes, sunk deep in her memory, transferred to the blade, as far away as a million years is long.”

Zana Hala’Kaalni is a warrior princess in exile, untethered from her home, and from her sense of self. Allowing chaos to lead her, she enters a nation on the verge of civil war, a quest for a failed utopia, and the ruins of a long dead era, the lost history of her world.

Aertelis combines the action of classic Sword & Sorcery, the literary themes of the Sci-fi Fantasy New Wave, and the character-driven storytelling of the modern era. Aertelis is a standalone story in the Kalni Chronicles anthology.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 10h

It's also full of detailed street-level life in late-30s London. It has one of the funniest end paragraphs of any book I've read, which is remarkable considering the subject manner.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 10h

Finished Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. Written during and set at the start of WW2, it's darkly comic but bleak as characters who are dangerously ill, alcoholic, and even sympathetic to fascism enact a nihilistic faux-bohemian life, as the world collapses.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 20h

re: post below this about watching things directly, another problem is that a lot of people have brain rot from the tropes site and extreme online fandoms, so that they start books on audio at 1.5 speed, check about 5-10 pages and say, nah, this is not my trope/MC combination - DNF. It's so bad.

Reposted by Andy Best

lou-ellen @louceph.com · 1d

please watch movies and read books and play games and look at art, please view it with your own eyes through a lens you made yourself and not just through video essayists and ending explained videos please im begging you

Reposted by Andy Best

Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 1d

A hoot of a movie!

Joe Griffin @thejoegriffin.bsky.social · 1d

Me and the family rewatched Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves the other night. It is delightful, this generation's Princess Bride. Very funny, charming, and inventive, it deserved to make a billion dollars. Cold comfort for the filmmakers, but I'd say it'll be rediscovered eventually.

Poster for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, featuring Chris Pine looking smug and handsome

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 2d

What the fuck, Emilia Jones is Aled Jones's kid? I'm so old aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 2d

Task, like Inglesby's previous show Mare of Eastown, is brilliant.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 3d

With a name like Archer Rhodes you would have been a celebrated writer of airport spy thrillers.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 3d

He can't engage with the truth so he denies fact and re-asserts his statement like a religious belief, to justify his actions, which basically describes a huge swathe of 'economics.'

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 3d

Gary immediately replies, "the 2008 crash." Levy smiles and says ah yes, Neville stares and waits, ready to drop more, having shot him down completely, and Levy says, "let me put it this way, I BELIEVE that government regulation never works."

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 3d

Still thinking about Gary Neville's interview of Daniel Levy on the Overlap, the brief moment of clarity among the platitudes and effortless lying of the CEO class: discussing club ownership and spending issues, Levy says, Gary, can you think of a single time government regulation has worked? ...

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 3d

Denying them air and blocking doesn't fully work if we regularly post screenshots of their posts into our followers' feeds. It's not that we can't discuss stuff, it's the directly sharing of posts that are otherwise blocked.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 4d

Pre-war existential novels are about hating the bourgeoisie, but hating yourself more for being no better, then manifesting this dissonance through anti-social behavior.

[insert joke about social media here]

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 4d

Reading novel Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote the plays Rope and Gaslight. Let's check out the existential musings of a man slowly drinking himself to death in the face of encroaching fascism and crushing capitalism.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 4d

One of my favorite things is watching people get mad at stupid decisions in horror films as if the world is not a daily clusterfuck of bad decisions, avoiding simple solutions and acting against our own interests, usually out of fear.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 5d

Revisited The Conformist (1970) for the first time since university, assuming it would have a new layer of meaning given the world today. Depressingly, it does.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 5d

tangent, sorry, this is also the fallacy behind a huge slew of economic theory, we have a system that forces us into a mode of behavior, then they're like 'here's why capitalism is an extension of this naturally occurring behavior.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 6d

'AI use for idea generation' I think people need to rediscover Ray Bradbury stories about the radical, humanizing value of going for a walk.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 7d

Looking at Drew Struzan posters and seeing "Revenge of the Jedi." When it came out in the UK, the novelization and merch was already done before the name change, so, a friend of mine had a Revenge of the Jedi novel, with the poster artwork as the cover, I think. We were in primary school.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 9d

In the UK during the 80s, the genre was called Teen Fiction. I use 'YA' as a shortcut here.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 9d

Don't have an unhinged opinion, but as a younger teen I found industry YA to be simplistic and patronizing, preferring adult SFF. The exception was Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall, which was eerily prophetic given its from 1983. The OG dystopian YA.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 9d

Peace and love. No worries.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 10d

Yup, but it's fine. Social media is not the best for context.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 11d

Big Daily Mail energy: pedos and immigrants will take your kids, also, let's all consider how attractive this 6 yr old is.

Andy Best @andybest.bsky.social · 13d

I found a rare example of a good writer doing games/lit crit in the wild @gracemachine.bsky.social : even in games references and creative choices work when coherent and connected to a theme or thesis

Hades II's Ill-Defined, Unserious World Undermines the Depth and Power of Mythology

With its cardboard cutout characters, Hades II flattens the fearful, uneasy mystery of its mythic inspirations.

www.endlessmode.com