Rachel Reddick / RZ Nicolet
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rr4idic.bsky.social
Rachel Reddick / RZ Nicolet
@rr4idic.bsky.social
71 followers 64 following 660 posts
Sci-fi/fantasy writer by night, data scientist by day, astrophysicist by training, Star Trek fan all the time. See the ol' blog at rznicolet.com
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rr4idic.bsky.social
Convincing you to read my novel by the first sentence. (And share yours if you want!)

The opening of The Cloak and Its Wizard (to be coming out... probably February 2026, exact date TBD).
Chapter One: I’m picky about wizards. The wizards themselves will complain about that, but of course I’m picky. When I choose a wizard, barring utter abandonment of moral scruples, it’s a till-death-do-us-part situation. (Their death, not mine. I’m the next best thing to indestructible.)
November 11, 2025 at 4:13 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
And now, the intersection of #books I've been reading and #gardening: The Enchanted Greenhouse! Absolutely delightful book, very cozy. The sentient plants are so much fun. Also a master class in how to write an enthralling plot _without_ a bad guy.

#amreading #fantasy #romantasy , I guess? 📚🪐 💙📚
The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst. A winged cat in the foreground looks across a snowy landscape; beyond a path through the snow is a greenhouse that promises light and warmth.
November 8, 2025 at 4:32 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
So I finally finished playing #DragonAge #Veilguard the other day, on my highly non-standard setup.

Pretty fun, liked the fact that you got to make friends with the supporting NPCs. Might like to play again some time... but only on very different hardware that's, you know, actually above min spec.
End credits for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, playing on a 2019 iMac which has been dual-booted into Windows 10. I do not recommend playing with this hardware setup. It was rough.
October 10, 2025 at 4:50 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Oh no, I forgot the cover! The covers for this series are pretty great, too.
Strange New World, by Vivian Shaw. The cover is in a colored woodcut-style. A human hand holds a wineglass that contains a red liquid with an eyeball garnish, underneath a red cross with a skull. Skyscrapers loom in the background.
October 5, 2025 at 5:32 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz. Exactly the cozy, community-building sci-fi I wanted. I love all the robots and now I'm hungry for noodles.

#amreading #cozy #nearfuture #scifi
Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz. The stylized cover shows a robot hand using chopsticks to lift a bunch of long noodles from a box decorated with the Golden Gate Bridge. Assorted smaller robots adorn the lower edge.
September 26, 2025 at 11:39 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh. Magical boarding school, but from the PoV of one of the teachers. Absolutely fabulous. I love that they had the big obvious confrontation right in Act 1, and then explored the consequences.

#amreading #fantasy #urbanfantasy 📚🪐 📚💙
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh. The book has a black background with a few stars; a phoenix is outlined in red-orange.
September 14, 2025 at 8:11 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
New #garden resident: Best guess is this cutie is an eastern black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) caterpillar. Apparently, they like dill. (We've discovered we don't use the dill much, anyway.)

Now we know what that butterfly we spotted a couple weeks ago was doing...

#caterpillar #insect
A bright green caterpillar with black horizontal stripes. There are orange dots on the stripes. It's climbing up the stem of a dill plant, which has little yellow flowers on top of the stems.
September 6, 2025 at 11:55 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard.

Good fun alternate history/urban #fantasy with fallen angels and intrigue in a badly damaged Paris. Also a book where I wanted to shake sense into some (most) of the characters.

#amreading #urbanfantasy 🪐📚 💙📚
Book cover: The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard. Dark blue clouds loom behind a damaged stone throne and assorted rubble. The Eiffel Tower stands in the distance. Feathers fall in the foreground.
September 2, 2025 at 1:35 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
And old #book but an interesting one: The Dark Hand of Magic, by Barbara Hambly. I love how she handles characters, including conflict among friends and allies, particularly around Sun Wolf's character growth over the series coming into conflict with who he once was.

#amreading #fantasy 🪐📚 💙📚
The cover of The Dark Hand of Magic, by Barbara Hambly. A man with an eyepatch leans on the edge of a glowing red window, staring up, horrified, at something casting a massive, hand-shape shadow upon him.
August 21, 2025 at 2:23 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer. Loved it. Smart teen protagonist, strange-but-you-can-see-how-it-happened libertarian seastead culture, a little mystery, and getting to watch the consequences of everyone's choices unfold. #sciencefiction #amreading 📚🪐 💙📚
A book, Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer. Gray structures rise from the ocean to loom over it in front of a misty background. (The actual seasteads in the book didn't look like that, but the cover's very cool.)
August 2, 2025 at 2:04 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. It's an #urbanfantasy magical school book from the parent's PoV, which is pretty fun. (And a bit anxiety-inducing, as a parent of an elementary school kid who isn't a werewolf.)
July 28, 2025 at 5:01 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Found this fellow lurking under a leaf while looking for fresh sugar snap peas. Was completely unbothered by photography. One of the biggest beetles I've seen in the wild - about an inch long. Anybody know what this is?

#minnesota #gardening #insect
A dull orange beetle with black legs and small black spots clings to the underside of a pea life. The pea plant is trying to escape its trellis and protective chicken wire.
July 20, 2025 at 5:33 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Dear Pioneer Press (alas, the account on here doesn't look like it's crewed by the actual paper): Uh, maybe you should check in with your editors and layout people and make sure they're okay. Typos are one thing, but this is egregious.

(And yes, I've filed a correction form.)
A9 from July 12's newspaper. It includes cutting off a opinion piece, "Header" as a title, an empty image, text that looks like something from Lorem Ipsum, and a bunch of extra empty space at the bottom. Yikes.
July 12, 2025 at 2:56 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
I'm of two minds about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky.

Physicist Me: Oh, no, no, there is so much wrong, my thesis was on dark matter and-
Trekkie me: This is amazing! The Baomind Dyson swarm! The ships! The visuals! The drama! The...

💙📚🪐 #books #amreading
The Folded Sky, by Elizabeth Bear. Multiple spaceshift fly in front of an enormous space station; the latter appears to have had several structural pieces damaged. Behind them is an ominous orange sun.
July 2, 2025 at 1:49 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: The Fourth Consort, by Edward Ashton. Loved the translator AI and the aliens. Humorous, with a surprisingly sweet ending. (Also a story where the humans are not all right...) #amreading #scifi 💙📚🪐
The Fourth Consort, by Edward Ashton. A man wearing futuristic armor, seen from behind, stares at a distant alien city whose towers stand before a cloudy orange-tinted sky.
June 22, 2025 at 3:59 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. As is often the case with his books, I am fascinated by the aliens and mad at how badly the humans have messed things up. #sciencefiction
A picture of the book "Shroud", by Adrian Tchaikovsky. On the cover: a yellow spaceship trailing red exhausting is crashing into a black-and-white landscape consisting entirely of spikes.
June 21, 2025 at 8:15 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher. This one was a delight -- Halla was great, Sarkis was hilarious (I do love a good-hearted-but-grouchy character) with a blend of adventure, romance, and just straight-up shenanigans. Good fun. 💙📚🪐

#amreading #fantasy #romantasy
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher. On the cover, a large sword stands upright behind the title, with two birds perched on it. Quote below the title: "Love is a double-edged sword."
June 9, 2025 at 1:35 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Well, that was faster than I expected.

Stories that qualified me for associate membership --

In Memoriam (Diabolical Plots): www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-3...

Missed Message (Nature Futures, sadly paywalled): www.nature.com/articles/516...
A lot of writing, partly on a purple banner background, with the SFWA seal on the right. The most important part of the text is: Welcome! Your SFWA membership application has been approved!
June 4, 2025 at 11:14 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: The Keeper's Six, by Kate Elliot. Angry mom gets the gang back together to rescue her (adult) kid. Cool adventures between realities. Short and sweet. Loved all the characters.

#amreading #fantasy 🪐📚💙
The Keeper's Six, by Kate Elliot. An enormous skull looms over a wasteland; an opening in it leads to somewhere green, with a handful of tiny human figures facing that mysterious entrance.
June 3, 2025 at 11:40 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
More in #books I've read lately: "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)," by Dennis E. Taylor. This was a highly entertaining read -- kind of like Isekai progression fantasy, except scifi and done via brain uploading. It takes the premise (person uploaded into a von Neumann spaceship) and...

#amreading 💙📚🪐
We Are Legion (We Are Bob), by Dennis E. Taylor. Spaceships are firing missiles at each other in a strangely dense asteroid field on the cover.
May 16, 2025 at 1:45 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett. Brilliant fantasy murder mystery with creepy bio-magic. Exactly what I wanted: a fascinating puzzle where you can solve it alongside the investigators. At least as good as the first in the series. #amreading 💙📚🪐
A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett. An Ana and Din Mystery. Green plants decorate the spine of a black hard-cover book. The cover shows the title over a gold-and-black illustration of a plant growing out of a hand.
May 14, 2025 at 1:54 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
Another #book I've read lately: Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty. Murder mystery on a space station! Delightfully weird aliens! But... 💙📚🪐

#sff #sciencefiction
A blue-toned, stylized image of a woman wearing glasses, with an insect and several planets reflected in the lenses. Station Eternity: The Midsolar Murders, by Mur Lafferty.
April 16, 2025 at 1:31 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
More on what I've been reading lately: Terminal Alliance, first book of the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse. It's as funny and delightfully absurd as it sounds, but I found it a little frustrating that the Big Twist [don't worry, no spoilers]...

#amreading #books #sff
Two humans and a millipede-like alien standing on top of a miniaturized space ship. The humans have spacesuits. The woman in the center has bottle of cleaning fluid and a mop. It's very dramatic. Terminal Alliance, by Jim C. Hines
April 9, 2025 at 11:21 PM
rr4idic.bsky.social
The world is (gestures vaguely) a lot right now, but I have seedlings and cookies, so it can't be all bad. #cookies #seedlings
Cookies on a metal cooling rack. They're brown, and if you could smell them, you could tell they have the sweet goodness of molasses, plus ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. (They're molasses crinkles.) A tray of small black plastic pots, most filled with soil, some of which sport tiny green seedlings.
April 4, 2025 at 1:38 AM
rr4idic.bsky.social
#Spring in #Minnesota. (A screenshot of the weather forecast yesterday.) #weather #winterweatheradvisory
A Saint Paul weather forecast from Friday. The current temperature is 70˚F, but there's an alert about a Winter Weather Advisory for Saturday.
March 29, 2025 at 3:11 PM