"Identified: Musings..."

One of my favorite stories last year was Toiya Kristen Finlay's "The Avatar of Background Noise" in Text:UR. She had another story in the same milieu last summer in Lone Star Stories. And now there's a new one in Farrago's Wainscot that I just noticed yesterday: "Identified: Musings (Attributed to Mardun, T.)."

Two central things combine in these stories, a secondary world that has developed alongside our own (or rather a geographical location within our world that has maintained itself nominally separate) and a sense of many settings or worlds connected by libraries that are fictional, all created by Our Mutual Author. It's like the book-jumping stuff of Jasper Fforde's work without the silliness (though still whimsical at times) with some of Borges thrown in.

I'm not sure how well this story would stand on its own--I enjoyed it, but some of that came from connections with the other stories. Still, it's worth checking out, and I hope someday Finlay collects a bunch of these stories in one place.

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