Reviews

Review: Horseshoe Nail Series

According to FanFiction.net, Dyce hasn’t posted since June 11, 2008. A check of other places on the web indicates that she last updated her AO3 account in 2021 and she last updated her original fiction blog in 2024.

That’s sometimes the nature of fandom, and of writing as a whole. Individuals drift in and out of the community over time; some, multiple times, and others only once. But the legacies often live on in the form of the written works themselves, and that’s what’s happened with Dyce’s Horseshoe Nail (fan fiction for Firefly) series. It consists of five stories:

Review: The State Within

Reviews

I first ran across the BBC America production The State Within while I was on a sick day from work. The version on Amazon Prime, at least here in the U.S., is seven, fifty-minute episodes, which is exactly the right amount of time for marathoning something when you’re feeling too well to stay in bed but too poorly to do much more than sit in front of the television.

It was a good call: I was absolutely riveted. At the time, however, I figured it was because (a) I was sick and my brain wasn’t at full capacity and (b) I was in the middle of a celebrity crush on Jason Isaacs. But then, across this past holiday season, I found myself queuing it up again — and, like before, being completely enthralled. This time, I didn’t have anything to blame it on, either; this time, I can trust that I did, in fact, genuinely like it.

Review: Nexus Nine

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I’m well aware of the phenomenon of “filing off the serial numbers” in fan fiction. (It’s pretty much impossible for any fan fiction author not to know about it, particularly in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey.) To be quite honest, filed-off fan fiction tends not to be very good, and I often find myself turned off a bit by it. After all, one of the unspoken rules of fan fiction is that it’s always kept non-commercial; the very act of filing off the serial numbers violates that rule.

But I’ll admit it: every time I saw an advertisement for Mary E. Lowd’s Nexus Nine: a Tri-Galactic Trek Novel, it looked interesting. And recently, when I had some digital credits over at Amazon, I gave in and purchased it.

I’m not sorry. Not at all. Rather the reverse: I adored it.

Fanfic Review: Come Whatever

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For my first fan fiction review, I’ve gone back to one of my all-time favorites: Come Whatever, posted by gabolange in September 2022.

Summary: Susan really had meant to put the whole day–week, really–behind her in the immediate aftermath of “Sic Transit Vir.” A story of friendship, change, and getting the last word.

This delightful short story, written from the viewpoint of Commander Susan Ivanova, is lighthearted while addressing topics that are actually quite serious — just like the episode it’s based on, Sic Transit Vir. In it, poor Ivanova is surrounded by questions about alien sex and the political ramifications of romantic pairings, and when she has the expected reactions things don’t go quite the way she’d like.