SGA Big Bang and mcshep_match recs

Between the SGA Big Bang novels/novellas that went live on Aug. 7 and the mcshep_match stories going up two a day until Sep. 9, there have been a ton of great McKay/Sheppard stories to wade through lately. These are the ones I've enjoyed most so far.


McShep Match

Like the snarry_games that synn and captain_tulip do each year, mcshep_match features two competing teams, Angst and Romance, who were given the same set of 25 prompts to assign out to their authors. Now, every day, each team's entry for that day's prompt goes up, and you vote on (a) how effectively the story conveys angst or romance, (b) how well it fits the prompt, and (c) how much you enjoyed reading it. All stories are anonymous until the reveal next month.

Though I vowed not to prejudge Team Romance as fluffy (and let's not get started on the artificial and perhaps unfair distinction between "angst" and "romance" to begin with) and have been enjoying many of their entries, so far all but one of my favorites have come from the Angst side. They are:

• Homunculus (prompt: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing; team: Angst; R) – My favorite of the entries so far. An absolutely wonderful sci fi story, riveting and chilling and suffused with dread and dramatic irony, and it's just beautiful. It's about Rodney and John and the team, and the expedition, and Atlantis and the Ancients, and there's science and psychology and a niggling sense that something is (as Rodney would say) wrong, wrong, wrong, and I can't say much else or it'll spoil you.


• Iteration (Catch-22; Angst; PG-13) – Another very creative premise with distressing fallout reminiscent of The Butterfly Effect. Given an alien "reset button," Rodney has to choose between two unacceptable outcomes again and again until it nearly drives him (and Sheppard) mad.


• Acidimia (Absent Without Leave; Angst; PG) – The Wraith make John a Runner. Good action, good sense of what it might be like to be a Runner and for John to be a Runner, and that wonderful warm feeling when everyone works together to save one of their own and bring him home.


• Moments, Coming and Going (Finest Hour; Angst; PG-13) – Memories from John's past intermingle with flashes of reality when he's injured in an accident on Atlantis. Deftly crafted.


• Rock, Paper (No Scissors) (Correspondence; Angst; R) – As much humor as angst in this one. Rodney and John are being held prisoner on an alien world, and each night they pass notes back and forth between their cells. Features emo- and binary poetry and intimacy issues and a prisoner John nicknames Professor Rononface.


• Clear Blue Skies (Absent Without Leave; Romance; R) – A freak encounter with asteroids leaves John and Rodney stranded for a week on a tropical paradise of a planet. Tent-pitching and fishing and sunburn-fear and surfing and ratcheting tensions ensue, and yeah, you know where this is going.

SGA Big Bang

This challenge was for authors to write stories of at least 40,000 words in a certain period of time. Those who finished on deadline were permitted to post their work on the website. Some of them are remarkable, especially considering how little time their authors had to write, while others... you can tell they were going for quantity over quality. Sorry for the plotty descriptions here; it's been a while since I've read some of them, and they're so (wonderfully!) long besides, that I can't remember many of their particularly moving details.

Recommended:

• Aegis by Springwoof and Leah (90,748 words, NC-17) – An incredibly well-realized AU in which some people with the ATA gene have Gifts in addition to/instead of technology activation, such as telekinesis (Markham), precognition (Grodin), empathy (Weir) and charm (Sheppard); the Gifted are envied and feared, and every Gift comes with individual power checks as well as a universal weakness (using the Gift burns the body's glucose so that extensive use can kill you). In addition to skewing canon events in interesting ways and offering insights into other characters we wouldn't normally be allowed (such as empath-Weir cataloguing all the emotions radiating from Sheppard while nothing shows on his face), the Gifts provide windows into the characters' internal struggles, both deepening what we see of them on the show and offering new angles for consideration. Many characters have their shining moments, but above all else, this is a story about John's struggles to love and trust and be loved and trusted and to come to terms with his Gift after some traumatic events in his youth.


• None Can Quite Extinguish by Cate (sheafrotherdon) (45,307 words, R) – Ronon convinces his new acquaintances on Atlantis to take him to Sateda, where they find a group of survivors struggling to live without alerting others to their presence; the Atlanteans try to earn their trust while Rodney plays mentor to their most promising young scientist. One of the only Big Bang stories I've read without speeding up towards the end. A marvelous story that explores the tensions between science as weapon and as helpful progress; brings to life the ragtag survivors of Sateda with their wariness and splintering factions; diverges and converges with canon; gradually develops John and Rodney's relationship; provides a fantastic depiction of John taking charge under siege; and explicitly and hauntingly compares Sateda and the Genii and Doranda to Hiroshima.


• Mirror Dance by trinityofone (45,000 words, NC-17) – Carson's ATA gene therapy mutates Rodney's DNA into John's, leaving them looking like identical twins. A fascinating re-imagining of John and Rodney's relationship starting very close to the beginning of the series, including an exploration of how Rodney's appearance wears down John's resistance to intimacy (and complicates things, since for a while they feel a fraternal rather than a romantic connection). The strong points are tempered only by the necessity of revisiting so many canon events along the way—though there are enough twists to keep things interesting, such as Kolya thinking Rodney is John during his attempted takeover in "The Storm"/"The Eye."


• Theory of Evolution by lavvyan (41,993 words, NC-17) – In the tradition of many post-"Conversion" fics, John can't stand what he's been turned into. Here, however, Carson isn't able to restore John's superficial features to the way they were, and John retreats from everyone in anger and disgust, physically and emotionally, including Rodney, with whom he has a fairly new relationship. It takes months of anguish and soul-searching, not to mention the events of "Grace Under Pressure," for John to reach out again.


• All Falls Down by justbreathe60 (45,616 words, NC-17) – This story broke my heart, leaving me with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes for pages and pages. Rodney Ascends in "The Tao of Rodney," but he can't help interfering in small ways to protect those he left behind and comfort a deeply grieving John, and as their friendship becomes something more and the Atlanteans face their worst opposition yet, he risks everything to save them. The author really hits you over the head with John's grief and Rodney's epiphanies about his love for John and Atlantis and their love for him, but it's all worth it for the emotional gut-punch that comes about two-thirds of the way through when the Ascended Ancients mete out Rodney's punishment.

( More of a note-to-self, but others I have read: )

There's a link at the bottom of each post for leaving feedback over at sgabigbangfb. Hint hint.

*blink* Though I've only read one actual printed book this month, a quick count here shows that I've read at least 440,000 words in the last few weeks on Big Bang stories alone. Yipes.

Whew—and that's not counting the fics I want to rec from outside these two communities. Next time...