The Large Hadron Collider, as drawn by Leonardo.

Read (among others) Fantastic Four #606, Irredeemable #37, and Batman Inc. #1. None of them *bad* as such, and all of them had nice moments, but all fell short of the possibilities, and felt more like shutouts to the past than to attempts to create new futures.

I guess it's the best we can expect these days from mainstream comics (and certainly it's far from the worst), but I know for a fact Hickman can write better and bigger ideas (heck, he has done much better in Fantastic Four itself, and his limited series like Red Mass for Mars, Pax Romana, Secret, and The Manhattan Projects all range from good to awesome), and Grant Morrison used to be more consistently great back when he held his tendency to surrealism a little bit more in check.

As always, YMM(and probably will)V.

Just because it'd be technologically impossible to build The Machine, it doesn't mean it's not the only entity honest enough for John Reese to trust, and as lies go, it's one of Finch's least untrue ones.

After all, The Machine is how the other intelligence analysts used to call him.

.finis.

Rogue Moon (Algis Budrys, 2012/#42): Old-fashioned in its technobabble and the vernacular of interpersonal relationships (the two things that seem to age most quickly), but its underlying concepts are still part of contemporary SF (identity given the possibility of duplication, the possibly radical strangeness of alien artifacts), and are handled, I think quite well.

Iron Kingdom (Christopher Clark, 2012/#43): It's taking me a while to wrap my head around the strangeness (from my raised-at-the-end-of-the-20th-century point of view) of the history of Germany/"Germany"/Prussia/"Prussia." It's a helpful reminder, though, of how essentially contingent, or at least historical, are politics even at the largest scales. Countries are born and die within the span of one or two generations (although names tend to stay), and yet people and civilizations stay. A good guide, I think, to what's important and what's not.

The Machine doesn't feel, but it knows about feelings.

The loss that makes people fall off the world.

The pain that turns a victim's loved one into an asset.

The Machine needs assets.

Some numbers it keeps to itself.

I'm trying to locate a quote, and both my memory (unsurprisingly) and Google (not so unsurprisingly) aren't being of much help, yet I'm sure it's a well-known one, I'm just phrasing it wrong. It goes, roughly, like

You're not here because you have to make a decision. You already made it. You just need to understand the decision you made.

This is driving me crazy. I can hear the quote in the back of my head, a woman's voice saying it. I'm sure it's from something I know very well, some book, comic, or movie, but for some reason it's just blocked.

I know I'll feel stupid once you tell me where this is from, but that's going to be better than having this thing bouncing around my head. So... help?

ETA: Got it. Thanks!

Title: The Way of the Father
Fandom: Avengers movie, AU.

Loki build his palace were Mjolnir fell, and decorated his throne with his brother's bones.

Stark, blind and crippled, forged a weapon with death in his soul.

Romanoff pulled the trigger like the old men had taught her, between heartbeats — her last one and the one before.

The death of Midgard was visible from Asgard. The mourning banquets lasted a month.

.finis.

A man who couldn't risk getting angry without destroying everything around. Another who had everything money could buy, and even the mind of a genius, none of which made him any less alone. And let's not forget the woman who had lived much longer than seemed possible, and yet had seen more than her years' share of blood.

Broken people, all of them. A monster, a weirdo, and a killer — but there were worse things threatening the world.

Amanda Waller knew about threats, and that was what the Avengers Initiative was all about.

.finis.