RE: https://mastodon.art/@mobydick/115744652365738289

I initially thought I was reading some Infosec post and that said "certs".

I've been doing, very haphazardly, some voice feminization work with a teacher who is patiently putting up with my inability to focus on it right now.
One of the things I'm supposed to have is three different texts, of varying length, to practice on.
I decided to pick some of my favorite intros to novels. I haven't run these by her yet, so we will see.

Can you name the novels?

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These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

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This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice…but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks…but nobody loved it.

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Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

Not even food, as Damien’s new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designers’ display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.