A perfect Sunday with... Mur Lafferty
Dim Sum, D&D, Lower Decks, and dice making!
Every week, a top writer, artist or creator reveals how they’d fill their perfect Sunday, sharing their favourite comfort reads, movies, food… anything that would make their weekend great.
Today, it’s the turn of Chaos Terminal author, Mur Lafferty.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… brunch
Years ago my friends and I would go to a local dim sum place. It was highly popular and we had to get there at least half an hour before they opened to sit down. Time, children, moving, and regular turnover for restaurants happened, and that place isn't there anymore, but heck if I'm dreaming I'd like to have that experience again, at that restaurant with friends and dim sum and amazing sticky rice and dumplings and peanutty black bean paste little balls of heaven.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… read
I'm currently reading Where Peace is Lost by Valerie Valdes, an excellent sci-fi mixture of road trip and peril and secrets. Valdes has a great knack for writing characters and dribbling their secrets and their fears out at just the right rate, and her pacing keeps me reading long past my bedtime, so it's ideal for a long Sunday afternoon read.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… comic
I currently have Kieron Gillen's massive DIE collection sitting shrink-wrapped on my coffee table and I am looking forward to digging in. I love this comic because it takes a trope, jumping into the TTRPG world from your youth, that sounds overdone but in Gillen's hands it's fresh and terrifying.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… movie
The weekends are for adventuring, and I'd like to see the most recent D&D movie again. Despite the fact that it didn't have a beholder (I complained bitterly about this because it had so many other fan-service monsters in there, like the gelatinous cube and the mimic) I found it an excellent bit of storytelling and action. Also a big hot air balloon with Hugh Grant's head on it. how can you beat that?
Mur’s perfect Sunday… TV binge
I'd start with Lower Decks, since that show is amazing with its obscure Trek references, its ability to laugh at itself, and the building of a hysterical ensemble cast. The brilliant but unambitious Mariner paired with super ambitious and less capable Boimler is one of the best odd couple type pairings I've ever seen. And I'll see anything with Eugene Cordero (Rutherford) in it. Long live Pillboi.
Speaking of Pillboi, if the Lower Decks didn't do it for me, I'd go for The Good Place, which presented afterlife fiction in a completely new way. Seasons one and two are my favorite seasons by far of most television.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… podcast
I haven't had a regular gaming group since my mid-twenties, but I keep up with what RPGs are coming out. Last year I became semi-obsessed with Brindlewood Bay, which is Murder She Wrote meets Lovecraft. Every player is a little old lady who sets out to solve a murder and uncover the weird eldritch stuff in their cozy town. Since I can't play it, I have been loving Roll To Meddle, the actual play podcast of some very funny gamers and a GM who presents the game in an easy to follow format for listeners.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… album
The horror browser game Blaseball died a tragic death this past June. But that didn't change the massive amount of fandom art that came out of the game, including the worldwide, 20+ person band who call themselves the Garages (after the blaseball team Seattle Garages, naturally). io They dabbled in many different genres of various sound and musical quality, but there are several songs that just kept me going through the pandemic, and it's still my go-to playlist. Listening is a little bittersweet now that I know the game is dead, but music, and the stories the music tells, lives on.
Mur’s perfect Sunday… treat
I've been dabbling with resin art, mainly dice making, for a few years now, so the treat would be sitting in my basement pouring resin to pursue the perfect set of dice. I'm not artistic, but I learned that you can make some pretty neat things with some resin, some mica or dye, and a good mould. It's a hobby that forces me to slow down and do things right, or I'll screw up everything (or ruin a piece of clothing) but I still feed the instant gratification desire because I can see if my pour turned out well or not after about 12 hours.
Also, making dice is awesome.
Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty is out now from Ace Books!
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, and fled to outer space to avoid it…but when one of the new human arrivals on a space shuttle is murdered, she’s back in the game.
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, thank you very much. But no matter what she does, people persist in dying around her—and only she seems to be able to solve the crime. After fleeing to an alien space station in hopes that the lack of humans would stop the murders, a serial killer had the nerve to follow her to Station Eternity. (Mallory deduced who the true culprit was that time, too.)
Now the law enforcement agent who hounded Mallory on Earth has come to Station Eternity, along with her teenage crush and his sister, Mallory’s best friend from high school. Mallory doesn’t believe in coincidences, and so she’s not at all surprised when someone in the latest shuttle from Earth is murdered. It’s the story of her life, after all.
Only this time she has more than a killer to deal with. Between her fugitive friends, a new threat arising from the Sundry hivemind, and the alarmingly peculiar behavior of the sentient space station they all call home, even Mallory’s deductive abilities are strained. If she can’t find out what’s going on (and fast), a disaster of intergalactic proportions may occur….
Mur Lafferty is an award-winning author and Hall of Fame podcaster. She’s the author of the Nebula- and Hugo-nominated finalist Six Wakes and the Shambling Guides series, and host of the popular Ditch Diggers and I Should Be Writing podcasts. She also co-edits the Hugo-nominated podcast magazine Escape Pod. Lafferty is lives with her husband, daughter, and two dogs in Durham, North Carolina, where she runs, plays computer and board games, and bakes bread.
Author photo: K. Osborne.
