I connected to this book, it meant something to me, it made my darkling plain a little less dark.
It’s an ending that acknowledges the world kinda sucks sometimes, it’s not like we planned for it to be this way, it’s just how it is. Feelings I can’t put a name to. He wakes up a few hours later, with Lyanna still missing. Now they will live forever, knowing each other entirely, belonging and sharing, in an immortal love. Robb and a local team visit one of the caves where the shkeen are consumed by the greeshka, and when he tries to read the emotions on a shkeen in the middle of the process, he receives a feeling of love that overwhelms him and is unable to resist it, until he loses consciousness. Like us when we make love, almost. Enter it was every bit as fascinating and heartbreaking as I thought it could be. And more and more, on and on, down and down. Robb and Laurie spend the night together, both heartbroken but still human, softening each other’s darkness.I have to confess I can’t, and I don’t really want to, avoid the lens of being an ASOIAF fan. (…) its violence was the violence of love. Robb and Lya attend a ceremony for shkeen that are about to get infected with greeshka and the following day they explore the city to find some who are already infected. Beyond familiar names like “Robb” and “Lyanna”, beyond songs and towers,  is about isolation, relationships, and trying to endure the darkness together. We’re incomplete creatures, each of us flawed in our own particular way. I can’t know you. I can hear the words rattling around in your head as you fit a sentence together before saying it. She and Robb were the lucky ones, but this is better. The Union called her, every night she could feel the same mindstorm that Robb felt in the cave.

Everything is right at the surface, right there, their whole lives and all their dreams and feelings and memories and oh—I just took it in, swept it up with a reading, a glance.

Before he leaves, he tells Valcarenghi what he learned:“That’s why your men are converting, Dino, that’s why people are going over. With men, with humans, it’s so much work. Sometimes. Their minds are so deep, so open. That’s the question Robb and Lyanna were called to answer, using their Talents to understand what’s going on with these people.With the help of the planetary administrator Dino Valcarenghi, his aide Nelson Gourlay, and the extee anthropologist Laurie Blackburn, with whom Dino has a romantic relationship, Robb and Lyanna begin to understand the shkeen culture.

It’s fast and easy to read, in two hours I was done. follows two humans with special Talents on a disturbing quest that takes them to the distant planet of Shkea. Yes, all we have is a touch and a voice. Persuaded by Dino Valcarenghi, Robb visits the caves without her. Would we still be And look at us. The end of the search for the Shkeen, and for Man too. Maybe I still hope, for something still greater and more loving than the Union, for the God they told me of so long ago.

Please. Below it, there’s more, more of you. We the lucky ones, even if the darkling plain is still there. What do we have, compared to them?”If what Lya and Robb have is love, then what is this feeling that she shares in when she reads the shkeen? They’re the lucky ones. But am I? I felt—I don’t know. Could we? No. And though we’re tired and alone, we keep going, we keep forging new relationships, we keep loving. Passions you suppress, and memories even you don’t know you have. Our narrator Robb is an empath, able to read people’s feelings, and his lover Lyanna is a telepath, with the ability to read thoughts. And because we’re flawed, because we’re missing something, we develop our dreams, our desires, our goals. Lyanna and Robb know each other as well as human beings can ever know each other, but how much is that? They’re always apart, always guessing, always trying to reach each other. A Song for Lya is one of George RR Martin's earliest published works.

Yes. The book collects nine short stories and one novella, all in the science fiction genre. He can’t give us easy answers because they don’t exist. It also...Remember the new “Revamped” edition of D&D’s Curse of Strahd campaign module that was announced a little while ago? But it’s wrong to call it a mindstorm. Do we ever really know each other? celebrates the connections we do manage to forge, the small moments we feel we’re not alone, and our capacity for love even among loss and fear. How beautiful is that, even imperfect and lacking as we are, with our limited and incomplete love, we can still make such strong connections? Or maybe what we call love is a tiny piece of God. After finding (careful, lots of spoilers) this amazing meta by tumblr user @joannalannister, I realized I had to read A Song for Lya. , being alone on a darkling plain is a part of being human. When he meets the main greeshka and tries to read its feelings, he begins to understand what the more Talented Lyanna was sensing:I opened myself.

And me, do you know me?
But how many of us have read GRRM’s other, non-ASOIAF related stories? In his essay "The Light of Distant Stars", Martin said it was inspired by the first serious romance he was involved in.