Friday, February 7, 2025

Book Review: Atacama by Jendia Gammon

A pulse-pounding SF/Thriller hybrid that feels like a modern day episode of The X-Files.


Fiona Hawthrone has a problem. Her best friend Alva, a researcher in the titular Atacama desert in South America is dead, along with the entirety of her team... and all the signs point to something like murder. There’s not a lot that Fiona can do about it from all the way in eastern Tennessee, but soon she is wrapped up in the mystery of her death, a strange and powerful corporation, and something else, even more unexpected. Something impossible. Something extraordinary.


This is the story of Jendia Gammon’s Atacama.


In the tagline above, I mentioned The X-Files, and I do think that using that as the model is the best way to describe and follow the throughline of the book. After a strange in medias res prologue (that appears to be actually an excerpt from a different story altogether set in the same verse), we are plunged into the at-first quotidian life of Dr. Fiona Hawthorne. We get a “bang” of an opener right away as she gets the news the entire expedition to the Atacama that included her friend Alva is dead, no sign of the bodies, nothing. Fiona is then inexorably, piece by piece caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue as, given that she is Alva’s best friend, a number of parties come to call on her, not all of them with her best interest in mind. And of course she wants to know what happened to Alva, and what it all means. 


Thus, for a good portion of the book, there is only the barest hint of a SFF tone to the book, the book preferring to the technothriller slash mystery and also a deep dive into Fiona’s character and life. We get a strong sense of her as a character, as someone who has had Alva’s death push her off what was already a precarious cliff. A lot of the novel is her working through her friend’s death and what it means for her, and for those around her. Gammon does the emotional and psychological beats of this rather well, bringing us firmly into Fiona’s mindset and her precarious state. (the entire book is from her point of view).


And as you might expect, eventually, all roads lead to the Atacama desert, and Fiona finding out what is really going on and what happened to Alva and the remainder of her team. The time in eastern Tennessee is the prelude, background and foundation for Fiona’s fateful trip to South America. And the point is made that Eastern Tennessee is a very different place, in terms of physical geography and environment, than the driest of deserts, the Atacama. It’s quite the cultural and physical shock for Fiona when she goes there, and a writing shock as well.¹


There are some mysterious goings on in Tennesse. However when it does come time to really ramp up the genre elements (and I should be clear, that also includes notes of horror that we saw before in Tennessee, but really get a real dose of here), mysterious doings at the college, the strange corporation known as Cuprum, and the slow unveiling of what is really going on, the trip to the Atacama and what is there and why really bring this facet of the novel to life. Since the unraveling of that secret and what it is and what it means is really a treasure to be savored, I do have to draw a curtain around the central mystery of the book. I do point at my earlier statement that this really is an X-Files episode in tone. Mysterious doings, a character under pressure, and a mysterious entity, and the mysterious Cuprum.


Although there are a set of interesting characters around Fiona (including Alva, whom we get to know of, after death), Cuprum is the star of the book that I really want to discuss besides Fiona herself. While she has that interesting set of co-stars and characters to bounce off of, where the book really sings, aside from its central mystery and genre element, is Cuprum. If you like weird faceless corporations with that sinister and higher-tech-than-anyone-should-have sort of vibe, Cuprum is here for you. This is an advancement, a evolution from the days of the X-Files where it would have been a quasi or fully government agency that was behind what is going on. Here, Gammon goes with the times to a very creepy international corporation with an unknown agenda and even more unknown and unearthly technology at its disposal. 


There is a piece of tech, though, that Cuprum employs in the book that I didn’t quite accept as being realistic. It’s necessary for the plot, especially for the denouement, but given the ending, I think it is not strictly necessary, and given that it did somewhat break my suspension of disbelief a bit, I think it could have been done without or handled somewhat differently. Otherwise, the resolution of the story and the mystery and the “sting in the tail” at the end of the novel are all very classic X-files like techniques which are really employed here well.


That’s the thing about this novel. It’s definitely more mystery, strange occurrences, X-Files-esque feel and tone, with a strong side dish of personal growth, a strong sense of place (both in Eastern Tennessee and in the Atacama) than it really is a straight up science fiction novel.It sits near the borders of science fiction, technothriller and even mystery. It feels also, for all of its genre elements, to be a very personal, introspective and a story of the author’s heart. There is a real care and touch to Fiona’s life and story here that feels weirdly intimate, and it helped draw me into her story, and the story of the novel in general. 


I want to say a few words about the writing, because it really needs a little more highlighting beyond what I’ve said before. Be it the interiority of Fiona’s head and mind as she is going through a lot of trauma (a real highlight of the book to treat such a subject with such care in the writing) or the descriptions of the locales, or the twisting plot and intrigue, the writing flows smoothly and well. The novel is a complicated piece of moving parts, but the author is always on top of what is happening, and plays fair with the reader at the same time. On a sentence by sentence level, there is a strong execution of the craft here, and the overall structure of the plotting is very sound. I keep going back to the X-Files as my touchstone here, but this really is like a good X-Files episode: crisp, well paced, and page-turning.


Finally it should be noted that the novel is also illustrated gorgeously, from the cover, through each chapter, to the end, a real compliment to the writing. Overall, this makes the experience of reading the book lush, inventive and immersive. It may be less strongly genre than maybe I would have liked, but it was an excellent and entertaining read. 


--

Highlights:

  • Immersive writing with a strong character focus
  • Excellent X-Files like feel 
  • Strong sense of place both in Tennessee and in the deadly desert


Reference: Gammon, Jendia, Atacama, [Sley House Publishing, 2025]

¹ Given the recent terrible flooding and damage done to this region by Hurricane Helene, the parts of the novel set in Eastern Tennessee hit even harder than they normally would. Also, I was also reminded of the TV series The Peripheral, which has its setting in the same area (in point of fact, the town where much of that footage was filmed was particularly hard hit by the hurricane).

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Review: Everything for Everyone

I want to believe, I want to believe...



Mark Fisher famously said in his slim, efficient book Capitalist Realism that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (he mentions the sentiment as appearing in the works of both Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson). I have also seen people nowadays invoke the old Soviet concept of ‘hypernormalization,’ popularized by the Adam Curtis documentary of that name and borrowed from Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe the feeling among inhabitants of the late Soviet Union that boiled down to that Simpsons meme of “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas,” but on a societal level, to describe today’s world. It feels like we live not merely in late capitalism but in a capitalism that has completely overstayed its welcome. We in the United States have had the particular fortune of electing the dumbest motherfuckers imaginable to the highest offices in the land, and they are busy dismantling all the good things about the modern capitalist state and with it anything resembling even the twentieth-century consensus, leaving us in a full-on robber baron’s playground. What is painful, then, is how nobody seems to be able to think of a way out of it. Liberals and even leftists are left seemingly unable to imagine doing anything other than holding the line against a lumbering, smoldering beast that, as of writing, is poised to start a trade war because of one man’s narcissism.

It is in times like these it is good to remember that the human brain is capable of imagining alternatives, that we need to be imagining alternatives, because this situation is simply intolerable. There are reasons that higher education has been gutted throughout the Western world and the same applies to anything good in primary and secondary education, including the monomaniacal focus on STEM, which turns people into tools of our rulers, rather than those who can think clearly about who it is that rules us. The science fiction genre is filled with such attempts, such speculations, such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson or Octavia Butler or Cory Doctorow or Terry Bisson or Ursula K. Le Guin. I cannot think of a better time than [gestures vaguely at all this shit going on] to bring to the attention of the readership Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.

Like a good history book, the title tells you exactly what you’re in for. The book is, in fact, a collection of vignettes structured as interviews with participants in the great upheaval that overthrew capitalism in the city of Wall Street and replaced it with a communal way of living. The two narrators are versions of the authors, transposed a few decades into the future and conducting the interviews with the various participants. This form is a clever one, throwing the ‘fake history textbook’ form common in alternate history and in some other SFF subgenres (H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come is an early example) on its head; it allows simultaneously a larger view of events while keeping the human element there, with all its grit and drama and messiness. In a lot of alternate history writing there is a tension between those two elements, but here they are made complimentary.

What is so refreshing about Everything for Everyone is that it is an unabashedly utopian book; I am tempted to describe it as ‘Edward Bellamy but woke (complimentary).’ The format of the series of interviews prevents the utopianism from becoming dull, like so many plodding nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian novels that go on and on and on and on and on about the minutiae of how these worlds may work, with Bellamy’s Looking Backward being the most prominent example. Here, the world is explained naturally, logically, as the people being interviewed are those who had lived to see the changes. Abdelhadi and O’Brien pull another trick in having these interviews recorded with the intention of being saved for posterity, for people who never knew anything else than this utopia, so they can understand what the before time was like. This leads to interesting perspectives, and more than a few bits that are both grimly funny and cutting. The most damning one of these was how one character explains health insurance to children who have only ever known communally provided medicine.

This book is a work of intellect as much as a work of emotion, and much care is taken to show how our rotting capitalist citadel could collapse. It reminds me more than anything else of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which showed a way that capitalism could end in a way that my nebbish, autistic, heretofore vaguely libertarian mind could grok, setting me down the road to becoming a raging leftie during the pandemic. The revolution in this book is less like Robinson’s and more like the anarchism espoused by the likes of David Graeber, who had pointed out that most of the truly revolutionary movements of the past few decades have been of that tendency. It is revolution in the manner of Black Lives Matter, or the protests against the Palestinian Genocide that happened last year. So many people who have participated in those protests feel like the seed of a better world is there, and O’Brien and Abdelhadi take that feeling and rework the world around it.

The book is focused on New York, as the title would suggest, but you see the reverberations elsewhere. There are people, interviewed in New York, who have experience in the Midwest or the Canadian Prairies, a discussion of what would be done with the space resorts of the ultra-rich, and there is a whole chapter about the creation of a free Palestine. It is the last chapter that I found among the most interesting; I was quite impressed by it because it described a resolution to the grueling conflict in that region that did not simply end in one side wiping the other off the map. It was a chapter that left me filled with a melancholy, a mix of hope and despair, as on the one hand it gave us a roadmap, and on the other hand, the contrast to the razing of Gaza that only recently ended (and could easily flare up again at any minute).

It is the segment on Palestine that, perhaps unintentionally, reveals one of the profound strokes of this book. It is a moment that is extremely problematic - and yet looks profound because of how problematic it is. The Palestinian-American narrator uses the word ‘Zio’ to describe the Israeli government and its repression of Palestinians, in a manner that struck me as unaware that it was a term commonly used by neo-Nazis such as David Duke. It was a moment that gave me pause, and called to mind an interview between Kelly Hayes and Shane Burley with the appropriate title of We Don’t Talk Like Nazis, surrounding the Leftist use of the term ‘ZOG’ or ‘Zionist Occupied Government,’ which is indisputably an antisemitic slur used by aforementioned neo-Nazis. But, taken as a whole, that chapter’s anger is focused on the oppressive force of the Israeli state, rather than the Jewish people as a whole, and it mentions a number of Israelis joining in the creation of a free Palestine for all its citizens. You can read this in at least two ways: the character not knowing the source of the term, or the authors themselves not knowing the source of the term. From this, you can see the truth of all revolutions, even the best of them: they are not perfect. They are made by human beings, as flawed and as wretched and with so many blinders, who nevertheless fight for the good of the people, however they define it. It works both in-universe and in our universe; I don’t know if this was at all intended, but there’s something that works very well about it, if as an experience than as a work of fiction. I will caveat all this by saying that I am not Jewish, and would defer to opinions on the use of the word.

As luck would have it, this was the book I was reading in a diner as 2024 passed into 2025, as New Year’s Eve passed into New Year’s Day. It is a book with the calloused, worn, yet hopeful tenor of any number of old Black spirituals; its interviews are songs of despair, of suffering, and of aspiration. It’s a book that stirred something in me, as one year was about to flow seamlessly into another, one administration giving way to one run by madmen, fools, and sadists. This is a book that dares to hope, dares to dream, dares to say that all of this will end, that we, as human beings, can do better, must do better. The lords of silicon and oil are destroying the humanities to prevent a book like Everything for Everyone from being written, so that people cannot imagine their castles built on sand to come tumbling down. It is a book that wields Brecht’s distancing effect like a scythe, cutting down all the tawdry justifications for the cruelty of the world, while still never forgetting that the forging of a new world will be the story of people. I took a look at the world of this book and came away wanting to believe, needing to believe, in the world it promises. I hope the readers of this book, and this review, can do the same.

--

Nerd Coefficient:
10/10

Reference: O'Brien, E. M. and Abdelhadi, Eman Everything for Everyone [Common Notions Press, 2022]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review. Companion

A fun slasher drama, but nothing groundbreaking

It's hard to find unique things to say about a story with so few unique elements of its own. Companion is a distillation of themes that had been previously (and better) explored in dozens of movies, including A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Stepford Wives, Blink Twice, Don't Worry Darling, Ex Machina, and even classics of robot cinema like Westworld and Blade Runner. A common thread running through this tradition is that people who exert control are terrified of the day when those who are controlled figure out how to control themselves. Here two branches of social critique converge: one related to patriarchal domination and another related to the allegory that robots provide for slavery. Although Companion could easily be mistaken for an entry in the killer robot genre, this killer robot has fully legitimate motivations, and we're supposed to take its side. As opposed to the usual template of helpless humans running away from a malevolent machine, this is a story with a helpless machine running away from malevolent humans.

Companion begins as a romantic drama where a generic guy (Jack Quaid) takes his new girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his cool, rich friends. She's apprehensive, insecure, and at times disturbingly obsequious toward generic guy. As the first scenes progress, we learn that he takes her for granted and has no concern for her obvious self-esteem problems. Her puppy-eyed devotion to him is far from reciprocated, including in bed. Things are not right with this relationship.

And then the movie has the girlfriend kill a man in self-defense and we're treated to the plot reveal that the trailers had already spoiled: she's a robot girlfriend. Generic guy tampered with her programming so she'd be able to kill. The entire trip was a scheme to get rid of a man, take his money, and blame her. From this point on, the movie is a continuous chase: will the robot girlfriend find help before generic guy can turn her over to the police? Betrayals, additional murders, villain monologues, switcheroos, minor plot twists and moderate bleeding ensue.

Much of the movie's impact is lost for viewers who already had the first twist spoiled by the trailers, but even unaware viewers will find little to chew on after that moment. The choice to place the movie's biggest twist so early in its runtime can work if subsequent twists are of comparable magnitude; Companion is a slasher with an escalating body count but diminishing returns. The protagonist, who was programmed with ignorance of her nature as a robot in order to preserve the realism of her role, isn't given enough time to process the truth about herself. The villain, who has been using her all along and still tries to manipulate her by appealing to her implanted command to love him, becomes quite intimidating toward the end, with Quaid delivering a flawless image of malice concealed in politeness; however, this character doesn't have any more layers once you peel away his nice guy mask, and his act can feel one-note. The true impact of this villain is noticeable in hindsight, when one considers the opportunity that robotics gave him to shape in mnute detail any partner he could have wanted. The fact that what he chose to program is a shy, anxious overpleaser reveals the extent of his evil.

One key implication that the plot seems not to notice, and thus doesn't get any development, is the robot girlfriend's self-preservation drive. Usually, in this subgenre of rebellious A.I., one would expect self-preservation to naturally emerge as an instrumental goal for the fulfillment of the core goal (in this case, the robot girlfriend could reason that she can't love her boyfriend if she's not alive). But Companion doesn't take that route. The protagonist's struggle for survival is presented as a given, with no need for a logical argument behind it. The choice is understandable. The alternative, where she would have hesitated for longer between fulfilling her programmed function and protecting herself, could have detracted from the story's feminist leanings.

Companion won't leave any big footprint in the records of slasher cinema, but it serves as a form of vicarious comeuppance for the toxic manipulator in your life. It's painfully hard to go against programmed behavior and stop caring for the demands of a person you loved deeply. But it's worth all the trouble once you revoke an abuser's access to the buttons that control you.


Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Book 2, Royal Assassin

Fitz is angsty, but has reasons; and other characters are awesome

Cover illustration by John Howe

Brandon Sanderson describes the basic three-act structure of a plot as follows. In Act 1, you chase your hero up a tree. In Act 2, you throw rocks at them. In Act 3, you get them down again. Royal Assassin, book 2 of the Farseer Trilogy, the first installment of Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings saga, is 750 pages of Robin Hobb throwing rocks at Fitzchivalry Farseer. Rock after rock after rock. Poor Fitz. And it’s only going to get worse. 

In principle, it didn’t have to be this way. When we last left Fitz at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, things were not great, but there was hope of something better to come. A path forward, a path towards recovery. Despite Evil Uncle Regal’s (literally) poisonous shenanigans, the political marriage between Kettricken, Sacrifice of the Mountain Kingdom, and Good Uncle Verity came off as planned. Now, with the aid of their new ally, the Six Duchies might now have the resources to mount an effective defense against the brutal Red Ship Raiders, who have been laying waste to their towns and cities, and stripping their prisoners of humanity in a process known as Forging, after the first town whose people were so treated. Yes, Fitz got a bellyful of poison and nearly drowned, but he’s sort of recovering, and on the whole, things might still work out.

Ending Book 1 of a trilogy in this way is evidence of how new Robin Hobb was at this endeavour. She was still hedging her bets in that first of 16 books in the Realm of the Elderlings, giving readers an easy exit point, a way to check out with a sense of accomplishment and hope. It’s what makes Assassin’s Apprentice such a satisfying first book in the series. It makes the reader trust the writer: I had a good time, the reader thinks, but I’m not going to be compelled to continue reading if I don’t want to.

This is the last time such a thing will happen in a Robin Hobb series. 

And yet, somehow, despite all the large boulders the size of small boulders that Hobb chucks at Fitz, it never quite feels unfair because he does, kind of – well, not deserve it, quite. But you know how many books that feature whiny, angsty, stupid teenagers making stupid decisions are just exercises in frustration for the reader? This isn’t. No matter how stupid Fitz is (and gosh, is he ever a dummy in places), it’s never really the case that he could have averted his misfortunes by being smarter. ‘Oh, woe is me, the world is out to get me,’ wails the tediously self-absorbed teenage protagonist. Except in Fitz’s case, he’s right. He's the acknowledged bastard son of the former heir to the throne; he's loyal to King Shrewd and current heir-to-the-throne Prince Verity; and he's a mighty thorn in the side of Evil Prince Regal, who wants nothing more than to carry out a coup in peace, raid the kingdom for all its valuables, and retire to his comfortable inland Duchies, leaving the coastal duchies to take their chances with the Red Ship Raiders. Of course Regal's not going to take kindly to coastal Dukes' attempts to replace him with Fitz. Of course Regal's going to want to do a bit of murder on our narrator.

Still, I find this book the hardest to take, because, no matter how justified the angst, I still find angst a hard sell. So instead of whiny angsty Fitz, let’s talk about the other characters who deeply kick ass in this book. Let’s talk about Duke Brawndy, who, when Evil Regal withdraws all support against the Red Ship Raiders because he gives 0 fucks about the plight of blue states coastal duchies, organizes the defense of Bairns himself. It's doomed, and Bearns falls, but Duke Brawndy showed the world what proper leadership looked like.

 And speaking of leadership, let’s talk about got Kettricken. She’s wonderful in ways that are not ‘kick-ass princess on a horse with a sword.' To be sure, one of her best moments is exactly that -- but, crucially,  not because of that. In fact, it is wonderful because she rejects the equation of virtue with martial force. See, the people around the castle discover that a horde of Forged marauders have been lurking in the countryside, attacking and ravaging whoever they find. Aching with powerlessness against the Red Ship Raiders, the castle guard put together a hunting party. The goal is to find these Forged monsters and kill them, letting them stand in as targets for their rage against the raiders who created them and set them against the people of the Six Duchies. 

And Kettricken, on her horse and armed with a sword, tells them, No. Not that they mustn’t kill the Forged – they absolutely must – but that they mustn’t kill them in anger.  Forging cannot be undone –  all attempts at that have failed.  So the quarry of this hunt are their own people, Six Duchies people, who have been dead from the moment they were Forged. This expedition is not a hunting party, but a funeral. Instead of fighting and killing in anger, they must do it in mourning. They are not killing monsters. They are burying their dead (who must first be cut down until they stop moving). 

It's a beautiful moment, and illustrates exactly the kind of leader Kettricken is. How hard must it be to take powerless, furious, grieving warriors, who have worked themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust against a clear target, and tell them not to abandon their killing spree, which would be hard enough –but to continue with the killing spree, and abandon the bloodlust behind it? It’s a fantastic character moment, so much deeper and subtler than just making Ketricken someone who’s good at swinging a sword and being violent. 

Then, we’ve got Patience, and her quietly magnificent companion, Lacy, who definitely has training that goes well beyond stitchery. Patience is the wife of Fitz’s father, Prince Chivalry, but not his mother – because, remember, he is a bastard. She never had any children of her own, but in a deeply mature way, she decides not to resent Fitz, whose very existence is proof that their fertility problems originated on her end. Instead, she pursues a relationship with him, and ends up being one of his strongest allies – but never really a comfortable ally. Their interactions are full of the deepest respect and goodwill, and also uncomfortable and awkward in a way that never really eases, and feels deeply real.

Again, this is an example of Hobb’s skill at characterization. There are relationships other than antagonism, friendship, romance, and found family, that authors can build between their characters, and this is one of them. And it doesn’t even interfere with plot! You don’t need to be best friends or lovers to plot how to spirit the queen away from a castle where her evil brother-in-law is orchestrating a coup and would dearly love to make her and her unborn true Farseer heir conveniently disappear. You don’t have to be sworn comrades to stitch up each other’s wounds following capture and torture – although it does take a slightly odd perspective on the world to insist on doing that after your awkward-but-respected acquaintance is already lying dead on a gaol floor, awaiting burial. Still, Patience does have a neurodivergent perspective – ADHD coded, jumping from obsession to obsession and prone to hyperfixation in a way that yields oddly useful tidbits of information. And since it turns out  that Fitz is really, really hard to kill completely, the dead-body stitchery is also useful. It’s nice, when being dug up from a fresh grave, to have first aid already completed.

And, finally, we’ve got Nighteyes. Despite Fitz’s repeated ill-fated attempts to bond with puppies in the previous book, he goes and does it again here, this time with a wolf. Nighteyes is great – not just because he’s a talking wolf, but because here, finally, we have a relationship between Fitz and someone else that is true, open, trusting, and not hampered by any of the missed opportunities that made the previous book such a lonely read. 

It’s Fitz’s bond with Nighteyes that makes it possible for him to nope out of his body after Regal finally finds a reason to catch him, torture him, and beat him to death. (To be fair, part of this is on Fitz. He did go on a very ill-advised murderous rampage through the castle and kinda sorta agree to let Duke Brawndy put him in Regal's place while Brawndy planned a coup of his own, so it’s not like Regal had to work all that hard to come up with an excuse to get rid of him.) Only by placing his consciousness into Nighteyes’s mind can he take a break from the world of humans, which has treated him so badly, and denied him any bonds that might encourage him to remain. (Again, to be fair, another part of this is again on Fitz. His beloved Molly left him in no doubt as to what he wanted, and he took ages to talk to Shrewd about marrying her, and then ages to tell her that Shrewd said no. She ends up much, much better off without him than she ever could be tied down to him.) 

 And it’s Fitz’s bond with Nighteyes that allows us to learn more about the Wit, this wild, animal-based magic that is a counterpart to the royally-approved Skill. From Fitz’s perspective, the Wit gives him a sense of presence of living things: animals, yes, but also people. It’s his Wit that allows him to recognize how inhuman the Forged are: they give off no more sense of presence than a rock. But from Nighteyes’ perspective, the Wit gives him insight into humans. Burrich, who seems so cold and disapproving, who finds the Wit obscene while indulging, against his own values, in a bond with his own dog, is still Heart of the Pack to Nighteyes. Kettricken is not really Witted, but she has a sense for life that Nighteyes senses in her, and it's part of what makes her such a conscientious devoted leader. Nighteyes recognizes people in other terms from human terms, and in so doing offers another layer of characterization.

Because – have I said it before? Hobb is a master of characterization. Even when she’s characterizing an angsty teenager. And, as we’ll see next month, she’s also a master of plot.  

--

References:

Hobb, Robin. Royal Asssassin. [Harper Collins, 1996].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Anime Review: Hell’s Paradise

Fascinating characters and deep philosophical explorations balance the intense violence of this unusual tale 


After hearing much acclaim for this gruesome anime, I finally decided to try out Hell’s Paradise although I’m not normally a fan of very gory or intensely nihilistic fiction. However, Hell’s Paradise lives up to the hype and delivers fascinating characters, meaningful emotions, and intriguing backstories in its very violent first season. 

Hell’s Paradise is set in a fictional historical time period and is primarily the story of Gabimaru, an emotionless assassin taken from his murdered parents as an infant and trained from childhood by a cruel ninja leader to be a high level killer with no emotional attachments. Gabimaru’s efficient and ruthless killing, along with his lack of emotion lead to his nickname, “Gabimaru the Hollow.” As a reward for his overwhelming successes at killing, Gabimaru is given his leader’s daughter as a wife. Gabimaru initially treats her with emotionless indifference, however his wife is unexpectedly emotionally strong, intellectually thoughtful, and intentionally kind in a way that slowly brings Gabimaru back to his humanity. Of course, this kind of happiness can’t last. Gabimaru is sentenced to death for trying to leave the assassin group so he can stop killing and live quietly in his marriage. He is jailed and separated from his wife (whose fate is unclear throughout the story). However, despite his death sentence, he remains alive because repeated violent and horrific executions fail to kill or even injure him and he becomes bored to the point of despondence. This leads some to believe he is a demon. After multiple attempts at killing him fail, Gabimaru and several other condemned prisoners are given a chance for a pardon, but the cost is high. They must journey, each with an assigned asaemon (guard/executioner), to a fabled paradise island and bring back a substance known as the Elixir of Life. The prisoner who successfully brings back the elixir will get a pardon but everyone else will be executed. Gabimaru is suddenly motivated to live, and accepts the offer in the hopes of earning a pardon so he can be reunited with his wife. 

All of these detail are just the premise. The main plot of Hell’s Paradise is composed of the experiences of the prisoners and their guards as they navigate the unimaginable terrors of the island along with their own internal demons. Gabimaru is assigned a young woman named Sagiri as his guard. She is lethal, quiet, and introspective, but also periodically insecure—not because of her skills but because of the constant sexism and gaslighting she faces. Her internal journey to balance, rather than suppress, her emotions becomes entangled with Gabimaru’s unsteady journey to and from emotional deadness. Over time, the two build a strange connection. The initial exploration of the island is portrayed through the experiences of Gabimaru and Sagiri, but the story soon shifts to the intriguing backstories of the other prisoners, some wrongfully condemned, and the asaemon guards, many with complex motivations or unexpected viewpoints. These include loud and powerful Chobei and gentle but lethal Toma, the criminal and guard pair who are secretly brothers. The anime also follows the poignant friendship between the reformed criminal guard Tenza and innocent child prisoner Nurugai. 

The overall vibe of the story feels like a combination of shows like Lost, Jujustsu Kaisen, and Squid Game. It has the mysterious island setting of Lost along with the intriguing character backstories that lured Lost viewers in the first two seasons. It has the intensely artistic animation style of Jujustsu Kaisen (MAPPA is the same animation house that does both series) and it has the fantastical, supernatural creature element, in which unexpected, strange, or grotesque creatures create an ongoing atmosphere of uncertainty for characters who are constantly surprised by new antagonists with randomly unknown levels of strength. And, if that isn’t stressful enough, there is the Squid Game-style lethal competitiveness where the prisoners are pitted against each other in a race for both the elixir and survival. But, what makes all of this stress worth it are the primary characters. Each one is intriguing, tragic, likeable, and complicated, making the show more than just a bloodbath or an adrenaline rush of adventure. Each individual’s race for survival is an extension of the character’s struggles that began long before they arrived on the mysterious island. 

Hell’s Paradise is also a dizzying philosophical exploration of conflicting concepts. The fabled paradise of the island is actually a hellscape of terrors hidden in serenely beautiful plants and flowers. The titans of the island, the Tensen, continuously shift genders, sometimes mid-conversation or mid-conflict. The trees are human beings. The only child on the island is hundreds of years old. Throughout the story, characters ponder a range of conflicting philosophies in an ongoing struggle to understand their unbelievable experiences. In fact, each episode has a title and theme which reflects the ongoing inherent or interwoven dichotomy (“Heart and Reason,” “Gods and People,” “Dreams and Reality”). 

Be warned that Hell’s Paradise is not a teen shonen anime. The show has adult content in terms of both violence and sexuality. Those less familiar with the discussed philosophical theories, may want to research some of the referenced concepts, although it is not essential to do so. Gabimaru and Sagiri start as the primary protagonists but gradually merge into the ever-changing ensemble, and, as the story progresses, it turns out many of the core elements of the journey may not be what they seem. The effect is, at times, intense, heartbreaking, and profound. However, the next season of Hell’s Paradise is still a year away. So, there is still plenty of time to become immersed in this violent but uniquely addictive adventure.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

  • Fascinating characters with intriguing backstories
  • Extremely bloody
  • Thoughtful philosophical explorations amid fast-paced fight scenes.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Film Review: Dog Man

Let's pretend the unsanctioned decapitation didn't matter, and let's have a deep conversation about parenthood and growth

First, a confession: it's been a long time since I've tried a story targeted specifically at very small children. I'd forgotten the tons of suspension of disbelief required to simply sit and enjoy the mayhem. But apparently, from what I can gather, there's been some great storytelling going on in that area, with the likes of Peppa Pig and Bluey straddling the line between wholesome and topical, and even commentators finding fuel for discussion in the politics of Paw Patrol. So I guess I should start paying more attention to that segment of SFF.

Another confession: what drew me to the new DreamWorks animated film Dog Man wasn't this realization of a gap in my screen watching record, but simple morbid curiosity for how a production for kids was going to handle its spectacularly gruesome premise: the titular hero is a Frankenstein-ish monstrosity built by sewing the head of an almost-dead dog onto the body of a (now most definitely) dead man. Dr. Vladimir Demikhov would be proud. Because this is a fun adventure in bright colors, the movie cheerfully brushes away the obvious questions about animal cruelty or the fact that a man has been decapitated to create this abomination. Look, a dog walking on two legs!

Following the long and rather strange tradition of severely injured characters technomagically transformed into obligate crimefighters (think of The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, Inspector Gadget, M.A.N.T.I.S., Max Steel, or Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex games), Dog Man promptly resumes the frenzied chase for an evil cat called Petey, whose crime is... getting revenge on Dog Man, I guess? We aren't told what was the original misdeed that kickstarted this cycle of dramatic arrests and creative prison escapes, but the sequence is undeniably funny.

(Also, let the record show that I protest this slander against cats.)

This first part of the movie goes like a breeze and helps the viewer get used to the lightning pace of the story. Not only are we treated to a beautiful picture-book art style, with clouds that look like crayon scribbles and canine howls that visually reach from one scene to the next; we're asked to switch off our brains and delight in the rapid succession of cuteness and absurdity and pathos and newfound joy.

Petey the cat only changes tactics when he runs out of ideas for increasingly wackier doomsday machines (I am impressed by his seemingly infinite R&D budget), and when he tries to create a duplicate of himself, he ends up with a child duplicate of himself. And that's when the actual theme of the movie is presented to us. This is more than a slapstick series of loud, splashy cartoonish antics. If it were only that, it already does it pretty well. But what Dog Man is actually about is the question of inborn tendencies vs. conscious choice.

Little Petey is sweet, friendly, optimistic, and without one drop of cynicism. He can see the best side of the worst people. Adult Petey, the typical jaded edgelord, wants to teach him that life is the opposite of that. But after a messy series of mishaps, Little Petey gets the chance to spend some days living with Dog Man. And Dog Man is going through the same identity crisis: does he want to be a policeman with serious obligations, as his human part, or a fun-seeking dog, as his other part? His canine instincts have already interfered with his duties too many times by now, but he doesn't know what other job to do.

I find it reassuring that Dog Man acknowledges the difficulty of this question. It even introduces a quick subplot about adult Petey's father that helps the young audience get a sense of how learned mistakes can be perpetuated across generations. Evil, as the plot demonstrates, is more a matter of actions than one of immutable nature. So is love. That's a precious message to present to the children who will be too amused by the endless gags to notice upon first watching. But a few years from now, when they want to revisit the immensely entertaining experience that was Dog Man, they'll find the strong heart that was beating at the center of it.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Friday, January 31, 2025

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.


Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.