Monday, February 17, 2025

Nanoreviews: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End; Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty; Stray

The G catches you up on some quality titles 


Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Remaster (PS5, PC) 

I went straight into this remastered PS4 classic after finishing the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I was not disappointed. A Thief's End is considered by many to be the best entry in the series, and a fitting end to the story of Nathan Drake, treasure hunter. The remaster is superbly done, with crisp high-res graphics and subtly optimized gameplay. This one features a lot more action and a lot less stealth than Indiana Jones, and on balance I prefer stealth - but the 3rd person shooting and platforming are all well done. The story is surprisingly compelling, focusing as much on interpersonal relationships as the quest for Henry Avery's treasure. I have two complaints, though. First, whereas Indiana Jones captures the sense that you are a human being with physical limitations (which heightens tension in key moments), the action here is more like what you find in a superhero film drunk on CGI and VFX. I found that annoying and distracting. Second, there's no map! Sure the game is pretty linear, but there are more open stages - making the decision to forego a map super annoying. Rating: 8/10.


Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (Series X, PS5, PC)

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games of the past decade - I've played through it twice and will probably do so one more time. It's that good. Phantom Liberty is a meaty addition to the story, designed to be played about 2/3 of the way through the main story. It opens up a new section of the map, Dogtown, which is the autonomous fiefdom of a warlord and his private army. The story begins with a downed plane, carrying the President of the USA. You are contacted by a member of her inner circle to go into Dogtown to save her. But nothing - as you can imagine - is what it seems. As you progress through the storyline and its many double-crosses, Phantom Liberty poses interesting questions on the nature of consciousness in a transhuman, AI-powered social landscape. As far as expansion packs go, this one is about as good as they come - and definitely a worthwhile purchase for fans of the game. Unfortunately, it's not quite as compelling as the main questline. Rating: 8/10. 


Stray (Series X, PS5, PC)

In this one, you - a cat - become lost in an underground world populated by robots. Your journey to the surface uncovers a dark secret - as well as a message of hope. Sound enticing? That barely does the game justice. Stray is beautifully rendered, melancholic and completely absorbing. In fact, it's one of the most remarkable games I've ever played. My only complaint is that it isn't long enough. Rating: 10/10. 


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

Friday, February 14, 2025

Book Review: The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

A secondary science fictional world whose protagonist, and her world, turns on matters of justice and law

Nila is an ambitious student of law in the city of Peruma. And it is an exciting time to be a student on a track to be a full-fledged Guardian, which you might usefully think of as a neutral lawyer and advocate. Nila’s hope, given her high standing in the community of students, is to be selected for the case of the century, to be one of the twelve students chosen to argue one of the two sides of a question that could decide the future of the city. Nila is not selected for that case, but is instead asked to argue to overturn the sentence of a murder... a murder which changed the course of history a century ago.

This is the story of Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence.

The novel takes place in a rather unique setting. It is a completely mundane alternate world that nonetheless appears to be the only world. It’s not a colonized planet. It’s not the far past or far future of Earth. And yet it is a world that has no magic or even the hint or trappings of a fantasy setting, either. It’s just an alternate cradle of humanity, from all the textual evidence.

That said, the history of this world reflects, refracts and rhymes with our own. It takes place on a subcontinent with a number of city states besides Peruma, where all the action takes place. Peruma, once upon a time, was an imperial power and dominated the entire subcontinent before a world with technology slightly ahead of ours. A revolution in the imperial capital, freedom for the other cities, and war left them with a subcontinent of competing and jockeying city states, high in technology. Given the names of the other cities (Chemur, Monara, Lubini, Jharna and Sampi), and other worldbuilding we get, this all gives the subcontinent that Peruma sits on a very Indian flavor. However, this appears to have been a homegrown empire rather than one imposed from without—much more like the Chola empire, rather than the Mughals or the British.

The empire, however, is four centuries in the past (this is the kind of novel that has a timeline up front). After the fall of the empire, the city of Peruma turned into a mercantile republic (republic in theory, anyway) wracked by revolts from the lower classes. Finally, a hundred years ago, Purul, the head of the republic, the Director, had a lethal confrontation with a worker, Jagat R., leading to a revolution within the city and its division into two halves. Jagat R. was found guilty, but in a world where the death penalty had been abandoned, he was instead put into cryosleep.

A hundred years later, it is Jagat R.’s sentence of murder that our protagonist, Nila, is asked to reopen and overturn, rather than what she really wanted: joining the “case of the century”, which is an examination of the treaty signed at the end of that same revolution.

And thus our plot is up and running.

So, while the ostensible plot is Nila trying to work on what is seemingly an open and shut murder case from a century ago, and one that literally is seen to have changed history, the novel is really about the sociological and legal questions that the author poses in the narrative. The Sentence itself, the cryosleep that in a real sense is almost always just a slow-motion death penalty (after about 100 years, someone put into cryosleep cannot be revived) is just one of the base questions. Questions of justice, due process, and equity in sentencing and representation (the Guardians are a fascinating legal idea) are part of the pie.

Even bigger are the sociological and political questions that the novel raises. I didn’t mention that when half of the city broke away from the other after the assassination, that lower city’s revolution took its form of government in a radical direction that went all the way to an anarchic commune. A century later, it is mostly following the precepts of its own revolution, but the upper city still holds a strong hand, and would definitely want to reintegrate it back into its political control. What is more, the commune’s future is already at stake. Someone upsetting the applecart of the fact of a lower city martyr, Jagat R., assassinating the Director could be at best a destabilizing force on its very existence.

And did I mention that Nila’s mother is an important member of the commune?

So The Sentence is The Paper Chase by way of the Paris Commune, set in a secondary science fiction world loosely based on the Indian subcontinent, with aircars, cryosleep, and a few other twenty-minutes-into-the-future-level technologies. It’s a legal thriller, certainly, but even more it is a sociological and societal thriller that poses some not-easily-answered questions about justice, society, government, and the role of personal responsibility to all three.

It makes the book hard to judge with its peers in the SFF community because it takes several uncommon subgenres (a legal thriller, a sociological piece, and a de novo secondary world unconnected even by hint to our own) and alloys them all together. There is definitely DNA of LeGuin here, but the deep study and appreciation and concern over the ideas and use of anarchism are far rarer in science fiction outside of LeGuin, and perhaps Doctorow and to an extent MacLeod, and given the author’s setup here, The Sentence is much more in dialogue with things like The Dispossessed than anything else in terms of the anarchism (which does really feel like the beating heart of the book) but combined with the legal aspects and the sociology of the entire world), and it really is boldly striding into uncharted territory.

How it gets into that territory is, of course, the proof in the pudding. The book is written cleanly, strongly and crisply, but with a lot of overt worldbuilding, necessary because of the nature of the setting (I mentioned the timeline before as just one example). The writing is thus rich with details of all kinds. One particular highlight is Unclean Hands, which is a fictional play that turns into a touchstone for Nila and other characters. It might be inspired by the real Dirty Hands by Sartre, but the two are clearly different.

Another interesting highlight is the historical attitude and viewpoint of this society and it frames itself within it. The society has a theory of history that works on points of potential divergence, where the course of history was shaped, called Inflection Points. The entire society agrees that this is the standard model of how history is currently interpreted, looked at, discussed and debated. The assassination of the Director a century ago is seen as the Fourth Inflection Point in the post-imperial era, and everyone seems convinced that the 100th anniversary of that assassination and the debate between the halves of the city is destined to naturally be the Fifth Inflection Point. And that is even before it is revealed that Nila is going to try and reopen the case of the murder of the Director by Jagat R.

Although the politics are extremely different, the only other recent work that really compares to The Sentence is The Broken Trust (Mazes of Power) series by Juliette Wade. That too takes place in a society that is not our own, and explores some thorny questions about sociology and anthropology as well.

While there is intrigue, and some action sequences intended to dissuade Nila from handling the case get more and more overt and dangerous, the real heart of the book is, in fact, Nila’s heart. She is faced with some very difficult decisions, morally, ethically and personally in the course of her legal investigation, with implications for the city, for society, and most importantly, the author points out, her own soul. It makes The Sentence fascinating reading, and as of the writing of this review, frustratingly only published in India. This seems to be a wasted opportunity by UK and US publishers. The Sentence is the type of science fiction that demands a much wider audience.

Highlights:

  • A world not our own, with thorny and interesting sociological questions
  • Strong legal framework and centrality to society and main character
  • A book that will remain with you long after you read it

Reference: Bhatia, Gautam. The Sentence [Westland IF, 2025].

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

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Nerds of a Feather Contributor 2025 Awards Eligibility

Awards season is well underway! Hopefully you're finding our Recommended Reading parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 useful in your potential nominations.

While we remind you that Nerds of a Feather itself is recused in the Best Fanzine category, we would be remiss if we did not highlight that we are a flock of many participants, each of whom is eligible for their work with us and, because they're a multi-talented lot, elsewhere.

As such, for your consideration, you can find here the list of all of our contributors who provided work in the 2024 period, and for some of them, specific selections they would like to highlight. While this is predominantly in the Best Fan Writer category, there are some additional selections, so do keep an eye out for those.

Joe Sherry (senior editor)

Best Fan Writer:

Arturo Serrano (editor)

Best Fan Writer:

Best Related Work:

Personal blog Parallelepiped Ream

Paul Weimer (editor)

Best Related Work: The 2024 Glasgow Worldcon Photography, by Olav Rokne, Amanda Wakaruk, Paul Weimer, Simon Bubb, Dan Ofer

Best Fancast: The Skiffy and Fanty Show by Shaun Duke, Trish Matson, Daniel Haeusser, David Annandale, Paul Weimer

Roseanna Pendlebury (editor)

Best Fan Writer:

Best Related Work:

Project here at Nerds in which we looked at small press novellas published in 2023:

Ann Michelle Harris

Best Fan Writer: 

Haley Zapal

Best Fan Writer:

Phoebe Wagner

Best Fan Writer:

Please also consider the work of our other members for their work with us throughout 2024:

The G (founder)

Vance K (founder)

Adri Joy (senior editor)

Alex Wallace

Chris Garcia

Clara Cohen

Joe DelFranco

Thank you, and happy nominating!

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

TV Review: Squid Game 2

Thematic changes, familiar characters, and lots of social commentary lead to a more predictable season two of the iconic show

Netflix’s Squid Game is an immensely popular exploration of the class disparities that lead to both desperation and exploitation. The show is told through the lens of despairing, financially desperate people who were willing to risk their lives in a series of lethal games to get money while loathsome billionaires toy with their lives and enjoy their suffering. Season 1 was violent, heartbreaking, and disturbing, with a poignant but satisfying ending. Season 2 provides the same basic setup, but with fewer surprises and with a significant thematic shift in the overall concept of desperation for money. The result is an equally addictive but much more cynical storytelling experience.

[Mild spoilers for Season 1] In Season 1 we met Gi-hun, a down-on-his-luck single dad with massive loan shark debts. His daughter lives with his ex, and his desperation to provide for her, coupled with his mounting debts, push him to find any way to earn money. He is approached by a well-dressed young man in the train station who offers him a secret invitation to play simple games with the lure that he could win billions of dollars. Gi-hun and the other players who are lured to the game are drugged and transported to a hidden island to play creepy variations of children’s games. The four hundred or so players are surprised, however, when they discover that the smallest loss or misstep in the game results in being shot in the head. And only one player can leave alive. All this is set against a backdrop of colorful playhouse sets and killers in bright pink jumpsuits with video game controller icons over their faces. The symbolism is endless.

In Season 2, a now mega-rich but deeply traumatized Gi-hun engages in a desperate attempt to stop the masked man responsible for the game. He uses his immense wealth to hire a team (including his former abusive loan shark) to help in his quest. Those he hires don’t really believe his strange story of a secret island of lethal games, but they are willing to help in exchange for money. His goal is to locate the original man in the subway who first lured him, as well as to find the hidden island and the masked leader behind the cruel and deadly game. Through various twists, he ends up back in the deadly game for season 2. Also loosely allied with him is the tenacious young police officer from Season 1, Jun-ho, who had been searching for his missing brother. Like Gi-hun, Jun-ho is obsessed with finding the mysterious island, and also, like Gi-hun, nobody believes him.

The thematic shift in the story is subtle but meaningful. In Season 1, the characters who were trapped in the game were primarily there out of genuine and faultless desperation. Many had sympathetic backstories that made their plight even more tragic. Eventually we saw the wealthy, hedonistic billionaires (grotesquely naked and masked) enjoying the suffering of the group of desperate and impoverished people. Adding to the degradation, the individual victims were initially lured by playing a game where they got repeatedly and publicly slapped in the face if they lost. The overall theme was one of humiliation and desperation, as well as class disparities and oppression. In contrast, in Season 2, the vast majority of the characters have chosen to join the game due to their own financial mistakes and misdeeds or by being collateral damage from various forms of gambling or irresponsible financial choices. Season 2 is less about railing against the oppressive rich, and is more focused on blaming people for their irresponsible decisions. This changes the tone of the story, moving it from desperate and tragic to intentionally predatory and cruel. In a fascinating early scene, the man in the suit offers hungry homeless people the choice of bread or a lottery ticket. Most choose the ticket (which is always a losing one). But when they ask for the unused bread, he refuses to share it with them, choosing instead to stomp the food to filth rather than let the hungry person have it. There is a decided undercurrent of punishment for irresponsible financial choices. Also, in Season 2 we have the perspective of two new types of people: we gain emotional insight into one of the shooters who execute the players in each round, and we meet the devious current gamemaster, who is hiding in the game as a player.

Despite his experiences in the previous game, Gi-hun remains confusingly naïve and gullible in Season 2. He has the benefit of knowing the lethality of the games and knowing the lethality of the violent and selfish group dynamics. He also has previous insight into an undercover player who was the actual mastermind. However, he falls for the same deception again. From his plan to find the masked leader to his misguided plan to capture him, he is constantly being outsmarted. Initially, he appears to be clever and calculating, but we soon see him transformed into a desperate and emotional victim. The contrast is fascinating and emphasizes the theme of the long term effects of trauma and oppression.

In addition to Gi-hun and the mostly absent Jun-ho, Season 2 gives us several likeable new characters, along with several tropey, stock, or comic relief characters, and a new gamemaster. Season 2 (currently) ends on a cliffhanger and promises a wrap-up shortly. But the thematic shifts from the first season make it harder to predict how things will end. Hopefully we will have our answers soon.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

· Thoughtful thematic and tonal shifts
· Frustrating characters and fewer surprises
· Addictive adventure despite increased tropes

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

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Film Review: Love Me

An interesting look at the remnants of humanity as filtered through the lonely AIs we leave behind

Love Me is a quirky little film set long after the demise of humanity, in which two human-made pieces of technology fall in love. Well, kind of. Artificial intelligence, as far I can tell, can't really produce human emotions, so instead they approximate, imitate, and try to make sense of connection, disappointment, and feelings of warmth as memorialized by the extinct humans that made them.

A lonely smart buoy, known as Me, and a distant satellite, referred to as Iam, somehow connect as the last two pieces of human-made tech to function. The satellite revolves around Earth's graveyard of a planet, launched into space purposefully with petabytes of human data, information, videos, and other relics as a sort of eternal gravemarker of the civilization that once populated the planet—a stationary Voyager 1, as it were.

This concept alone is a fantastic start, but the movie gets a little complicated, and perhaps bites off more than it can chew, conceptually. The two AIs begin to communicate, and Me (the buoy) pretends to be a life form.

They interact via social media and memes, and even "move in" together in a digital space as video-game-esque avatars. The issue, of course, is that despite watching influencer videos of date nights and relationships, neither being really knows what it is to be human. And social media, unfortunately, is perhaps one of the worst ways to learn about authenticity and experience.

Me and Iam eventually have a falling out, and after a title card reveals that a billion years passes, they eventually reconnect—and Iam has shifted from cartoonish avatar to real-life physicality. The only two characters in Love Me are played in all forms by Kristin Stewart and Steven Yuen, and they both do an extraordinary job in portraying surprisingly human artificial intelligences. If you're a fan of either, you'll be very entertained watching them in such a strange movie.

My favorite part of the film is perhaps an unintended —or if not unintended, not the primary focus— idea that the real essence of humanity isn't in the grand, sweeping events and monumental life decisions. It's in the little things we do every single day, ad nauseam. It's similar to David Foster Wallace's "This is water" speech, namely that "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." When Iam spends a billion years alone, he fills his time with little things that make up a big life, as well as small sensory pleasures that make life worth living. Eating ice cream, building IKEA furniture, doing chores, dancing.

When the two reconcile, as Earth's sun turns supernova, they launch out into the solar system, happy to be together experiencing life in all of its forms, which is the ultimate epitaph to humanity.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.


POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Nanoreviews: Star Wars Outlaws, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

A roundup of video games The G has been playing lately.

Star Wars Outlaws (Series X/S, PS5, PC)

Haley reviewed this one back in September—and her take mostly holds for me too. So instead of reinventing the wheel, I'll just add a bit of color from my personal experience with the game. First the good. Outlaws is a charming game that does a fantastic job immersing you in one of the most interesting geographies and time periods established in Star Wars canon: the Outer Rim under partial Imperial occupation. Gameplay is modeled after the earlier Assassin's Creed games, deploying the same mix of stealth, action and platforming. Once you get into the flow of things, it's pretty great. Now the bad: it takes 5-10 hours to get into the flow of things, and before that matters, Outlaws is a frustrating mess. Most people won't stick it out, unfortunately—and that's on Ubisoft. The main culprit is the broken save system, which allows you to quick save unless you are on a mission, where you are captive to a badly-implemented checkpoint system that only allows one autosave at a time—coupled with the fact that, if you load up a previous save, all the NPCs you blasted or knocked out respawn. A lot of early missions force you to replay long sequences that can fall apart with one tiny timing mistake. It's the bad kind of challenging, to be honest. But, again, once you're past that, this largely (but not fully) smooths over and the game ends up being a lot of fine. Recommended for stealth enthusiasts, Star Wars stans and the very patient only.

Score: 7/10 (same as Haley).


Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Series X/S, PC)

Another licensed property, this time an Xbox exclusive published by Bethesda Software—and developed by MachineGames, a Swedish studio founded by refugees from Starbreeze Studios. That DNA is very much in evidence here, as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle immediately reminded me of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay—one of the best licensed properties I've ever played. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is up there as well. It's a first-person action game that will bring the Uncharted series to mind for most folks, and it's true—there is a lot in common in terms of both gameplay and thematic content between Great Circle and Uncharted 4 in particular. But, while both games are very good, they don't really feel the same. The shift to first-person gives it a level of immersion that you don't quite get from the third-person perspective, so you really feel like you are Indiana Jones. And the vibes are just different, like comparing James Bond to Jason Bourne. The game is beautiful, expertly paced and —despite not having a quick-save function— presents a decent challenge that never gets tedious or frustrating (I'm looking at you, Outlaws). It really does feel like you're in an Indiana Jones film. One small quibble: the map is terrible—though at least there is a map (now I'm looking at you, Uncharted 4).

Score: 9/10.


Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5)

I've been a fan of this series since the original came out for PS2. Ratchet & Clank was one of Sony's most popular exclusive properties during the PS2 and PS3 eras, releasing a whopping 12 titles from 2002 to 2013. But then the series took the PS4 era off, as the devs focused on other projects (including the well-regarded Spider-Man games). Rift Apart is a triumphant return to the market, combining series mainstays like crazy weapons and tight platforming action with some new gameplay dynamics, like the ability to traverse interdimensional rifts. The writing is quite good, with an engaging story and strong characters—including Rivet, a Lombax-like Ratchet fighting an even worse version of Dr. Nefarious in her dimension. Now, the not so good... while the game is generally a lot of fun, the boss battles get very repetitive. They aren't especially hard, just long and, well, they're all pretty much the same.

Score: 8/10.


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

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.