Monday, March 18, 2024

Nebula Award Finalists

The finalists for the Nebula Awards have been announced for work published in 2023. The Nebula Awards are presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and will be presented on June 8, 2024.

Starting with this year’s Nebula Awards, Nerds of a Feather is planning to more widely cover the awards scene within the science fiction and fantasy genre than we have in the past. There will still be Hugo Awards coverage, of course. That isn’t going away. There will just be more.

My view of awards is that each award is designed to recognize and reward excellence in a particular field and through the lens of a particular awards body. The Hugo Awards are nominated by and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society at a particular time and reflect the tastes, preferences, and prejudices of those members. The Nebula Awards are nominated by and voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. It is more of a professional organization in terms of who is eligible to join.

The Nebula Awards have history, longevity, and from my perspective - prestige within the genre. This is a significant award.

Congratulations to all of the finalists.

Nebula Award for Novel

  • The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)

  • The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)

  • Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  • The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)

  • Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW, Gollancz)

  • Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)


Nebula Award for Novella

  • The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom)

  • “Linghun”, Ai Jiang (Linghun)

  • Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)

  • Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee (Tordotcom)

  • The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom)

  • Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

Nebula Award for Novelette

  • “A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair”, Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23)

  • I Am AI, Ai Jiang (Shortwave)

  • “The Year Without Sunshine”, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23)

  • “Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon”, Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23)

  • “Saturday’s Song”, Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23)

  • “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9-10/23)

Nebula Award for Short Story

  • “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont”, P.A. Cornell (Fantasy 10/23)

  • “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200”, R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)

  • “Window Boy”, Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23)

  • “The Sound of Children Screaming”, Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23)

  • “Better Living Through Algorithms”, Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 5/23)

  • “Bad Doors”, John Wiswell (Uncanny 1-2/23)

Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

  • To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)

  • The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson (Android)

  • Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood)

  • The Ghost Job, Greg van Eekhout (Harper)

Nebula Award for Game Writing

  • The Bread Must Rise, Stewart C Baker, James Beamon (Choice of Games)

  • Alan Wake II, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala 

    (Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games Publishing)

  • Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, 

    Marie Brennan(Android)

  • Dredge, Joel Mason (Black Salt Games, Team 17)

  • Chants of Sennaar, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel (Rundisc, Focus Entertainment)

  • Baldur’s Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, 

    Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corcoran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, 

    Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, RuairĂ­ Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, 

    Swen Vincke (Larian Studios)

Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

  • Nimona, Robert L. Baird, Lloyd Taylor, Pamela Ribon, Marc Haimes, Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, 

    Keith Bunin, Nate Stevenson (Annapurna Animation, Annapurna Pictures)

  • The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin (HBOMax)

  • Barbie, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach (Warner Bros., Heyday Films, 

    LuckyChap Entertainment)

  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, 

    Michael Gilio, Chris McKay (Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Allspark Pictures)

  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham 

    (Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Avi Arad Productions)

  • The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, Toho Company)



The SFWA noted that Martha Wells declined a nomination for her novel System Collapse. 


Review: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, by Seanan McGuire

Let’s ignore the absolutely perfect cover art just for a moment. Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is NOT the dinosaur book that it appears to be. There are dinosaurs and they are wonderful, but following on 2023’s excellent Lost in the Moment and Found, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known continues the story of Antsy, a girl who stepped through a portal to another world and found herself in a borderline magical shop that was a bit of a hub world which has its own cost (as entering any of those doorways do).


Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is the ninth novella in the Wayward Children series and brings Antsy, a girl who looks a bit older than she actually is, to Eleanor West’s and there is a sign that states “No Solicitations. No Visitors. No Quests.” Readers, there are quests. This book is a quest. It is also an escape, perhaps not for the reader but Antsy has a particular gift where she can find just about anything that has been lost and some of the kids at Eleanor West’s want to take advantage of that.

In an attempt to escape, Antsy and others have to commit quest and yes, there are dinosaurs but there are other doorways and Mislaid in Parts Half-Known does what Seanan McGuire so often does with these novellas (and with most of her books, if I’m being honest), which is to weave together character stories in small ways so that it is building and laying seeds for future stories. Specifically, this is McGuire inching closer to really telling Kade’s story - which is one McGuire has publicly stated she’s been hesitant to do until she’s built up enough trust because Kade is trans and that’s a more challenging story for a cis-writer to tell with real grace and honesty and that readers (and trans readers specifically) will trust to get right.

That’s the thing about Seanan McGuire’s writing in general and Mislaid in Parts Half-Known in specific - the characters speak with blunt and plain honesty in ways that I don’t think we encounter very often in real life. McGuire’s characters are often clever in how they understand themselves (as they come to understand themselves) and how they explain themselves to others. It can very easily be too on the nose, and perhaps it is, but it also works perfectly for me as a reader and I *think* that this is stylistically something that will hit very hard for the right readers who are looking to find how they are feeling put down in a story about people who don’t fit in and can’t quite find their right places in this (or any) world. It’s what I loved so much about Every Heart a Doorway and the best of the Wayward Children novellas capture that feeling of yearning towards a childhood that could have been smoother and I had it so much easier than so many.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known gets close at times and at its best is so tightly focused on the kids that it is one of my favorite books of the Wayward Children series. But even the ones that don’t reach those heights are still wonderful. It’s just that the bar is so impossibly high and Mislaid in Parts Half-Known gets there for me. It’s personal. It’s always personal.


Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Friday, March 15, 2024

6 Books with John Wiswell


John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for "Open House on Haunted Hill," and the Locus Award for Best Novelette for "That Story Isn't The Story." His fiction has been translated into ten languages, and has appeared in venues such as Tordotcom, the LeVar Burton Reads podcast, and Uncanny Magazine. His debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, is forthcoming from DAW Books in the U.S. and Jo Fletcher Books in the U.K. on April 2nd. You can find more from him through his Linktree:  https://linktr.ee/johnwiswell

Today he tells us about his Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

One of the books readers recommended to me most across 2023 was Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller. It starts out as basically The Witcher but for gods. Gods behave badly, so human hunters --the godkillers-- go around hunting them and liberating people from tyranny. Kissen lost her family to a fire god in her youth, so she’s a particularly angry godkiller. Now, Fantasy heroes fighting gods is nothing new, but what hooked me was her getting stuck on a buddy journey with Skedi, the God of White Lies. It seems mysterious assassins are after both Skedi and Kissen, so now the hunter is the hunted, and she’s got to rely on this weak god to survive. Don’t you love unexpected bonds? It’s bloody and fun, and just keeps getting more interesting as it goes.


2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I came up through writing short stories, and Kelly Link is one of the gold standards in the field for me. Few short story writers have ever wielded her power, and no one entwines the mundane and the unreal like her. How many collections of hers have I chewed through? Stuff like “The Monster” and “Magic For Beginners” are always close to my mind. After so long I thought she’d only ever write shorts. But here we have it: a Kelly Link novel! What story of such length finally captivated her enough to put it onto the page? What sustained her to make such a particularly long book, too? Here’s a confession: I don’t know what it’s about. I’m literally refusing to learn anything about The Book of Love until my copy is in my hands. I want it fresh in my wriggling mind.


3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Can I cheat and say The Iliad? Because I’ve read it several times. Each time I usually pick a new translator. Last year the great Emily Wilson released her translation, which I’m eager to gobble up. Wilson made waves with her gorgeous translation of The Odyssey, blending poetry and contemporary language, and gave the epic an identity it had never had before. She did for The Odyssey what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf. In fact, just her Foreword on the minutia of her choices, and of the political history of other translators’ previous choices, was one of my favorite things I read in the last decade. That’s an energy I’ve got to see applied to The Iliad, which is basically The Infinity War of Greek heroes. It’s the biggest crossover, with the biggest brawls and moves and tragedies. The Iliad was one of those books that opened up literature to me as a kid. So this new translation is gnawing at me. I just need the time!


4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a book where my feelings are the same and my thoughts are utterly different. As a young teen, I hated how the book treated Lennie. My instinct was to write what would today be called fix-it fic; to give Lennie and George a better world with lots of rabbits. But that’s what the book wants, too. It was only as I grew older and met more disabled people that I appreciated the novel criticizing how our world exploits and harms us. That the book was asking me to fight harder. It’s challenging to grow up and realize that you’re as angry at a book as that book is angry at the real world, and to realize that in your disagreement, the book was right. We all deserve better. To get it, we have to do that work together.



5. What’s one piece of fiction, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?


Ray Bradbury’s short story “Zero Hour” lived rent free in my head for years. It’s a great short to introduce kids to Science Fiction because it’s about kids secretly being right. It’s told from the POV of a mom while the neighborhood kids play increasingly disturbing games about extraterrestrials being about to invade. But the kids really are collaborating with our future overlords. So it validates children’s make-believe in a twisted way, but it also uses POV so well. Because the mom is wrong. Our whole lens of the story is unreliable, but it’s unreliable for relatable reasons: we, too, would dismiss kids saying UFOs will land at zero hour. So we’re almost complicit in the unreliability. Unreliable narrators often make us prickle or pushback; we question them and feel superior that we could access truth they couldn’t. “Zero Hour” does something else. It sympathizes with her and with us. That’s what makes it chilling and memorable. I think for the rest of my life I’ve been in love with fiction’s ability to give us relatable unreliable characters. People with sympathize with because we say, “Oh yes, I’d also be doomed.”


6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My debut novel is Someone You Can Build A Nest In. Do you like monsters with feelings? Lots of feelings? Because Shesheshen is a shapeshifting horror who lives in a lair, building her body out of whatever she can find, a bear trap for a mouth, and reusing the bones of hunters that have come after her. She just despises us humans. After some hunters manage to poison and nearly kill her, she’s rescued by Homily, a quirky, bookish lady who mistakes Shesheshen for a fellow human. Shesheshen is shocked when Homily nurses her back to health rather than killing her. And the more time they spend together, the close they get. Could Shesheshen have actually found someone she can live with? Is this love? The emotions bubble up until Shesheshen absolutely has to confess that she’s not human. But right before she can confess, Homily tells her why she’s here: she’s hunting a shapeshifting horror. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
 

Their story is for everyone who’s ever been made to feel like a monster.


Thank you, John!


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

Thursday, March 14, 2024

What was the point of Dream Scenario?

This surreal dramedy doesn't so much reach a resolution as just stop. Maybe it's because it still hasn't ended

With a creative twist on the Kafkaesque dread of The Twilight Zone, yet fortunately without the cheap moralizing of Black Mirror, Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario presents the bizarre case of Paul Matthews, a random guy who for whatever reason starts showing up in people's dreams. Not quite prepared for the stresses of overnight fame, Paul staggers his way through some innocent blunders and some less innocent ones until his life is toppled over and swept away by the unforgiving tide of public opinion.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that Dream Scenario is trying to satirize. The dialogues include painfully unsubtle lines about cancel culture, but if we take that interpretation at face value, the movie becomes a misfired barb at an unrealistic target. The reason why Paul becomes a hated figure is that people stop seeing him as a passive background character in their dreams and start having horrible nightmares where he commits brutal violence against them. In essence, he's assigned undeserved blame for purely imagined misdeeds. And here's where the presumed allegory for cancel culture fails, because if that's what the movie claims is happening in real life, that people are just making up traumatic events in order to smear bosses or teachers or intimate partners who didn't do anything, then we have a vile instrument of victim invalidation before us. However, watching this movie provides ample evidence that we're dealing with a clear-sighted, self-aware story, born from a mind far too sophisticated to resort to such banal role-reversal tactics. Something more complex is at play here.

The casting of Nicolas Cage in the lead role is a first clue. More than for any other Hollywood star at this time, Cage's public persona occupies a peculiar place, one where embarrassment can't reach him. He's inherently memeable, because you know you can seamlessly drop him into any ridiculous scene, in the confidence that he'll perform his part with utmost seriousness. This is how the people in Dream Scenario first perceive his character's unobtrusive presence in otherwise outlandish dreams.

But for the middle-aged college professor Paul Matthews played by Cage, that's not enough. He's simply there. He's at the blurred edge of public awareness, even if it's everyone's awareness. In a bitter blow of irony, he has achieved what every TikTok influencer desires: he's become the world's most recognized person through no merit of his own. But he wants more. He's even disappointed that the collective unconscious doesn't give him something exciting to do. So there's an undeniable element of ego in Paul's characterization, but I'd err on the side of seeing this as not really unhealthy. I've learned that I'm in the minority.

In online discussions about Dream Scenario, I find an almost uniform trend of unwarranted meanness. At IndieWire, critic David Ehrlich finds the character of Paul "pathetic and annoying." He strikes Cracked's Tim Grierson as "a massive putz." Writing for Digital Trends, Alex Welch labels him "a constantly grinning vessel of pure cringe." "Nebbishy to the ninth power" and "a fiercely memorable loser," says Justin Cheng at the Los Angeles Times. For Rory Doherty of Flicks, he's an "insecure narcissist" and a "needling braggart." And finally, Kyle Anderson of Nerdist describes him as "an a-hole who plays the victim."

And that reminds me of the public attitude that emerges in the second half of the movie, once Paul's presence in dreams shifts into that of a serial murderer. Paul becomes a public enemy because of atrocities that happen entirely inside people's heads and that he has no control over. His students vandalize his car, a stranger spits on his food, he's suspended from his job, his wife doesn't want him anywhere near her, and one wants to shout at all those people: What's wrong with you? Why are you making him responsible for what your own head invented? What did this man actually do to you?

I get the same feeling when I read press articles about Dream Scenario that go out of their way to point out how utterly unlikable Paul is to the reviewer. And now it's time for me to jump to conjectures. I think this is where Borgli set his trap: outside of the movie. The character of Paul is portrayed, both in the script and in Cage's acting choices, as socially inexpert, eager to be liked, with a number of badly concealed resentments under the surface. (I think there's much to be inferred from the fact that his children are unusually young for a man of his age, possibly suggesting he didn't find a wife until sometime in his 50s.) So we have someone who has a very comfortable life but can't enjoy it because he hasn't really connected with people. But critics have gone into full detail to state en masse how much they find Paul detestable and pitiful. And I'd like to say in response: This is a person who carries a burden of loneliness that still haunts him, and who is desperate to feel that he matters. Plus he doesn't even exist in real life. And you go on the internet to call him all sorts of ugly names. What did this man actually do to you?

To be clear, there are things to dislike about Paul. But they are to be seen in his actions, not in his person. I can understand if you find fault with his ill-advised choice to barge uninvited into a school auditorium full of people who hate him. I don't understand why you would mark his nervous speech habits as a deep personal failure.

But perhaps Borgli does understand it, and he deliberately created a character who doesn't hurt anyone but that he knew you would still despise. And the events of Dream Scenario seem to match my speculation: all the people who dream of Paul are effectively watching a Nicolas Cage movie. They only turn against him when they no longer like the character he's playing in their heads. This is not a story about woke mobs and cancel culture; this is a story about hate raids by trolls who agree on a defenseless enemy to pick on. Paul isn't mistreated because he's a bad person; he's mistreated because he meets totally arbitrary criteria for cringe.

To speculate a bit further, I guess this is why Dream Scenario feels so off near the end. It doesn't have a true ending because it's still happening. The collective hatred for the character of Paul Matthews lives on in professional reviews and forum discussions, even though, just like in the movie, all you're hating is an image of a person, not a real one. I suspect Borgli knew viewers would react in that way, and he set out to steer our perception of this character in order to replicate in us the behavior the movie merely dramatizes. That's the trap Borgli built, and even some who think seriously about movies for a living fell into it.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Review: Tanglewood by Knicky L. Abbott

A smoothly, deliciously prosey story that deftly captures the interior life of its characters, taking no prisoners with its confrontation of a bigotry that hurts its believer even as she harms those around her.


Barbados in the 1840s. A rich estate. A black man working as a groundskeeper. A cursed woman hiding in the nearby wilderness. The loathing she holds in her heart, for herself and for the world that put her in this situation. The lingering threads of the choices that left her cursed in the first place. This is Tanglewood's story. At its heart, though, this is a story of white resentment against their black neighbours, and the horrible alchemy of oppression that makes success a zero-sum game, turning their own hardship into fuel for a bigotry that cannot be reasoned with.

The story follows Aoife, born to a white Irish indentured family, cursed, living alone in the wilderness, trapped in her own misery and her own thoughts, forever looping back and back on her suffering. We are deeply embedded within her POV, within her way of thinking, and this, Abbott has managed to capture beautifully. It is a novella with a crystalline sharpness in its lens of human despair - the interiority of the characters, and Aoife particularly, comes across so emotively on every page. But what Abbott does best is in her abstraction of that. She is so good at turning incredibly vivid and visceral introspection into metaphorical language, giving a potent and immediately graspable insight into the mind of a character. She makes the intangible, illegible insides of someone else's mind comprehensible, while maintaining their individuality, their voice. For example:

It was as if the forest of my humanity had been slashed and burnt, so that the fields of my penitence could be cultivated.

and

Like the earth around my childhood home, the soil of me was poor, not good for growing much else but coarse grass and hard lessons.

Aoife's despair, her misery, is so well crafted on the page, the sentence-level, word-by-word care is evident in every sentence. But that is not her only angle, and nor is she the only character. Because this is also a story of a growing infatuation, and again, this is where Abbott's prose shines - again bringing that deftness of craft across in really giving us the emotional sense, the heady rush of a growing emotional connection to someone, that feeling of falling head over heels, that obsession as Aoife experiences it.

Because we also follow John Jack, the groundskeeper at Tanglewood Manor, a black man, born a slave but now living free and working for pay, who finds himself travelling to the gully where Aoife lives, returning again and again, becoming entranced, despite the strangeness of her curse and herself, despite not knowing what and who led her to be here, as she is. We see this place and its beauty through his eyes too, and while what they see is nearly the same, it is the way they see it, the way their minds process and feel, and our insight into it that colours the story, and slowly draws us in to the crux of the matter, casting back into the years to Aoife's cursing... while also being heavily grounded in the now, and their growing feelings for each other.

Despite the page time for it being incredibly short, Tanglewood has some incredibly well-written... I don't know what to call it. It's not smut. Is it romance? Not really. It's certainly not erotica. Let's just say... intimacy. Whatever it is, in the same way as she has written the rest of the story, Abbott fully embeds us into the emotional perspectives of her characters as they grow closer, and finally come to the... ahem... climax of their affections. And by narrating it through the lens of that emotion, again with that evocative, abstracting prose, just a few lines of sexual encounter are rendered breathless and gut-wrenchingly real, and somehow far more charged than any amount of physical mechanics would have been in the same page space. And it's precisely because she puts us in those characters' headspace, lets us feel their wanting, and words it in such a way that it clicks into a familiar alignment if we are someone who has ever wanted in that way. It's absolutely deliciously done.

But, despite the good, there is also the bad. And it wouldn't be a gothic story without a great deal of the bad, even if we weren't dealing with curses. The latter half of the book, once we've met and become grounded in these two characters is where we really start to dig into the truth of what happened to Aoife, and where the themes that have been seeded throughout the early part begin to bloom. And it is here that we really see the benefit of that embedding into character headspace and that emotional resonance - because Abbott is really digging into the racism of the white working class, how their own oppression becomes a nearly unstoppable fuel in the fire of anti-blackness. We have seen the life that the white Irish in this place live, through Aoife's memories. We know their lot is hard. We sympathise with them. There is no part of the story that does not acknowledge that hardship. But while doing so, it bluntly lays out how they in turn hate and harm the black people around them as if it is the natural result of their predicament, and how insidious, how unshiftable and how self-justifying that perspective is.

By the time we reach the critical moments, where all the themes are confronted and the resolution plays out, the writing is very much on the wall. It is not an unsubtle story, but it is a blunt one. That's a hard needle to thread, but Abbott does it incredibly well, delivering an ending that, once read, feels like the only natural outcome to the story, a terrible, gothic inevitability, even if you maybe thought earlier things might lead elsewhere. What needs to be confronted is confronted, with nuance and thoughtfulness, but without sparing the sharpness it needs. The reader must sit with it, and see things for what they are, in this 1840s world of wealth, privilege and oppression, of narrow worldviews and bitter consequences for those in positions unable to fight back, and the nastiness of where the lens of blame turns, when it cannot confront its true architect. 

This is a very slim novella - only 95 pages - but it packs a huge quantity in, without ever feeling like it skimps or rushes. It leads us emotions first through a complex tangle of love and betrayal and oppression and bigotry, and delivers the ending that story absolutely needed to hit home the conclusion the whole narrative has been building too. It is a sad, inevitable, truly gothic story, and it is incredibly well done.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, amazing immersion in character perspectives and emotions, precision wielding of both bluntness and subtlety

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Abbott, Knicky L., Tanglewood, [Luna, 2024]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Review: Seeds of Inheritance by Aimee Kuzenski

Bringing power chords of science fantasy into a story of revolution, change, magic and technology in a spacefaring elven empire.


Uneasy lies the crown. This is especially so for Leontios. He’s the ruler of an elven empire that not only stretches across the globe but into space and multiple star systems. But he doesn’t have a male heir, much to his patriarchal heart’s dismay. The rebels he exiled to the moon after their revolution are stirring and causing trouble. And Berenike, one of the leaders of that rebellion, supposedly bound by magical oaths as his servant, has plans of her own. Plans that involve her daughter, best friend, and secret lover of the emperor’s daughter.

This is the background and story of Seeds of Inheritance, by Aimee Kuzenski.

While this is a rich world of spacefaring elves, magic and lots of crunchy worldbuilding, let’s start with the vividly conceived relationship map that Kuzenski sets up here. In the end, everything in this novel ultimately comes down to how the characters we meet are related to each other and how the changes in plot all tie back to the decisions they make, usually fueled by strong personal conflicts. Berenike has been magically bound by oath after her failed revolution against Leontios, but she finds loopholes and more to maneuver her daughter to oppose the emperor. But her daughter herself, Evrim, is in love with the emperor’s heir, Hypatia, and really doesn’t want to deal with anything with revolutionary dreams, until the map shifts and she finds herself confronted with the remnants of a revolution that consider her a prophet. And the current head of the said revolution has history with Berenike, and also with Evrim as well.

This character focused relationship map, showing long standing histories, relationships and conflicts helps give this the feel that these are truly elves in space, not pointy eared humans with magic. The title, Seeds of Inheritance, can be taken in so many ways, the seeds of what Leontios did in order to invoke the revolution that he quashed in the first place, and what that revolution still fights for. The inheritance of Berenike’s daughter, whether she will or not in terms of that revolution. Berenike herself, as an inheritor of her mentor’s power. Once upon a time, Berenike was the student of Theodora, head of the Order still and the right hand of the emperor. Now she is a servant, but she sees her former mentor in the Fingertip Order everyday and that tension between mentor and student is one that slowly builds through the novel.

With this suite of characters as its center, Kuzenski builds a fascinating interstellar elven empire with all sorts of worldbuilding indeed. We get a space elevator in the form of The Lilypad, a gigantic Yggdrasil-like tree (sort of like the one in Niven’s Rainbow Mars). We get seed-shaped flyers and spacecraft. Magical bindings and rituals and how to make use of them, subvert them and deal with their consequences. The magic is very much inherent and not flashy, you are not going to find Evrim throwing fireballs here. Plenty of potions, poisons and the like, though, and lots of other biotech. In point of fact, biotech turns out to be the axis and the central question as to what and why and how the revolution happened and the consequences of that. It gives a verdant feel to the magic and technology of the novel.

And I didn’t even mention the Palacetree, the greatest of these biotech and biomagical bits of worldbuilding. The Palacetree, where most of the action takes place, is a living being, and in a real sense is an arbiter of the fitness of a new ruler if, say, the old one should get assassinated (as what Leontios did to HIS predecessor). The Palacetree, as it so happens, is also key and important to interstellar space travel.

But I do want to mention that politics again; Leontios assassinated his predecessor. Rebels and deadly decadent court and politics to match. Our other names throughout this narrative are all Greek, too. It’s clear to me that Kuzenski decided that her model for this elven empire is none other than the Byzantine Empire, and gives the elves names to match. She’s awfully clever, too. Evrim, for example, means “Evolution” in Turkish. Berenike “She who brings victory” in Greek. Hypatia was a famous scientist, and indeed, her namesake is a prodigy of magic and technology. And so on. Names convey meaning and worldbuilding and hints in the writer’s work.

As you might have guessed before, the novel and the world it depicts is very queer friendly, if almost but not quite queernorm. The emperor's obsession with having a male heir to the throne instead of his daughter, or either of his daughters shows that even the elves of a space empire need to deal with the problems of patriarchy. But we definitely see characters attracted to all genders and it is accepted as basic fact. 

Thus, if the idea of an interstellar elven empire with politics to match Byzantine court politics is something that sounds like it is relevant to your interests, Seeds of Inheritance is very possibly your cup of tea. Kuzenski is a clever writer, and it behoves you as a reader to pay attention to how the characters work with each other to get the full effect of what is happening, and why, and what it all means. I nearly missed a subtle early clue about a major character and so when a revelation and resulting cascade occurred, I was a bit flatfooted until I recalled the clue (thank you, ebook notes) and then saw how it was very nicely foreshadowed.

I did mention the relationship map before, and if I found something that is a bit weak in the novel, it is that a character, AyÅŸe, a potential future wife for Leontios, is introduced and integrated into the web not quite as fully and completely as I had come to appreciate with the other characters in the novel. Her relationships with the other characters, especially Berenike, don’t quite have enough room to breathe, I think, to become believable and don’t load-bear as much as the author tries to do in the finale of the novel.

Overall, however, this is a strong one-and-done novel (although further novels in this universe would be welcome) that hits space fantasy right and center, and gives the reader a fascinating set of characters and a thorny and complex problem to navigate in the context of their own very thorny and complex relationships.

--

Highlights:
  • Space science fantasy, with elves!
  • Deadly decadent court with Byzantine notes
  • Strong character focused and driven story beats

Reference:
Kuzenski, Aimee, Seeds of Inheritance (self published, 2024)

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

Monday, March 11, 2024

Somehow, Megamind returned

Be ready for endless iterations of the DreamWorks smirk

Fourteen years after gleefully parodying the Superman mythos, the Megamind franchise has released a sequel TV film, Megamind vs. The Doom Syndicate, and a sequel TV series, Megamind Rules! In the film, the titular supervillain-turned-superhero has to deal with his former evil teammates who won't take kindly to his turn toward good; in the series, we follow a standard Villain of the Week format interspersed with the buildup toward the return of a threat from Megamind's past.

With the rare advantage of keeping the same team of writers from the original 2010 film, this continuation of the story preserves a consistent characterization of its protagonist, with a firm grasp on emotional tome. The first Megamind questioned Superman's inborn goodness by positing a scenario where the last survivor from a destroyed planet ended up being raised by criminals while his archenemy landed on a ridiculously rich mansion. The resolution of Megamind's arc hinged on the realization that established roles matter less than moment-to-moment choices, and therefore all he needed to do to become a good person was to start doing good things. This very existence-precedes-essence insight, far more than the superpowered battles, is the nugget of gold hidden inside those 95 minutes of unexceptional animation and way too many on-the-nose needle drops.

In the sequel film and series, Megamind undergoes further personal growth along the same path: the storylines explore the worth of fearless authenticity, the pointlessness of performing an identity instead of building an actual one, the irrevocable power of each individual to choose their purpose, the potential that can be achieved by not letting yourself be defined and constrained by past fears, the benefits of walking a mile in each other's shoes, the unhealthiness of having an emotional life tied to how other people manage theirs, the impossibility of being exactly the person you think others demand that you be, the dangers of feeling like you always have to prove yourself, and the benefits of knowing when to admit you need help. These are the usual life lessons that can be found in a show for kids, but the Megamind sequels manage to weave these key psychological themes organically within loads of silly slapstick, futuristic gadgets, and groanilicious puns.

The understandably lower budget of a TV series means that this double sequel release fortunately doesn't resort to as many musical callbacks as the original film. However, it also means it delivers noticeably diminished animation quality. For reference, this is a competently made, entirely unobjectionable image from 2010:

And this is what we get in 2024:

If you're going to take the risky bet of choosing an alien with an unmissably huge, bulbous head as your protagonist, the least you can do for the sake of your viewers' eyes is to draw him in a way that makes him pleasing to look at for a full movie plus eight TV episodes. One would expect 3D animation to have improved somewhat in all these years, but at least now we know a fun bit of trivia: Metro City is located along the placid slopes of Uncanny Valley.

Also, I thought The Incredibles had already settled the question of why child sidekicks are a bad idea.

Only the writing and plotting save these new productions from the lifeless look of their characters. The writing duo that first created Megamind have maintained a clear idea of who this hero is, how his atypical upbringing shaped his understanding of the world and of personal connection, and what kind of experiences can help him continue maturing. Given that the first season of the new series ends in a cliffhanger, Megamind is going to need to rely on all those anchoring points if he wants to fix the latest crisis life has thrown at him.


Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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