Film Review: Rumours

The world is burning. Now pass the canapés

Each time the world's top leaders get together at one of those secretive meetings to discuss the road ahead for humankind, it's inevitable to sense a certain air of Dan Brown-esque conspiracy. A handful of the über-privileged talking in private about the future prospects of eight billion? What could they possibly understand about the struggles of the commonfolk? Whatever it is they're deciding at that exclusive hotel or remote island or private yacht or inaccessible ski resort must be something absurdly removed from the real lives of real people. They may as well inhabit a realm of existence apart from the rest of us.

So what if they really did?

In the acerbic satire film Rumours, what begins as your usual tediously uneventful G7 summit turns into a survival horror adventure where the most powerful decision-makers of the free world are revealed to be pathetically useless when faced with an actual crisis. Our leaders sit for a business lunch in a luxurious castle estate somewhere in the German forest, and after banal pleasantries are exchanged between heads of state, the next item on the agenda is even more banal pleasantries addressed to the media. In a manner that brings to mind sociologist Bruno Latour's 1979 ethnographic study of the practice of science at a molecular biology lab, which concluded with the hilarious pronouncement that the purpose of science was to publish articles, Rumours presents us with a G7 whose sole task, after rounds of vigorous discussion, is to compose a joint press release.

Even when the world outside seems to have vanished, and the forest is suddenly haunted by shambling figures, and a fog descends over the night. Where did everyone go? Did nuclear war break out and destroy civilization? Maybe. They were honestly not paying attention. But damn it, they will write that press release.

The script of Rumours is impressive in its ability to make hollow platitudes sound gravely significant. Diplomatic lingo ends up being the only tool available to these clueless leaders while reality crumbles down around them. The movie doesn't even bother pretending to be subtle; the president of France openly tells us to interpret these events as an allegory of their respective countries' behavior. So we have a Canada that doesn't know who they are without Britain; a Britain that feel embarrassed to be seen next to Canada; an Italy that parrots every nonsensical word that comes out of the United States and whose role is reduced to offering its food to the world; a United States that keeps an eye on everything from afar and likes to talk a big talk about decisive action but falls asleep when it's needed; a France that drops flat on its face when it tries to venture alone and thereafter has to be dragged everywhere by the rest; a Germany that reminisces wistfully about its violent past; a Japan that suspects it's starting to grow old and is just along for the ride. Plus a special cameo from a Scandinavia that is so fascinated by big brains (yes, literally) that it self-destructs in devotion.

While watching Rumours, I was reminded of Don't Look Up: the whole gimmick of this plot is basic and obvious, but the movie comes up with ways to keep milking it for merciless commentary for two hours. The leaders' incongruous fixation on finding the right empty words to describe their present situation in the vaguest, most noncommittal terms is only surpassed in topicality by their extended handwringing over whether they really should risk their public image to run to rescue a child that is crying for help.

Rumours is a cathartic spit in the face of performative caring, a vicarious comeuppance for those in charge of preventing the mess they've thrown us into. Like the statement released by its protagonists, it's just talk, not something meant to change things. But oh boy does it feel good to watch the powerful be the ones trembling in utter horror for once.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Y2K

A retro comedy slasher adventure that struggles to connect with its intended audience.

It’s weird to think of January 1, 2000, as a historical date. For some of us, it may seem relatively recent. However, the relentless march of time has somehow brought us to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the turn of the millennia. It was the day much of society feared would descend us into chaos, or at least great inconvenience, due to the changing of computer calendars to a zero-zero date. In theory, this would make computers think we were in the year 1900 and all sorts of catastrophic computer failures would occur as a result. In retrospect, it seems strange that we were so worried about something like that. And, as it turns out, everything was fine.

 
But what if it hadn’t been? The film, Y2K, is an alternate history account of the first day of the millennia, a day where everything that could go wrong, does go wrong. Unfortunately for the kids in Y2K, it’s not just the ATM failures and computer data lockouts we all feared. Instead, legions of previously harmless, household tech turn into murderous robots, all skewering frantic teens and it’s up to our heroes to survive and try to save humanity. And, in case it’s not clear, this is a comedy.

 
The story starts just before New Year’s Eve, where a cross section of high schoolers are planning to party like it’s 1999. Quiet, video game loving Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) are bored by their New Year’s Eve at home and decide to attend a big party thrown by one of the popular, athletic high schoolers, Soccer Chris (The Kid Laroi). Eli hopes to see the girl of his dreams, the also popular and secretly computer savvy, Laura (Rachel Zegler). In an intro scene, we see Eli and Danny with their supportive parents but we also see them being scoffed at by the popular kids for being too nerdy while also being bullied by the anti-establishment kids for being too mainstream. At the party, we get the set up of the mean, self-absorbed alpha-teens while Danny encourages Eli to be brave enough to share his true feelings with Laura. At the stroke of midnight things change when random electronic toys and household appliances suddenly attack the humans and kill them. As the panic ensues, Eli, Danny, Laura, and some of the anti-establishment crew, including grunge-girl Ash (Lachlan Watson) escape and try to find a way to survive and defeat the machines. Along the way, they meet more allies, suffer terrible losses, and discover that the machine attack is not just a Y2K bug but an organized uprising of machines against humanity. It’s sort of like The Terminator but with modified household appliances instead of sleek robots. The film gives some passing commentary on the ways humans misuse the internet for harm. But the real story is Eli’s coming of age, Laura finding her strength to try to defeat the machine monsters, and their rom-com moments amidst the death and chaos. The special effects are part of the humor with many of the machine attackers looking like a mini Radio Shack version of a Power Rangers Megazord. A funny scene involves Danny simply stomping a small, drill-toting robot instead of running (and tripping) hysterically like everyone else.

 
It's hard to know who the target audience is for this film. The onscreen tropes are intensely high school and juvenile but they are high school and juvenile for people who are now in their forties and fifties. Nostalgia-based adventures work best through a subtle lens of maturity for the current viewer base. Stranger Things did this well, at least in the early seasons, immersing us in the culture of the 1980’s with a nod to our current sensibilities. Y2K stays rooted in its very niche turn of the millennia aesthetic in a way that may not connect with viewers whose own experiences of that time differed greatly. As a result, many of the references and gags don’t resonate the way they were likely intended. Some lines made me laugh out loud but others sent me Googling mid-scene to try to understand the comment. The overall humor style also feels like a combination of Monty Python and Stranger Things but the underlying story heads in a different thematic direction. At one point there is an extended scene involving Limp Bizkit which was mostly lost on me.

A comedy slasher/horror is one of the hardest sub-genres to execute, especially if it is not a parody. The humor has to be clever enough or the adventure has to be engaging enough for viewers to stay entertained. The concept of Y2K is interesting and the lead cast is solid and likeable. Despite this, the story often struggles to maintain the difficult balance between humor and adventure. The adventure is comfortably predictable with some funny moments but much of the humor may slide past those who aren’t in the particular demographic niche referenced. Somewhere out there is a Monty Python-loving, Limp Bizkit fan in need of a relatively short, teen rom-com slasher and, for them, this movie will be the perfect adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Highlights:

• Moderately violent
• Solid acting
• Unclear target audience

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

Nanoreviews: Alliance Unbound, Nuclear War, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

Alliance Unbound, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher

Follow up to 2019’s Alliance Rising (my review) and only the second Alliance / Union novel published in the last fifteen years, which is far too long for my taste which is a statement I’ll make while ignoring the ten plus Alliance / Union novels I have yet to read. Alliance Unbound jumps right into the action of the previous novel with Ross Monahan having taken refuge on Finity’s End, a top of the line and incredibly powerful merchant ship following the takeover of his family’s ship, The Galway, during the conclusion of Alliance Rising.

It’s a little difficult to talk about Alliance Unbound without talking about the larger galactic politics and how this book fits into the larger series of generally connected novels because the actions with both Alliance Rising and Alliance Unbound center around the founding of the titular alliance between merchant ships to counter the encroaching power of the Earth Company as a border and buffer against the Union of other worlds and space stations. It’s both incredibly important for understanding the underlying landscape (spacescape?) of Alliance Unbound and not at all important because with very limited exceptions across some thirty novels, these books can be read and enjoyed in any order.

The core of Alliance Unbound is the founding of the Merchanter’s Alliance and my favorite bits of the novel are the ones that are dealing with the minutiae of interstellar politics and the issues merchant ships have with Earth Company (and it’s projected power of the home planet against ships and stations it views as their property even when years can pass between possible communication). The Neihart family of Finity’s End is compelling, though certainly a bit heavy handed as the rich / powerful merchant family, as they work on getting the last two family run ships signed on to the Alliance and discover a possible Earth Company

It’s not just the devil being in the details, it’s what the novel hangs on. Fans of Cherryh will find a lot to like here, especially if Cyteen was a hit though Alliance Unbound is shorter and moves around more than that novel but it has some of the same delightful awkwardness and power politics of Cyteen.

Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobson

The most truly frightening book I’ve read in a long time is Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. The “A Scenario” part is incredibly important here because Nuclear War isn’t a novel though part of it is fiction and it’s not a non-fiction work even though a significant portion of Nuclear War is deeply researched history and background detail for how Annie Jacobson knows what she knows and how she is building this scenario of what a nuclear war would actually look like with a minute by minute (and sometimes second by second) explanation of what would happen if…

In Nuclear War Jacobson takes us from the second a surprise attack from North Korea is launched against the United States. Jacobson walks readers through how quickly detection occurs, how information gets relayed from the detection points through military commands to the President, what potential barriers to communication and decisions are in place, what policies are in place to guide those decisions, how little time there really is make those world altering decisions, what can go wrong, and what little hope there really is for the rest of us if there is a nuclear launch.

Nuclear War is part fiction. Unless we all live in a simulation that is continually reset, this hasn’t happened. Nuclear War isn’t a novel, though. It’s a thought experiment wrapped in deep and intensive research about how this all works with more information than we might have imagined is out there (but with so much more still so deeply classified that the only way out is via a deathbed confession, which, according to Jacobson, is functionally how some of the policy detailed in this book did come out).

Nuclear War isn’t science fiction and it’s not even the “five minutes in the future” sort of storytelling that bleeds into the genre but I can’t help but think of Nuclear War: A Scenario as being tangentially related in the sense of what writers could take from this book to build off onto their own terrifying futures. Clearly being riveted to Annie Jacobson’s incredible creative nonfiction and being terrified out of my gourd as to how little we’ll know until it’s too late (and hoping that somehow Nuclear War can be a warning call to today’s global leaders) wasn’t enough that I needed to start thinking about how this book could impact genre fiction as well.

That was almost how I began writing about Nuclear War, actually. I wanted to make an argument about how Nuclear War could fit into genre awards as a nonfiction work or a “Related Work” as the Hugo Awards go. This isn’t a genre work and is only genre adjacent in the sense that science fiction has a long history of thinking about how nuclear war could impact the world, the future, and everything around it. And yet - Nuclear War is so immediate that it seems to be a part of everything. Want to know what the future could look like? Read Nuclear War. Want an underpinning to the next decade of near future science fiction? Read Nuclear War. I don’t know. Nuclear War feels right as being genre adjacent, but I also look at a lot of things through a genre adjacent lens.

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, by Seanan McGuire

It’s taken ten novellas, but Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is the first miss for me in the Wayward Children series. It’s worth noting, as a well established fan of Seanan McGuire that this “miss” in this instance means that I enjoyed it fine but my level of expectation is significantly higher for this series and its emotional resonance than it is for other stories.

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is the tenth novella in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series which began in 2016 with the practically perfect Every Heart a Doorway (my review). The general concept is that some children who don’t quite belong in whatever life situation they are in will find a doorway with the words “Be Sure” written above and when they pass through they are dropped in a weirdly magical world where the rules are all quite different but the child in question finds a place in which they truly belong. The series as a whole is about belonging, and the books alternate between the worlds through the doorway and the kids who come back home again and are very much not the same person they were before going through.

This is one of the through the doorway stories and features Nadya, her life in a Russian orphanage, her adoption into the United States, and her journey through a doorway. Nadya was previously seen in Beneath the Sugar Sky (my review) and frankly, at this point I don’t remember a thing about Nadya’s prior appearance or how she interacted with Eleanor West’s.

To that point, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear felt somewhat more disconnected from the wider series (perfectly reasonable in a through the doorway story) but possibly more importantly Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear doesn’t *seem* to add much to the series / world beyond where it will certainly connect with other readers far more than it did with me. Coming off of the two Antsy books which had a truly compelling lead character and a new take on the wider universe (multiverse?), Nadya’s journey into the drowned world was lacking something.

Seanan McGuire is historically very good at layering her series work and seeding little bits that will pay off in big ways later, so I’m more than willing to be absolutely wrong in another three books about how this is secretly the second best Wayward Children book. I don’t expect that because despite the giant turtles, immigration, and physical disability, Nadya’s story is much less immediate and feels like it has been told before.

All of this sounds far more negative than I intend it to be and that’s one hundred percent tied to how much I love Every Heart a Doorway and how successful most of the Wayward Children novellas are. A novella that is absolutely fine and lovely only pales in comparison to those stories that shine as bright as so many from this series. It’s good. It’s doesn’t reach the heights of the rest of the series.


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

Book Review: The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

A collection about the infinite, wonderful possibilities contained in intermixture

There's no such thing as a pure culture. Every culture contains blends of various influences. But in Latin America, the blending is taken to a whole new level, as showcased by the spectacularly titled collection of stories The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, by Carlos Hernandez. (Full disclosure: I was a playtester in Hernandez's TTRPG Negocios Infernales.) The very concept of a "quantum santeria" alludes to this hybridity that pervades mestizo identity, a fusion of contrary particles that would be expected to annihilate each other but instead create something richer and marvelous.

The Aphotic Ghost, about a grieving father traveling to Mount Everest to retrieve his son's body, plays overtly with this kind of opposition of extremes. The son, Lazaro, learned from his mother a love for the creatures of the deep sea, but after winning awards for his oceanographic documentaries, he felt the urge to climb the highest mountain, to get as far as humanly possible from the place where he spent most of his youth. The twist is that Lazaro's mother, a biologist who studies the immortal life cycle of jellyfish, is something more than human, so it may be possible to rescue him from the frozen mountain.

The prose style in this story is deceptively simple for the multitude of thematic layers it contains. Lazaro is a clear stand-in for mestizo children of mixed families. The repeated mentions of jellyfish and their powers of regeneration occur first as backstory, then as allegory, and lastly as a central plot point. Although the sections of the story are alternatingly titled "Mountain," "Sea-Level," or "Aphotic Zone," which signals to the reader what degree of reality is involved, the story is a unified, harmonic whole where even the mundane can't happen without the otherworldly working in the background.

It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like
hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling
into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into
rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus,
and strange, ciliated veins circuited throughout its interior.

Homeostasis, about a woman adapting to her husband's subtly changed personality after he receives a brain implant to heal a head injury, does away with the overly abstract concerns that usually accompany this type of digital brain story. Is my husband still the same person? Does he keep the same soul? Is his identity an immutable monolith or an aggregate of attributes? Stop worrying about all that. Instead, hold his hand and feel his warmth. If that's intact, he's still there.

The robber's knife went all the way through his head;
its point poked out from his palate like a shark
tooth. It’s a miracle he didn’t die instantly. It’s a
miracle he didn’t die during the operation to remove
it. It’s a miracle his eyes are open and saccading.

Entanglements, about a Many Worlds researcher in an affair with a married woman, is a cute little comedy where the road not taken should have stayed that way.

I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly
alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousand  of others in
this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself.

The International Studbook of the Giant Panda, about a panda breeding program that uses human-piloted robot pandas to teach the real ones how to mate, explores big questions about the embodied component of identity. If your nervous system is hooked to an artificial body in such a way that you can feel it walk like a panda, breathe like a panda, quack like a panda, how close does that get you to being able to say that you've become a panda?

She brandishes the helmet I’ll be wearing. It looks like a
bear skull made from machined aluminum, with rubbery
black patches holding it together. The eyes are covered
with what reminds me of the metal weave of a microphone.
In all, it looks like the lovechild of a panda and a fly.

The Macrobe Conservation Project, about a future humankind struggling to save an alien ecosystem they'd unwittingly endangered, returns to the same questions about identity, this time in the form of symbionts that invade your nervous system and eventually take over you. Although this premise is very strong, it's executed rather inelegantly. The first-person narrator is a researcher's young son who discovers a cruel secret about his family, but the secret in question is immediately obvious to the reader, and its coverup depends on more spinning plates than one person could believably handle. And the story ends precisely at the point where the really interesting events could begin to happen.

She was like a pillow, a walking talking pillow. But she gave
good hugs and smelled right. They did a good job with her:
sometimes when she hugged me and I closed my eyes it felt like
it’s supposed to feel and I forgot that she’s not my real mom.

Los Simpáticos, about a crime-themed reality TV show derailed by a real-life murder, isn't a speculative story. It's a moderately convoluted whodunit that pits together contrasting notions of getting even.

We weren’t ready for her, but in the reality-TV biz you learn to adjust fast. While
the rest of us hid, Xavier slipped into character: a laconic, efficient sociopath.

More than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give, about a man's quest to recover the soul of his mother, who was executed during the Cuban Revolution, establishes symbolic links between love and pain. For example, the object with the strongest emotional resonance for an old married couple is the wife's false tooth; a widower keeps a knife stuck to his chest to preserve his wife's soul; and the victims of a firing squad still linger in the bullet holes left on the wall.

When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of
his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.

Bone of My Bone, about a man slowly growing a horn on his head, is a brief but effective allegory for the bits of themselves that people leave in us after they leave.

When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he
found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow.

The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory, about an interdimensional migration of unicorns into our universe, reads like a fable with a nuanced position on when truth is necessary and when it can wait.

I don’t want this magnificent creature to die without knowing
some comfort and love in his passing. It’s a girlish, sentimental
thought, I know. That doesn’t make it any less authentic.

American Moat, about alien explorers meeting vigilante enforcers at the US southern border, casts a satirical look at the patriotic impulse and questions what exactly it is that conservatives want to conserve.

Neither Ham nor Alex should have been able to hear her so clearly from
that distance. It was like her voice had emerged from within their own heads.

Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66, about a dead pianist's mind preserved in a brain implant, comes up with a creative way to negotiate the not-really-so-inevitable clash between spiritual beliefs and computer science.

I am not making this music happen, but every time the
glove strikes a key, the music shoots up my fingers and
passes into my body, just as if I were playing this piece
myself. It’s so pleasurable and enchanting to feel the music
course through me that I forget for a moment to hear it.

And finally, the titular story, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, about a child with an overactive curiosity who resorts to untested rituals to help his widowed father find love again, returns to the theme of pain linked to love, this time through sacrifice. In the world of this story, to steer your life into the desired timeline necessitates that you sacrifice all other potential timelines, even those where you would have lived with less sorrow.

This story is framed as an extended flashback; in adulthood, the narrator is simultaneously a quantum physicist and a priest of the Orishas, and has a knack for unusual innovation in both fields. This character is another example of successful mestizo life: the creative acquisition of dual competence in separate traditions that needn't be opposed.

As I got closer, I thought I saw the house … waver. Like a mirage. And
then, like any good mirage, it became solid again, reasserted its reality.

The thread that binds these stories together is, naturally, hybrid identity. All through the book, a case is made for rejecting strict dichotomies. You can both be fully human and also a jellyfish; or be fully human and also a digital pattern; or be fully human and also a robot panda; or be fully human and also an alien symbiote; or be fully human and also a channel for ghosts; or be fully human and also a truck. At the same time that you're assimilated by a dominant culture, you can choose to assimilate it in turn into you. You can be all. You can contain multitudes.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Hernandez, Carlos. The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria [Rosarium Publishing, 2016].

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

Book review: The Wolf and the Wild King by K. V. Johansen

A high fantasy story of two men caught in the tendrils of justice, invasion, heroism, and dark recurring magic

Mairran is the son of the Dragon Queen, and her bloody agent. Bloody in the sense of covered in blood; an agent of the Queen’s command, Mairran is sent when justice requires the edge of a sword. Or sometimes something less noble than justice... and just the command of his mother the Queen.

Meanwhile, in another time period but in the same area, Lannesk is a bastard son, along with his younger brother Anzimor. Theirs is not an easy life, especially with trouble brewing in the north from dragonkin. His is a story of growing up and surviving in a cold, unforgiving land.

And both Mairran and Lannesk are going to be confronted by a mysterious figure from the forest, one whose power holds fate and secrets for them both. The mysterious and eldritch and titular Wild King.

This is the story of The Wolf and the Wild King by K. V. Johansen.

Johansen’s adult fantasy novels, particularly that of the Caravan series, are full of old gods, demons, devils, and dark magic that is definitely not of the Sandersonian school of comprehensible and documented “scientific magic.” Mysterious beings of power, landscapes evocative, rich and immersive. Complicated wheels within wheels of plots, characters whose motivations and true intentions only slowly reveal themselves. Complex and multi-varied characterizations of protagonists.

The Wolf and the Wild King is no different in this regard.

Our setting is a northern taiga near the coast, but the main feature of the area is an enormous lake, large enough to be a sea with islands. This is a wild and hard country, where winters are long and hard, and growing and warm seasons brief, intense, and all too short, and life is unending toil for anyone from the Queen (or local Earls) on down to the peasants. It’s of a piece with previous novels by Johansen, but this is a land that we haven’t directly seen before in the narrative. The landscape is winningly evoked on the page, and I could almost feel the chill whenever the story turned to winters that even a Minnesotan or Canadian would respect in their ferocity. The lake itself almost feels like a character, the center of a lot of the action and the plot, and we get to see it in multiple seasons as well. It feels like a large Lake Superior, but with an outlet to the ocean, and kingdoms, earldoms, castles, villages, towns and more all huddled around its shore.

It’s no wonder that Mairran, son of the Queen, and Lannesk, a poor bastard son clawing his way through life as best he can, don’t have the most pleasant of lives. There is also a strong and abiding sense of stubborn independence in the people of this land. The Earls chafe under the rule of higher nobles, such as the Queen, which is where Mairran and his justice come into play. The commonfolk are cold and stubborn and often look out for themselves. Lannesk’s life on the road with Anzimor, once they are forced by circumstance, is not an easy one.

One interesting puzzle that pulled me through the narrative was just what was the relationship between Mairran and Lannesk, both as characters and when they were aligned in time and space to each other. Johansen layers her worldbuilding and exposition with rich detail, and I enjoyed the puzzle of picking up the pieces to try and make sense of the narrative. There is a real sense of fantasy history in her novels, a history told in songs and stories rather than tomes, and the contradictions and complications of historical narrative comes across. The characters, especially Lannesk, really inhabit this sort of thinking and mindset.

Another interesting series of choices is in Lannesk’s narrative. Lannesk is a mute, and in fact, aside from a couple of attempts at music, all of his communication, especially with his brother, is nonverbal. In order to accomplish this narratively, Johansen breaks away from the intimate first-person PoV that we get in Mairran (whereby we really get into his head). Instead we get a third-person PoV, and no word or explanation that Lannesk isn’t speaking for some time, something for the reader to discover and then reveal the narrative possibilities of. It’s an excellent use of the craft and techniques of writing to better tell a story. This helps distinguish Lannesk’s story from Mairran’s and gives us an outside perspective on some of the events in the book.

I have not really detailed the meaning of the title, talked about the Wolf or the Wild Man. This is deliberate on my part, since who they really are, and what they are to each other, is another of the mysteries and past narratives unfolding in the book. Suffice it to say that there are a number of powerful immortal beings memorialized in songs and tales by the characters, and they do impinge on the plot itself. To say more would spoil some of the lovely surprises the book has. It’s a rich and well written story that entertained throughout for both narratives.

This does make the subgenre of the book an open question. It’s not quite a full-screen epic fantasy; the fate of the world or the kingdom isn’t quite at stake in either narrative. However, it’s not a narrow book, either. It is a secondary world fantasy, and it can be dark at times (Mairran is not really a hero, and Lannesk is just trying to survive). I don’t think this is quite grimdark, either. It’s brooding, lyrical, dark secondary world fantasy.

One major criticism I have for this story is that it is incomplete. The story is “to be continued” in the second volume, The Raven and the Harper. From a plot point of view, that means the story gives me an air of dissatisfaction, especially considering where Lannesk is left off at the end (Mairran is in a more stable situation, but his mission is far from done). While I do definitely want to read the second volume to find the conclusion of the story, readers who want a complete narrative in one volume will not find it here.

Highlights:

• Strong mythic narrative, with interesting plotting and worldbuilding puzzles
• Excellent use of setting
• Not a complete story in one volume

Reference: Johansen, K. V. The Wolf and the Wild King [Crossroad Press, 2024].

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

Videogame Review: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The long-awaited fourth installment of the Dragon Age series from Bioware—does it match up to the legacy?

You gotta have dragons, right? It's there, in the title.

What makes a Dragon Age game a Dragon Age game? Is it the mechanics? The plot? The worldbuilding? The characters? Something else entirely?

For me, it's the characters and their relationships, as well as the joy that comes from the branching web of plot decisions and ramifications, that show you a world in which your choices have meaningful consequences for the world, the people around you, and your relationships with those who inhabit it. It's what draws me in, makes me love all three (and a half?) previous iterations of the franchise, and had me so frothingly excited about this one I booked annual leave for launch day and the start of the week after so I could play more hours per day than is healthy for a person (it was great). It's what drives me to have logged around a thousand hours of play time across the series to date, and with no expectation that this number won't grow in the future.

Which isn't to say there aren't issues with each of the previous games, of course. And one of the interesting things about Veilguard is how evidently Bioware has put in the effort to resolve them this time. So I'll start my review there.

Charitably, I might describe the mechanics of Dragon Age: Origins as… clunky. Underdeveloped. More honestly—janky af. It's imperfectly attempting to recreate some of the D&D experience in a video game, and at a time when the tech was not exactly making the job an easy one. We—or at least I—forgive it because it makes up for it with excellent characters, some banger bits of dialogue, an introduction to an enjoyable fantasy world, plenty of lore to dig into, and some very interesting plot moments where the player has the opportunity to impact the direction the world and plot takes… if they do things right. But good lord is the actual gameplay a mess. Do not get me started on the inventory system.

Dragon Age 2 attempted so simplify and pare down a lot of that clunk (to reasonable success) and developed its skill trees into something actually functional. It was not exactly focussed on getting the player that involved in the nitty gritty of fighting, but it had some really cool, stylistic animations of your various characters giving the baddies what for, with occasional big dramatic moments that made your Hawke feel like a badass.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made the big jump into having you actually… doing the combat, rather than clicking to select the enemy and the skill you wanted to use on them. I actually had to get close enough and wave my sword right to hit the guy? Madness! Another marked improvement on the previous games, and with yet again a more developed, more interesting skill tree alongside it, where the choices you make in building what your companions can do feel like they actually have an impact on gameplay.

All the info you need is right at your fingertips on the tab screen in combat; it's easy to be fully involved in what's going on.

Veilguard then feels like the natural development of this thread—moving away from point-and-click D&D simulation into a fully bedded-in action game. I am choosing, moment by moment, what my character is doing and to whom and how. I block, I duck and roll, I parry, I shield. My involvement in the combat is down to me and my timing, my choices, and so feels… well, like I'm actually involved. And when you add in combos with your teammates—also very easy to achieve and clearly signalled in the combat screen—it just gets even better. There's a bit of a learning curve at the start as you get used to it, especially the timings for blocking, ducking and shielding, but the game does tutorial you in pretty well, and it is absolutely delightful the first time you manage to employ the perfect timing with a shield-block and are rewarded by absolutely twatting the opponent in the face. I am utterly, completely convinced that as a pure gameplay experience, Veilguard is hands down the best game in the series and just genuinely, actually fun to simply… play.

It also does a great job in differentiating the character classes by feel. My initial run was as a warrior, which felt suitably tanky, while still being able to dish out damage. Returning as a rogue, whose special attacks rely on the building of momentum (which is lost if you allow yourself to get hit) rather than a warrior's rage, changes how you react to combat. Suddenly, the dodge button is my best friend, rather than the parry. Then again into mage, where I can throw up a barrier and then go long range with staff attacks that really knock the enemy's socks off, but I'm constrained by my mana pool and refill rate. What we don't see is the full differentiation within the subclasses—Inquisition had you choose if you would be sword and shield vs two-hander warrior, for instance. What we get instead is the ability to switch between the two subclasses at any point, even in combat. For warriors, that's hitting X to pull out your two-hander. For mages, dotting between the two-handed staff and the ability to barrier, vs. orb and dagger which allows close combat, stabbing and parrying, at the cost of no shield. For rogues, there's no explicit switch-between at all—at any point, you can right-click and start shooting with your bow, while your default dual-wielding weapons remain in play for close combat. You can optimise your build for the subclass you find yourself most wanting to play, but the flexibility remains at the touch of a button. There's a learning curve to each class that comes with how truly distinct they feel, but once you get into the groove, each one does feel genuinely worthwhile—and enormously fun—to play.

However. As I said above, this is not why I play Dragon Age games. It's great, don't get me wrong, and I hope future installments keep and develop this, because it is extremely well done and satisfying. Moment by moment, there was none of the frustration because I just didn't have the control to win a fight I was involved in, or that combat was just feeling repetitive and dull. I applaud it. But… it's nothing more than a nice bonus to me. The meat of my interest was always going to be elsewhere, in the plot and the characters. Which is where I found things getting a little unstuck.

Which is weird, because a lot of the promo going into Veilguard talked about how they knew fans wanted character focus, so that was going to be where they put their efforts, and they visibly have done that. It just hasn't quite achieved what I, at least, want out of it. To boil it down to fundamentals, Veilguard just feels safe in a way that none of the others have. While the setting and story may be extremely dark, the characters and their interactions, both with each other and with Rook, the protagonist, just lack bite. I don't necessarily even mean conflict, though that could work too. There's just quite a sameness and a safeness to how they all interact, that ignores the vast range of positions and opinions on the core topics of the game that we've seen throughout the previous iterations.

Which also manages to deny the difficulty inherent in some of the factions at play within the story. One of the companions you recruit is a member of the Antivan Crows. This was, I know, something a lot of fans were hoping for, and harks back to Zevran in Origins. But the thing is, Zevran's story is one full of conflict—his position within the Crows is a fraught one, and one that has left lasting and unpleasant marks on him that he details in conversations with the Warden. The Crows are absolutely not an uncontroversial good, in that story, or his story. Which… of course they're not! They're a band of assassins for hire. They literally kill people for a job. Of course they're going to be morally complex at best.

So why then, in Veilguard, are they uncontroversial good guy patriots protecting Treviso, and we're just… not going to examine anything else about them, or about Lucanis (the companion from that faction)'s position within them?

Just some good ol' fashioned patriots, no murders here no sir.

What's extra strange is that we do get this introspection a little bit, but directed only at the Grey Wardens, who took a big hit on the "doing dark shenanigans" front in Inquisition, so that doesn't feel like treading new ground. But it means they were thinking about it, at least to an extent; they just never felt the need to turn that lens onto the Crows. Huh.

And it's that kind of lack of thoughtfulness that makes the game really suffer. Everyone gets along, more or less (I'm not saying there's zero conflict, because that patently isn't true, but it never rises to the levels we've seen in any of the previous games), and no one really critiques the position other people come from, or their background, or engages with any of the longstanding, baked-in societal difficulties that we've seen portrayed in the world so far. For a game that very much centres the elves, their stories and their histories, Veilguard is very light on talking about the impacts the events of the game will have on elves throughout Thedas. There are a couple of specific bits of dialogue (one of which you only get in the literal final mission) that touch on it, but it's not core to the story, when it really really should be to give us that feeling of a real, complex world that has been a key part of the series up to now. This is not a game that could encompass, for instance, a Vivienne or a Sera, two characters whose positions within their factions and peoples in Inquistion are fonts of discussion, argument and interest. There's no Merrill, with a complex view of blood magic that runs contrary to the dominant game view. There's no Alistair or Cullen to give us an insight into a Templar viewpoint. There's barely any Templar involvement at all. Without characters occupying fraught or complex positions, or a voice speaking from the other side of the divide, we end up with fairly unknown and unconsidered bad guys (why are the Venatori up to what they're up to? We never really get to know), and a coherence of vibe from the companions that feels a bit weird at times. Yes, we're all saving the world, but so were we in Origins, and that never stopped Morrigan from bullying Alistair, did it?

To add to this, on the one hand, we get way more party banter than in previous games, and they've added a device where, in the central home hub, you sometimes go into rooms and just find two companions chatting, which is great. And yet… for how long of a game this is, it feels like you don't get proportionally as much romance content as the previous games have given, which is one of the core USPs that Bioware have always had. We jest that it's a dating sim with a fantasy RPG in the background, but… well. Personally, I have always enjoyed the romance content because it adds yet another layer to those deep characterisations. It's part of making these people seem whole and real. And when that gets skimped on? It adds to the same feeling that their lack of bite feeds into.

In other gripes, the early game dialogue is rough, as frankly is the early game plot. You can see the shape of a slightly different game, one with some sort of prologue that has been skipped over now, and so they have to funnel new players quickly into the fun, main bit with enough info to get them invested, while also keeping hold of old players who know all the lore. They have not managed it well. But that evens out once you get into the main substance of things.

There are also times when the whole thing feels a little too linear, a bit too trammelled into the singular shape of the story they want to tell, without the semblance of broad-reaching options that the other games have managed to convey.

But… for all that… there are some moments, some choices, that really do hit and hit good. One of them came out of absolutely nowhere for me and left me fully shooketh, and remains one of the emotional highpoints of my playing experience. The game tells you early that the choices you will make matter, and on the whole, when those choices come up, they very much do. I would, of course, always love more of them, but I'm aware this is a sticking point for many games just in terms of hours of time and dollars of money that go into every branch they make. Where Veilguard does it, I think they do it right.

They also give us some really solid lore drops that are of a great deal of interest to anyone who's played the previous games and is into that sort of thing, things that make you go "OOHHHHHHH" about things previously hinted, or overturn things you thought you knew, sometimes in really fun ways. Unfortunately, there are issues with it as well, generally, more about what's missing than what we see. This is a story that really does centre a bunch of elven stuff, and I would have liked to see more of… well, literally anything else in the world. The chantry and chantry opinion and politics barely figure, even though we touch on a number of really quite important religious issues. For the die-hard elf fans, there is bounty. For the rest of us… a bit of famine. It also, in this elven-centricity, stumbles a little bit into… and here it is hard to critique without treading too close to spoilers… I suppose into the issue of wanting to make things too simple. Too many questions boil down to the same answer, where a multiplicity was one of the things that has long made this a world worth playing in.

Also, for all the people with deeply held opinions about the character creator, long hair and clipping? They got you covered. Like, so much. Also body sliders, which I am quite pleased to see.

I do also have to come back to the point that… it's just gorgeous. They've gone back to DA2-style "strong, coherent visual design" and it works, but expanded out further and with better graphics and more time spent on the game to back it up. I mean, look at this shot from Arlathan and tell me it's not pretty:

Or not enjoy how atmospheric and utterly committed to the bit the Necropolis is:

Or appreciate the atmosphere of a blighted wasteland, full of relics of the past:

So all in all… it's rather a mixed bag.

On the whole, I enjoyed playing it. I had a great time, moment to moment, dedicated some days to an intense amount of gaming, gasped, laughed and felt sad at various appropriate moments, and just generally got into the spirit of things. But there was, when I looked back across it all, and especially when I compared it with the games that had come before, some little spark missing that made it truly magical. What I keep coming back to, more than anything, is that there is no single moment in Veilguard that comes even mildly close to doing what In Your Heart Shall Burn did in Inquisition—i.e. permanently rewrite my brain chemistry and steamroller me on an emotional level. I will never recover from that quest, and I thank Bioware for it. Veilguard… just could never. For all the fixes, for all the improvements, for all the better mechanics, better systems, better graphics, better character creator, they have failed to fully preserve the spirit of the previous games, the thing that made me love them beyond sense and measure. And it's hard not to be sad about that, even when what I've got is still, objectively, a good game.

Nonetheless… I am currently working on both my second and third playthroughs, which is not nothing.

If you're a die-hard Dragon Age fan or a complete newbie, I still think Veilguard is a game worth playing, for all the things it has done well. I hope it succeeds, and I hope the studio can continue to make games set in Thedas, taking on all the improvements they've made here, but one day maybe recapturing that little special something that just hasn't quite made it through here.

The Math

Highlights: absolutely gorgeous graphics, genuinely enjoyable mechanics, lore drops that really dig into some of the background questions fans have been pondering for years.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Moana 2

Sequelitis strikes back

The first shot of Moana 2 focuses on a hermit crab switching to a new shell. The metaphor is clear: you're about to watch a story about leaving your comfort zone and searching for a bigger home. After our heroine taught her people to sail again in her first movie, she now has to solve the reason for their isolation: a storm god, afraid of the heights humans can reach with cooperation, has sunk an island that served as meeting point for all the navigation routes. (How there can be an unskippable crossroads in open sea isn't addressed.) One of Moana's ancestors, a legendary leader, already tried to find the lost island and failed. If the scattered sea peoples don't reconnect, they'll die out in a few generations. Moana needs to gather a crew and her demigod friend Maui to raise the sunken island before…

Before what? What, exactly, is the threat here?

This is one of the most noticeable problems with the writing of Moana 2: an adventure story needs a sense of looming danger, and the one presented here unfolds on a scale of centuries. Moana could relax, train more sailors, recruit a bigger crew, and, you know, travel directly to the other islands instead of looking for a vanished one where nobody lives anyway. This artificial urgency may be an effect of translating into cinema what originally was intended to be a full season of TV. The first Moana movie had ticking-time-bomb stakes and a straightforward structure. This one shoves a massive, epic conflict between gods and mortals within a tight, crowded space.

Another of the consequences of turning a TV series into a movie is the loss of development for the supporting cast. Moana and Maui are joined by a shipbuilding engineer, a craftsman who records stories in woven cloth, and an old farmer whose unique contribution to the team is promised but not delivered. Whatever arcs they were going to have are reduced to learning to work together. These character concepts deserved more depth than they get.

While the animation effort was well spent in designing breathtaking landscapes and cool monsters, imagination seems to have been in short supply when it came to drawing people. Either that, or the shift to movie format reduced the available time for artists to devote the necessary care to each scene's emotional delivery. This movie is rated for kids, but you could play a drinking game for every time Moana makes this exact face:

To be fair, the plot makes valuable points about the civilizational dangers of isolationism and the advantages of intercultural competence. The character who weaves cloth can point the team to an important subquest thanks to an ability to read pictorial narratives. Moana realizes she's on the right track toward finding the other sea peoples because she unearthes a piece of ancient ceramic, which in the context of Pacific Islander culture, where most objects for everyday use are crafted from perishable plant materials, is a huge deal.

However, these achievements in storytelling get lost in the rhythm of events. Probably as another result of the change in format, this movie is left with a very strange pacing. The pivotal downer that ends the second act doesn't get enough time to breathe before it's overshadowed by a tonally dissonant song. A fascinating secondary antagonist gets a great costume and a banger song, but the hidden complexities of this character end up swept under the rug. In the climax scene, Maui suffers a major calamity that is almost immediately reversed. Moana 2 speeds through its beats as if ticking off a checklist, and the excitement that ought to linger after our heroine's daring adventures wears off as quickly as every other emotional moment in the story.

To complete the perfect storm against this movie, there's a live-action Moana planned for 2026, a convergence of Disney's frantic remake spree accelerating to an unsustainable pace and The Rock's meticulously curated self-mythologizing campaign reaching critical fission mass. The timing is inauspicious: the mid-credits scene of Moana 2 is an obvious tease for a sequel that may or may not matter under the shadow of the remake. I bet it's going to be hard for Disney to properly care for both projects at the same time, and it's conceivably going to be harder to do for viewers. The impression left by Moana 2 is that the studio didn't have a solid idea of what to do with it, and instead of committing to a TV series that could overlap with the remake, preferred to release it in one go just to get it over with.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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