Review: House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Tyrant Philosophers series continues in a new setting

War? What is it good for? For the Palleseen, it's absolutely everything. Converting the world to their materialistic and rationalistic philosophy by armed force means that, in order to fight effectively, they are willing to try a number of things to keep their armies effective, including a rather special medical unit. As the Palleseen fight against their opposite and equal number on the battlefield, the members of that medical unit find that the costs of war are higher than even they can imagine.

This is the story of Adrian Tchaikovsky's House of Open Wounds.

The first book in the series, City of Last Chances (reviewed by Roseanna here at NOAF) featured a rotating set of points of view, including Yasnic, a priest of a small god who has diminished so much that his name is just God, a peculiar god of healing. At the end of that book, he finally fell into the hands of the Palleseen conquerors. In House of Open Wounds, set sometime later, we find out what they decided to do with him. And that is to assign him to a medical unit, an experimental medical unit. After all, he is a priest of a god of Healing, right?

House of Open Wounds is the story of this medical unit and its characters, all broken in very strange ways. The metaphor I kept coming up with as we started to learn about the characters and slowly learn their stories is that this novel comes across as a mixture of M*A*S*H and Glen Cook's The Black Company. The hospital staff are all misfits, quirky, odd and weird. One might say, in the Pals parlance, that none of them are even near to be perfected. But since there is a war on, the Hospital unit is just barely tolerated (and the threat of its dissolution hangs over the unit throughout the book), and so the misfits of the hospital do the best they can in an endless cycle of war.

This book gives the spotlight to the relatively large cast of the hospital, as they find themselves in a number of locations and conflicts. They are not often in combat, but when that happens, it is a catastrophic and dangerous event, since even with some of the limited resources on hand, the hospital unit staff are not very effective fighters. But Tchaikovsky leaves the prospect of direct action only as a vague threat for much of the book (until he doesn't) and focuses the staff on the conflicts and considerations between each other, and with the rest of the army.

I've already mentioned Yasic (who finds himself with a new name to his chagrin, Maric Jack) but there are plenty of other memorable characters here, who conflict with each other, the army, the war and anything else. Banders, the most promoted (and subsequently demoted) soldier in the army. The Butcher himself, who is holding a very dark secret as to his alchemical skills and just why he is so good a surgeon. Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, who is a necromancer, who only gets new material if the Butcher and company cannot save someone. Cosserby, who can make golem-like servitors, but whose work is looked on with extreme suspicion by the powers that be. It's a whole set of misfits, and early on, Yasnic/Maric Jack (who is new to the unit) is introduced to all of them and what they do, cleverly giving us the essentials upon which the author then sets these characters into motion.

In other words, this would be a hell of an Apocalypse World-style game setting, with a bunch of misfits and castoffs, all of whom are keeping secrets (sometimes not even knowing that they HAVE a secret) and all of whom don't fit in with the rest of the army or with the world in general, all trying to get along with each other and with their lives, but the war keeps getting in the way.

This makes House of Open Wounds, for all of its interesting setting and worldbuilding, ultimately a very character-focused novel. This is not to say that Tchaikovsky's work has skimped on character before or that he hasn't had a good sense of characters in previous novels, but a lot of this novel is driven by putting these quirky, broken, unusual misfits in a pressure cooker (or an instant pot), turning it on, increasing the pressure, and watching what happens to them.

However, it's not all grim and humorless, just like M*A*S*H is a dark comedy. There is a lot of dark humor throughout, as one might expect. In addition to that, Tchaikovsky knows his pacing and timing, especially in a long novel, so there are definite rhythms to the war and its progress. An endless sequence of battles would wear down readers and characters alike, and so one of the most interesting worldbuilding bits and sequences in the entire book is when the hospital is sent to a distant front far away.

Given the time and logistics of doing so, the Pals use one of their incorporated people's magics to deploy flying islands for the purpose. Thus the hospital, and many others, are loaded onto a giant flying island and flown to the site of the new front. This gives a fair chunk of downtime away from the battle, and allows us to breathe and the characters to rest, and we get to see new and different sides to the characters when they aren't awaiting the conveyor belt of the results of war. It is not the climax of the book (the climax is rather interesting and different, and brings together some of the characters' secrets into a cohesive and satisfactory whole), but I think that it is its centerpiece, because it gives us a chance to really see these characters and think about the whole project of war and what they are doing and why. It is no surprise that when the island lands, Tchaikovsky plunges the hospital staff into an even worse conflict than when they left, and ramps us toward that finale.

It seems that whenever you are talking about epic military fantasy of this type, whether you will it or not, Malazan comes to sit at the table. Steven Erikson's Malazan books, with their devoted legion of fans that can be rather frightening in their passion, may well be the standard against which epic fantasy series are measured. Even 20 years after its initial release, I note that, for example, Subterranean Press is now in a third printing of Gardens of the Moon, the first in the series, at the high value, quality and cost that Subterranean Press editions fetch.

So how does this compare? If you are a reader of Malazan, you like your intense deep history worldbuilding, with strange gods, magic, morally grey characters, and military grade action and adventure. This novel is set in a military hospital, so our protagonists don't do a lot of fighting (when the war comes TO them, it's usually a disaster). But otherwise, there are a lot of parallels one could make here. The Pals and their rationalistic program of trying to convert the world to their philosophy, their logic of empire, will feel awfully familiar to Malazan fans. Characters like Banders, The Butcher and many of the others could be dropped into the Bridgeburners, or have the Pals fight the Malazans. The Seven Cities would definitely be in need of some correction in the Pals' eyes. There are definite differences in tone and style, and I personally think Tchaikovsky can write circles around Erikson, but people looking to scratch that "Malazan itch" (and given the sales and popularity, it is definitely there in the SFF community), House of Open Wounds is here for you.

This is the second book in the Tyrant Philosophers series, but aside from Yasnic/Maric Jack, God, and the common universe they are set in, it is a character sequel but not a full-on sequel to City of Last Chances. And like the rest of the characters, we get Yasnic/Maric Jack's backstory, as he tells it, in an abbreviated fashion but enough to make us understand him and his deal. This is all to say that, especially as these are chonky thick books and time is finite, if a character-focused story in a medical unit in a fantasy war really sounds like your jam, you could skip City of Last Chances and jump into this world here at House of Open Wounds. While Tchiakovsky is building and developing his world across books, you could start here if you really want.

House of Open Wounds, with its setting and selection of characters, does something untried and new in the epic fantasy genre, with his characteristic penchant for invention, worldbuilding and eminently devourable writing. It's rare for a writer to attempt, much less put out a high output and succeed at a wide variety of subgenres in SFF. However, House of Open Wounds continues to show that Adrian Tchaikovsky is definitely one of those writers.

Highlights:

• Strong character focused military fantasy set in a military hospital
• Excellent worldbuilding and depth
• Lots of dark and grim humour. 
• Fantastic cover art for this book and for the series as a whole.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. House of Open Wounds (Tyrant Philosophers Book 2) [Head of Zeus, 2023].

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

Microreview: Strange Darling

A wild ride of a thriller that will subvert every expectation you think you have—go in without knowing much. (Spoiler-free review)

What would happen if you crossed a Tarantino film with a Coen brothers movie—and threw in a little Longlegs?

You'd get Strange Darling. Honestly, this review was supposed to be about the new Crow movie, but that cinematic venture is currently sitting at 20%, and I got seriously dismayed about having to sit through what's apparently horrible.

I was led to Strange Darling by several of my favorite movie critics and podcasters calling it the surprise of the year, and one of the leading contenders for favorite-of-the-year even. This, coupled with a nigh unthinkable 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, changed my focus.

I went in blind on the trust of internet strangers that know more about movies than I do, and I was rewarded. (I love these types of movies, the out-of-nowhere flicks that fans beg viewers to go in as blind as possible. It happens so rarely in these days of endless Spidermen and spoiler-y sequels.)

It would be very easy to spoil Strange Darling, and that's why it's very important that you read as little as possible about it. I'm going to sell you on it, however, with as much bravura and insight as I can without giving anything away.

First off, it's a non-linear serial killer story that actually works. Usually, I detest out-of-sync narrative chapters because they tend to be lazy ways of spicing up a story. With Strange Darling, the non-linear sections are absolutely imperative to what, and when, and how we learn details about the plot. It makes you feel like the first time you watched Pulp Fiction or Memento, like you're a kid in a film class learning about the different ways stories are told.

The sound editing, production design, and acting are all superb—the two main leads aren't famous (yet) but ground the characters that we spend so much time with. It's gorgeously shot, and feels strangely out of time, despite the fact that the characters have cell phones.

This movie is gory and violent and scary, but there is enough comic relief and small moments of tension relief that it's not a complete sensory onslaught.

If you like horror/thrillers, you owe it to yourself to see this shot-on-35-mm gem in a theater with absolutely no expectations save for a good time.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8

Bonus: I haven't been able to stop thinking about the breakfast scene in Ed Begley Jr.'s farm house and probably never will.

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

Film review: Kalki 2898 AD

A clash of past against future, tyrants against gods, ambition against destiny

The latest blockbuster to come from epic Indian cinema, Kalki 2989 AD is India's most expensive film so far. Set in a far future beset by hunger, despotism and hopelessness, it follows a handful of improbable heroes struggling to bring about a new era of peace.

The background context for this film is the Kurukshetra War, a pivotal moment in epic Indian literature. According to the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata, two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fought each other brutally for eighteen days over control of the Kingdom of Hastinapura. Toward the end of the war, one formidable soldier allied with the Kauravas, Ashwatthama, upon seeing that his side was losing, hurled a weapon of divine might against princess Uttara, who was pregnant with the last surviving heir of the Pandavas. The hero Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, stopped the attack and cursed Ashwatthama to walk the earth for centuries.

The film takes these events and gives them a continuation in our far future. The opening credits, which consist of a digital animation of scenes from the Kurukshetra War, end in a close-up of a CGI shoot of grass that blends into an identical-looking, real shoot of grass. The meaning is clear: the realm of myth extends into the real world. In this future setting, the Kali Yuga, the cosmic era ruled by sin and perversion, is nearing its end, and the hero Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu, who will restore the world and put an end to evil, is about to be born. Unfortunately, the tyrant who controls the last surviving human city has a habit of kidnapping fertile women for horrific experiments to try and extend his own lifespan. It is one of those women who is carrying the foretold savior of humankind.

Kalki 2898 AD does a good job of explaining the basics of its massive lore, but for Western viewers it wouldn't hurt to brush up on their Hindu mythology. Much of the emotional impact of the plot (especially the return of Ashwatthama as an eight-foot-tall badass immortal) relies on the audience's assumed familiarity with and personal investment in Hindu eschatology. This is not like watching a movie about Hercules or Achilles, where we know the relevant myths but don't take them as historical fact. Rather, imagine if the plot of Left Behind happened in the setting of Mad Max, and, more importantly, imagine that you're a devoted believer. The tacit position of the film, and of its intended audience, is that the Mahabaratha narrates actual events that happened in real life. Whereas Western scriptwriters and directors will probably not feel any reverence for the Olympian gods, to a huge portion of the Indian population the Hindu gods are very real. Keep that in mind as you sit to watch.

Once the stakes are defined, the film becomes a series of frantic chase scenes between bad guys and good guys trying to snatch this desperate pregnant woman who never asked to occupy such an important position. Combat scenes are a mixed bag: while Ashwatthama (now tasked with protecting Kalki's mother until he can be born) commands every scene he appears in with his imposing presence and impeccable acting (no surprise there, since he's played by cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan), his sometimes rival, a bounty hunter named Bhairava, is comparably strong, but the visual effects used in his fighting moves are too obviously fake. Nameless mooks get smashed against the walls like bowling pins, making Bhairava's battles (even the all-important one at the end) look more comical than awesome.

Visual effects in general are a problem with this film. Landscape shots look impressive, but the objects moving in the foreground seem copied and pasted from a stock photo archive. Together with the Zack Snyder-style yellowish tint that was applied all over the film, the disorienting editing between sequences and even within the same scene, the ill-advised use of fast motion for dramatic effect, and the cringeworthy sense of humor, these moviemaking choices rob Kalki 2898 AD of the majestic aura it wants to claim.

Your enjoyment of the protagonist, bounty hunter Bhairava, will depend on how much patience you have for the lovable rogue archetype. Take Han Solo, but replace Chewbacca with KITT from Knight Rider, and you'll get the idea. It's interesting that Bhairava starts the movie in opposition to the aims of divine prophecy, but gradually becomes an antiheroic figure who fights the villains for selfish reasons. Alas, the rest of the cast isn't fleshed out at all. The expectant mother of the god Vishnu is treated as a standard-issue damsel in distress; the generic mid-level commander who persecutes our heroes is stuck in the role of generic mid-level commander; the supporting heroes are an interchangeable collection of cool gadgets and catchphrases; and the minor villains are disposable meat. That's a common problem with plots built on prophecy: characters don't need to grow, because victory is already written in stone.

This film is the first entry in a planned Kalki Cinematic Universe that has already produced a prequel series. Accordingly, Kalki 2898 AD ends in a cliffhanger that renders much of its plot moot. In a discouraging imitation of Hollywood's worst habits, the film even has a post-credits scene that teases a bigger battle with the final boss. It's clear that the producers want to go big with this, but the studio needs to hire better scriptwriters, and the visual effects aren't yet at a level capable of delivering a spectacle deserving of awe.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Cool Books I Read While I Was Too Overwhelmed To Review

You want reviews? I've got reviews! Small ones!

Back in February, I rounded up some recent-ish books that I received review copies of, and read, but couldn't find the time or headspace to review at the time. Well, surprise! There were more books that I still hadn't got around to reviewing! This is the second round of clearing the decks for me, inspired in no small part by all the great reviewers and creators I got to hang out with at Glasgow Worldcon. Let's get back into it:

The Last Hero by Linden A. Lewis wraps up the trilogy that began with The First Sister, and it's a book that particularly deserves attention for anyone looking for more books in the vein of Emily Tesh's Hugo winning Some Desperate Glory. While Lewis' trilogy doesn't have that book's 90 degree plot swerves, it offers a much deeper look at what radicalisation and deprogramming look like when the bullets are actually flying, and we get to watch the young protagonists from across different factions—the fundamentalist Geans, the caste-based Icarii and the marginalised Asters—grapple with what is expected of them within their respective systems, and the price of trying to overthrow them. Add in some great bits of worldbuilding and a hefty dose of character gender feelings, and you've got a trilogy well worth checking out.

The Bone Shard War by Andrea Stewart also closes out a trilogy (the Drowning Empire) about exploitation and the cost of change, and especially grapples with the question of who ends up on top when said exploitative system is overthrown. It is also, deliciously, about earnest but silly youths in love, who are being kept apart and even forced into betrayals! At this end of the Drowning Empire, the brutally high cost of bone shard magic isn't as viscerally present, and that feels like a bit of a loss despite the emergence of new magics and the rediscovery of how this world functions, and (relatedly) what those cute animal companions that the main characters picked up have been about this whole time. While it has its ups and downs, this is a cool trilogy by an author I hope to see even better things from in future.

Book three, but not a series ender, The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu is part of the Edinburgh Nights series, and while I'll forgive this year's Hugo voters for not putting it on the best series ballot, my patience on that front is not endless (nor will the series be). These books are the chronicles of Ropa Moyo, a highly motivated Zimbabwean-Scottish teenager who is offered entry to a prestigious occult library... as an unpaid intern. This time, Ropa's aspirations and hustle come fully up against the barriers placed in her way, and this series does a great job of showing how institutional racism and classism are perpetuated not just by bigots in the institution, but by people who limit their allyship or try to offer "meritocratic" entry points rather than fighting the corner for marginalised people. It's an interesting shift for Ropa—who, to this point, has been a bit naive about her circumstances and whether she can just push through them—and it makes me even more eager to see what book 4 brings.

System Collapse by Martha Wells. The second Murderbot novel feels structurally closer to the novellas than the previous Murderbot novel, and at this point the recommendation is "if you like Murderbot, you'll like this Murderbot." Unlike the rather static-feeling Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse does push things onwards from Network Effect in an interesting way, both literally (conflict de-escalation through documentaries!) and in Murderbot's character development and how it narrates its story. We quickly learn that Murderbot is not working at full capacity, and that it is keeping something from us about how this happened, and while the reader is used to the quirks and selectiveness of Murderbot's narration, this withheld information immediately puts the reader off balance, adding an extra layer of tension to both the conflicts and the crew relationships that are both staples of this series. Of course Murderbot and friends save the day with the power of love and justice—not that Murderbot itself puts it quite that way.

The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan wasn't a Subjective Chaos Award winner this year, but it was an interesting addition to a stacked ballot. This mosaic novel, centred around a future Bangalore now known as Apex City, shows us the ins and outs of a society where citizens are constantly tested against the "Bell Curve". The city's residents are constantly striving - through conspicuous displays of capitalist productivity - to be promoted to the super-privileged ten percent, and to avoid deportation outside the city to join the "Analogs", who are treated as sub-human and denied basic ameneties by a city that nevertheless relies on them for its continuation. Through the novel, we see both confident Virtuals and those barely clinging on inside the system, as new technologies create further alienation; we also see, though not with as much depth as I would like, the way in which Analogs are organising themselves to resist and overthrow their oppressors. It didn't add up as well as I wanted it to, but there's a lot going on here for readers to enjoy, especially if you like Black Mirror-esque technological absurdities and the overthrow of transparent dystopias.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee was just beneath the Hugo finalist cut-off this year, and it's a very well-crafted fantasy novella: Ester's story has a strong thread of revenge, but there's also more going on: her progressing in her vocation as a rukher to a roc named Zahra, the relationships she builds with her comrades (and her bird), and the strains of being part of a military campaign whose political and propaganda motives seem at odds with actually making the Kingdom safer. Untethered Sky does suffer from the "author of incredible thing (Green Bone Saga) goes on to write pretty good thing" but it works great. 

The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi is an incredible book, and somehow it's not on the Hugo longlist, but it is on the Ignyte novella shortlist so we can celebrate that recognition at least! The best thing about this story is its worldbuilding, which feels like it's come straight out of a fable: the protagonist comes from the "City of Lies," which has made the terrible bargain to cut the tongue out of every adult resident in return for an annual allocation of water from the Ajungo. This, of course, means that its residents can no longer tell their own story, and that their own history is now in the hands of their oppressors. When almost-13-year-old Tutu leaves the city in search of water to save his mother, he somehow avoids the disappearance that has befallen every other child who has left, and instead he finds out the truth behind the Ajungo's conquests and where his city falls within it. Amazing stuff.

Finally, Earth-space adventure Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod, fantasy adventure The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso, and mecha-YA Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee are all series openers which fall into the "fun, but probably not reading on" category for me—a category which I need to be more firm in maintaining, as the list of books gets bigger and my time on this Earth grows shorter (fatalistic? me?) I did enjoy MacLeod's speculation of near-future superpower blocs, especially the split between Anglophone death capitalism and optimistic-but-also-vaguely-sinister European socialism; and The Wolf of Oren-Yaro did not disappoint with its main character's Bitch Queen credentials, but had me shrugging at its relative cliffhanger ending rather than rushing to download the second book. Moonstorm, I am simply not the target audience for, and that's OK! I think this is a great contender for the Lodestar list, especially since books by authors who have also been nominated for adult SFF do very well there, and I hope that this story of giant robots, terrible empires, friendships, rivalries and betrayals IN SPACE finds each and every one of its people.

Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Bluesky at adrijjy.bsky.social.

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

The most charming, entertaining cold blanket to ever rain death on my joyful dream of space settlement

Cover design by Stephanie Ross; Cover art by Zach Weinersmith

Before Kelly and Zach Weinersmith released what would become a Hugo Award-winning Best Related Work, most people¹ only know of them through Zach Weinersmith’s webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I’ve been an avid fan of SMBC for years, charmed and impressed by its clever willingness to combine deep discussions of philosophy, robotics, mathematics, economics, religion, literature and linguistics with some pretty crude humor. And sex.² So I was naturally curious to see what would come out of a writing duo composed of Zach Weinersmith and the woman who was willing to live with him, Kelly Weinersmith.

And the answer is a darn good book! A City on Mars is a discussion of the scientific, ethical, and legal obstacles that stand in the way of actually building settlements on other planets, asteroids, moons, or space stations. Since reality is no fun, the Weinersmiths bear the unenviable task of breaking the news to us that, honestly, space settlement is probably not going to be feasible for a very, very long time. They don’t like it any more than we do. They say so in the introduction: they started out wanting to write this book buoyed by the enthusiasm engendered of burgeoning space tech industries. We’re so close! they thought. What are those last steps before we have a city on Mars?

And then they did the research, and discovered the full extent of the depressing Well Actually. And because they are killjoys (or perhaps because they already had the book deal), they decided to kill our joy too. But because they are not complete monsters, they do it delightfully, with sympathy and wit and a kindhearted touch that crushes all our hopes into stardust no less thoroughly for all the gentleness of their approach.

The book is organized according to the types of obstacles that need to be overcome. First, the Weinersmiths discuss the known biological complications of weeks or months in zero gravity, combined with the unknown—but, extrapolating from zero-g, probably non-trivial!—biological complications of long-term or permanent life in low gravity. There is an appropriate degree of poop-centered discussion, and due diligence given to the procreative act in space. Proposed technological ameliorations of various degrees of wackiness are laid out, of which a representative sample include 'sucking pants' (to encourage fluids to circulate more freely through the lower half of the body) and the 'snuggle tunnel' (to counteract Newton's third law, which complicates thrusting motions in zero-g). The broad takeaway is that, for a self-sustaining city with natural population growth (i.e., more births than deaths/departures), we would need to be able to gestate, birth, and raise children in lower-than-earth gravity; and given the known complications of reduced gravity on healthier-than-average, trained, consenting adults, it would be wildly unethical to impose such conditions on children.

Next, there is a discussion of where such a space settlement might be situated, with considerations not just of Mars, but also the moon, and space stations. We get some really fascinating discussions of the technology that would be needed to make such settlements airtight, including meditations on the convenience of lava tunnels and warnings about the dangers of regolith dust (very pointy particles). The broad takeaway here is that it would be so wildly expensive that there is no possible way that any degree of mining or resource exploitation from asteroids or planets could make it economically viable. Just because raw materials might be available in situ doesn’t mean they can be easily transformed into the resources needed to build and maintain a settlement, and transporting them back to Earth as an economic export isn’t any better. As the Weinersmiths put it, ‘It does you no good to know the asteroids are worth $700 trillion if it costs $700 trillion and ten cents to get them to market. After all, if you’re willing to just ignore the cost of acquisition, you’re really better off digging on Earth. Earth contains about 10^23 tons of iron. If we assume a value of $100 a ton, that’s roughly a bajillion zillion hojillion dollars’ worth of iron.’³

After a brief discussion of not-entirely-unsuccessful attempts at creating self-sustaining miniature biomes on Earth (in brief, the participants were not dead at the end of it), the Weinersmiths then move on to the less sciencey but equally important consideration of law. How does the philosophy of ownership work in space? (Latin figures here, as does John Locke.) How does public vs. private control work? How does international legal jurisdiction work? What laws are already in place? Are they adequate to govern settlements, and what would it take to change them? I found this absolutely fascinating—not least because so much of the discussion of space settlement focuses on the STEM-related challenges, while the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Jeff Goldblum turn out to have some important contributions.

The book concludes with an unnerving discussion that fans The Expanse are already familiar with: the ease of destroying a planet by chucking rocks at it from space. In brief: it’s very easy, and the more settlements in space we have—and especially the more contentious those settlement politics get (see: Humanities and Social Sciences)—the likelier it is to happen.

It’s rather a bleak picture. Space settlement is not going to solve any of the problems we have on Earth—not economic, not political, not philosophical. (There is no evidence that living in space grants any real novel perspective on life; post-space astronauts are as nutso as the rest of us. Also, they always lie on their psych exams.) And certainly it won't be any kind of solution to climate problems. Any environment off Earth is going to be wildly worse to live in than the most horrible worst-case climate disaster we can imagine here. The Weinersmiths propose a very revealing litmus test: if you run around outside naked for ten minutes, will you be alive at the end of it? On Earth, no matter how climate-changed, the answer will usually be yes. Anywhere else, the answer will most definitely be no.

However, the book is so charmingly written that I didn’t feel bad taking my medicine. Zach Weinersmith contributes lots of entertaining illustrations, and both Weinersmiths have absolutely nailed the right tone here: Look, they say. We’re like you. We’re not experts (or, at least, Zach isn’t; Kelly Weinersmith is a member of the faculty in biosciences at Rice University), but we’re pretty smart, and we’re super interested in this. And we spent a lot of time doing the research and talking to the experts and going to the conferences and reading the histories, reports, and other primary sources. We know all the bits and bobs of space trivia that caught your attention in the first place, and we can tell you what actually happened, not just that Twitter thread that you shared.⁴ And we really, really wanted the answer to be more encouraging. But it’s just not. It sucks, dude. Sorry.

Yes, it does suck. But if someone had to shatter my dreams, I couldn’t have asked for them to be shattered more nicely. A very well-deserved Hugo.

1 Fine, okay, me! I’m most people! For the duration of this review I hold absolute power over words herein and the meanings thereof, and I so decree that my opinions of the world are, for the next 1200 words or so, shared by the majority of the rest of humanity.^↩
2 There is an awful lot of sex in SMBC, which I'm acutely aware of every time I consider whether some brilliantly erudite commentary on type vs. token phoneme frequency is appropriate to put on my office door.^↩
3 When I shared this gem of expository wit with my spouse, he responded severely, ‘That’s not the right number. It’s $10^25.’ My spouse is a mathematics teacher, and highly allergic to flights of fancy that neglect the basic tenets of scientific notation.^↩
4 The one about the 100 tampons being sent up with the first female astronaut? That wasn’t NASA dudes being clueless about menstruation. A female astronaut/doctor, Dr Rhea Seddon, was involved in making the decision. And the decision settled on 100 tampons because NASA’s approach to supplies was ‘take the absolute maximum amount you can imagine needing under any circumstances, double it, and then add 50%.’ Which is, y’know, not a terrible idea!^↩

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

• Buzzkill
  
• Killjoy
  
• Dream-crusher
• Full of fascinating facts about the challenges across sciences and humanities preventing us from settling space
• Cute illustrations
  

Reference: Weinersmith, Kelly and Weinersmith, Zach. A City on Mars [Particular Books, 2023].

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

Book Review: Point of Hopes by Lisa A. Barnett and Melissa Scott

The first in a series of city state fantasy novels set in a fascinating and diverse world, re-released after two decades.

Back in 2018, I coined the phrase “City-State Fantasy” in a review at Reactor in discussing Sam Hawke’s City of Lies. It’s a type of fantasy of medium states, set exclusively or almost exclusively in and around a city-state, which itself is a common location in fantasy. However, when the characters and the plot of a secondary world fantasy novel are inextricable from their city setting, and that city is itself a character, then you have city-state fantasy.

Point of Hopes, the first in a series of novels in the 1990’s by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, fits well in that tradition. In particular it follows a line that goes from the city of Tremontaine (as written by Ellen Kushner in her Riverside novels and stories, through Point of Hopes, and on to works like Silasta, the aforementioned City of Lies, or the many Maradaine novels of Marshall Ryan Maresca, or the Kithamar novels of Daniel Abraham). I had read Point of Hopes (but not its sequels) in the mid 1990s, and so this first volume was a re-read for me.

Point of Hopes is set in a world where the city of Astreaint is not an individual political entity, it is the capital of a kingdom. However. all of the action takes place within its borders (aside from one culminating excursion). Astreaint’s technology is in our terms in mid to late 16th century in terms of firearms--flintlock firearms are just starting to replace wheellock firearms. Other technology we see seems to be in keeping with the period except for one thing that is definitely ahead of the curve, and that is clocks.

Astreaint, you see, and the entire world from what we can tell, is obsessed with keeping time, and the precise knowing of the hour is important. Why? Well, because in this world, magic most definitely exists, and more importantly, astrology here is both a magic and a science, and the stars most definitely affect one’s proclivities and strengths. It is made clear that the stars and one’s astrology are not *destiny* but they are a strong factor that cannot and should not be discounted in considering things like one’s occupation or career. So, knowing when you were born, as accurately as possible, is something that is rather important to the people in the world of Astreaint.

Oh, and there is one interesting bit, not used as much as it might be in this novel. And that is the world of Astreaint has two suns. There is a regular sun and a “winter sun” and it is clear that the orbital dynamics of the solar system are rather interesting (assuming this is a Copernican model of the universe, not at all certain of that!). I found myself imagining the lighting challenges of photography and graphic arts in capturing images in this world.

There are other forms of magic which are studied and practiced in Astreaint, too, particularly necromancy. The form of necromancy we get in the Point of Hopes universe is speaking with the spirits of the dead, that is to say, ghosts. The necromancer we meet in the story, a secondary character, becomes important less because of his skill in this area, and more in his more general skill as a sorcerer in general.

Our two main characters, our point of view characters who are on a slow burn romance (that will not bear fruit until later books) are an interesting mismatched pair. Nicolas Rathe is our street smart, from the streets pointsman (police man) who knows all the criminals and knows his beat rather well. He walks the mean streets of Astreaint, and, in contrast to many of his counterparts and fellow members on the force, is honest and doesn’t take bribes. On the other hand, he does have a friendship with a Wilson Fisk like character, Caiazzo. Caiazzo definitely is a crime lord but also has a lot of legitimate businesses.

Philip Eslingen is a soldier who has just finished a stint in a mercenary company for a rival nation, looking to bide his time and find some side work in Astreaint until, possibly, campaigning season starts again and he can pick up the trade of war once more. He’s good at fighting and relatively honest, and a pretty solid shot with his guns. He is a foreigner, however, and is used to show the prejudice the residents of Astreaint can have against Leaguers like him (the two nations fought a war recently, and even if there is trade between them).

These two meet as the city propels itself toward its annual fair, a celebration that this year is tainted and under threat, and forces Rathe and Eslingen into an uneasy but slow burning partnership and friendship.

The actual main plot, once we get the city and its nature and the nature of this world under its feet, is a mystery: many children are disappearing, more than be accounted for in the usual set of young people running away from their guild positions, or running to join mercenary companies, or trading caravans, or the like. How and why the children are disappearing does in fact, as you might expect, ties in directly to the astrology of the setting, but who and what and why I will leave for you to discover.

I will point out that the book is a slow burn in far more than just the romance. The plotting of the book is distinctly sedate if not slow. This gives us a lot of time to soak in and get to know Eslingen and Rathe and the characters around them rather well, as well as the world that they inhabit, before we get the plot in full motion. This may be a slight weakness to readers with modern sensibilities who want more crackle and pop and forward momentum from the get go. We get to meet a lot of characters, set up a lot of situations and take time in getting things together. The sheer legwork a pointsman has to do in finding that there IS a problem and that it is worse than anyone suspects does consume a fair amount of the book. It does give us through Rathe an opportunity to meet a variety of characters and see a variety of areas of the city, not just in his district (point), the titular Point of Hopes. It goes to, perhaps to a fault, to my thesis about city state fantasy making the city a character in and of itself. Astreaint definitely is definitely described in detail as the novel progresses. But it may take too long for modern readers.

Aside from that, however, I think the book has aged rather well. I did recall the incident that is depicted on the old cover of the book quite well (and rather disappointed, however, to learn that they were distinctly far more minor characters in the overall scheme of things than I had realized.). The casual accepted queerness of the novel’s setting is something I had not recalled in the earlier reading, but here, it is clear that Astreaint is close to what we would call queernorm, with one of the main characters possibly bisexual. No one makes any hay or deal out of it. Also, the role and positions of women in the world of Astreaint are strong and equal to men. The monarch is a queen, we come across many important members of the community as being women, including members and leaders of the Points themselves.

In fact, Point of Hopes makes it clear you can take an early Renaissance setting, not quite a analog of our own world, and improve on it by making it queer friendly, and balanced in terms of the roles and social power and position of women and men in society. This is a lesson that Point of Hopes got right three decades ago. And gets it right today, now that it is widely available again.

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Highlights:

• Strong sense of place and location
• Queer and diverse world
• A successful relaunch of a fantasy classic 

Reference: Barnett, Lisa and Scott, Melissa, Point of Hopes, [Queen of Swords Press re-release, 2024]

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

Book Review: Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts

A structurally clever tripartite trio of space mysteries, whose culprit is known from the start without giving anything away

Cover design & illustration by Blacksheep Design

 

Adam Roberts has been on my radar for several years, now, due to his striking way with words. He’s got several blogs, one of which is mostly siloed off for reviewing SFF in an entertaining and quirky way (his discussion of Ad Astra springs to mind). He also is a dab hand at a sonnet, and has done more than one take on Ozymandias (as so many people in my internet circle seem to have done). So it’s clearly high time for me to move from sipping his literary contributions to the internet, into a big slurping quaff of his long-form fiction.

Jack Glass is, as I rather expected it would be, extremely clever. However, I was rather disappointed with several character elements. I don't usually mention flaws first, but if I get started on what this book does well I'm going to forget about them entirely. Indeed, I'm writing this paragraph last, because I thought I'd finished this review and then remembered, 'oh. . .  right' and had to go back in! So: if you like character work, you might be disappointed by this.One character is present through 2/3 of the book and yet never really does anything to justify her presence, until a very tropey reveal at the end that felt quite lazy. A different pair of characters enjoyed a relationship development was set up with a stronger foundation throughout the book, but still felt icky and wrong and weird in a way that left a bad taste in my mouth.

But! If you like structural cleverness--and, better yet, cleverness that isn't in any way smug--this book is a great ride. The structural gimmick is foundationally tripartite. The plot proceeds in three parts; each part is a whodunit, or a locked room mystery, or a prison escape. Or—as the prologue makes clear—all three at once. And, to give us even more of a head start, the whodunit is always known from the start: Titular Jack Glass is responsible for the central murder(s) in each part, in one way or another. The fun is in seeing all the bits come together.

The development of this structural conceit is, on reflection, extremely skillfully done, especially because the form of the different plot archetypes varies in overtness. In the first part, all three are easily identifiable. Jack Glass (or Jac, as he’s known in this portion), has been captured, tried, and sentenced to an 11-year prison sentence (prison story: check). The nature of this prison sentence reveals a lot about the dystopian economics of humanity’s far-future in our solar system. Humans have taken to the stars, but their existence there depends on a combination of three things: raw materials, energy, and labor. Raw materials are scarce---Earth’s exhausted, and harvesting them from asteroids is expensive. Energy is scarce and also expensive. But labor! Labor is cheap and ubiquitous. People keep on multiplying; there is no end to them; and they are always desperate. So if you want to do something cheaply, you don’t throw technology at it; you don’t throw robots at it. Technology and robots require resources: raw materials and energy. No, it’s cheaper to throw people at the job. In this timeline, AI is never going to take our jobs. Worse, the power structures are such that the vast, struggling population will be too constrained by the difficulty of not dying in space to have much hope of any sort of successful revolution or restructuring of governance. Not unless something pretty big changes . . . (hold that thought).

So: developers contract out prison labour, seal them in an asteroid (locked room: check), and come back in 11 years to see if the prisoners have managed to terraform it into a living habitat that can be sold to wealthy people who want a second home. If the prisoners have died, oh well, darn, there are plenty more where they came from. If they survive, great! Set them free, sentence served, and sell the asteroid for money. These circumstances are stressful, to put it mildly, and our small group of 7 prisoners do not deal well with the stress. Things go about as you might expect. There is conflict., bullying, madness, and eventually murder. I should mention that there is also desultory sexual assault which is treated not as a source of trauma so much as a disagreeable but unavoidable circumstance to be endured. The eventual culmination, in which Jac does indeed escape, leaving only dead bodies behind him is---no, settle down, relax, this is not a spoiler. We’re told right at the start that he’s the one whodunit (check). Anyway, even though I knew in principle what was coming, I still yelled out in horrified delight when I saw how the details worked out. I’m not entirely sure that that anatomy would work in the way described, but I also didn’t really care.

The second part shifts its perspective to a young girl, Diana Argent, about to turn 16, and one of two heirs to an extremely high-up family, one of the top echelons of governing clans. Diana is very bright, adores murder mysteries, and is having a rough time at the moment, since she’s been forced to spend some time on Earth to become re-accustomed to Earth gravity. She finds this extremely trying, raised in zero-g as she has been, so she is naturally thrilled to discover a murder (whodunit: check) amongst the servants who have accompanied her to Earth, right in their own monitored living quarters (locked room: check). A murder of her very own to solve! What fun! It plays right into her specialty, which is understanding and reading the undercurrents of relationships and motivations among people.

Diana is accompanied by her older sister, Eva, whose interests are much more esoteric. Eva is working on her 7th PhD in astrophysics, which focuses on so-called ‘champagne supernovas’, or supernovas that are extremely rare, and involve stars exploding with much more energy than their mass would seem to allow. But Eva has a sense, an idea, a hunch, that somehow this seemingly dull murder, which is clearly the result of some tedious emotional conflict among the servants, is related to her work on champagne supernovas.

And—because it’s hardly a surprise when a hint like that is dropped—I can confirm that they are related, and Jack Glass is involved. I repeat: this is not a spoiler. We know this from the start. The fun is in seeing how it all comes together. In particular, it’s interesting to see how the three plot archetypes are realized in this part. The locked-room element of the mystery is straightforward. The whodunit is a smidge shifty, and requires a bit of squinting before you can satisfy yourself how it is that Jack is responsible. But the way in which this is a prison-plot is a substantially more nebulous. One interpretation is that all of Earth, with its unbearably oppressive gravity, is a prison that Diana can’t escape. Another interpretation might equate her responsibilities to family and governance with a type of prison Or perhaps you prefer to equate the biologically enforced inequities of this world (the servants are literally drugged to love their masters) as a prison of the soul. But there is yet another interpretation, which becomes particularly salient in the third part, which I think might be the intended one.

In the last bit, Diana has joined forces with Jack. Together they are looking into the idea that something pretty big will need to change if the solar system’s power structures are going to be rearranged. Whether that something is based on technology or on people is a matter of some debate, which ties back rather nicely into the economic theory presented to us in the first part, setting the scarcity of resources and energy against the ubiquity of labor. I can’t give any real details about the culmination of this part, though, because they build on the revelations in the second part. Suffice it to say that, again, the locked room archetype is straightforward, if whimiscally futuristic; the whodunnit holds no surprises; and here the nature of the prison is undeniably identifiable, even if it is buried under a bit of philosophical interpretation.

I’m sorry to be so cryptic, but I don’t believe in spoilers. And I promise, it’s harder on me than it is on you to behave in this way. It’s actually rather maddening, because I am dying to discuss it with someone! Ping me on mastodon---my profile details are at the bottom of this review---when you’ve read the book! Let’s chat!

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Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

•     Clever tripartite structure
  
•     Economic dystopia
  
•    Locked rooms, prison escapes, and whodunits
•  Weaker on the characters
  

Reference: Roberts, Adam, Jack Glass [Gollancz, 2012].

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

Alien: Romulus is OK, and that's not OK

After the... ahem, headscratchable choices in the Alien prequels, a course correction was supposed to do more than rehash the exact same original formula

Unwary team visits inadvisable place. Inadvisable place has toothy critters. Toothy critters munch on unwary team. Yummy! Final girl survives. The end.

I get that many viewers were disappointed in Prometheus and Covenant, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the bare minimum. Alien: Romulus, a film burdened by the masses' anxious expectation to finally see a good Alien movie for the first time in decades, but also burdened by the curse of being plotwise an inconsequential interquel, fulfills exactly what was required of it. The problem is that it doesn't do anything beyond that. The beats of a monster/slasher/space/survival adventure are followed to the letter, the supporting characters recite their lines one by one before dutifully becoming xenomorph chow, the topic of robot rights is addressed with less lip service than plausible deniability, and characterization is kept at just enough thickness above cardboard to prevent this film from being reclassified as stop-motion.

I'm not saying Romulus doesn't have its moments. There's nothing to complain about re: visual spectacle. The shots of the characters' spaceship moving around the falling station convey a good sense of relative positions and sizes, the mandatory explosions are dosed responsibly, the interior lighting matches the emotional tone of each scene, the background planetary rings are a gorgeous sight, and the xenomorphs look as threatening as they should (even though a real-life biologist can nitpick their tendency to pose dramatically as not believably predatorlike). For the ends of a people-eating monster movie that aims to reliably jump-scare you for two hours, Romulus does the job.

But we should be asking more of an Alien movie. The themes of nature refusing to be controlled by human ambition; the fear and uncertainty inherent in motherhood; the way workplace exploitation resembles predatory violence; the impersonal cruelty of corporate calculations; the horror of forced pregnancy; the open questions about robot morality; the symbolic mirroring between the classical Marxist analysis of people alienated from their production and the franchise's repeated image of victims alienated from their reproduction—all the key preoccupations that define the Alien series are present in Romulus at the level of mere allusion without development.

The closest that Romulus gets to an interesting exploration of the canonical themes of Alien is the subplot where the robot gets a temporary upgrade with another robot's knowledge and personality. The robots aren't useful to the xenomorph breeding strategy of incubating their young inside living hosts, but having another digital consciousness in your head, supplanting your motivations and controlling your choices, comes quite close. And yet, the resolution of this subplot goes nowhere. The robot has a Blue Screen of Death, the upgrade is uninstalled, and all is back to normal. What's that I hear you mutter in grumpy tones? Character growth? Never heard of it!

As I said, the strength of Romulus is in its spectacle. But even this is delivered unevenly. There's a wonderfully tense scene near the end with xenomorph blood floating in zero gravity, but it comes immediately after a very silly fight where an entire herd of supposedly deadly xenomorphs gets dispatched in quick succession à la whack-a-mole. Soon after that, we get the predictable arrival of Chekhov's fetus and another extended fight that feels superfluous in a movie that should have ended by that point. It's a repeat of other fights we've already seen in other Alien entries.

And that's the final sin of Romulus: it's too reverent. Just like the catastrophic misfire that was The Rise of Skywalker, the Alien franchise under Disney control is now overeager to please old fans of the original movies and apologize for the audacity of the recent ones. Visual and spoken callbacks are thrown at the viewer for the instant dopamine rush, regardless of whether they make sense in their new context. And that's without getting to the ghoulish recycling of a dead actor's face with a Mummy Returns level of care.

If we don't count Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (and by all means, let's not count it), Fede Álvarez is the first Alien director whose childhood coincided with the first Alien movies, and his attitude toward their legacy is noticeably deferential. Being a relatively younger director tasked with reviving a legendary franchise, it's understandable that he has created a cast of YA stock characters who venture into the ruins of the Nostromo expedition. As if to reinforce the point, what these newcomers find is the mess left by their predecessors' attempts to experiment with the alien.

Alien: Romulus is exactly the return to form that you demanded if you found Prometheus and Covenant blasphemous to the spirit of the franchise. But Romulus has mistaken returning to form with staying frozen inside a stasis pod.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

 A familiar, soothing balm for the soul (if the soul doesn't mind the odd bit of murder thrown in for good measure).

In every story I have read by T. Kingfisher, there is a character of a certain... well, character. She is invariably female, often older, not always the protagonist, and has about her a particular spirit that is immediately discerned - when you meet her, you know her in a heartbeat. Her situation, her backstory, her motivations may change book to book, but her fundamental substance is entirely similar, and if you had them all meet up in some sort of extra-narrative liminal space, they'd all get on like a house on fire and probably organise a trans-universe insurrection so nobody gets imperilled for the plot anymore.

In case it wasn't obvious, I love her, this character. I don't think I'd keep reading the books if I didn't, because she's so integral to all of them. But she is ubiquitous and... well... isn't this a problem? Doesn't that mean the books get a bit samey?

Which is what I want to talk about here, in regards to A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher's latest novel. But first, the boring bit - I should at least tell you what the book is about before I go on a wild tangent about her wider canon. The story follows two women, one, Cordelia, fourteen years old and desperately alone, abused and isolated by her mother; the other, Hester, middle aged and comfortable, living a wealthy life in the manor house of her loving if daft bachelor brother. They come into contact when Cordelia's mother, basically a professional mistress, decided that Hester's brother Samuel is a prime target for marriage and a comfortable life, from which she can set Cordelia up for success and her own advantageous betrothal. No one else in the story, save the hapless Samuel, wants this to happen and does their level best to thwart it at every turn, in spite of the quite present danger. Because Evangeline is a sorceress, and a powerful one at that, who can hold someone prisoner in their own body, turning them to her will while they watch, powerless.

It is a story about power and powerlessness, and suffering, and surviving. It's about helping those in need, recognising cruelty in the world, and the lengths people will go to in harming those around them when they get in the way of their wants and desires. And it focuses very intently on the experience of being the victim of that, using the titular sorcery to emphasise it for anyone at the back who may not have been listening the first time.

So yep, it's a jolly one...

Except, it's T. Kingfisher, so actually it kind of is, despite the murders, mutilations and intense emotional and physical abuse. 

And this is what we come back to in the familiarity of a T. Kingfisher fairytale story, and its likewise familiar characters. The moment we meet Hester, this book's designated no-nonsense woman, we know it's all going to be, approximately, ok in the end. She, like her many brethren (sistren?), is so solidly practical, so absolutely sensible, that she acts as anathema to all the crazy shit going on around her. Sure, someone's been stabbed in a melodramatic fashion, but Hester is going to be reasonable about it all. Stolid, even. It's hard to maintain horror in the face of such down-to-earth pragmatism as The Character always has.

And for me, this is the crux of what T. Kingfisher does so well in her fairytale-retelling-style books in particular - she uses the sense of the familiar, and the intensely mundane, as a contrast to the darkness and grimness that goes with certain types of story, butting up against horror as they do. I would not call them cosy fiction, because they are nothing of the sort, full of, variously, moulds and murderers and abusers. But there is comfort there nonetheless. If anything, the darkness allows the creation of the comfort because it gives The Character something to stand in contrast against - she is a source of security because she exists in opposition to the fantastical (and less fantastical) evils of the world. She says "no more", and rolls up her sleeves and tells them to get lost because she has stuff to be getting on with thankyouverymuch.

But, to come back to our question earlier, doesn't this risk them all running together and feeling samey? Yes. It absolutely does. And, sometimes, they rather do. I am reasonably sure I have mixed up some of what happens in Nettle and Bone, Thornhedge and The Seventh Bride, now that I've put them down and read other things in between. It's what has held me back from nominating those books for something like a Hugo Award - they hold themselves back from the greatest heights of memorable and thrilling and engaging and [insert positive adjectives here to suit], because they set themselves up, and set up the reader, to fit so neatly into so many expectations. But, on the flip side, they do what they do with that comfort and those expectations so incredibly well, that I will never stop seeking them out to read. The ceiling may be a little low, but the bar is very high and so very, very consistent. You know, when you pick one up, that you will receive the experience you expect, and enjoy it, be pulled along by it, be unable to put it down. Often, that is all I want.

For this particular installment, I think it also exists right at the top of the "fairytale retellings" tier of T. Kingfisher works, ahead of Nettle and Bone pretty clearly. The way it uses the magic within the setting to talk about abuse and manipulation is done extremely well, and the two viewpoint characters offer excellent foils for one another, without totally outshining the relatively large cast of secondary characters. There are genuinely chucklesome moments, some really quite horrifying imagery, unexpected geese and a slightly nonsense strategem to solve a problem. It is intensely well-crafted within the space it has set up for itself, even as that space constrains it.

If it has any flaw aside from that, it's perhaps its slightly dated attitude to men - one I am predominantly used to encountering amongst women Of A Certain Age. Most (not all, but most) of the men in the story are slightly daft, hapless but well-meaning lumps who must be directed around the plot by the competent women who hold little official power but clearly actually do everything because those silly men, couldn't possible organise anything could they? Got to let them think they're in charge, poor dears, but we'd be lost if they were actually doing the planning. On the face of it, of course, this is a mildly droll inversion of patriarchy, right? Haha hoho, isn't it funny that the women are actually the competent ones? But as soon as you examine it any more closely than that, it starts to feel a little... off. The implications that one can spin out of its assumptions aren't pleasant, and it has the same lumping-together-ness that is half of the problem of the good ol' fashioned misogyny, tying one's usefulness as a person to innate characteristics of sex. It's something I observe in people the age of... let's say my mother and upwards, and ends up being what traps them into endless life admin and the mothering of the grown ass men around them, while also being rather insulting and infantilising to the perfectly competent men who then aren't being trusted to boil and egg or put away their own socks.

But at the same time, I know, in real life, women who are like this, to a greater or lesser extent, and they are also women I am rather fond of, in spite of it all. They are women who have had to be competent in that way, because of the men who likely merited the inception of the attitude they have held onto. They just haven't quite seen that it's not everyone around them anymore. T. Kingfisher alone is not responsible for the state of shifting feminist attitudes to men, and I'd be rather unfair to pin that on her and her alone. It's just a little niggle, a vibe I see in the world and sigh a little inside to replicated in characters of whom I am also rather fond.

And so I can overlook it, for the sake of reliable comforts of the rest of the story, done with the characteristic wryness and dryness that makes her narrative voice an eternal delight. All the characters speak with their own voices (even if their accents, so to speak, are the same as the characters of her other works), and have enough about them to feel real and realised, and with genuine relationships binding them to each other, of friendship and more. The setting doesn't get anymore time than it needs, but enough to feel like a world this story and these people absolutely could exist within. All in all, it's very well put together, and retains the heart, the down-to-earth-despite-the-literal-magic core that I hope for and expect whenever I pick up one of T. Kingfisher's books. I will absolutely be rereading this in the future, on a day when I need something soothing for the soul, but with some real darkness in it to make the comfort all the more present.

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The Math

Highlights: the usual no-nonsense T. Kingfisher older woman character we know and love; funny and distinctive tone of voice to narrative and dialogue; well explored themes of abuse and manipulation

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call [Titan Books, 2024].

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

TV Review: Scavengers Reign

 Hopefully the move from Max to Netflix will help this fantastic series find a broader audience

Scavengers Reign is an animated sci-fi series (very much) for adults that sets up a great premise, then unfurls its surprises judiciously, dispenses its violence suddenly and shockingly, and episode-by-episode, earns its emotional pay-offs. 

When the colony ship Demeter is forced to crash land on the planet Vesta, the crew members rush into escape pods. But upon landing, they find themselves distributed across the planet’s surface, with no way to communicate with one another. With no way of knowing if any other crew members survived the crash, Azi and her robot Levi (a pair), Sam and Ursula (a pair), and Kamen (on his own) each make the decision to try to make their way back to the Demeter. Not only does it seem like the only way to survive and possibly get off of this planet, but there is also a shipload of colonists in cryosleep on board.

But the thing about Vesta is that it’s crawling with flora and fauna — and all of it, if it considers human space travelers at all, considers them food. Or worse…hosts.

Azi and Levi work well together, but when some spores get into Levi, the robot begins changing — and, profoundly. Where will this hyper-speed evolution end? Kamen, wracked with guilt over something that happened on the ship, and experiencing increasingly material hallucinations of his wife, makes a cuddly friend. But Kamen, blinded by these hallucinations, misses some…warning signs, let’s say. Sam, the oldest member of the crew, seems like he might hold Ursula back, until something about Vesta begins agreeing with his constitution. But when his ability and drive tips toward the superhuman, alarm bells begin ringing for Ursula.

And unbeknownst to any of them, the Demeter itself is facing challenges of its own. If any of the survivors manage to navigate this hostile planet and get back to the ship, what will they find when they get there?

When I was a kid, survival fiction had a big boom. I read books about kids stuck under houses, alone and bitten by rattlesnakes, stranded in the woods, stranded on a glacier, stranded on an island, you name it. My teachers characterized them as man vs. nature narratives, rather than man vs. man, or man vs. self. And they were everywhere. Gendered nouns aside, the dawning realization I had in the first episode of Scavengers Reign that this was a character vs. nature survival narrative dressed in sci-fi clothes got me very excited. But over the course of the 11 episodes, creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner find ingenious ways of developing cascades of character vs. character and character vs. self arcs that build upon one another and interweave with the overarching struggle against a planet that is both indifferent to the survivors and also stunningly lethal.

The writers also seem to have done their homework on Earth creatures that use unconventional camouflage or seemingly innocuous enticements to attract prey, because there is a stunning breadth of metaphorical tripwires present on Vesta, many of which the characters are able to navigate, but some they aren't. So each time a character experiences awe at seeing some magnificent offering of a brand new world, and when they feel drawn to it, the sense of dread that began around the edges of the viewer's experience creeps ever closer to the center of the frame.

Because when characters die in Scavengers Reign, it hurts. And each time it happens, that death has broader consequences that ripple out across the narrative. As Sam says, in a line that pretty much sums up the characters' experience of Vesta, "God damn this place."

On just a storytelling level, beyond the widening narrative that continues to bring surprises, the flashback structure deployed to various degrees throughout the different episodes parcels out information just as needed, giving the viewer crucial context when it is the most meaningful and feels the least like exposition. And lest I forget, the art and animation style is gorgeous.

I could spend a lot of time exploring the symbolism and metaphorical structures that weave in and out of this show, but that's not what this review is. Instead, this review is just to encourage folks to jump in and watch, because in the notes I made to myself while watching the series, the last thing I wrote feels like a good way to sum up my overall feelings about Scavenger's Reign:

This is extraordinary science fiction.

--

Highlights

• Compelling characters who reveal more of themselves as we spend more time with them
• Beautiful environments and creatures that evoke Studio Ghibli in many ways, and then bend and contort them into horrors
• A rich text that rewards re-watching and reconsidering the characters, their motivations, and their ability to accurately perceive their own situations at any given time

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by Vance K - cult film nerd, music guy, Emmy Award-winning producer/director, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together. 

Review: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

A fantastical future world of giant robots, broken AIs, and brutal societies

Sunai has a problem. A lot of problems, given his true nature and role in life. And his possible relationship with an expert in AI shrines and technology, Veyadi, is just one of those thorny problems. But in a world where broken artificial intelligences, giant mecha robots and repressive city states are what the Earth has got, Sunai is going to have to deal with his problems, and the new ones engendered by an expedition that might awaken yet another AI god into an already fractious and corrupted world of them...

This is the story of The Archive Undying from Emma Mieko Candon.

Imagine a world of artificial intelligences as veritable gods, but fallible gods. Gods that can be corrupted, destroyed, changed. A world of advanced technology and hardscrabble living by the humans in the midst of gods, broken gods, mecha, and much more. It’s a tapestry rich with potential for worldbuilding.

And indeed the worldbuilding is where this novel really shines. The world Candon creates here is unpleasant in many ways. An undefined amount of time in the future (but given the utter lack of references to anything resembling our present, it’s a long time to be sure), the world appears to be a set of city-states or small polities. Artificial intelligences, in various levels of corruption or disrepair, run these city-states. Most of the states, from the implications in the novel, are much like other brutal, oppressive, hostile places that have resorted to violent control because of dangers like fragmentary portions of AI and war machines: “fragtech.” The potential of finding valuable things in shrines and in the ruins and the dangerous world outside the city-states does draw the desperate and determined, but even right in the city-state itself, fragtech can appear, and strange half-controlled mecha like the Maw. In other words, this is not a safe world, and it provides a canvas to build story and characters upon.

Speaking of mecha: My exposure to mecha (in the form of anime and manga, anyway) has been limited, and so this chance to appreciate giant robots (powered by AI, by corrupted AI, by fragtech and so forth) might be slightly wasted on me as a reader. Nevertheless, even with my limited exposure to such things, the giant robots and the conflicts and pulse-pounding action beats enthused me as a reader. This novel could be thought of as “Come for the action with giant robots, stay for the thought-provoking ideas about artificial intelligence, sentience, the uses of technology, society, and a love story all in the bargain.” And did I mention AIs?

Now imagine a fragment of one of those AIs, one Sunai, who has wound up in the Wrong Bed with the Wrong Person. He’s had a hard life, especially given that he mostly hides his true nature (who wouldn’t in this world?). The Archive Undying imagines Sunai (our primary point of view)’s life struggling to survive and persist in a world that is fascinating and precarious (even given his nature, and perhaps especially so). At the bottom of all of that worldbuilding that I’ve discussed through most of this review is the story of Sunai, his relationship with Veyadi and how they try to navigate a relationship that probably shouldn’t work, can’t work, but matters of the heart are the thorniest and prickliest things in this future world that Candon creates.

I’ve used that metaphor of thorns and prickliness a couple of times and I want to emphasize that again in the context of the social relations in the novel. People in this world have pasts and presents and intersect with each other in sharp, pointed, multidimensional ways. And while both Sunai and Veyadi are our protagonists and are definitely sympathetic protagonists at that, both of them have agendas and multiple angles to them and what they do. Where the magic really happens is in Candon throwing both men together in this relationship. I could see in the hands of another writer their relationship blowing up and falling to pieces, but that is not the story she wants to tell. But she doesn’t make it easy in the least for either of them.

There is also a clever use of point of view in the novel, showing the author’s skill and subtlety in bringing across character and theme. In addition to the primary point of view and narrative thread, Candon deploys the second person effectively in two ways. First, in bringing us some of the backstory of Sunai, and how he wound up tangled up with Veyadi and the story that unfolds in the primary narrative. And second, it helps introduce a “hidden character” to the narrative whose nature, motives and goals becomes clear as the novel moves toward its final act.¹

It’s a rich and deeply interesting and immersive world that Candon has created. There are a couple of touchstones for me that came to mind. First up would be the world of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain. That novel imagines a future world that resonates somewhat with this one, with AIs running cities, the world outside quite dangerous to traverse, and a sense of populations bottled up with forces beyond their control in charge of them. That novel’s Kathmandu is a more pleasant place overall than the Harbor of this book, however. The Archive Undying turns the dystopian aspects of the far future setting a few notches up, and replaces myth and magic with the aforementioned mecha.

Also, I was put in mind of the Outside novels by Ada Hoffmann, which have AIs turning into gods and thus ruling the human population. That series has an interstellar feel to it, although the second novel in particular, The Fallen, mostly sticks to one broken planet, with a lot of dangers and leftovers for the humans to try and deal with even as gods and angels maneuver and scheme.

Overall, I found The Archive Undying richly and deeply detailed and a fascinating world and set of characters to visit. I do understand that more novels and stories are projected in this wildly inventive setting, and I look forward to reading them.

1. Maybe its just a recency effect, or just the luck of what I am reading, but I seem to be noticing more and more the careful and judicious use of second person tense in SFF recently. It’s never the only tense, and its use is as an added ingredient; load-bearing, but not the only thing going on. One thing that these stories seem to be exploring with the use of the second person is something that is implicit in every story that is not first person: Who is telling the story and what is their agenda and viewpoint? Second person has an intimacy in that someone is telling you what you are doing. Who that someone is (if the second person is done well) is incredibly important and can provide extra buttressing to the narrative. Candon manages that quite effectively here.

Highlights:

• Interesting AI theology and setup

• Fascinating use of point of view to engender intimacy in the narrative

• GIANT MECHA

Reference: Candon, Emma Mieko. The Archive Undying [Tordotcom, 2023].

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