Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

--

Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

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

Review: Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones

Hanuvar’s story continues as he meets new allies, enemies, and challenges

This, third in the series, is not the place to really start with his story (that would be Lord of a Shattered Land). Shadow of the Smoking Mountain continues the story of Hanuvar, Volani General trying to survive and help his scattered and enslaved people in the wake of the Dervan invasion. The Dervans are expy Romans, the Volani are the Carthaginians, and Hanuvar is the terror himself, Hannibal. The story of his life after Carthage fell in our timeline doesn’t get much interest except for real enthusiasts of the period, and it is not a happy one. Jones, in his secondary world, has given him a different, and so far happier, path. But not an easier one.

The book continues its structure of being a series of short stories about Hanuvar’s adventures and efforts to free the enslaved surviving Volani. In doing that, he gets tied up and wrapped up in all sorts of local situations. This world is a sword-and-sorcery reflection of our own, so gods, demons, strange beings, and dark magics are all real, and to be feared. Hanuvar knows about magic, and at points in the book poses as a worker of magic, but in the end he is a general, tactician and warrior. He knows of magic as a tool, and struggles against it, but he is no spell-slinging wizard.

The title will give you a clue as to the culmination of where the book and its characters are headed. Indeed, Hanuvar is going to find himself on the slopes of a mountain ready to go boom, but in classic sword-and-sorcery fashion, it’s going to be even worse than a simple catastrophic eruption. The story of Hanuvar finding that out, and who the real enemy is, and the struggle against them, are the meta-plots of the novel, overarching individual episodes. Another overarching plot is one he’s had since the first book: what happened to his daughter? As much as he is working to free all of the Volani, he is especially interested, passionate, about his daughter and her fate.

That is an advantage to the Hanuvar novels that counters the view that a number of people have about sword and sorcery as a genre. The idea that Conan is just a muscle-bound idiot hewing through life idiotically with no overall sense of connection to anyone or anything, or other sword-and-sorcery heroes having few or no ties, is a misperception that Hanuvar seems tailor-made to counter. Hanuvar wants to free his people, abstract but concrete, but he is also looking for his daughter, and sometimes makes a bad decision or three in order to further that goal. There is a slow-burn romance for Hanuvar in the novel as well. One of the stories breaks away from Hanuvar altogether and makes Antires (his biographer) the main character in a very fun change of pace, as we get to see what makes him really tick.

My favorite character, however, is the “Catwoman” of the book, and that is Aleria. We met her in a previous volume, but she really swoops into the narrative here on multiple occasions, and her dynamic with Hanuvar is some of the best character bits in the book. The classic “heroine of her own story” with her own goals and motivations, but she wouldn’t mind having Hanuvar as a partner, far from it. One wonders, given Jones’ erudition, if Aleria isn’t meant to invoke Valeria from the Conan story “Red Nails”. (and yes, the Conan the Barbarian movie, but that Valeria is quite different than the original character). Aleria is the kind of character that could be spun off on her own adventures in stories and novels, easily.

And that brings me to a topic that, as of the writing of this review, has been in the air again,and that is worldbuilding. The worldbuilding in the Hanuvar novels, including this one, try to walk the line between infodumping and having the reader sink or swim. Some of the footnotes in the text also do help in this regard, but some of those are as much about the interpretation of the text as anything. They are not Vancean/Pratchettian in their design and intent.¹ Jones works heavily on the expy model to get readers halfway to their understanding of their world, and leans into some simplifications to make things easier. As you know, Jane, the Romans defeated Carthage once and for all over a century before they became an Empire. They fought three wars against Carthage. But for simplification for the worldbuilding, the Dervans are already in the Principate, they fought only two wars against Volanus, et cetera. But the smoking Mountain of the title, Esuvia, is most definitely meant to be Vesuvius under another name. The Herrenes are most definitely the expy of the Greeks. A lot of the names Jones uses, as you can see, are close enough to rhyme with the real world particulars to help get the reader there.

For me, worldbuilding is best when it provides the imagination a space that seems larger than the events in the book itself. It feels grounded and complete enough that you can imagine, afterwards. This doesn’t mean I need or want an RPG manual “The GM’s Guide to Derva” but when I am reading, I am putting myself into the world and into the characters. I want to be able to feel the road beneath my feet, and imagine, what if Hanvuar took a left here, rather than a right, and plausibly have enough of the world to imagine it. I don’t need to know what the other side of the globe is like (although I wouldn’t mind) but for the purposes of the work, there is a trompe l’oeil that there is much more to the world than the road Hanuvar walks.

Shadow of a Smoking Mountain accomplishes all this for me, and so for me, is successful at worldbuilding.

¹Like previous books in the series, there are footnotes in the text. The book is presented as a reinterpretation of a previous text, the Hanuvid, with commentary. Jones is having his cake and eating it too basically presenting the story in this frame.

Highlights:

• World continues to be rich and engaging.
• Good use of characters both as point of view and secondary, to provide a tapestry of interaction
• Strong sword and sorcery writing

Reference: Jones, Howard Andrew. Shadow of the Smoking Mountain [Baen, 2024].

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

Review [Video Game]: Astro Bot by Team Asobi

A beautifully-written love letter to fans of 3D platformers and of the PlayStation legacy

While anticipation for Astro Bot flew under the radar following its announcement, its reception has soared. Team Asobi may be new to the scene (originally a subsidiary of the now-defunct Japan Studio), spinning off in 2021 to become a standalone team. But from the release of their three Astro Bot titles, you would think they've been at this forever. As the first official Astro Bot for the core console (Astro Bot Rescue Mission being a VR title, Astro’s Playroom; a free download for PS5 to show off the Dualsense controller), Team Asobi has created an indelible game that excites and delights. As someone who usually gets bored halfway through platforming games, I found Astro Bot struck the perfect balance. Let’s get into it.

The opening scene sees the adorable little Astro and crew traversing the cosmos, partying in their PlayStation 5-shaped spaceship when they are waylaid by a fiendish green alien in a UFO. The alien pries open the PlayStation 5 spaceship, steals the CPU, and spreads the rest of the components and fellow bots across multiple planets. The spaceship crash lands on a desert planet where the player is given control. This cutscene is succinct, sharp, and adorable. This can be said for the rest of the game as well. While there is a story, Astro Bot doesn't weigh you down with expository nonsense for longer than necessary. What little is there, cooky or not, makes sense within the context of the story they’re trying to tell.

Astro Bot is a treat for multiple senses. At first, Team Asobi treats your eyes and ears to the immaculate visuals and fantastic audio, then the haptic feedback hits and the sense of touch is activated. Anyone who played Astro’s Playroom knows what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t, Team Asobi are masters of the Dualsense controller’s haptics, making the game not only visual and auditory but tactile as well. Raindrops, clanking metal, tiny footsteps on glass, snow crunching underfoot, jumping off of a diving board into a pool, and so many other sensations are meticulously crafted and implemented into the game to add a third dimension to gameplay. The game feels satisfying. While the promise of the Dualsense has gone mostly underutilized throughout this generation, Astro Bot is the perfect example of what can be done with the tech, and how it elevates an already engrossing experience.

But let's get back to the visuals. Beautiful, simple, crisp. Astro Bot looks amazing on the PlayStation 5 from boot up and is maintained throughout. The game has a Pixar-like quality, and it is easily one of the best-looking games on the PS5. This extends to the visual effects as well. Water, snow, textures, and reflections all look fantastic. This is in no small part aided by the art direction and level design. From some of the more vibrant, cheery levels to the darker, more ominous ones, Astro Bot shines in the visuals department. For instance, the Creamy Canyon level is based on confections. The pastel-colored level reminds me of Easter but with ice cream sprinkles that can be kicked around (and felt with the controller). Other levels are more vibrantly saturated but are nonetheless visually balanced.

The sound design is fantastic. The soundtrack and sound effects both make this game pop. The sound is implemented into the level design, assisting players in finding hidden bots throughout the level (you can usually hear them struggling somewhere nearby (and yes, it’s adorable)) and in helping with the timing of obstacles. The music is easy to vibe to and fits whatever level it's in. But my favorite songs were the mash-ups with the PlayStation classic levels, which I will allow you to discover for yourself. I wouldn't put the music on the level of a Mario game, but it stands on its own. Astro’s personal sound effects were adorable and didn't grate on my nerves like a certain Italian plumber I know. His sound effects are robotic, charming, cute, and quirky, just like Astro himself.

But what does Astro have to do? What is the player tasked with? Well, you have two tasks; rescue your fellow bots, and collect the missing pieces of the spaceship. You accomplish this via 3D platforming: jumping, hovering, punching, grabbing, and through the use of special items. The levels are straightforward and show you what you need to do. Most levels have seven bots to rescue and three puzzle pieces to find (some special levels have fewer). A few levels have some cleverly placed portals to secret levels in another galaxy, so be on the lookout. It’s easy to tell when you’ve missed a bot or puzzle piece because you’ll be notified on the UI which bot you’ve gathered, so you can always go back and recollect. If you’re having trouble, each level (after you’ve completed it at least once) allows you to pay two hundred coins to unlock a little bird that will follow you around and sniff out missing bots and puzzle pieces (though it isn't necessary in most cases). Astro Bot’s gameplay is inspired by the greats of the genre, especially the 3D Mario games, and it’s all the better for it.

One of my favorite aspects of Astro Bot is the pacing. Each level is short, mostly around ten minutes, some are two minutes, but none much longer than ten (not counting the challenge levels). This makes the game easily digestible. With every AAA game being sixty to one hundred hours nowadays, it's difficult to feel like you’ve accomplished something after ten minutes of game time. Astro Bot manages to do so repeatedly, all the while ensuring the game feels fresh. Every vista feels new, and every level creates new challenges and allows the player to feel like they're making progress in a short time. Not to mention, they don't overuse the supplemental items in the game. For instance, there is a robot bulldog that boosts Astro forward with a lot of force, damaging anything (almost anything) in your path. It’s used in a few levels here and there, but not to the point of exhaustion. And that’s the same with everything else. On some levels, Team Asobi uses a mechanic once and never again, which is refreshing. In addition, boss battles aren't repeated over and over. They use unique mechanics, despite being rather forgiving (Astro usually dies in one hit; versus bosses, he gets three). Each boss is one and done, and it’s a wonderful thing. I have to reiterate how much I loved the pacing: Astro Bot’s mechanics never overstay their welcome.

I mentioned the challenge levels a bit earlier, and there are quite a few. Some do put you to the test (curse you, rubber ducky lava level!), but for the most part, the game as a whole is quite easy. Exceptionally enjoyable, but easy. Now, I know difficulty is relative, but this is my personal experience, and I feel like the game could benefit from just a bit more challenge outside of the challenge levels (of which I would have gladly accepted more). Not only this, but I feel like it could have been enjoyable to hide some of the bots a bit better (some are brilliantly hidden, but most are easy to spot). The aforementioned rubber ducky got a bit frustrating at times because of its inconsistency when aiming, but other than that, I can’t think of anything else negative to say about the game. It’s that good.

One of the most special things about Astro Bot is that it’s a love letter to PlayStation fans, and to a larger extent, people who have played games that have existed on their platforms. Fans of The Last of Us, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, and Parappa the Rappa will find Easter eggs here, but so too will fans of Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Yakuza. PlayStation has been around for over thirty years (and goodness knows what kind of mischief they’ve been up to recently), and the platform has been home to so many first and third-party games. Astro Bot shines a light on some of those IPs and does so in a humorous, heartwarming way. Also, this is probably the only place you'll see any attention given to the Bloodborne IP from a Sony studio (sorry, Bloodborne fans).

From the lovingly crafted levels to the intricate haptic feedback implementation, Astro Bot is an impressive title that, despite its ease, goes on to compete with the heavyweights of the industry. If you like inventive 3D platformers, if you like your non-speaking protagonist to endear and charm you, or if you like to run around with a robot-chicken-rocket strapped to your back propelling you upward to new heights, this is the game for you. If you are a fan of gaming, especially PlayStation, then this is a love letter for you folks. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. If you like your video games to make you smile in childlike glee, go pick up Astro Bot now.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9.5/10.

Bonus: +.5 for perfect pacing. +.5 for art direction. +.5 for tactile feedback. +.5 for endless charm.

Penalties: -1.5 for overall lack of challenge. -.5 for a few brief experimental levels that, while good, weren't as good as the rest.

Nerd Coefficient: 9.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: Gorse by Sam K. Horton

A deeply atmospheric tale set amidst the Cornish moors of the 18th century

Some books are heavy on plot, some on worldbuilding, some on character, some on vibe. Gorse, the debut novel of Cornish author Sam K. Horton, leads instead with atmosphere, and a sense of place so sharp it cuts.

Set in a small village in the moors in the late 18th century, this is a story that could be nowhere else but Cornwall. Every part of it, every word, every plant, every folkloric motif draws from its location, whether real or invented. It is a story full of flowers, trees and bogs, of smells on the air and weather, of sensation. Even after only a few pages it is a story that has deeply, thoroughly immersed you in its location, because that's where its magic is, and comes from... both in a metaphorical sense and a rather more literal one.

We follow Pel, the Keeper of the High Moor, a man charged with maintaining balance between the human world and the unseen world of the fey, along with his partially estranged ward Nancy. They both can see the spirits, sprites and fairies that infest the countryside, giving help and harm to the people around them, while remaining invisible to nearly all. They mediate, give charms and spells to those in need, bind things that threaten, and work to keep the world ticking over and in good order. But there are murders happening, sinister deaths that leave a burnt handprint on the victims' neck, and the vicar is starting to cast blame at those who he claims believe in devils. Tensions are high, and more and more people turn from the old traditions towards the church. The balance is no longer being maintained, and Pel's pride, his wounded ego, are holding him back from offering the help the village sorely needs. We watch as events unfold, as a promise of doom begins to build like storm clouds over this community, and the events that ensue.

Much like the sense of place, a lingering feeling of doom building up suffuses every page. It becomes very quickly apparent that Gorse is not a cheery novel, and that it takes its mode of fantasy from the old sort of folkloric tales, replete with death and vengeance, and bloody prices and sacrifices required for what is owed. This is not a story that glamorises magic, or the people who practice it, nor is it one where its magic can be systemised and categorised—there is nothing of D&D in this fantasy, only the raw stuff of old legends, where the logic of intuitive sense holds sway. It is a story about grim survival in the face of horrifying things, of forces beyond control except by those willing to pay the price. But it is also, very deeply, a story about people, and about a war between two ways of seeing the world, one that will allow peaceful co-existence, and another that demands no path but its own.

And that it does immensely well—the mythic quality of it all shines through on every page, and maintains a remarkably clear atmosphere throughout. But there is a catch to it. With that palpable doom, with the elevated tone of the mythic, comes distance. Horton's prose keeps its characters at arm's length, even when we are deeply invested in their point of view, in their feelings about a situation. We watch someone go through awful grief, and yet that grief fails to touch us, because the story always keeps us outside of the situation: an observer, not a passenger. It's a double-edged sword. Without this feeling of distance, without the dispassionate narrative voice, the story simply would not have the folkloric vibes it so painstakingly maintains. But that choice comes at a cost, and it is felt most painfully in moments of intense character emotion. It seems, in this story at least, you cannot have both.

And it is a shame, because both Nancy and Pel, as close as we get to them, are incredibly compelling characters to watch. They both have their burdens, their angers and their passions, and we see both of them go through some really quite emotive situations. But where another writer—a Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance—could twist this into sorrow that genuinely provokes tears, Horton never quite manages to stick the knife in, emotionally speaking, and it feels like a story that would merit it and feel the better for it. Sometimes, you—or at least I—like a good sweet sorrow type of story, where the sadness is so exquisitely crafted it is transformed into something wonderful and nearly addictive. There are moments here where I desperately wanted that. I saw a character reach that point, but because I felt kept outside of their mind, outside of their experience, I could never quite connect enough to them and what they were going through, what they were feeling, for the sorrow to hit just right. For Nancy, this means seeing someone—someone whose determination and goodness make her very easy to like—go through tragedy, heartbreak and rage, and not feel quite connected to it. Sad, frustrating, but still an arc whose narrative beats make sense to us, show us what sort of story it is. For Pel the struggle is greater, because he is such an interesting and difficult character. We spend much of the story watching his ego, his need for control, and his superiority get in the way of him making the right decisions, or indeed meaning he feels that he's the only one who can make those decisions, even when they impact the people around him. He's frankly insufferable at times, and it is very easy to sympathise with Nancy's irritation and fights with him. But we get glimmers, especially in moments of interaction with her, that there's a lot more going on under the surface with him. And because we are denied access to the fullness of his interiority, we are likewise denied an emotional connection to what drives him to be as he is, which makes the character so much less. I wanted, at so many points, to like him. We can see he is trying to do good, to help the world, to do his duty. But he gets himself in the way of his solutions so often that it would be rewarding to have access to the emotional narrative that drives all of that. As I say, we get glimmers. There are little moments that do give us pieces of it. It's enough that you know it's there. But just not quite enough to sink your teeth into.

There is, too, an issue with the tone of the book. The sense of incoming doom mentioned above is constant, from very early on, and it is increasingly easy to become numb to it. There's no narrative respite, so our capacity to appreciate the doom lessens as we grow accustomed. Had there been brief interludes—and they would only need to be brief—I think I would have appreciated that cold sense of impending disaster all the more, because it would keep biting me afresh.

But... both of these, problems though they might be, are also fitting. That doom, that detached tone, all feed into a coldness in the novel that is so absolutely fitting to both the story it is trying to tell and the place it is trying to evoke. Everything here comes back to place. You cannot escape it. To read it is to feel the chill of the wind and the rain, and I was intensely glad this was an autumn release, one I read just as the temperature here in the UK is taking a dip into chill, and I could hold a cup of tea close for comfort while reading. The brittle wintriness of the landscape of the Cornish moor escapes off the page and into the reader with ease.

And so too the folklore. Some of the aspects of the story were familiar to me—the giants Gog and Magog loom large (wahey) over English tales beyond just Cornwall, but some were either entirely new or close but not exactly the thing that I knew from my own upbringing elsewhere in England. At one point, Nancy sings:

See-saw, Margery Daw,

And here, I think, I know this one. But then she follows it with:

Sold her bed and lay on the straw.
Sold her bed and lay upon hay.
And Pisky came and carried her away.

Whereas the rhyme in my memory has her receiving only a penny a day for the slow speed of her work. But this is the traditional Cornish version, apparently. It is not English folklore, because folklore like this cannot be genericised in that way. It is tied to a place, and a place as experienced by one person, or one community, and it is the greatest strength of the story—this understanding that the magical and the mythic can be so intimately bound up in the living world, and thus to the particularities of a place.

We see occasional intrusions of myth from outside—though there are no coasts or mines on the moor here, buccas and spriggans visit—but those externalities are consciously rebuffed in favour of the people and magics of this place. Which is not to say it's a story where only those of a particular location are able to enact its magic, which is a less pleasant direction these types of stories can sometimes go in. Pel, we are told, journeyed here from elsewhere and became the Keeper because it was the way he could prove himself the best at what he did. People, it seems, do not need to be tied to their locations, just the magic—it is enough to know it, to make yourself familiar with it, in order to be able to wield it. I have more time for this as a thesis on folkloric magic. He brought some of where he came from with him, but blended it with the place he came, and so, even in a story that is so utterly rooted in a singular location, there is an understanding that these types of stories, these mythologies, have always been as transitory as the people who tell them.

Ultimately, I found it a successful book. I was willing to be carried away, to see with clear eyes a moor covered in gorse and heather, dotted with tors and the dangers of bog and marsh. I wanted to feel its wind and rain, and be a little afraid of its dangers along with the characters. And it achieves that atmosphere absolutely perfectly. Where it suffers is in the closer, more human work, and I am, ultimately, willing to forgive it that (even though it's often the thing I care most about in stories) because its delivery of atmosphere, of this bottling of a place and time, is so exquisite and unusual in its intensity. I don't think I've read anything quite like it in a number of years. It brings to mind perhaps, most clearly, Sarah Perry's work—the creeping winter chill of Melmoth or the open bleakness of The Essex Serpent. The landscape is different, but some of the intent is the same. And all three are books best savoured in the cold weather, with something warm to comfort you from them.

Highlights: atmosphere in heaps and spades, sadness and doom, intimate folklore and feeling of a specific place and time

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Horton, Sam K. Gorse [Solaris, 2024].

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

Review: Star Wars Outlaws

The first Star Wars open world video game is a beautifully designed treat for fans by developers that clearly love the universe, but the gameplay leaves a little to be desired. (Spoiler free)

As a long-time Star Wars gaming lover, I've been waiting for an open-world video game. Hell, I even bought a PlayStation 5 in anticipation of this release, putting my long-suffering PS4 to rest finally. And I enjoyed it! I did my first playthrough in about 25 hours, completing the main storyline. I've since restarted, and am giving myself time to really relax into the game. Like in many open worlds (I'm a huge fan of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Fallout 4), it takes time to learn, explore, and discover everything a game offers. And to be clear, Outlaws offers a lot—you just have to be willing to work for it.

The setup

You're Kay Vess, a loner thief from the gambling capital of the Empire, Canto Bight. After a job gone wrong, you're on the lam in a stolen space shuttle called the Trailblazer, and tagging along with you is your trusty sidekick, Nix, a creature that's like a cross between an axolotl and a cat. No matter anyone's take on this game, good or bad, they love Nix. We all love Nix. Nix is a damn saint.

He rides shotgun with you on your speeder, can grab weapons and pickpocket for you, push buttons behind energy shields to lower them, and any of a dozen other useful features throughout the game. He's not unlike the little droid companion in Jedi: Fallen Order.

Together, you land on the planet Toshara, where you fall in with a man name Jaylen Vrax, who's putting together a crew for a one-last-time kind of heist against a crimelord named Sliro. The first half of the game is gathering all of the different members (the muscle, the bomb expert, etc.) while the second concerns the actual pull-off of the heist itself. Think a Star Wars Ocean's 11, and you're close.

Throughout the game, you have tons of side quests on the various planets and moons: Cantonica, Toshara, Tatooine, Akiva, and Kijimi. Because you're dealing with all of the underworld elements and crime syndicates, you have the ability to get in good—or piss off—factions like Zerek Besh, the Hutts, Crimson Dawn, and more. There's lots of double-crossing and backstabbing, which makes for a fun, if at times complicated, story.

The gameplay

The first thing any Outlaws player will want to discuss—or hate on—is stealth. This game is not a shooter or a button masher; it's a stealth game. For those not expecting this, it can be kind of frustrating. But I keep coming back to a comment I saw on Reddit explaining this: you're a skinny sneak from Canto Bight, not a warrior or stormtrooper with small arms training. Once I really let that sink in, my perspective changed.

Kay has lots of Imperial compounds and gang-dens to infiltrate, and the stealth gameplay often requires you to not trigger alarms while sneaking around. Once you do, the level restarts, which can be annoying. Much has been said about the AI NPCs being inconsistent in terms of difficulty, but honestly I found several parts to be super challenging.

As a sneak, you have to do lots of slicing (the Star Wars word for hacking) and breaking into buildings. Slicing in this game is basically like playing Star Wars number Wordle: you have to rearrange numbers into the correct order. No real skill is required for this, and it gets repetitive pretty quick. The other way you gain access to doors is with your data spike, which you use by syncing up flashing lights to a trigger. Again, not terribly complicated, but I always liked these breaks in the game.

When you're not sneaking and shooting, there's lots of other activities to keep you busy on the planets. Flying into space is fun, and the space battles are entertaining, not unlike in Star Wars Squadrons.

Traveling in between the planets through hyperspace and approaching them reminds me of Mass Effect. Even in the vastness of space, there's so many little nuances that showcase the developers of Star Wars. When you jump to hyperspace, for example, you move both the joysticks forward simultaneously—you're truly "punching it" as Han would say.

There's also a very a robust Sabacc card game simulator that you can play frequently, and it's surprisingly fun and engaging. Sometimes I'd find myself just settling in for 30 minutes to play this card game with aliens and loving every second.

Spending time in our favorite universe

Honestly, a non-Star Wars fanatic probably won't love this game. The gameplay and story just isn't enough to really impress someone immensely. But if you do love Star Wars, and the thought of just roaming around the Jundland Wastes on your speeder bike appeals to you, you're in for a treat.

The maps are SO comprehensive and detailed, and it's clear that these developers put a lot of love into this game. Here are just a few of the little moments of joy (thanks to some breathtaking graphics) that made me smile—and keep making me smile, as I'm now 40 hours into this game and have no intention of stopping soon:

Petting a bantha at dusk outside Mos Eisley

Checking out a gonk droid sale on Toshara

Winning a game of Sabacc against a Rodian and two humans

Hanging out with some Jawas at night on Tatooine

If these things appeal to you, you'll probably enjoy this game. I wasn't blown away when I rushed through just the main storyline, but as I slow down and take my time, exploring every little bit because I'm a Star Wars super fan, I'm really loving it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The Substance

In order to sculpt yourself into your ideal form, how much are you willing to chip away?

For The Substance's lead role, a 50-year-old performer desperate to stay afloat in the ruthlessly sexist job market of show business, Demi Moore was the perfect casting choice, not only because of the parallels with real life (Moore's career has veered away from the dazzling spotlight she enjoyed in the '90s), but also because of the implicit irony in the fact that it takes a 60-year-old actress to portray Hollywood's idea of 50. To be clear, Moore is an exceptionally attractive 60-year-old, and her character's arc is valuable for reminding those of us of the homelier persuasion that not even a renowned star gifted with her breathtaking caliber of beauty is immune to the image insecurities that the patriarchy imposes on us all.

The Substance tells the story of Elisabeth, an Oscar-winning actress whose fame has faded over the years, a transition that the film represents with a brilliantly designed time-lapse of her slowly eroding star on the Walk of Fame. She hosts a morning fitness show à la Cindy Crawford, until she's fired by a pervy studio executive (played in gaudy extravagance by Dennis Quaid) who wants a younger face on the screen. In shock over the sudden news, Elisabeth gets distracted while driving and has a serious accident that she somehow survives unharmed. Here's where a certain strain of film criticism would propose the reading that Elisabeth actually dies in the accident and everything we see from that point on is her torment in the afterlife. I'm not a fan of that type of interpretation, because I find it facile and unconstructive, but in this case it may as well be true: what Elisabeth goes through after the accident is, in every sense, hell.

Before leaving the hospital, Elisabeth is approached by a suspiciously good-looking nurse who leads her to a clandestine treatment that promises to turn people into their best versions—and to make sure there's no confusion, here "best" means "pretty." The eponymous Substance is an injection that triggers cellular division at the most literal level: Elisabeth's body contorts and warps until it rips itself open, letting a young, stunning, smooth-skinned, perfectly shaped woman step out. This scene is painstaking in its deliberate gruesomeness, and it reminded me of the no less horrifying violence involved in real beauty treatments. Think for a moment about the butchering of the human form that routinely goes on in a plastic surgery clinic, and the idea of pushing an entire adult body out of your spine doesn't sound so far-fetched.

According to the instruction manual, the younger body can only survive for one week, sustained by daily injections extracted from the older body. Then the patient must switch back to inhabiting the older body for the next week, and the cycle restarts. So Elisabeth must alternate her life with her other self, who goes by the name Sue. Under this fresher, livelier persona, it takes no effort for the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Sue to get hired to replace Elisabeth as the new fitness instructor on TV and, while she's at it, to embark on a meteoric modeling career that puts her on every billboard and magazine cover. As Sue, Elisabeth can vicariously receive the adoration and popularity that she misses from her glory days, but the younger body still depends on the older one to stay alive. As long as she follows the instructions, nothing should go wrong. The complications arise when Sue gets a little too ambitious and starts trying to push Elisabeth out of the way.

All through the movie, we're reminded that Elisabeth and Sue are one person. The escalating insults, lesions and betrayals they inflict on each other are really self-insults, self-lesions, self-betrayals. This is the cleverest trick in The Substance: it takes the hidden toil of self-hatred that underlies extreme beauty regimens and makes it explicit.

The Substance wastes no time in making it clear that it has no interest in subtlety. Moviegoers are already aware of the economic and social subjugation of women by means of impossible beauty standards, and even the ghastly ordeal that Elisabeth endures in her quest to be valued again is only a few degrees removed from reality. A core component of this injustice, besides the basic sexism, is the distorting effect of fame: after decades in the spotlight, Elisabeth's psyche is at a state where she must earn nothing less than the fanatical adoration of the masses in order to fulfill the minimal human need of feeling respected.

In accordance with the intensity of stimulus that Elisabeth requires, The Substance is an unforgiving assault on the viewer's senses. The screen bursts wide with a parade of open wounds, rotten tissue, vomit, needles, guts, creaky joints, loose teeth, and assorted bodily fluids, each matched with the corresponding sound effect. The foley team had the daunting task to come up with a whole palette of variations on "squelch": we hear flesh being pierced, torn, stretched, crushed, munched on. The experience of watching The Substance is designed to bring the viewer as close as possible to suffering the same punishment Elisabeth goes through.

One can think of The Substance as an abomination stitched together from stolen organs: take the first act of Death Becomes Her, the second act of The Nutty Professor, and the third act of The Fly, paint it over with an emotional tone distilled from the psychological disintegration of Black Swan, and set it all on fire with the climax of Carrie. To sit down for this film is to gorge on a banquet of flaky skin and brittle bones and dripping pus. Once Elisabeth is at open war with Sue, the gore factor only goes higher and higher, and when you think the film has reached the edge of gruesome imagery it can dare to produce, it shatters that edge with the strength of interminable torrents of blood. You will only make it to the end of this film by being dragged into it as an unwilling officiant in its profane rite, because the tyranny of glamour and celebrity knows no limit with regard to the parts of humanity that it demands in sacrifice.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Microreview: The Last Movie Ever Made

At the end of the world, art may not save us, but it will prove that our lives meant something

One morning, every human being on the planet hears a voice in their head. It's not a hallucination: it's a public service announcement. The simulation that hosts our universe will be shut down in a few weeks. Be sure to say your goodbyes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To prevent mass chaos, the people running the simulation have dialed down our rebelliousness. They want none of that rage against the machine, thank you very much. We're expected to just go gentle into the night.

And yet, one man will spend his last days ensuring that his brief stay among the living will leave a mark. Our protagonist, Marshall, is a complete nobody. But in the face of eternal oblivion, that's what we all are. Regardless of his complete lack of talent, friends, or any redeeming qualities, he will stop at nothing to finally make the movie he left unfinished years ago. It's not a good movie, not even a good concept. But it's his movie. That it matters to him is enough. That hopeless scream against the void is the premise of the indie film The Last Movie Ever Made.

Now, to be clear, the fact that you're making sincere art doesn't automatically mark you as a good person. Marshall has learned the same narcissism he criticizes in his mother, and the way he gathers his moviemaking crew exposes the faults of character that have left his life stranded and directionless. He does acquire a more mature perspective about himself during the runtime of the film, but it's still an indictment of his person that it took the end of the world for him to begin that process.

Art is meant to be useless, if you go by Oscar Wilde's word. Nothing will change because of Marshall's movie existing. It won't convince the makers of the simulation to keep us alive. It won't buy our reality even one more day. When everything ends, so will art. So why bother?

The Last Movie Ever Made rejects that question. Its position is that it's precisely because we are limited and ephemeral that art is worth the effort. In fact, our finitude is what makes art valuable. It doesn't even matter that the beauty we create is doomed to fade away. It suffices to elevate the universe, to be a place where beauty once existed, as opposed to one that never had it.

It's a pity that the script doesn't maintain a firmer grasp of its own theme. The character of Marshall lacks consistency from one act to the next because the plot requires his immediate world to warp itself around his goals: one day, his ex-wife is angry at him for caring more about finishing his movie than about her recent family tragedy; a few days later, she happily stays for his sake and dismisses whatever her family supposedly meant to her. This muddles the film's earlier point about the lines that Marshall has crossed for his art. It's as if the fact that everyone will soon die rendered moot any consequences for repeated misbehavior on Marshall's part.

The film is made with almost the same simplicity with which Marshall makes his. The characters' situation already carries enough emotion without any need to punctuate it with fancy camera tricks, digital effects, or even a relevant soundtrack. This is a bare-bones production whose only ambition is to say what it means, and it succeeds at that.

In a possible parallel with the larger premise about a computer program coming to an end, the film's third act begins when Marshall's computer crashes and most of the scenes he's shot are lost. At that point in the story, it appears that his entire life's work has been for nothing. Even if he were to start again, he may not have enough time before the universe is shut down. There you have the human condition in a nutshell: We never know whether it makes sense to try, because none of us is promised there will be enough time.

So what does Marshall do? He tries again. Of course he tries again. Because that's what humans do when confronted with the absurd. Because, although no human effort can destroy death, art is the one human effort that death can't destroy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Salt-Black Tree by Lilith Saintcrow

The Dead God’s Heart (Spring’s Arcana) duology by Lilith Saintcrow conclues, as the daughter of a Goddess of Spring comes face to face with her own destiny and her mother’s dark desires

Nat Drozdova has come far from the little house in Queens she lived in with her ailing mother and her uncle. Sheltered all her life, dropped into a world of very American (and not so American) Gods, she’s more than halfway crossed the country on a quest to retrieve the magical artifact that might save her mother’s life... and kill her in the process. With a God of Thieves as her traveling companion, Nat’s journey continues as she comes to terms with what her mother truly wants... and what she wants, to say nothing of the other Powers very interested in the journey of the daughter of the Goddess of Spring.

The Salt-Black Tree by Lilith Saintcrow completes her story.

I covered Spring’s Arcana last year here on the blog, and if you want an introduction to the universe, I recommend you read that. Here I will confine myself to the new things, plot-, theme-, and character-wise that we get as we continue with Nat’s story.

Once again, we are mostly in Nat’s point of view, with the occasional break for a shorter chapter for Dmitri (the aforementioned God of Thieves). Having visited the Well, and gotten a piece of what she needs, their journey takes them (as you can see on the map) toward California, and much more on the quest to reunite the titular piece of Arcana. Nat goes to meet more of the Gods and Goddesses of America, all of whom show a greater and larger interest in Nat as it becomes obvious to everyone, including her, that as her Mother continues to die, and Nat gathers the Arcana, she is starting to come into her own power.

Really, the first book is a fish-out-of-water story as a very sheltered young woman learns some hard facts that the universe, her mother, and herself, are not quite what she imagined. In this novel, she has started to become more keyed into what and how things are done. There’s still a learning curve, but Nat’s evolution in this novel is more toward the very key choice she is forced to make at the titular Salt-Black Tree in Louisiana. It’s a long trip there, and not by a direct route. So, along the way, Nat runs into relatives, gets a vehicle of her own, starts to exercise her power as a Goddess of Spring to be, and much more.

Although what her mother intended for Nat was clear to the reader (if not Nat herself) in the first book, what her mother really wants becomes absolutely clear to Nat in the second book. The author is playing with powerful mythological themes and ideas, and very old ones, in the story of a Goddess of Spring wanting to hold on and rejuvenate, even if it means that her daughter must be sacrificed to do it. Given Nat’s sheltered life and the forced closeness that her mother has imposed on her, the fact that it is even a possibility that she would reject self-annihilation is a testament to the power of programming, gaslighting, and control. Everybody has family issues, and the Powers of Saintcrow’s universe are absolutely no different in that regard.

Readers who read the first book closely also will realize that Dmitri has hung over the narrative and not only as a helper, but as a threat to Nat all this time. There has been a real sense in the first book, and it is continued here in the second, that Dima (Dmitri) is protecting Nat only because he wants the heart she is seeking, and thus needs her alive... until he doesn’t. That conflict does resolve, but in a clever and paradigm-breaking way. Nat is stepping into a new world, but she isn’t (and doesn’t have to be) her mother.

Besides all that, the details on locations, minor characters, and the portrait of the United States and its Gods and Goddesses continues to be a feature. Nat gets to meet a whole variety of more Gods, pays another visit to the Hotel of the Gods known as Elysium, and gets to explore some more wonderful landscapes across the country. Although I read this in an ebook, I can imagine that if you wanted a road trip across a good stretch of the country, these two books would make fine companions, especially when interacting with real-life locations. (The town of Deadwood, in South Dakota, for example, makes an early appearance, as does Southern California, the 101 along the Pacific and more. I particularly enjoyed sections of the travel narrative that have overlapped with my own journeys and adventures. Recalling and seeing those landscapes through Nat’s eyes has been a treat. And of course the new places Nat visits just fuel and further my own endless wanderlust.

One skill Saintcrow has in her series fiction, and the Dead God’s Heart series is no exception, is to tell a complete story in such a way that I don’t feel like I need more (even given the open-ended ending), but she creates secondary characters and complete worlds that are an absolute pleasure to visit and I wouldn’t mind another book or two in this universe. Given relatively recent attention on a particular author’s behavior, I feel confident now that if I want to recommend a contemporary fantasy about deities in the modern world, instead of a certain famous book by that famous author, I would point them toward Lilith Saintcrow’s Dead God’s Heart duology. It’s dollars to donuts that the existence of the aforementioned book made these books more possible and palatable to the publisher. But you can just get in the car with Dima and Nat and take a road trip with them.

(One last note: If you look at the map at the beginning of the book, and trace the route Nat takes, pay attention to the symbol it creates. Food for thought, and a clue, too, as to theme and plot, and the ultimate fate of the protagonists.)

Highlights:

• Fascinating, esoteric, Hidden World
• Excellent writing, of characters and of locales, places and events
• Why can't we get a series out of THESE books?

Reference: Saintcrow, Lilith. The Salt Black Tree [Tor Books, 2023].

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

Film Review: Uglies

Meaningful messaging wrapped in predictable plotting

Decades ago, the television series The Twilight Zone presented an episode called “Eye of the Beholder” in which a disfigured woman gets a chance to have plastic surgery to become beautiful. Throughout the episode, we never fully see the faces of the characters until the very end. And, in traditional Twilight Zone form, there’s a twist in the reveal. Last year, the film Barbie gave us a thoughtful, poignant exploration of the pressure of unrealistic beauty standards that left women around the world cheering. The new Nexflix film Uglies is the latest story to tackle the concept of beauty. However, unlike its predecessors, the positive messaging in Uglies gets a bit tangled in the execution.

Uglies is based on Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 middle grade novel set in a future dystopian society where children are required to undergo cosmetic surgery to become beautiful (“Pretties”) when they turn sixteen. Until then, teens who have not yet had the surgery are called “Uglies.” Once the surgery occurs, the beautiful ones get to live in a perpetual frat party in the futuristically cool Pretty City (yes, that’s the name). How exactly does this help society? According to the backstory, the old world destroyed itself with overuse of fossil fuel, environmental pollution, and wars. Beautiful people had unfair advantages over ugly people and people had conflicts based on physical appearances. To solve this problem, everyone is made beautiful. This setup comes from the source material, but it’s confusing for appearance-based conflicts to be solved by making everyone look like the primary discriminators. Also, the racial and ethnic differences continue after the surgery, so it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to theoretically create peace by turning everyone into Balenciaga models. Of course, we eventually find out there is more to the surgery than just creating facial symmetry, and eventually the story slides into The Stepford Wives territory.

The film follows protagonist Tally Youngblood (Joey King) as she anxiously awaits her turn to become pretty while she attends the boarding school for Uglies. In flashbacks, we see her long-term, close friendship with her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), who is a few months older than her. The two promise to remain best friends for life, and Peris promises to visit her after his surgery. However, when the story opens, Peris has been transformed and now has cut off communications with Tally. Tally engages in low-stakes shenanigans, like sneaking into New Pretty City to see him, but on a return trip she encounters a new friend: Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an alternative, surgery-free community outside the city (called The Smokes), run by a mysterious leader called David. When Shay disappears, Tally gets caught up in the government’s search, led by the cruel and severe Dr. Calder (Laverne Cox), for David and the Smokes community.

Although the story has several departures from the novel, the film is entertaining in a low-stakes way. The special effects of the hover skateboarding are fun, and the visuals of the dystopian community and the gorgeous scenery of Tally’s journey to the Smokes is appealing. The acting from all the leads is solid and engaging throughout the film. The problem is the plot. There are so many incongruities that eventually they become distracting. For example, except for Peris, the appearance differences between the existing Uglies and the existing Pretties ranges from minimal to non-existent. Tally’s new bestie Shay is supermodel gorgeous despite being an “Ugly.” When Tally gets to the Smoke, outsiders David (Keith Powers) and his best friend Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos) look like they fell out of GQ. A few characters undergo the long-discussed surgery during the film. Again, with the exception of Peris, the big glow-up amounts to an anti-climactic addition of department store makeup and a quick trip to the salon for clip-ins. Anyone who understands the concept of mascara and lipliner will be rolling their eyes at the “change.” If this were a stage play, it would be understandable. But the unwillingness to take visual risks in a big-budget Netflix film is a little disappointing. The only character who stands out as particularly changed or uniquely “pretty” is Peris. Between the makeup and the special effects, he manages to look artificially chiseled, with razor-sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes, and a perpetual William Shatner in Star Trek glow about him. His visual is the best example of what creepy, out of control beauty would look like. The similarity in attractiveness between Pretties and Uglies may be an intentional choice in the film, perhaps designed to be an ironic social commentary on the relativism of beauty. If so, the premise of the story, that universal beauty eliminates societal problems, becomes irrelevant.

In addition to the lackluster visuals, the plot itself is problematic. David, who is a likeable classic hero/prophet/leader archetypal character, falls too suddenly in love with Tally, almost at first sight, and certainly too shortly after meeting her. The acting is fine, but the behavior is inconsistent with both David’s reputation as a sharp, elusive, pragmatist and with their short and relatively meaningless relationship. Tally’s character is also inconsistent. She is initially presented as inquisitive, rebellious, and fierce, but she is simultaneously whiny, cowardly, and indecisive. Teen emotions are complicated, but by the end of the film it was hard to take her character seriously. Joey King’s acting is solid and appealing, but some of the cliché lines she is forced to recite were eyeroll-worthy.

If you are expecting a Barbie-esque discourse into the superficiality of societal standards, or commentary on racism and sexism, this is not that film. Uglies is a traditional middle grade/YA dystopian adventure where the grown-ups are bad, besties betray you, the rebel-boy is boyfriend material, and in the end, you finally find your true self. Depending on what you are in the mood for, this may be the perfect low-stress film for you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights

• Appealing actors
• Incongruous plot and visuals
• Perfectly fine background entertainment

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

Microreview: Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Nigerian spirits do a heist at the British Museum, but struggle to deliver on the promises of that brilliant conceit

Cover illustration by Jim Tierny

This book is a welcome breath of fresh air into the pantheon of stories about gods and humans. No longer are we revisiting the familiar names from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, perpetually retold and reused and recycled, with genuinely fresh takes few and far between. Instead, Wole Talabi is presenting us with a pantheon that many Western readers, or readers from the Global North, will find unfamiliar: that of the orishas, or the divine spirits from Yoruba mythology. The titular Shigidi is a very minor orisha, whose responsibilities involve sitting on a sleeper’s chest to engender nightmares, and eventually suffocate the life out of the victim.

It’s not a very nice job, and Shigidi’s physical form matches that valence: he is small, squat, and ugly. But he doesn’t really have any control over it. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company—has, in fact, been created solely for the position he now holds—and he must navigate the familiar corporate challenges of unfriendly supervisors, reductions in human prayers which cut into the company’s bottom line, and competitors in the field who have their own plans for the victim he’s been sent to nightmare-suffocate. One such competitor is a succubus, Nneoma, but after a heated exchange of views they decide to team up and go freelance. This puts the team in the perfect position to take a job from Shigidi’s erstwhile boss: namely, to make their way into the British Museum and retrieve the titular MacGuffin, the Brass Head of Obalufon.

So: we have an erotic (because succubus) heist, featuring Yoruba gods stealing back their cultural artifacts from the British Museum, with a bonus commentary on modern corporate drudgery. This is so awesome on so many levels. The opportunities to do brilliant things with this narrative conceit are boundless.

And so many of them were missed.

I really, really don’t want to write the rest of this review. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was. It could have been so much better than it was. And I think, on the whole, that each missed opportunity is reasonably small, so if you think the conceit sounds awesome, then maybe you should stop reading right now, buy this book, and enjoy it. Maybe you won’t be bothered by the things that bothered me, and that would be ideal.

But if you are curious, or perhaps you’ve already read this book and were dissatisfied, read on, and perhaps what comes next will resonate with you, as I try to articulate why this book disappointed me.

First, the narrative does the thing where the timeline jumps around. So we start in medias res, with Shigidi bleeding out in the back of a cab, his arm ripped off, blood everywhere, monsters chasing them—clearly something has gone badly wrong. Nneoma tells him she loves him. Fade to black. OK, cool—I’m engaged, I want to know how they got into such a fix.

But the remainder of the timeline jumping around just didn’t work—to the point that after the second or third hop, I started looking at the copyright page and the acknowledgements to see if I’d somehow missed a Book 1 in this series. Things that hadn’t happened yet were being referred to and briefly summarized, as if I was expected to remember them from a previous book. Then, when those events finally take place, twenty or fifty pages later, they feel redundant and pointless, because I had already gotten that ‘remember when this happened?’ summary earlier in the book.

One case in point is the events surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s decision to team up and go freelance. We hear about that as a done deal from the past, before the narrative jumps backward and shows us how it happened. In principle, this could be useful for elaborating on another component of the narrative—not the specific plot-based events, perhaps, but certainly the character arc surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship. A continuing thread involves Shigidi trying to get Nneoma to admit to loving him, which she is unwilling to do for backstory reasons. This plays out in various conversations, one of which, infuriatingly, takes place during an extremely time-constrained heist. Priorities, people! But the point is: the whole question around Nneoma's admission of love doesn’t matter. We already know that Nneoma’s going to eventually say that she loves him. It happened on page 3! It was resolved before we knew it was important! So there’s no tension or uncertainty surrounding that plot arc, which means all the jumping forward and backward serves no purpose, except to make me wonder whether I picked up Book 2 by mistake.

Next, let’s talk about Shigidi himself. He’s created to be a small, ugly, minor god, and physically he is small and ugly. He doesn’t like his job, he doesn’t like his appearance; he’s miserable in all aspects of his life. There is such richness here to explore, from divine work-life balance; self-perception (what is ‘ugly’ when you are divine?); body-image and views of beauty. For example, one component of Shigidi’s ‘ugliness’ is scarification marks. Scarification, Wikipedia tells us, is the act of scratching or cutting patterns into one’s skin, after which follow-up treatment, such as repeated irritation, or packing clay or ash into the wound, ensures that the healing process leaves visible scars in the pattern of the original wounds. It is a deliberate, culturally significant procedure in many parts of the world, and if you click through to the Wikipedia entry, you can see that the results of this undoubtedly painful procedure can, in fact, be quite beautiful. To be sure, Westerners don’t particularly care for the practice, and so Christian missionaries in Africa spoke against the procedure, and colonial governments straight-out criminalized it. So, in sum, scarification and its relationship to beauty—especially in the context of orishas—raises some very deep questions! Why does Shigidi consider his own scarification ugly? What is his relationship with the culture whose patterns are etched into his body, that he thinks so poorly of them? What is beauty to an orisha, and why do specifically Western human beauty standards apply to him?

We never find out. Shigidi is ugly, doesn’t like being ugly, and pretty much the first thing he does after meeting Nneoma is allow her to remake his body into something super hot and muscled and glistening and abs-full. Through the power of sex-magic, to be sure, because Nneoma is a succubus, so there’s a certain amount of orgasmic potency to his transformation. That’s fine, I guess. Talabi wanted to write an erotic thriller, and this is one way to do that. But by doing that, he disregards all of the really interesting issues implied in Shigidi’s self-image as a corporate drudge. Shigidi was ugly. That lasted less than 40 pages. Then he becomes hot. Next.

OK, next: let’s talk a bit about Shigidi’s status as a corporate drone. This was so promising. I love the idea of a pantheon of gods operating according to bureaucratic norms. The idea of audits of prayer-income, overbearing supervisors, board meetings devolving into chaos as gods try to smite each other—it’s delightful.

But in this book it doesn’t quite work with the cosmology of the spirit world. Because it seems that the Orisha Spirit Company has been in existence for a long time. Shigidi was created to fill a role in that company; he was literally created to be a worker drone. Since records of Shigidi predate human corporate bureaucracy, and the Orisha Spirit Company predates Shigidi, then that means that the gods decided to organize themselves according to a human cultural construct before human culture constructed it. Or, conceivably, humans got the ideas of corporate infrastructure from the gods—which is again, a delightful world-building conceit—but if so, then shouldn’t the idea of board meetings and progress reports have originated in Nigeria? (I mean, maybe they did! People with business degrees, please weigh in! But my impression is that the daily grind was imported to, not exported from, West Africa.) There are ways of making the whole corporate-gods shtick really sing, but this book doesn’t do it. It just invokes the idea as kind of a gag, and ignores all the world-building implications.

Moving on from Shigidi and his employers, let’s discuss Nneoma. As I've mentioned, she’s a succubus. I’m not a huge fan of the phenomenon of succubi (especially in the absence of incubi), because I think they’re based in a deeply misogynistic perspective that sexuality in women is inherently dangerous and bad; and also that men cannot be expected to control their sexual appetites. But I went to a panel at Worldcon in which Wole Talabi made a really interesting case for Nneoma: in the same way that Shigidi must kill people for the Orisha Spirit Company, because that was the role he was created to fill, Nneoma must kill people (through sex) because that is how she is designed to live. It’s not her fault; her deadliness to mortals is also not something she enjoys. Rather, it’s a necessity. So for different reasons, these two represent a complicated relation with mortals, in which malice and deadliness are entirely disconnected. That was neat. I was on board with that.

But this book doesn’t follow through on any of those promises. Because Nneoma, as written, absolutely loves fucking people to death, and also enjoys engendering pointless jealousy in men too, just for kicks. And, remember, Shigidi is an ugly miserable corporate drone for less than 40 pages before he gets orgasmically turned into a thirst machine and sets up as a freelancer. And even though I can’t complain about a book being super sex-oriented when one of its characters is a literal succubus, I can complain when the erotic bits are so clunkily written that they’re not even hot.

Clunkily written? Oh, yes. Let’s talk about the writing style. It’s, as I implied, clunky. For example, after descriptions of women’s nipples in a nightclub we get, ‘Shadowy people-shapes gyrated sensually against each other.’ Sensually?  Oh, good, thanks for specifying. Do the sexually attractive sexy people do sex sexily together? Or this: ‘Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s [sic] where it encountered her curves.’ The typo I can forgive, but the repetition of ‘flowing’ and ‘flowed’ is a real clanger. (Don’t worry—it’s not all male gaze. We get lots of descriptions of Shigidi’s muscles too.)

And then there’s this approach to prepositions: ‘… the words of a man with whom he was completely in love with and for whom, in the moments when they lay together, he’d sworn he would do anything for.’

‘With whom he was in love with’? ‘For whom...he would do anything for?’ Yikes. I myself think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with preposition stranding (‘who(m) he was in love with’), but if you’re going for the more self-consciously formal pied-piping construction (‘with whom he was in love’), you’ve got to remember to leave out the final preposition. Getting smacked with that kind of sloppiness in the face, twice in quick succession, really ate up a lot of my goodwill about the writing style.

I recognize that a lot of these problems are specific to me. Writing style is an incredibly personal judgment, and if Talabi’s style works for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the eroticism as well. And although I really wanted the book to dig into the corporate commentary and the world-building, perhaps you’re on board more for the British Museum heist—which, as far as heists go, is lively and fast-paced (except for the bit where Shigidi and Nneoma pause to talk about their feelings, despite the inconveniently brief window of opportunity rapidly closing around them).  And there are some stunning images evoked in this book as scenes dissolve into other scenes.

I think this book achieves a lot of what it set out to do. But the things that it could have done and didn’t do unfortunately happened to be exactly the things that I was most interested in; and so I put it down feeling annoyed and disappointed. But that was me. Maybe you’ll be different.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Brilliant conceit
  
• Heisting the British museum
  
• Clunky writing
  
• Full of missed opportunities to explore things that Clara, specifically, wanted to see explored
  
• Disappointingly traditional use of succubus as main character
  

Reference: Talabi, Wole. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon [Gollancz 2023/Daw 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.