Book Review: A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau

An unflinching science fiction and environmental fable about the costs and dangers of societal extremes.

There is a strong movement, maybe the dominant undercurrent ethos of science fiction, that science fiction (and I am talking strictly about science fiction and not fantasy) is not about the future, alternate present, alternate past or whenever it takes place in which it is set. Instead, the rosetta stone of much of science fiction is--what is this novel, story, work talking about in the modern day. What is it showing, through a mirror darkly (or sometimes very much obviously). Figure that out, and you can really dig into what an author is doing, intentionally or otherwise.

So with that in mind, let’s look at Lauren C. Teffeau’s A Hunger with No Name. We start off in a slowly decaying herding village of Astrava. Our main character, Thurava, is training with her mother to be a herder of the sheep (or perhaps llama-like) lucerva. This is a herding society where herders take their flocks to pastures and then return with them with the change of seasons back to their village to be shorn. We quickly learn this itself is a change, the herds used to be kept a lot closer, but the nearby river has dwindled in recent decades, and so cannot support the village and pastures both. We get a sense of diminishment, that the way of life of Thurava’s people is under slow constant squeeze.

There’s more, though. This is a post-apocalyptic society, one that grew up in the wake of a dominant and highly technological civilization that collapsed. Astrava and its peers are what came out of that fall.
And then there is the Glass City. A city of wonders, of technology, of very different ways of life. Of, perhaps, a return to the life before the apocalypse. The Glass City has sent an automation, a representative, to coax and convince people to give up the herder life and come to the City to find work and stability. Is it a false premise? An illusion? Those who have gone to the city have NOT sent messages back as to their life there. Not even Thurava’s best friend.

Given the attitudes and fear and apprehensions of life before that apocalypse, you’d think an automation from the Glass City urging to come to its home with the hope and promise of those beforetimes would be a nonstarter. However with their way of life diminishing year by year, the trickle of people heading to the big city and a new life becomes a flood, once that eventually drives Astrava to come to the Glass City, and find out for herself what is really happening, and what she can do about it.

I very deliberately used the word fable in the tag line of this review and I want to interrogate and explain why as the focus of this review. A Hunger with No Name is a science fiction novel but it is even more so a fable¹, right from the name which has that resonance to it. What is, in fact, the titular hunger with no name? It does get a personification in this book, as Thurava finds out as the dark secret (even to most residents) of the Glass City. That monstrous personification is what has been driving the city, and also its effects on its neighbors, including Astrava, for quite some time.

But again, why is this a science fiction fable? It’s a fable in the same way the movie Snowpiercer is a fable, or In Time. If you want a literary parallel, the closest thing I can think of that really sits in the same space as this novel are the stories in Stanslaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, which explicitly says they are “fables for the cybernetic age”. But this is a novel-length fable which does veer against the usual short length nature of the form. And Lem’s fables are written for humor to leaven his fables and messaging. The author, here, is most deadly serious in her fable.

But now as to the clincher as to why this story isn’t just a straight up science fiction novel. Our main character, Thurava, is engaged directly in the idea of gathering stories. She goes from herder of lucerva to herder of knowledge, of stories, of the culture of her people. Once she reaches the glass city and see what it is doing to her, to her people, her ambitions to preserve and transmit and keep the stories and culture of her people makes her, in effect, a storyteller, a transmitter of culture, knowledge, and the philosophy of her people, their way of life. Even more so than the aforementioned Lem, by grounding Thurava as a storyteller, and infusing her story with stories she learns, collects, tells.

But while Thurava is at first trying to be a preservationist, trying to preserve, the force of the story as she learns the truth of the Glass City, is to be spurred to eventual reluctant but decisive action against it, especially once that hunger’s nature, and its all consuming desire becomes clear. Once Thurava learns the truth of it, she has no choice but to take action against it. She is a reluctant protagonist, but when the truth of the fable that she is in becomes clear, the inevitability of her course of action plays out in the denouement of the book.

So what is this a fable of? It’s simple. The heart of the city and what Thurava finds there, as well as the societal and social structures around it, are a metaphor and a personification of rapacious and unrelenting late stage environment-destroying capitalism². It is literally a hunger with no name, and a bottomless hunger at that. The author gives it a form and a shape for Thurava to fight against and oppose. That too puts this in the realm of a science fiction fable. Opposing an entire societal structure that we live in is hard to handle (or even believe can be done, and especially not by one person). But giving the hunger with no name a form (and a name), Thurava can take decisive and destructive action against it.

But this is also more of a fable than a hard science fiction story in that it doesn’t take a hard look at the long term consequences of her actions and their aftermath. One could really see Astrava’s ultimate course of action in apocalyptic terms, and it does fundamentally change the way of life for the residents of the Glass City, and not at all for the better. Thurava’s course is a radical one, but in keeping with the fable frame, we are looking at it as a response to the personification of the problem that the aforementioned personification embodies.

Thurava’s story may not satisfy everyone, in the end. It may not satisfy you if you are not in a mood and mindset to receive it. It is a fable that will absolutely enrage a strand of readers who see the fable and its metaphors as a call to radical action. It’s not a comfortable story, by any means, but it takes time to get to that discomfort. Like the slow fade and fall of the Astrava, the novel takes its time but the eventual descent into the solution Thurava takes takes on the air of inevitability, but uncomfortable inevitability.

As mentioned before, most fables leaven humor into the story. Some do not. All, however, are made to ask and answer moral questions and sometimes pose answers. A Hunger with No Name asks a moral question and while it does not use humor, it uses the unflinching lens of the author to give an answer to it.

--

Highlights:

• Strong science fictional and environmental message in a novel length fable form
• Excellent use of Thurava as a main character as storyteller and reluctant but decisive agent of change

Reference: Teffeau, Lauren C, A Hunger with No Name, [University of Tampa Press, 2024]

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

¹There appears to be a difference between fables and parables that I can’t quite parse. Is this novel really a parable instead of a fable? I’m not sure, but the whole idea of a moral lesson or message is definitely on point here.

²There is also the possibility, given the nature of the automations and the works of the hunger with no name, that there is also a message against LLMs and generative AI at work here. That is less clear, and may be something the reader (me) brought to this fable.

Book Review: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

Working forwards and backwards in time to tell the story of a city and the demon who loved/loves it.

It seems Nghi Vo possibly likes to play around with the scale of her stories. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the small becomes the large; items spiral out to become stories. In her new novel (a short one, but she assures us, definitely a novel), she plays something of the reverse trick. Or possibly both at the same time. The story follows a demon, Vitrine, in the city she has helped shape for many years, a city that welcomed her as a refugee from her original, fallen home. She has curated it, whispered in the ear of its leaders, artists, librarians and pirates, sculpting it like a gardener with a well-tended hedge. And then, right at the start of the story, it is destroyed. Angels sweep in, unexplained, and put it to fire and the sword. All her work is gone. The story is of the aftermath, her memories and gried sweeping her up, telling stories of the large, spiralling down into the smallness of one single existence - her own - while reciprocally telling that grander scale through the moments of its individuals, day by day and year by year.

If it brings to mind anything - I'm not sure it truly does; it's a singular book in many ways - it is The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. At the simplest level, they are both stories of the soul of a city, told through a chorus of its inhabitants. The difference, however, is a big one. Where for Tchaikovsky the story of the city is the purpose in and of itself (and a very well executed one), for Vo here, the story of the city is only a half of what's going on. The rest is the story of Vitrine herself, and her care at that macro scale, using the humans that inhabit her city - and she is fiercely possessive of it, even after its downfall - as tools to shape it, things that can be discarded, that will pass even as the city endures, not stories or ends themselves. Vitrine lives outside of the scale of human life, and so the story must expand outwards, beyond those boundaries, to attempt to contain her.

This presents itself both subtly and unsubtly throughout. One of the most pleasing reflexes of it is the offhand remarks about how long Vitrine takes applying herself to a given task - stretched out into the days, weeks or months as debris falls and bodies rot around her in the aftermath. We observe the story through Vitrine's scale, experiencing events in a way that feels natural because it is natural to her, but then are jarred into awareness by these little comments, slipped around the edges, reminding us that nothing about her sits naturally with us, however it may feel in the moment. This is someone who can remain sat in one place for months, who can wait out a river. Vo manages to marry an extremely human and an extremely extra-human sense of wonder and scale throughout, with Vitrine's emotional reactions - intense, moving ones - lending accessibility to the broader scope of the story.

Where Tchaikovsky gives us the full view of his city by using multiple viewpoints, seeing it differently through each new set of eyes, Vo does is by using the same eyes, but seeing those people. There's a continuity that brings - Vitrine has been there and can keep on seeing, so can pull herself out of the "now", because she too experienced the "then". She can see change on a scale inaccessible to a mortal.

Even if it were only that, even if it were just a story of one demon's grief of her lost city, and the back and forward tale of its past and future circling around its apocalypse, it would be interesting enough. The prose is lovely, often bringing up moments of beautiful description, especially of colour and texture. You get a sense of the city as a physical place, as well as a cultural one, and for the complex mass of people moving within it. The beauty slips in even in the darker, more visceral moments of death and destruction and dismemberment. It is a lovely thing to read, just to exist in its descriptions and flowing use of language, just to be embedded within Vitrine's perspective on the world, swinging between abject sorrow, rage and a sort of wry humour about herself and the people she has experienced in her city.

For example:

Like comets who found the earth too cruel

or:

She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.

For a story so concerned with the grander scale, it is one profoundly unafraid of the physical, and it is enriched by it.

But it is not only that - the city, at the start of the book, is destroyed by angels, but not all of those angels escape unscathed by the angry demon who tries to stop them. One, cursed by Vitrine, returns. Keeps returning. And so, as well as the story of her city, it is the story of these two immortal beings, tied together by a cataclysm that was almost beyond human terms of reference, that they both lived through (though no unscathed). Theirs is a complex relationship outside of the usual human frame of reference, and one that takes the whole book to develop, not reaching its climax (no, not like that) until the very end of the story.

I want to stress here, it's not a simple enemies to lovers type of romance story. Whatever they are moment to moment, neither Vitrine nor the unnamed angel (she is not particularly interested in small talk with him) exist on a human level, with human emotions on a human scale. Whatever they experience with, through and around each other somewhat defies description. It is just that - experience. It is a string of captured moments that become something more, but evade categorisation. 

Which makes it rather hard to review. I don't, honestly, quite know what I think ultimately passes between these two characters, by the end of the story. It feels profound. It feels intense. But I don't think I entirely understand it. Instead, it sits in my head, making me wonder, making me chew at it, considering. I want to reread it, to ponder it again. It is the good sort of incomprehension, of a thing that may be currently evading me, but is graspable, and will be worth the time spent in reaching for it.

What I do know, even without that understanding, is that Vo has done a fantastic job in capturing a sense of two beings beyond the scale of human lives, who nonetheless interact with them. Vitrine and the angel feel different to one another, and yet also similar, tied to the same outsideness, that immunity to mortal scale, that makes them both alien and compelling to the reader. The holy is a rare sight in SFF - even more so than the religious - but there is something of it here, in the unknowable actions of powers beyond mortal control, seeking to reckon with one another in rules that are never stated, with powers that exist within a framework of intuition, not hard logic. They are as they are, and do as they do, and exist together, in this space for a little time, as we observe them, but cannot grasp them. The scene early on, in which Vitrine witnesses the destruction of her city, is powerful for its distance, its cold incomprehensibility. It's awful. But it also has the feeling of something so utterly beyond human power that nudges into the sort of boundaries quite apart from "magic" in the commonly used modern sense. If it is magic, it is at a scale beyond the individual, and thus its grandeur.

Wholly different from her other work, there is nonetheless an extremely distinctive feel of Vo here throughout, the deftness of her descriptions, the fierceness of her protagonist. It is a beautiful, sad, evocative story, that manages to compress something enormous and otherworldly into something graspable and personified, in a way that seems quite unique. It is thoughtful, provocative, and full of depth, and a story I think will reward multiple reads, and intensive discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, unusual framing, a complexity that keeps on giving the more you think about it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, The City in Glass [Tordotcom, 2024].

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

Film Review: Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 13 years is ambitious, messy, cheesy at times, confusing, breathtaking, and weird as hell. Is it fun? Oh yes. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. Is it worth seeing? I'm not sure.

I had many thoughts during this 2 hour and 20 minute movie. They include:

• Is this the same man that directed the back-to-back Oscar-winning Godfather movies?
• Is that eyebrowless man... Shia LaBeouf? (It was, and it took me an hour to recognize him.)
• Why is Jason Schwartzmann just wandering around here? (Oh, Talia Shire is here, and that's his mom.)
• Is Adam Driver handsome or is he just tall?
• Do I just want to get up and walk out right now?
• Why are there essentially PowerPoint slides and historical quotes scattered throughout this film? (To call it didactic would be the understatement of the year.)

Needless to say, Megalopolis has a lot going on in it. It's been rumbling around in Francis Ford Coppola's head since the 1970s, and he only just now managed to make it because sold off $100ish million from his winery business to finance it. It would be easy to just say "it sucked!" like nearly everyone else online is doing, but there's so much happening in this movie that that would be doing it a disservice. It's hard to even form cogent thoughts around it because they all bleed into each other, reflecting the countless inspirations and influences.

If I had to pick Coppola's Letterboxd top four while he was making Megalopolis, they'd be: Batman Forever, Caligula, The Hunger Games, and The Fountainhead.

The high-level plot

Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a brilliant designer looking to transform his city of New Rome, but at every turn he's stopped by the mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catilina is a genius that can stop time (which is used mainly as a little treat to do things like kiss on precariously dangling construction beams off of the Chrysler building, where his office is).

That's the main plot, as bare as I can make it. Where the story gets confusing is all of the side plots Coppola manages to squish into it, and these include:

• A dead wife mystery haunting Catilina 
• A teen singer scandal / rebranding effort à la Jo Jo Siwa
• A family drama involving a boner joke and an old-timey bow and arrow
• A hostile bank takeover
• A dangerous USSR satellite falling out of orbit and destroying New Rome
• A love story between Catilina and Julie, Cicero's daughter played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who I most instantly recognized as Misandei from Game of Thrones. 
• A science story involving megalon, a new material that can do... basically anything?

The characters

The characters are, arguably, the most interesting part of this movie, and even that's not enough to save it. Every single person is acting like they're in a different movie. This includes the old veterans like Jon Voight, Dustin Huffman, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, and Esposito. But it's also got younger folks ranging from Driver and Schwartzman to Aubrey Plaza.

Speaking of—Aubrey Plaza is an absolute high point of this movie. She plays a conniving, ambitious reporter named Wow Platinum, and she manages to sleep her way to power through various leaders in the film. It's a fascinating role for her, and very, very funny.

Every one is depraved, and like their ancient Roman inspiration, power- hungry and angry. At one point, there's a wedding held at the Colosseum (which is just Madison Square Garden), and the audience just watches while the patrician fancy folk celebrate on stage. Megalopolis is indeed intended as a cautionary tale about the excesses of a society's waning days, and this sort of attraction is something I could definitely see happen in America even right now.

How to fix this movie

First off, we have to reshoot this in technicolor. I'm talking about old-timey, super colorful, kinda grainy technicolor. This movie just feels old-fashioned, and I'm not sure why. Maybe its the hokey dialogue, or the Art Deco flourishes. While we're at it, let's give them all transatlantic accents.

Honestly? Maybe make it a musical! Every thing seems so over the top and emotionally pregnant that these people need an outlet!

If we're going to have a little magical realism, we need to go all in. Catilina can stop time, the statues can move, clouds reach out and grab the moon. It's unclear whether these are in a character's head or not. Let's make it REAL weird and go full magical realism.

Next, we're going to cut at least half the subplots. Let's focus more on Adam Driver's character. I could watch this man recite the phone book. And basically, he does—he recites on screen in the first few minutes of Hamlet's entire "To be or not to be" speech. And not just the fun first lines; he goes all the way to the proud man's contumely and bare bodkin parts.

Final thoughts

I still feel strangely compelled to defend this movie a little bit. Maybe that's the Stockholm syndrome talking, I'm not sure. I can say without hesitation that I've definitely never seen anything like it. Will I watch it again? On TV sure, so I can try to understand this bloated beast a little better. 

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10.

Bonuses: The cast is superb; the amount of time spent in the Chrysler building made me happy; I will always, always celebrate new stories versus just having another Spider-Man reboot.

Penalties: Too many to list. 

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.

How come I never knew The Fall existed?

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pendant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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