TV Review: Talamasca

The world’s most clueless spy, working for the world’s most ineffective spy agency… what could go wrong?

Our guy has a problem: his name is Guy. This show’s lack of imagination only gets worse from there.

Guy has another problem: he can hear other people’s thoughts, but the universe conspires to put him in the presence of either so many people that telepathy is too painful to use, or one person who is specially trained or magically gifted to resist it, so he’s that supremely irritating type of protagonist who has an awesome superpower that is of no use ever.

As it turns out, Guy’s life has been watched and orchestrated by the secret order of the Talamasca, who recruit people like him to keep tabs on the hidden supernatural world. The theory is that collecting data on vampires, witches, ghosts and demons (the series is set in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches) will help normal humans keep a reasonably peaceful life alongside so many warring superhuman factions. The reality is that the magical police is incapable of keeping its own house in order and its hierarchy is a tangled mess of betrayal and backstabbing enabled by jaw-dropping incompetence.

Welcome to the worst spy agency I’ve seen since Get Smart.

Our guy Guy is played by a too distracting Nicholas Denton, who, in fairness, isn’t to blame for looking so much like the spitting image of Eddie Redmayne that one forgets to listen to what he’s saying—not that he has much to comment on, what with the absurd level of secrecy his boss likes to maintain. Said boss, who goes by Helen, is a veteran spy and a master of the art of posing dramatically and giving a knowing smile as a substitute for having anything useful to say.

Helen has been the one in charge of steering Guy’s life from behind the scenes, preparing him for the right time to recruit his psychic talents in the neverending mission of keeping humankind safe. Nevermind that she never does anything to earn Guy’s trust; every one of his questions gets slammed down with the promise that all will be revealed in due time, which I guess is intended to be in the middle of season 4.

Because there’s apparently an urgent crisis going on, Helen gives Guy a crash course in spycraft (inexplicably, the course doesn’t include a lesson on “Don’t Read Your Spy Textbook in Public Transportation”), and sends him on his own across the pond to listen to the thoughts of a powerful vampire who has infiltrated the British branch of the Talamasca. On his first day in London, Guy fails at basic spying and hooks up with the first woman who makes eyes at him. One has to wonder why the spy textbook didn’t cover this kind of scenario.

Guy is supposed to be provided with a mentor/handler, who is alarmingly absent during most of the mission, and when it’s finally time to go looking for the big bad vampire, Helen refuses to make any plan. She basically tells him, “You’re smarter than any plan I could give you. You’ll think of something.” With this dismal neglect from his superiors, it’s no wonder that he turns against the Talamasca at the first opportunity.

Even before that, he seems to devote more effort to spying on his boss than on the vampire. He has valid reasons to resent the ways the Talamasca has meddled in his life since childhood, and when he discovers that his mother was also some form of spy, and that she and the agency parted ways in bad terms, any hope of retaining his loyalty is lost. But the side he chooses instead cares even less for his personal gripes, his lack of experience, or his continued existence. At times I wondered whether this series was supposed to be a comedy, because Guy speedruns through one disastrously bad choice after another, somehow making it way past the point where he should have already been dismembered by vampires several times.

The show’s aim appears pointed at feeling mysterious rather than narrating a mystery. We’re told that the magic police has vast resources, but when they task a complete noob with undoing a vampire conspiracy, they don’t equip him with as much as a cove of garlic. We’re told that the world has vampires, witches, ghosts and demons, but we only ever see vampires, and in the rare scenes that feature a witch coven, they don’t do anything particularly witchy, so they may as well be a hippie commune. We’re told that the order is ancient and has tentacles everywhere, but across the season we meet at most the same half dozen top operatives, which gives the impression that we’re watching a school play with zero budget.

As for the mystery of the season, it’s admittedly a clever one, but getting there is an ordeal, even with just six episodes. Someone has destroyed the centuries-old archives of the Dutch branch of the Talamasca, which should severely cripple the order’s ability to keep tabs on the supernatural world, but we don’t see any serious consequence. Out of earshot of her colleagues, Helen has been searching for something called The 752, which sounds like the name of a chemical weapon, or a model of missile, or a limited edition comic book. Whatever it is, it has immense power, so it must not fall into the wrong yadda yadda, or else the world will yadda yadda. And it just so happens that the person closest to finding it is the same vampire our guy Guy has to follow. Neat!

Oh, have I already mentioned that the season’s two-part premiere has not one but two fridged women? You know, for extra drama.

I haven’t watched the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but the praise I’ve heard about it has been consistently enthusiastic. This spinoff, on top of being mediocre on its own merits, does a shameful disservice to a beloved story.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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

Contributor Profile: Gabrielle Harbowy

NAME: Gabrielle Harbowy

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: East of Los Angeles, West of the Moon

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): Interviewer, tattoo fanatic, TTRPGer, Team Star Wars. Totally normal about Baldur's Gate 3.

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: many and varied. How much time do you have?

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Astarion Ancunín specifically. In this essay I will...

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A House Between Sea and Sky by Beth Cato, A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith ... and some fantastic books by clients (I'm a literary agent) that I can't talk about yet, but believe me I'll be crowing proudly about them when you can read them!

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Final Orbit by Chris Hadfield, Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... Curled up under a homemade blanket with a book and a mug of tea. No...I'll be at my desk reading queries.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO: Does Dana Scully count?

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Regulating the air temperature around me. Always comfortable in all situations!

THE BEST / WORST COMIC FILMS OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: I think it's been longer than that since I've seen one. I'm happy that other people enjoy them! I get my nerd-fix elsewhere.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Del Toro's Frankenstein

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE: the nightly news

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: the aurora borealis (or aurora australis), with their own eyes.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: Severance and Mrs Davis both hit me right in the feels.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): I need a movie of Aether's Pawn by Gabrielle Harbowy so that I can retire comfortably.

Welcome Gabrielle!

Film Review: Zootopia 2

The city of talking animals reveals a wider world in its past and its future

Some movie premises, like “How did Han Solo get his last name?”, can be classified as “Nobody asked for this.” Others, like “How did the rebels get the Death Star schematics?”, are in the smaller category of “Nobody asked for this, but now that you went ahead and made it, it turns out it’s really good.” Zootopia 2 belongs in that latter category. There was no need to explore why we didn’t see reptiles in the first movie, because the class of mammals sufficed for its predator/prey allegory (also, the vast majority of reptiles are predators, so their presence would only have overcomplicated the plot).

(Also also, the talking animals eat fish. Are the fish sentient? Don’t ask.)

The worldbuilding of the first Zootopia was only as detailed as it needed to be, and that’s OK; that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. But now that Disney has decided to answer an unnecessary question, we’re lucky that the result is as good as it is. Zootopia 2 takes the first movie’s points about exclusion and prejudice and weaves a bigger mystery that involves racism, real estate encroachment, and the erasure of the history of marginalized communities.

Our protagonist duo is back: Judy, the overachiever rabbit with a compulsive need to prove herself caused by the mother of all impostor syndromes; and Nick, the socially isolated fox who only became Judy’s coworker because he literally has no other friends. (This is not me roasting them; the script has them explicitly saying this.) So, after a spectacularly disastrous unauthorized mission, they’re quickly ordered to get support group therapy to address the rough edges between them.

As it happens, this is a tense moment for the police department: the city of Zootopia is celebrating the centennial of its climate control walls that allow camels and polar bears to coexist. This is the pivotal invention that makes Zootopia and its marvelous diversity possible, and to highlight their importance, the exclusive gala that commemorates their creation also has a priceless historical document in display: the design notes of the engineer who designed the walls. The notebook has been preserved by a distinguished lynx family that for some reason is hostile to one of its descendants, Pawbert, who seems to not measure up to the patriarch’s expectations.

The plot kicks into gear when a viper crashes the party, steals the notebook, rapidly delivers a speech that convinces Judy of his good intentions, and ends up accidentally envenoming the police chief in a comically contrived set of circumstances that make it look like Judy and Nick were the attackers. So now our heroes have to go on the run from their own colleagues while they try to solve the mystery of why a reptile has showed up in Zootopia after a century of absence, why the lynx family is so suspiciously hostile to him, and what the design notes have to do with it all.

As police investigations go, this one doesn’t rely on brilliant deduction as much as miraculous convenience. For our heroes, clues fall from the sky as needed; the only doubt is whether they’ll survive the next slapstick chase through a swamp or a water pipe or a collapsing house or a Gazelle concert in the desert.

A handful of characters from the first movie make an appearance in the sequel: your favorite criminal sheep, donut-loving cheetah, car racing sloth, hyperanxious rabbit parents, and mobster shrew return for brief yet memorable scenes. The new characters are no less vivid: the new mayor of Zootopia is a former action movie actor horse with a hilarious catchphrase, one of the key informers in the investigation is a plumed basilisk with a perverse sense of humor, and one unlikely ally our heroes meet is a tomboyish beaver with a conspiracy podcast. And of course, the star that steals the show is Gary the viper, voiced with endearing sweetness by a perfectly cast Ke Huy Quan.

The day is saved by generous emotive oversharing, multi-species cooperation, rusty electrical equipment, the magic of snake antivenom, and… the Zootopia patent office? OK, a bit bureaucratic, but I’ll take it. The reveal of why reptiles left Zootopia and why mammals have such a low opinion of them has echoes in the real-world history of forced displacement and the insidious normalization of racism. It’s heartening to learn the true extent of reptile contributions to animal society, but it may deliver a mixed message to have a plot where reptiles are only welcomed back into Zootopia because they contributed to animal society. As a matter of principle, a group of people shouldn’t have to show proof of noble deeds before getting basic dignity and equality.

Zootopia 2 shows us a more complex side of its society, a deeper manifestation of the disguised prejudices that were already evident in the first movie. Even if the specifics of the story could have been planned better, the basic message of joy in diversity resonates loud and clear.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Contributor Profile: Eddie Clark

NAME: Eddie Clark.

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: The bottom right corner of the map, if we have in fact been included on it.
 
NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): SFF books. Video Games. Anime. The intersection of gay shit with all 3.
 
MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: The Hugo Award for Best Novella from Tor. Books which don’t trust the reader to do the slightest bit of work. Mistaking aesthetic preference for for moral valence.
 
VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Alien Vampires.
 
RIGHT NOW I'M READING: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh.

…AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A Tangle of Time, by Josiah Bancroft. The Door on the Sea, by Caskey Russell. The Effaced, by Tobias Begley.

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Seventhblade, by Tonya Laird.

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE… on the couch. Either book or controller in hand.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: My answer to this will vary over time. This month: Kid Juggernaut and Mysteriant respectively (Anthony Oliveira’s run on Avengers Academy is a thing of queer beauty; do check it out).

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Sending anyone to sleep instantly. I’d mostly use it on myself.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Probably haven’t seen an western comic adaptation in the past five years! But the Netflix limited series adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto in 2023 was spectacularly good.

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Happily for the genre, I really don’t have one to offer!

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Kowloon Generic Romance—pitch perfect vibes, well produced, casually queer, and didn’t take any easy exits. 

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE. Star Trek: Section 31. Did not understand what Star Trek is. Didn’t understand character. Bleh.

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, Run, don’t walk, to whatever distribution is available in your country and watch the superb SF black comedy Creamerie. Funny, sharp, and bleak.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: The Expanse.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): A Merchant Ivory adaptation of A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers would be amazing.

Welcome, Eddie!

Book Review: We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford

A dark fantasy contemplation of family, and monsters, and darker subjects still.

Amelia lives with her mother. Driven out of their village into the big city of Medea, they live on the edges of society. Amelia and her mother have special... dietary needs. Dietary needs that cause them to pursue and hunt a particular two legged sort of prey. For, you see, Amelia and her mother are both monsters. Rippers, specifically. Rippers are monsters who hunt a particular kind of man called Alexanders.

This is the story of Jason Sanford’s We Who Hunt Alexanders, a dark fantasy novella.

The novella is set in a somewhat fantastical version of our own real world, in the imaginary city of Medea, in a county that is never named, but feels like from context and clues like an analogue of Great Britain during the Victorian or maybe early Edwardian Age (Amelia, it turns out, loves to read penny dreadfuls). With that set up, Sanford plunges us immediately into the nature of Amelia and her mother, what rippers do and how they do it. And quickly from there sets up the conflicts and themes of the novella. The novella is a lean and mean story that stays in Amelia’s point of view throughout.

The novella makes Sanford’s theme explicit from the get go: Rippers are monsters who only hunt men, and only men who have or do commit violence, the Alexanders.¹ The Rippers, it turns out, cannot actually hunt men who haven’t taken that violence into their heart, that violence into their hands. Amelia and her mother are in a new age (and we learn that her mother is old, and dying, and of another age). In this world, there are almost too many Alexanders, and they are too powerful to reduce their numbers. Amelia, young and uncertain and not yet strong, grows into her own. In addition to that coming of age story, Amelia slowly begins to realize she is different from her mother, different from other Rippers in fact. And as her mother slowly weakens, the outside threat that hunts them both comes to the fore: Bishop Stoll. He is, in the parlance of the novella, an incendiary : a man who stirs up anger and hatred and violence on a large scale but is not directly an Alexander himself. They convince others to do their bidding, or others are inspired by the incendiary to actually turn Alexander themselves.

The problem for Amelia’s mother is that since Stoll is NOT an Alexander, they cannot attack and harm him, and actually suffer physical consequences in trying to do so. Part of the genius of Sanford’s writing is in the antagonist of Stoll. Not only is he an incendiary and not an Alexander, he is genre-savvy enough and knowledgeable enough to know about Rippers... and about their limitations. And is willing to use those weaknesses against Amelia and her mother, as needed. There is a gloating intelligence and cleverness and evil to Stoll that shows his dark charisma not only to his followers but to the reader as well.

And given Stoll’s charisma, and his backing of the church, he is an existential threat to Amelia and her mother. Not only are there now too many powerful Alexanders to try and control, but these Alexanders, led by Stoll, have other targets. Not necessarily the other monsters (we learn and meet a vampire in the course of the novella) but Stoll sets his sights on disrupting and destroying an underground gay bar. In the course of the novella, Amelia, who has made friends with the owners and a frequenter at the bar (as well as come to an accord with a Ripper who spends time there), Amelia finds her friends and colleagues in the course of Stoll’s persecution and rage. While Stoll is genre-savvy as noted above, and wants to deal with and extirpate Rippers at all times, Stoll and his followers have this broader “culture war” target in mind. The framing is obvious and direct: Stoll sees queer folk as monsters, and to be dealt with as such. But of course, since Stoll himself is not an Alexander, merely the leader of many Alexanders, the still inexperienced Amelia and her weakening’s mother’s opposition to Stoll is necessarily fraught and perilous.

It was fascinating, taking apart the concept, once I had read it, and thinking about it. Rippers specifically target male purporters of violence. Could a ripper target, say, a female serial killer? As I further thought about it and the limitations of the food supply of Rippers, or, instead, their target base, I went again to the theme of the novel. The novel is an indictment of how male violence is institutionalized in modern society, how there are many Alexanders, and worse, as in the case of the Bishop, those who do not commit violence themselves, but instead whose words and actions incite others to commit violence. Parallels to contemporary society, and contemporary leaders come to mind and its not a big leap to see how Sanford’s Victorian world resonates with the modern day and its own problems. One can also see the transphobia rampant in modern society today as the modern inspiration for this world’s Stoll’s crusade against queer members of society, making them monstrous (like the “real monsters” Amelia and her mother and rippers and vampires are).

And there are strong themes of family and found family in the novella too. Amelia and her dying mother of course, but also the humans that they live with, the aforementioned vampire, other rippers and the sense of community in the bar. Families come in all shapes and sizes in this novella with intersecting and interesting memberships and interactions. All of these families are under threat by the Alexanders, one way or another, and grow and change as those interactions intensify as the novella progresses.

The ending of the novel, then, as Amelia finally grows into her own abilities and in fact proves herself a different sort of ripper, is one where Sanford is addressing, through the medium and milieu and the nature of this different sort of ripper, the limitations of the original ripper variety. That is to say, the limitations of old ways of combating and opposing hatred in society. Amelia represents a fantastical version and answer that points to the need in our own society for different and broader solutions to societal problems. Amelia shows that retail response to a societal problem is insufficient, and for real change and growth to occur, in this modern worlds, other, deeper solutions are needed. Amelia’s mother’s solutions are insufficient in the modern age, her encounter with the Bishop proves that. Amelia points to a potential future.

So I don’t think that is a horror novella, and is definitely much more of a dark fantasy. There are dark subjects here, sexism, queerphobia, domestic violence. One might say that Sanford himself is being provocative and incendiary in this novella in tackling these subjects, so for those who wish to avoid these subjects, this novella is probably not for you. The fantastical nature of rippers and how they kill does mitigate the impact of the violence, it's not in excruciating realistic detail. But this is a story of monsters who hunt other monsters and are hunted in turn.

There is probably a whole additional piece to be written in reading this in concert and parallel with Crista’s story in Plague Birds. Sanford clearly is still hitting the themes of Plague Birds, from a somewhat different voice , but the same strong storytelling and characterization. Consider, Crista becoming a plague bird in the titular novella, and what plague birds are expected to do, and contrast with Amelia, growing into her role and identity as a ripper. While Amelia was never human, and Crista was thrust into the role, one can see rippers and plague birds as two varieties of Erinyes that Sanford has created. To put it in musical terms, Sanford is building a fugue with this theme, with Plague Birds and We Who Hunt Alexanders as the canons, not identical but clearly in dialogue with each other, as voices in that fugue.

I look forward to more voices in Sanford’s fugue of resistance and response to violent patriarchy and the forces that nurture it.

¹ The etymology of Alexanders is something that Amelia herself wonders about and we do get an answer, but it’s a lovely bit of worldbuilding that I am not going to spoil. 

--

Highlights:

• Strong themes of found family, fighting against institutional violence and patriarchy.
• Vividly imagined central problems for main character: coming of age, uncertain of abilities even as their mother is clearly dying
• Rippers as strongly imagined Agents of Vengeance-- not the first use of the idea by the author.
• Stands strongly with author’s previous work.

Reference: Sanford, Jason, We Who Hunt Alexanders (Apex, 2025)

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

Contributor Profile: Maya Barbara

NAME: Maya Barbara

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Nestled somewhere between two major cities in West and Middle Tennessee 

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): horror, literary fiction, narrative essays, comics, anime/manga, vampires, movies, hyperspecific pop culture moments that is special to gay women specifically, pop music

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: gatekeepers, poorly written plot twists, unearned quips, mean horror movies, acting like genres were just born out of tiktok

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Vampires, duh.

RIGHT NOW I'M READING:

Beneath the Trees Where No One Sees: Rites of Spring by Patrick Hovarth

Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison II

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: 

Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker

The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A.

The Grimmorie Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: 

I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... in bed, rotting away with either a movie or a book.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Batman and Magneto 

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: telepathy because Jean Grey is iconic.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Across the Spider Verse

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Thor: Love and Thunder (UGH!)

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: I just watched Love Bites (1988), a softcore gay romcom created by porn vets, and it was awesome.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE: I just watched Prom Night (1980) and it was terrible because no one died for an HOUR. 

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: Everyone should see Interview With The Vampire (2022) before it’s too late. 

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: It’s going to be Interview With The Vampire (2022) I fear.

NAME A BOOK  YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): YELLOWFACE BY R.F. KUANG. I’m DYING for a A24/Neon level adaptation of it! It’s tailor made for it!

Welcome Maya!

Film Review: Wicked: For Good

Pragmatism versus idealism in the emotional conclusion of the hit musical

Those who have seen the long-running stage musical Wicked already know that the second half of the performance takes a dark turn as the story moves from bold empowerment to anger and tragedy. While Wicked, Part 1 explores the relationships of the witches of Oz during their time in school, the second part of the story undermines the original plot elements of the classic film, The Wizard of Oz. The result is an emotionally stressful story that will have you reaching for your tissues. Wicked: For Good picks up with an angry and disillusioned Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) trying to expose the corrupt Oz government while trying to free the newly oppressed talking animals. Meanwhile Glinda (Ariana Grande) accepts her figurehead role at the hands of the evil Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) while still worrying over Elphaba’s safety and pining for Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) who remains devoted to Elphaba. After the death of their father, Elphaba’s sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) becomes the governor of Munchkinland. But her obsession over her former classmate Boq (Ethan Slater) (who only loves Glinda) turns her into an oppressive and toxic tyrant to the Munchkins and to Boq in particular. Meanwhile, the arrival a little girl from Kansas creates a catalyst for the final confrontations in the story.

It’s hard to top a musical production as entertaining as Wicked, Part 1. The film did a great job of addressing themes of bigotry, social gaslighting, hypocrisy, and oppression. But, the messaging was subtle and cleverly woven into addictive show tunes and big dance numbers. The enemies to friends dynamic between Elphaba and Glinda was funny and endearing, and ultimately led to an entertaining ensemble dynamic with their friends Fiyero, Boq, and Elphaba’s sister Nessarose. However, in For Good, the amusing love polygon from the first film takes a grim turn as Nessarose obsesses over Boq to the point of imprisoning him, Boq pines for Glinda to point of bitterness, Glinda fixates on Fiyero to the point of a forced engagement, and Fiyero longs for Elphaba to the point of endangering his life and his humanity. 

In Wicked: For Good, the societal and philosophical commentary is more direct, the set design is darker, and the songs are definitely sadder. The combined weight of this removes any subtle irony and makes the film more directly angry, rather than quietly critical. The more serious tone is underscored by solid performances by Jeff Goldblum as the comfortably deceiving Wizard who flippantly justifies everything from fraud to oppression to murder. Additionally, Marissa Bode’s Nessarose is excellent as she shifts from adorable pining to a physically toxic control of Boq.

The grim visuals of the film stand out as an extension of the anger of the characters and the toxic nature of the new Oz society. However, the film intentionally balances the dark themes of the source material against an apparent need for a PG rating. As a result, several intense moments where key characters meet their demise, are diluted or given minimal screen time. Additionally, the Tin Man aesthetic was a little disappointing as it remained mostly aligned with the traditional film version rather than opting for something a little edgier or interesting for the big screen. Given the grim tone, it would have been nice to see something a bit more creatively gothic as the character descends into anger and bitterness.

The two main villains, Madame Morrible and the Wizard, dominate the fates of the characters, but they do so without much introspection or depth. Instead, the real villains are the residents of Oz who openly accept the injustices around them and readily swallow the lies from their leaders without debate or question. That seems to be the real message of the film: the manipulation or gullibility of the masses. As the film tells us, truth is what everyone agrees on, not what really exists. The Wizard is highly symbolic as a great, unrepentant con-artist who notes that once people buy into a lie, they will irrationally choose to cling to it, even when it’s been clearly disproved and shown to be toxic.

The other key theme is the idea of pragmatism versus idealism. Glinda and Elphaba both agree that the oppression of the talking animals is wrong and that the Wizard’s deception is wrong, but they still take very different paths. Glinda accepts a position in the oppressive Oz administration and uses it to her advantage, admitting she has an addiction to adoration. Elphaba is headstrong and repeatedly directly attacks the Wizard and Madame Morrible, but with failed results that paint her more and more as a villain. She, initially, lacks the subtlety to be strategic and Glinda, initially, lacks the resolve to be ethical. Fortunately, as the film’s title implies, the two opposites influence each other and result in a change in both of them, for good. As expected, the performance of the song “For Good” by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande is the showstopper moment of the film that will have viewers reaching for tissues in the best possible way. 

Wicked: For Good is a grim change from the tone of the first film but ultimately leaves audiences with a sense of hopefulness. Elphaba shows that her core value is her love for Oz and her desire to see it be the best version of itself. As the film tells us, in this second part of the story, we may not be changed for the better, but hopefully you will feel changed for good. The hard themes of For Good may be a bit heavy handed, rather than introspective, but the pay off is worth it for a solid ending that will leave you cheering, even if things aren’t as perfect as we wish they would be.

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Highlights:

• Grim tone and visuals
• Heavy handed but relatable themes
• Showstopping moment defines the film
  
  

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Contributor Profile: Christine D. Baker

NAME: Christine D. Baker

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Vancouver, B.C. (Oops, I disclosed my location. Feel free to say hi if you’re local!)

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): History over all other things, especially ancient and medieval history. Memes and Early Internet culture. SFF books and short stories. Working to develop a specialization in Canadian SFF.

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: Plots that are entirely based on two characters failing to have a normal conversation.

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Definitely vampires.

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: I am almost always reading 6-10 books at a time (have I mentioned the ADHD?). These are the books I am actively reading at the moment: 

• How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World (2024) by Ethan Tapper.
• The Raven Tower (2019) by Ann Leckie.
• The Tapestry of Time (2024) by Kate Heartfield.
• Dreams Underfoot (1993), Newford #1, by Charles de Lint.
• Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of ADD (1999) by Gabor Mate, MD.
• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (2025) by Moudhy Al-Rashid. 

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: 

• Bog Queen (2025) by Anna North.
• The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, 2nd ed (2016) by Stephanie Coontz. 
• The Siege of Burning Grass (2024) by Premee Mohamed. 

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Honestly, I never know. It could be one of the books on my massive TBR list, the next book I have on reserve to pop up from the library, or something I hear about on social media and then immediately buy and devour. 

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... Hiding in my bed, under several cats, listening to an audiobook. 

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Favorite villain is Ivan/Fornax from Drew Hayes’ Villain’s Code series. I avoid heroes. 

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Reading. Is there a book that the team needs to get through to save the world/destroy the world, I will be the one who can skim-read it quickly. 

THE BEST/WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: I have no idea, as this is not my area of nerdery.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME/TERRIBLE: The secret truth about me is that I do not actually watch things. My ADHD does not allow it. 

NAME A BOOK  YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): I think that Peter Clines’ 14 (in the Threshold series) would make a fun movie!

Welcome Christine! 

Book Review: Alien: Cult, by Gavin G Smith

 The Alien: Earth series we should have got. 

cover artist: Marco Turini and Julia Lloyd

We've been spoilt with new Alien content in the last few years - video games, excellent ttrpgs, movies in the same universe, television shows and novels. Alien: Cult is the latest of these from Titan and written by Gavin G. Smith who has done both original work but also has a track record in IP like this one. 

There are a huge number of Alien novels if you pay attention to these things. However, I'm not one for pay attention so this is the first Alien novel I've read. I like the setting and liked Alien and Aliens (although I've struggled with just about every Alien film since then and have a visceral hatred of Prometheus and Covenant because they require their characters to be dumb for their stories to work). 

I didn't mind Alien Romulus up until it jumped the shark. What I specifically like about Alien is the setting - at its best it's retro locked room SF horror, stuck in a world designed when the Cold War was still an existential boogeyman hovering like a dark cloud with five minutes standing between us and nuclear destruction. The power blocs in Alien are those that existed in the 1980s - The US as corporate haven in which government is for the rich and by the rich, the 3WE which is basically the British Empire, Space Communists and what was, at the time, called the 3rd World making up the remaining power. That these haven't been updated does, I think, speak to its visual origins - one can imagine that if this had originated as a novel or a game first then over the years the setting would have moved with the times. As it is, the Alien's universe is therefore curiously anachronistic, speaking to and about a world that has passed into history.

That it remains relevant is largely because it continues to focus on the one power bloc that persists in an unbroken line since Alien (1979) first hit movie screens more than four decades ago.

The preponderance of Alien material takes place in English speaking parts of the universe and nearly all of that within the US corporate robber baron/tech bro setting specifically. Sure, a corporate ruled world in which the powerful and wealthy get to decide whether ordinary people live or die with no comeback sounds like a pastiche of American society but...

More on point, Alien worked in part because it was space truckers meet a monster and are hampered by their corporate overlords. 

Aliens similarly works because it's jarheads meet the monster and are hampered by their corporate overlords. 

Even Romulus tagged into the working class vibe and it was, without doubt, the most exciting part of the movie. 

Long story, short - Alien works with its audiences where it's about ordinary working class people making do when they're faced with a monster in the flesh and corporate assholes who are probably well aware of what's going on but either don't care or are actively rooting for the monster against their own people. There's very few of us who haven't felt the pressure of trying to please our bosses while the real world attempts to take chunks out of our ability to make ends meet. Alien is, if nothing else, a metaphor for the vicissitudes of modern life with both corporate malfeasance and arbitrary events included in that framework. 

Alien: Cult sits nicely within this category - featuring nefarious corporations, corrupt lawmakers, a Wild West/frontier setting and main characters who are right out of central casting for working class Joes just trying to get by. It seems to me that the Alien setting is one that wants to repeatedly warn us about how people are corrupted, how money and power should be policed vigorously and how the law, if it's any good, needs to apply to the powerful with more alacrity than it does to anyone else. Smith's voice is one that drips with disdain for those who abuse their power and privilege and that lends Alien: Cult a flavour that really works. The setting is bleak but there's no shortage of anger with how things are to remind us that people will hate injustice and act on it if given the chance even as others will allow their characters to be corroded away for the chance to grab a few more dollars.

The pacing is just about perfect, with plenty of tension, action and a nice through line of detective work as our FBI agent main character slowly figures out the conspiracy at the heart of the book. I note that the title kind of gives it away, but if you're at all familiar with Alien then you already know it won't go well for anyone involved - this is sci-fi horror after all and Smith delights in making sure we know absolutely no one is safe.

Smith also brings the action to life by refusing to ignore that getting hit hurts. When his characters are beaten up or shot they feel it, it impairs their capability and after a million action stories where the hero keeps going because the narrative demands it, Alien: Cult does a good job of making you feel the wear and tear.

The tagline for this review is that this is the Alien Earth I wish we'd got. Noah Hawley did a fantastic job of world building but the show couldn't decide what it wanted to be and ended with an outrageous two fingers up at the audience. 

In contrast, Alien: Cult is tightly written with a complete story that deepens what we know of the Alien universe while not requiring any previous knowledge to make sense of what's going on. For those who know it has nods to classic moments from the film franchise without those being gratuitous and there were moments that felt as if they'd have fit quite happily in with Bladerunner. 

--

Highlights:

• Aliens!
• Cults, working class anger, lots of blood and explosions
• Gritty action, nefarious corporations and the corrupt getting their comeuppance

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, a fast paced story set in the Alien Universe. Not doing anything novel but a well executed example of the form.

References: Smith, Gavin G., Alien: Cult. [Titan 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Contributor Profile: Stew Hotston

NAME: Stew Hotston

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Sword School

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): Books, movies, animation

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: the hero's journey

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Aliens

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: Blood over Brighthaven by ML Wang

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: Exordia by Seth Dickinson, The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, Magic, Maps and Mischief by David Green

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... making chocolate ice cream

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Black Panther, Kilgrave from Jessica Jones

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: luck

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Spiderman into the Spiderverse

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Morbius

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: One battle after another

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: Frieren

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: Severance

NAME A BOOK  YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

Welcome Stew!

Film Review: Keeper

A slow-burning, dizzying, and surreal descent into folk horror madness

I'm continuing a trend this year where I go into movies absolutely blind, and folks, I can't recommend it enough. Trailers these days tend to give away the entire plot, choice scary bits, choice funny bits, and just generally lessen the film-going experience.

So when I heard Osgood Perkins, of recent Longlegs fame, was directing a new picture, I threw it on the calendar sight unseen. Perkins is divisive to say the least, but I love what he's doing with horror cinema, and I love the way he creates dreadful, brooding atmospheres. His name alone gets me in the theater, and it's fun having a scary-movie director you can count on yearly these days.

Keeper tells the story of a couple, Liz and Malcolm, who have been dating for exactly a year, and they take a trip upstate to spend a few days at Malcolm's family's cabin. Liz quickly discovers that something isn't right with the situation. The cabin itself is sparse, isolated, and none of the windows have curtains or blinds. Malcolm's rude cousin crashes their romantic getaway on the first night, and the next day Malcolm leaves Liz alone to return to work for a few hours. Before he leaves, he insists that she eat a bite of strange chocolate cake. That night, she rises alone and demolishes the rest of it.

What follows is a gradual descent into madness for Liz. Tatiana Maslany, of Orphan Black and She-Hulk fame, is incredible at capturing fear and paranoia. She sees disturbing spirits and dead women throughout the house, and, while venturing outside, nature and the woods take on an otherworldly quality that's hypnotic.

The first hour of Keeper is glacially slow, with Perkins ratcheting up the tension scene by scene through the use of strange shots. The camera is always peering from behind an object or wall, with 2/3 of the screen obscured by flat color while the characters occupy a mere sliver of it. These scenes are meant to make you feel like you're the obtrusive, evil presence.

If this all sounds weird and boring, you're not entirely wrong. The main complaint I've seen of Keeper is that it's way too long and slow. But don't worry—in the last 20 minutes you get the most surreal, intense, jaw-droppingly messed-up denouement dump I've ever seen.

Like with the villain reveal in this year's Weapons, everything goes back to a witch. Malcolm and his cousin, it turns out, are 200 years old, and as kids, they shot a pregnant woman who was on their property. (This woman also looks exactly like Liz in the present day.) She gives birth to what I can only tell are evil creatures, and these demons make a deal with the cousins: sacrifice a woman to them every year, and the boys can live forever.

It's an Omelas meets Picture of Dorian Gray situation, and for a minute in the theater, you breathe a sigh of relief—Ahh, so that's the hook. But then you realize there's so many questions. Why did the creatures need to make a deal? Why do the boys freeze their age at around 45 instead of 25, the best age that we can all agree would be best to live forever as?

The interesting part comes next, however. Liz, being sacrificed and thrown into the basement to be devoured by the creatures, doesn't succumb. Because she eerily resembles the creatures' long-dead mother, they spare her, imbuing her with evil black eyes and strange powers. Malcolm goes to bed thinking he's made another perfect deal with the devil, and instead wakes up aged 200 years, with Liz now taking the upper hand and killing him.

That's the simplified telling of the ending, and, like with any horror movie (or really any movie in general), describing it succinctly doesn't really do it justice. The scene in the basement where Liz comes face to face with the creatures is where the folk horror heads into overdrive. Splayed up against the wall is some sort of earthy, decaying effigy of the original witch, her head preserved in a vat of honey. The creatures are exceedingly spooky, and the real star of the scary factor of the movie. They're unlike any other demon I've seen (in a good way), and they're deeply unsettling. I like seeing the ways Perkins comes up with frights, and I trust him wholeheartedly to deliver.

Overall, I enjoyed Keeper. It's a twist on the haunted house trope that desperately deserves new life to be breathed into it. The cabin, like in any good horror movie, becomes a character itself and serves as a claustrophobic backdrop for the ever-intruding spirits that are slowly revealing themselves to Liz. It's hard to tell throughout the movie what's real and what's not, but that's part of the fun.

When you finish the movie, the opening scene makes more sense. It's a montage of different women throughout the centuries, and you realize they're all Malcolm's victims. The ending is made that much more satisfying when you realize his reign of terror has come to an end, and Liz is now in charge of the creatures. I can't stop thinking about what she'll do with them. Hopefully, she won't evil girlboss too close to the sun.

--

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.

6 Books with Stew Hotston

With a Celtic-Indian mother and a father of North African/Roma descent, Stewart Hotston is a somewhat confused second-generation immigrant living in the UK. His novels include the BFS and Subjective Chaos finalist Entropy of Loss, as well as the tech thriller Tangle’s Game and the science fiction novels based in UBISoft’s Watch Dogs universe—Daybreak Legacy and Stars & Stripes. He is also co-owner of one of the UK’s largest LARP systems, Curious Pastimes, and is an internationally competitive historical fencer with a PhD in theoretical physics.

Today he takes that diverse curriculum vitae and tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’m reading Blood over Bright Haven by ML Wang. For nonfiction I’m reading Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? I’m really enjoying both. Wang’s feels pretty timely, and an interesting take on a whole number of issues that are important to me (intersectionality, prejudice, colonialism) wrapped up in a meticulously crafted fantasy world.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Mahmud El Sayed’s science fiction novel The Republic of Memory is the one most on my radar. Having just seen the cover and read the first chapter, I’m really very excited for what he’s bringing to the genre—a unique cultural perspective, a fascinating stor, and what looks to be interesting structural choices.












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

I’m not much of a rereader, but I have promised myself I’m going to reread The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez and the Tyrant Philosopher series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

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

Annie Bot. I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind—I really disliked it when I first read it, but it then went on to win the Clarke Award, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to return to it and reassess to see if what I found so difficult the first time remains a sticking point on a second readthrough.












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

Oh, wow. That’s a difficult one because I read A LOT as a younger person and much of that has stayed with me. In terms of lasting influence on my writing, though? I think I was about 25 (I’m 50 now, so I’m going to let it count) when I read House of Leaves, and that really showed me that writing was more than content, more than delivering plot, that it could be about the words, the structure, the form itself. I’ve never written anything like it (and probably never will), but it remains a revelation to me that I return to again and again. Especially when I encounter people telling me there are rules to writing.

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

My latest is Project Hanuman, which is a space opera in the Culture mode, if that’s not too pretentious to say. More specifically, it’s also a retelling of how the god Hanuman lost his powers (and got them back), wrapped up in the collapse of a pan-galactic civilisation called the Arcology, and follows three of the survivors as they seek to build back. I am a trained physicist, and as a result this is one weird book, because modern physics says some incredibly strange things about reality, and I wanted to make those part of the story as much as the mythic elements around Hanuman.







Thank you, Stewart!

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

New Contributors

We are excited to announce that Nerds of a Feather is growing. Today we welcome five new writers to the flock. You’ll be seeing much more from them in the coming weeks and months, but for now, here is a quick introduction to who they are and what they are about.

Christine D. Baker, Historian and Cat-Wrangler

Nerd specializations: History over all other things, especially ancient and medieval history. Memes and Early Internet culture. SFF books and short stories. Working to develop a specialization in Canadian SFF.

Bio: Christine has a PhD in History, although not in anything immediately relevant to SFF fandom. She's currently working through all the Hugo award winners and podcasting about it at Hugo History

(@hugohistory.bsky.social). In addition to SFF nerdery, she also does a lot of weight lifting, open-water swimming, and kayaking. You can find her posting photos of her cats at @klaxoncomms.com on Bluesky. (Klaxon is her freelance writing and editing business; so named because Christine is often a human klaxon.)

Maya Barbara

Nerd specialism: horror, literary fiction, pop culture

Bio: Maya Barbara, or known by a few as Babs, hails from West Tennessee where you can find her yelling about something pop culture related. She is also a high school English teacher who has moonlighted as a pop culture researcher/reporter for an uneven amount of years. You can summon her by talking about hyperspecific pop culture history or Interview With The Vampire (2022), the only show she’s trying to create a cult for.

Stew Hotston, The Mummy Librarian

Nerd Specialisms: Books, movies, sword fighting

Bio: Stew is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society.

Eddie Clark

Nerd specialisms: SFF books. Video Games. Anime. The intersection of gay shit with all 3.

Bio: For his sins, Eddie has a day job which involves talking and writing about very specific nerd fixations to people who are at least nominally just as interested in them. Outside work, he takes a break by hiking, taking photos, and indulging in very specific nerd fixations and talking to people on the internet about them, which is of course very different from work. (He's an academic. All public nerdery, all the time).

Gabrielle Harbowy, part-time elf

Nerd Specialisms: TTRPGer, Team Star Wars. Totally normal about Baldur's Gate 3.

Bio: Gabrielle is an editor, writer of TTRPG adventures, novels, and short fiction, and she's a literary agent with Corvisiero Literary Agency. She loves cats, ravens, tattoos, starry skies, and playing tourist in her own city. When she's not reading or writing, she's thinking about reading and writing. She has a patreon focused on querying, writing, and game stuff at patreon.com/gabrielle_h, and can be found on bluesky at gabrielle-h and online at gabrielleharbowy.com.

Welcome to the flock!

Anime Review: 7th Time Loop

There's a little bit of everything in this compact time loop/romance/action/adventure

Anime series usually fall into distinct categories: shonen adventure, romance, magic and fantasy, portal adventure, etc. Seventh Time Loop is a fun, compact story that offers a little bit of all the things viewers might want from an anime. Its full title is: The Seventh Time Loop: The Villainess Lives a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy. Although it seems to tell the complete story, the title is intentionally misleading. The protagonist Rishe is not a villain, and her life in her seventh time loop is not at all carefree.

Rishe is a young noblewoman forced into an engagement to her kingdom’s arrogant prince. When false rumors paint Rishe as a villain, the prince denounces her and publicly cancels the engagement. Rishe takes the opportunity to flee and start life anew in an unexpected trade. However, she is eventually killed and reborn into the same moment of the original engagement being broken. In the style of Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, or Source Code, Rishe restarts her life with all the knowledge she amassed from her prior incarnations. In each time loop, Rishe has extended time to build skills, find practical mentors, create friendships, and learn about the world before she dies. Through her various incarnations she learns, with the help of others, to be a maid, a merchant, an herbalist, an academic scientist, a soldier, and other practical tasks, and she becomes stronger and smarter after each life.

In each time loop Rishe’s death is, directly or indirectly, brought about by Arnold, the cruel prince of a neighboring kingdom whose warmongering brings, in various forms, destruction to Rishe. However, in her seventh reincarnation, Rishe has had enough of her fate being controlled by both princes. She tells off her fiancé and jumps from a balcony to escape. She is intercepted by the same prince Arnold, who stabbed her to death when she was a soldier in her last life. Arnold is powerful, sharp-tongued, and stoic, but intrigued by Rishe’s fierce, unladylike behavior. Fascinated, he immediately proposes to her. With several caveats, Rishe decides to accept in the hopes that a closer relationship to her six-time killer may give her insight into him and possibly help her bring peace to the realms.

In many romance anime stories, the protagonist is shy, unpopular, or otherwise insecure, and is constantly dazzled or flustered by the other stronger/more popular/richer person’s attention. In Seventh Time Loop we don’t have that sort of unbalanced dynamic. Rishe is smart, physically strong, and very clever. Arnold is the same. Arnold is confident, although stoic, and he knows Rishe is no ordinary princess. Intellectually, Rishe has the upper hand, since she has relived this existence six times. The cat-and-mouse dynamic is reminiscent of the always entertaining The Apothecary Diaries but without the mystery elements. Both characters call each other out when they detect deception or manipulation.

However, the slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance takes a back seat to explorations of a range of issues, including class oppression, the role of women, using commerce to help build economic stability, and the unending cost of war. Since Rishe has lived life as everything from a scullery maid to a royal to a merchant to a soldier to an academic, she has insight into options other than war and oppression. But these are the options Arnold feels compelled towards. In each episode she uses one of her past experiences to redirect Arnold.

In addition to Rishe’s time looping, we also get insight into Arnold’s backstory, including how his abusive father shaped his bitter personality and led to a toxic relationship with his troubled younger brother. The story also introduces likeable side characters from various aspects of Rishe’s reincarnations. For those who like action and adventure, there is plenty of sword fighting, palace intrigue, war flashbacks, family drama, and political upheaval. For those who like romance, there is plenty of witty parlor banter (in the vibe of Queen Charlotte), ballroom scenes, and swoon-worthy moments between our bold heroine and her morally gray fiancé. The writers do a good job of painting Prince Arnold as a complex and problematic but still potentially redeemable character. In the vibe of Bon Appetit, Your Majesty, the time travel premise provides a perfect device for subtly redirecting a tyrant.

For fans of The Apothecary Diaries, this is an ideal short series to tide you over until the next season finally drops. But, the storytelling is more linear and direct, and lacks mystery elements or extended moments of introspection. The overall tone and animation style is much more simplistic. And the historical setting means there will be plenty of troubling content to wrestle with without resolution because of the short length of the series. However, despite these limitations, Seventh Time Loop packs a lot of entertainment, social commentary, humor, and adventure into twelve very bingeable episodes. With optimistic, brightly colored animation, and a pragmatic point of view, the series provides balanced storytelling with just enough adventure, moral depth, romance, and humor to keep you satisfied.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Slow burn, time travel romance
• Clever exploration of social issues
• Compact, linear storytelling

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

Film Review: In Your Dreams

Maybe sleep on this one

It’s tricky to make a story about dreams feel like it has actual stakes. In Paprika, the danger is that the outlandish creations of the dream world are leaking out to reality. In Inception, the danger is that going too deep may make you lose your mind. And you know what you’ve gotten into if you start dreaming of Freddy Krueger. But if you’re telling a cute adventure for kids, you can’t make things too dangerous. Ultimately, the consequences of experiencing a dream only matter in the real world; that’s what Pixar’s Dream Productions understood so well. In the new Netflix animated film In Your Dreams, the danger for most of the plot is rather unclear; whenever a dream gets too scary, the kids simply wake up. It’s only in the third act that the script seems to remember that something must be at stake.

In Your Dreams plays with the double meaning of “dream” as “the random images your brain vomits while you sleep” and “a heartfelt desire” to turn the character of the Sandman into a sort of wish-granting genie. Our protagonist, a young girl called Stevie, is worried that her mother’s new job opportunity may cause her parents to divorce, so she embarks on a quest across the dream world to find the Sandman’s remote lair and ask him to fix reality. The fact that in stories involving the Sandman he typically has no power outside of dreams should give you a hint as to how the whole matter will turn out.

As derivative as the story gets, it should at least be commended for destigmatizing divorce and women who pursue their careers. But do children in the 21st century really need to be reminded that divorce isn’t the end of the world? One would hope not, but with the conservative bent that the culture is taking, I guess any progressive message is welcome.

The movie follows to the letter the basic scriptwriting advice that what your protagonist thinks they want is not what they actually need. Stevie thinks that she should defend the sanctity of the nuclear family, but what she needs is to learn to stop poking her nose in adult decisions she doesn’t understand. She’s the only character in the movie with an arc, and it leads to not trying to fix what’s not broken. It’s an odd way to resolve a plot, because it implies that things were already going to sort themselves out before she started overthinking.

There's a minor additional arc for Stevie regarding her relationship with her little brother, and it goes exactly in the direction one can predict in a story for kids. The fact that she’s written as a control freak who must learn to take it easy, while her brother is a chaos goblin who is not required by the plot to mature or discover any lesson in order to repair their relationship, points to uncomfortable gendered assumptions that the script seems unaware of. You know your choices in characterization need some extra work when your most interesting character is a smelly plush giraffe.

In Your Dreams does fulfill the requisite task of making its dreamscape look random and whimsical, which is what should be expected of a child’s unconscious, but there’s a disconnect between Stevie’s current worries and the content that her dreams show her. It’s curious that during her whole adventure she doesn’t encounter any dreams about her parents’ crisis, and instead she spends the movie’s runtime revisiting the greatest hits of her own oneiric repertoire. That’s a missed opportunity for thematic cohesion.

There’s an original piece of lore that the movie comes up with to explain nigthmares, which has fascinating implications worth pausing to examine for a moment. Because the Sandman can’t affect the real world, it’s actually very dangerous to ask a wish of him: he’ll only make it true within his domain, which requires you to stay trapped in it. To protect dreamers from ever meeting the Sandman, his counterpart, a giver of nightmares, distorts dreams so that you’ll wake up before you make it too far into the world of dreams. This means that nightmares are good for you, and you should be grateful that they keep you from a much worse dream experience. I can’t wait to see parents try to soothe their kids’ night terrors with this argument.

In Your Dreams is pretty to watch, but it’s far from the visual grandeur of Inside Out and somehow, amazingly, less deep in its themes than Slumberland. I can’t even recommend it for a couple hours of mindless fun. You can get that on your own by going to sleep.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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