Video Game Review: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Exploring a capitalist wasteland one kindness at a time

Artist: Guillaume Singelin

I'm a lover of roleplaying games—especially ones that give you a chance to live a life and inhabit a personality. Sure, linear stories with lots of action are fine, but for me the real joy is in finding something where you feel like the world is alive, lives are precious, and decisions mean something. In other words, I don't have time for games where I'm asked to shoot a hundred goons in the face and then care about the big bad's moral quandary—the moral contradictions are just too jarring.

I had not come across Fellow Traveller as a publisher before, and the only reason I got into Citizen Sleeper 2 (having not played the first) was because it was included in my Playstation subscription. I say this to give you context for what comes next.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is about a character, a Sleeper, whom you play. The entire story is narrated in the second person. It’s set in a small part of a solar system not our own, which is now several decades if not longer after the collapse of a grand empire. That empire, a corporate behemoth that spanned multiple star systems, is gone, and in its wake so is interstellar travel.

All that’s left to the people living on the shore as the tide went out to never come back is an asteroid-filled star system in which they cling to the vestiges of what came before and try to make a life while they can. It’s clear that corporations still exist in this world—they occupy the fertile and rich inner system, but this game takes place entirely within an asteroid belt at the edge of their reach while they fight one another. The people here expect the war to reach them eventually but hope it won’t. In the end there’s nothing they can do about it, so they carry on with their lives.

You, as a Sleeper without a name, are an artificial being—a body made to house a partial personality someone sold to the corporation who made you so that the body you’re in could work as a slave.

The story starts with you on the run from your current master, who is quickly established as a pretty evil dude. From there you have a reasonably free hand on where you go and who you talk to within the scope of the game.

This isn’t an open-world RPG. In many ways it’s more of an interactive story with RPG elements. That’s an important distinction to make because the game has a story to tell, and although your choices make for a unique experience, the scope here is small.

Small is not an insult; it’s to set your expectations. I want to call out Disco Elysium as a companion game in its vibes. Not that you can die of a heart attack during character creation or be a destitute drunk; those are surface ornaments. Where the two games are similar and why Citizen Sleeper 2 works so well for me is that they’re concerned with telling a story and allowing you just enough freedom to build that tale yourself.

I would encourage you to experiment with its mechanics, because it doesn’t explain them beyond the most cursory help screens. I started this three times before I worked out how to navigate the systems in such a way that I didn’t choose myself into a frustrating dead end early in the game.

A lot of the game’s story is delivered one of two ways, through a series of dice rolls or through text that arrives in response to conversations and choices you make as a Sleeper.

This means there’s a lot of text on the screen. That wasn’t a problem for me because the narrative is well written, the text meaningful, and the game deeply immersive, but be warned: this isn’t an RPG where you’re moving people around the screen and getting into fights. All that could lead to a mediocre game that covers a lot of the ground anyone who’s been around the block is going to be familiar with. However, in an example of taking something familiar and executing it brilliantly, Citizen Sleeper 2 takes its elements and delivers a banger: a story involving the development of self, the essential nature of collective action, the plight of slaves and refugees, the need (or otherwise) to determine your own fate and how to build community when everything is objectively getting worse.

There are a good number of side characters, including some that arrive and depart after a couple of missions. Not everyone can be pulled together, but at the same time, there are only a few places where I think you can rupture your relationship with them once they’re on board. I note, though that your companions interact with you but not really with one another, and even then you can't just initiate conversations—the game dishes them out in response to events.

Citizen Sleeper does a good job of hiding the seams of the story, but they do occasionally show through—most often when you’ve botched a job or chosen a route that should break a relationship but doesn’t. I don’t mind this too much, because I found the process of exploration and of helping people to be extremely emotionally rewarding.

Most of all, just like Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper 2 doesn’t change the world—morally ambiguous people continue on after you’re done; others rise and some fall. The Sleeper’s arc feels complete but not finished, and the same is true of those around them. I like this kind of story because it remembers well that it’s never the case that the world revolves around an individual, no matter what we are told.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a deeply satisfying storytelling experience and roleplaying game. I felt love and sadness, urges towards kindness, and anger throughout. The game made me feel things. On top of that, it managed to make the stakes feel pressing and urgent, both via its mechanics that don’t let you sleep on making choices and also through its story.

It's not a game that wants you to rush, whether that’s in the delivery of a lot of text or in giving you free time on different stations to just potter about making friends and earning credits. Indeed, it rewards such patience.

The influences here are clear enough: from Saga, Descender, Cyberpunk and Bladerunner to Firefly and Silent Running. Citizen Sleeper 2 feels like the kind of thoughtful RPG you’re delighted to discover after playing D&D your entire life.

A last word on the characters. Each character gets some time to develop and interact with you as the Sleeper. Some are looking at their identities, some are trying to establish themselves. Some are on their own quests and some just want connection. Each of them feels like they matter, and it’s your intersection with their values and desires that brings the best out of the game.

Highlights:

• Miners unionising to defeat exploitative bosses
• All kinds of different intelligences
• Loneliness at the end of the universe

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, a patient piece of storytelling that takes the familiar and executes it almost perfectly.

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.

Book Review: Making History by K. J. Parker

Another novella set in Parker's mainline secondary universe, about a group of academics tasked with a seemingly impossible task by a tyrant. 

Uneasy lies the head of someone who is targeted by a tyrant for a special job. First Citizen Gyges, the tyrant of Aelia, has a plan for war but of a pretext beyond comprehension. The nearby Ana Strasoe is full of barbarians, and starting a war with them on the right pretext could give Gyges a chance to expand into their territory. That, once accomplished, could give him the power to go up against the regional power of Anticyrene. And if Gyges knocks them off, then Aelia would truly be in the heavyweight class and Gyges could contemplate taking on the biggest empire of them all, the Sashan. But it hinges on getting a reason for war that the Ana Strasoe, and his own people, will accept.

And so Gyges formulates a plan so that a few lead scholars, including our narrator, are to manufacture a false history of Aelis, complete with recently discovered artifacts and ruins, that will justify Aelia going after Ana Strasoe with a willing and eager populace. Gyges’ plan is as mad and grand as you might imagine--manufacturing a whole lost city and civilization that can be “discovered” and used as reason for the war to happen to recover lost glory. It has to be a bulletproof, fully documentable manufactured lost history.

This, needless to say, does not go to plan...

This is the story of the novella Making History.

Making History is set in the secondary world that Parker has, with often contradictory and twisty worldbuilding, been building for quite some time. Call it the Saloninus-verse, for the character he has alluded to, mentioned and referenced and written about the most. Or Parkerland, since that is what the author calls it. It’s a world based on areas of antiquity and medieval Europe from roughly the Mediterranean all the way to Central Asia, with lots of countries, polities and ideas that resonate with our world but aren’t quite our own. You can see the echoes and Parker has a lot of fun with that. The Sashan are very much in the mold of the Parthian or Sassanian Empire, except even more powerful. The Robur, who do not feature in this book, are the Roman stand-ins. And so on.

Parker’s trick and devilry for a reader who wants an organized timeline and the like is that his references are contradictory, mixed and tangled at best. Just where anything is in relation to anything else is often unclear, and when things occur in relation to other books is pretty dire to try and figure out, and that’s part of Parker’s joy. I’ve seen proposed maps and some time frames but they are all very speculative.

So figuring out when and where Making History takes place in this verse is tricky. We do have Aelia, and the Sashan and Anticyrene, so we have some basic ideas on when it occurs in the verse. It doesn’t actually matter when it occurs in the timeline and where. You don’t have to have to have read any previous Parker in order to enjoy this. Where it fits in a history that is unclear, contradictory and unclear doesn’t really matter to enjoy the novella.

And yet it does somewhat, given the plot of the story. The academics are trying to manufacture a history from scratch, a history that didn’t exist. They know the truth, mostly about where Aelia came from. They did not come from a fallen civilization that straddled the border of Aelia and the Ana Strasoe. They know that what Gyges wants is completely manufactured and unreal.

And yet they have to do it. The work is split up among these academics. Our narrator is tasked with an interesting problem, and that of language. A fair amount of the novella is concerned with our protagonist trying to reverse engineer a language that could be plausibly be seen as the ancestor of Aelian¹. Parker goes into a deep dive into a real historical subject but in a fictional context, something that he is awfully fond of doing. In this case, we get how to reverse engineer not only a plausible proto language that a high fallen civilization might have produced, but also its writing system as well. It’s a brilliant bit of worldbuilding backwards and forwards, which is ironic given Parker’s disinterest in presenting a coherent set of worldbuilding for his world.

In that way, Making History is Parker being self aware of what he is done in the universe, and having the opening of the plot having academics being tasked with making an articulate (if false) history of Aelia and making it all make sense and stand up to scrutiny and rigor. Is it a “take that” at the whole project of making consistent worldbuilding? Perhaps, because as the plot unfolds, the narrator and the other academics start to see echoes of their created past crop up in the present day, inexplicably. Artifacts that are clearly fake--they have to be, they weren’t made for the unearthed site but they are in the style. And then there are people speaking the language our narrator created. And documents as well...

And how and what is going on, unfolds the main plot of the novel. In classic style, Parker makes it clear that there are multiple answers as to what could be going on. The more fun and much more unlikely answer is the Borges answer. The academics hypothesize, that while their primary guess as to what is happening (redacted for spoilery reasons) is probably what is really happening, their alternate guess is even more fun and I will spoil that here: They think that by manufacturing such a large volume

Have you read Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? That is a short story where entries and information regarding a strange and seemingly fictional place start cropping up in the real world, and slowly and surely become real. It’s a horror story, in a way, that history and reality could be so weirdly warped as to have a fictional volume of an encyclopedia of a place that doesn’t exist start to intrude on reality and start to influence reality. In that story, artifacts from the titular Tlön, just like in Making History, start to appear. The false reality of Tlön becomes, in effect, real. The academics as their backup low-probability explanation think that the large force of their efforts to make a false history does, in fact, change the past and make it real.

And once again, it goes back to the theme I’ve looked at this novella through the lens with--the inconsistent and not defined worldbuilding of Parker in his Parkerland universe. There is no bible, no one set history of his world and the very act of him writing another book upsets and changes that applecart and the calculations of what has come before, all the more. It is all stone mirrors, all strange and invented languages, all Tlön.

The other book to tie this to is a book I’ve looked at over in Skiffy and Fanty, and that is All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily by Rhiannon Garth-Jones. That book is a non-fictional look at the legacy and responses to Rome by successor civilizations and how they change and take slices of that history and run with it. And in so doing, often distort or change aspects of that history, culture and society for their own ends. Just as one example, have you noticed that the Neoclassical style, so seen in Washington D.C, is all white marble? That’s a misinterpretation of the originals, the paint on Greek and Roman buildings being long gone. The actual originals, in the time of Plato, or Cicero, or Emperor Trajan, would have been polychromatic, even gaudy, by modern eyes.Were any of them transported to the modern day, they would take one look at the Capitol building and wonder what happened to all the color.

There is much more richness and discussion and thought in the novella, about the nature of truth, information, society and history. There is the classic dark humor and biting wit that Parker’s work features. It’s a thinking piece in many ways, much along the shorter works in his oeuvre, as opposed to direct action. But I do think it gives a very good entry point into how Parker writes, especially in the shorter vein, when he truly allows his nerdery and deep interest in subjects come to the fore. In some ways, I think Parker’s efforts in novels aren’t quite as sharp, or strong or rich as novellas and stories such as Making History.

About the only thing missing from the book is not even a jot of a mention of Salonicus. Is it set before him, then? Unclear! (see above).

-- 

Highlights:

• What is truth, anyway and can you manufacture it?
• Deep nerdery dives, a classic of shorter Parker work.
• Biting, dark humor.
• No Salonicus references in this one.

Reference: Parker, K.J., Making History (tordotcom, 2025)

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

¹Given Parker’s strong interest in engineering, going into this novella, I had completely expected that it would be focused on the engineering aspects of the story. If you are going to have a lost city, it’s not as easy as burying a city and then, voila, uncovering it. There are some concerns that our narrator discusses with one of his colleagues tasked with that part of the project, but it is not the focus of this novella that I thought it might be.

Festival View: The Ugly Chickens

Every now and then, there’s a short that comes across my desk that plays on each and every one of my things. The Ugly Chickens happened to be one like that. Subtle science fiction? Yep. Extinct animals? Quite. An adaptation of Howard Waldrop? No doubt. Felicia Day? In the extreme!

Let me start with a thing that has always been true: the best science fiction short films are gentle science fiction. This is what draws the line with features for me. Yes, effect-driven features are really where it's at (and you can fight me on that!), but the shorter the short, the more based on our world the science fictional scenario should be. When I came across The Ugly Chickens, I knew that it was going to be the one that made me happiest.

The story of The Ugly Chickens is fairly simple: it’s the late 1970s in Texas, and an ornithology associate professor, Paula (played by Felicia Day) is running to her class when she bumps into a woman who sees the cover of her extinct birds book showing a dodo. She says she hadn’t seen ‘those ugly chickens’ in years, and tells the story of how her neighbors had raised them. She’s been obsessed with the dodo for a long time, and that led to an adventure to find the dodo, who she hopes is not as dead as everyone had thought. Her obsession leads her to travel to Louisiana, and she finds proof that there were dodos, but runs into a local, and that sets her off on another series of adventures at tremendous cost to herself. The way it plays out is both utterly satisfying and completely non-ambiguously a let-down.

I can remember reading the story in the late 1980s. It was so smart, and it dealt with my favorite: the dodo. They were a sweet, loving bird. They weren’t dumb, just trusting. I might have identified with them a bit too closely, and when I read a story where these noble creatures were present, well, I dove in. It’s helped by the fact that it was a Howard story as well. His writing went into so many other areas and there's always the Waldrop style I miss so much now that he’s gone. I was lucky enough to get to meet Howard a few times, and even did an exhibit based on his book The Texas-Israeli War of 1997. The Ugly Chickens was easily my favorite of all his stories.

The short switches the gender of the ornithologist to a woman, which, when played by Felicia Day, is a perfect choice. I maintain that Felicia is the finest genre actor in America today. Yes, it is a different and more specialized form of the art. It requires the ability to interact with a setting as much as other characters. It’s a multi-tier reaction process that Felicia has mastered in a way that few not named Christopher Lee have managed. She gets to roll through a series of emotional tones in a way that brings her natural charm to the front, while also not blowing out the story as it progresses.

The film is beautiful. The cinematography, handled by Alan Poon, is magnificent. It looks gorgeous, and it takes the changing setting, various time periods, and regional environments, and gives each a deliberate sense of place. Poon also handled the shooting of American Born Chinese, one of the best shot TV programs of the last decade. The entire look of the film plays with Howard’s tendency towards the rural, the backwaters and backwoods. There’s a certain Southern Gothic sense even to the classroom scene.

Now, is this an adaptation that isn’t exactly fully faithful to the story, but it absolutely maintains the spirit of the original. George R. R. Martin, one of the producers, reports that Howard saw an early cut of the picture before his passing and much approved. The script is really smart, and moves between beats without dwelling too much. This is actually more difficult than it sounds to maintain across 30 minutes and still give time for character development and Day’s amazing emoting.

I’ve programmed thousands of shorts, and there are a few which I knew would be winning awards from both audiences and the jury. The Ugly Chickens was absolutely one that I knew would, and I wasn’t wrong. At Cinequest, it won both, and I could not have been happier.

I hope that The Ugly Chickens gets a release along with the other short films that are being made from Howard’s stories, including Night of the Cooters and Mary Margaret Road Grader. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Not much changed when the Fire Nation attacked

The Avatar saga remains faithful to its tried and true formula: visually breathtaking, narratively uninspired

There are truly interesting ideas in Avatar 3 that elevate the themes raised by the first Avatar to questions of thorny significance to the story, and time after time, their resolution goes for the easy answer, the overdone cliché. The Way of Water could be forgiven for delivering very little because it promised very little. Fire and Ash promises a lot and still fails to deliver, which makes this entry in the film series a more regrettable (forgive the pun) misfire.

Let’s begin with the film’s central conflict: Spider, the human boy adopted by the blue aliens. After a sudden bout of cosmic bad luck, he ends up convulsing on the forest floor, with no more human-breathable air left in his mask and far from his stack of replacements. As a desperate last measure, our miracle child Kiri connects to the web of nature and reformats Spider’s entire body chemistry to allow him to breathe Pandora’s air. So far, so good: no more depending on a 24/7 mask to survive. However, Spider’s new metabolism opens the door to a nightmare scenario: he’s living proof that the human body can adapt to survive unimpeded in Pandora’s environment. If the bad guys figure out how to replicate the process, the entire balance of power in Pandora will shift in favor of human colonization.

Now Spider’s existence is a danger to everyone he loves, and his body is an invaluable source of biomedical innovation. The rest of the film has him ping-ponged between enemy factions that want to either cut him open for the benefit of Earth or cut his throat for the benefit of Pandora. But the movie chooses the wrong Na’vi as the mouthpiece for the latter position, and there are no lasting consequences for the personal ties that should have been damaged between Spider and his would-be executioner.

It has a jarring effect that the film brings us to this immense rift between Spider and the blue aliens, only to give everyone a happy ending where he’s welcomed by the ancestors as a member of the Na’vi without further issue. Let’s stress the point again: Spider was almost murdered by people he deeply trusts and loves, because they became convinced that his life put all of them in danger. And this betrayal comes after Neytiri has spent half the film insulting and neglecting him because she’s still grieving her dead son and Spider is a constant reminder of which people took him from her. After his near-execution, the relationship between Spider and the Na’vi shouldn’t be able to go back to normal, ever. At the very least, it should take more for him to take up arms in their defense again. Even his evil not-exactly-father, the half-Na’vi clone of the late Colonel Quaritch, shows him more respect in this film than his adoptive parents.

The other conflict in the plot, which the trailers gave much attention to but actually doesn’t affect the story that much, has to do with the Fire Nation Ash People, a tribe of pillagers who some decades ago survived a volcanic disaster and have since rejected the cult of the nature goddess Eywa. Now they live off piracy and worship the same fire that destroyed their old way of life. This is a fascinating concept that the film does nothing with. It’s one thing to present a schism in a pantheistic faith and create what is essentially a demonic cult; it’s much more compelling to do so in a setting where the nature goddess is demonstrably real and present in people’s lives. What does it look like to despise the natural flow of the life force when that force is visible and has a tangible will?

But also, what does it say about Eywa that she plays favorites between Na’vi clans? The Ash People’s backstory has them praying to be saved from the volcano, but Eywa refused to send help. In such circumstances it makes total sense that they’d form a new religion around fire, which proved to be the more powerful force, and that they’d turn to pillage to survive, both because they no longer have fertile land and because they no longer trust Eywa’s generosity.

Eywa’s will is actually one of the bigger problems with the plotting of the Avatar series. In the first movie, she saved the day via literal Dea Ex Machina, and Avatar 3 repeats the same trick in an identical situation. The critique of real-life environmental devastation is loud and clear: the humans of this future are too dim to notice the obvious intelligence of the space whales they kill for profit, but it takes a civilization-sized Idiot Ball to ignore a whole sentient biosphere telling you to stop.

When you introduce a deity into your setting, and this deity’s opinion matches your stance as an author, it’s very hard to avoid turning your story into a pamphlet. Eywa steers the plot at the times when it’s convenient, in the directions that help the author preach his message, and thus can’t function as a character in the way that the rest of the characters treat her. And the only time we’re told Eywa makes a questionable choice, i.e. letting the Ash People starve, it’s presented in a way that makes them the bad guys instead of Eywa. As often happens with supreme beings in stories, there are no lessons for Eywa to learn, no need for her to change her mind or grow. The story assumes she can do no wrong, even when it clearly shows it happening. Instead of being a character, she fulfills the function of authorial (forgive the pun) avatar that stalls or pushes the plot as needed.

Another character whom the story treats far more favorably than their actions deserve: Jake Sully, whose boot camp style of parenting will probably push Na’vi culture to invent psychotherapy on its own. Even allowing for the sad reality that the entire Na’vi people is in a war for survival, Jake has no excuse for the way he treats his children, and he’s repeatedly portrayed as heroic for it.

Avatar’s in-your-nose parable about colonialism and predatory greed has been repeating the same basic points for three movies, and doesn’t have any original perspective to add to the discussion. James Cameron has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his box. This film series should stop before its incomparably gorgeous landscapes can’t disguise the mediocre storytelling anymore.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman

Second person present tense is the sexiest way to tell a story.

If you've not come across it before, Bisclavret is a 12th century poem, one of the Lais of Marie de France, which tells the story of a knight who suffers from frequent transformation into a wolf, a secret which is later discovered and exploited against him. Indeed, the word "bisclavret" is a middle Breton term equivalent to the Norman French "garwolf"... whose English equivalent I think we might be able to guess. It draws on the pool of shared early medieval mythology, with similar reflexes found in the Lay of Melion and in the story of Sir Marrok in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman is a retelling of this werewolf story, playing on its status as a romance in the historic and the modern senses, to explore courtly love, kingship, fealty and living with a secret dangerous to oneself and others.

But before we get into the story, I actually want to start by discussing the historical note provided at the front of the book, which is one of the best I have ever encountered at setting out the stall for exactly what the author wants the story to be:

That last sentence is key to how Longman handles the historicity of their story - they promise not strict accuracy, but an authenticity of approach that aims to situate the story in the thematic space of its inspirations, if not the details and facts. And that intention absolutely is borne out in the story itself; there is an internal consistency that holds the whole thing together, but which also strikingly evokes medieval works in feel, in way often distinctly absent from modern retellings, even of Arthuriana. And I love this. Honestly, I feel like this approach is probably more difficult to pull off than literal accuracy, but all the better for the effort. What I want out of historical stories isn't the replication of minutiae - if that style of hood only came into fashion ten years later, who really cares - but in the evocation of atmosphere, used to a purpose. If a story is situating itself in a medieval mythical world, what matters far more in my view is how it turns its tools to supporting the feeling it engenders in the reader. Longman's decision to mess with the details how the medievals would have done is exactly the sort of choice that I think works for this.

And there are other tools they turn to this end with precision and skill - prose for one. The story is set in 12th century France, so obviously there's not going to be any kind of realistic language usage (I don't know about you but my middle Breton is pretty poor). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to feed into the atmosphere with the linguistic choices they deploy. There's a consistent formality to the word choices - even the interior ones - that helps establish the court setting and the courtly manners of the people involved, even in moments of stress. They speak in the pattern of a knight from a story, even if their behaviour is more naturalistically drawn. Sentences are long and carefully structured, even speech full of delicately threaded subclauses and patterned back and forth. And the narration echoes this, seeming to speak itself in the voice of the storyteller, consistently determined to inspire wonder and magic, even at mundane details like travel-stained clothes. At no point does Longman let up: this is a myth, and so it must sound like one, in order that the spell never be broken.

It helps that Longman's prose is also just rather lovely:

The hunt is continuity: youth, exile, kingship, all of them joined by this bright thread of the horse beneath you and the call of the horns and the fierce joy of the hounds as they run, chasing down the boar as it crashes through the undergrowth.

Hear the alliteration and the rhythm to it. The story of Bisclavret is originally a poem, and Longman never lets that stray too far from memory either. There are three perspectives the story is written in, chapter by chapter, and one of those (labelled "other") is consistently in blank verse, its flow even closer to the poetic than even this crafted language.

For the other two, Bisclavret's chapters (labelled "him") are in close third, watching him from outside even though we know his thoughts, and the unnamed king's in second. This shifting gives a clear distinction to the different character perspectives, feeding into how they are in fact characterised, and what Longman wants to focus on in how they tell the story. Bisclavret feels at odds with himself, distracted and distant, and so we cannot be a part of his authentic thought process. The king meanwhile is the opposite, buried deep under his anxieties, his depression (never named as such but clearly described), his sadness and loneliness, his care and determination to be a better king than his father. And by giving us his sections in the second person, and the present tense, there's an immediacy to him, an intimacy to the experience of inhabiting his headspace because Longman puts us right there, thinking those thoughts through alongside.

Which pairs even more beautifully with those poetry sections of the Other. There... person is eschewed as much as possible. The Other is the wolf who overtakes Bisclavret and steals his skin and his self, and is divorced from humanity. There is no person, only scattered, ungrammared feeling and action, interspersed with italic moments of Bisclavret's humanity breaking through in the first person.

And Longman knows what they're doing with this, naming it on the page in one of these sections:

The mind of a man is difficult to lose: 

it whispers human, whispers I,

first person, self-absorbed, tangled up

with the gut instinct that pinpoints revenge 

The prose has us thinking about the how of the story just as much as the story itself.

But where this is all high romance and abstract, the text also provides details to ground the story in the physical where needed. One of the recurring themes that arises in Bisclavret's sections is his intense focus on his hands. It is the loss of his hands that he mourns when he loses himself to the wolf, and it is those same hands he finds himself touching, welcoming, when he returns to human form. They become totemic of his humanity as a whole, and his focus on them recurs at critical moments to focus the story's attention on his mental state and sense of self.

There are also many moments just of physical action - it's a story full of knights so there's a fair bit of sparring, but also the clasping of hands, kisses given in loyalty, skin touched to skin in passion. It's a hard thing, I think, to entwine the formalised world of the medieval and the mythic with a more naturalistic approach to human interaction, but Longman does it well, never breaking one for the sake of the other.

To linger on that clasping of hands, one of the central themes of the story is to do with medieval kingship, and the duties, fealties, powers and relationships that run in both directions from the person of the king. The unnamed "you" of the story is coming into kingship unready, learning the ropes, and is intended as a deeply thoughtful character besides, so there's a lot of wondering on exactly how his performance of kingship and his development and use of relationships with his retainers and knights is working. The king has relationships of a loving or sexual kind with several people during the story, too, and those factor into his wondering. It is a very modern concern to be preoccupied with the abuse of power differentials, but the way the king thinks it through never slips out of that medieval atmosphere, breaking immersion by this modern concern, because the king frames it in terms that feel in place for the time, predominantly duty and fealty. He is aware that he can but ask, and his subjects will give. He highlights that a lord could be asked to sleep in the royal bed chamber and this intimacy (named as such) would be considered a mark of high favour, rather than a one-sided wielding of power in counter to desire. This is a story conscious of contemporary medieval mores, rather than imposing modern ones, for the most part, and that allows Longman to think through this concern without feeling inauthentic. It becomes more part of the king's character - and Bisclavret's, though in different ways - to be overthinkers, doubters and worriers. To the point that the knight in green, a friend to both, comments on it to each in turn. 

I suppose that is the uniting feature - Longman likes to name things on the page that they are doing, the things that might be contrasts or awkwardnesses or disjoints, and by naming them in text smooth their path, just as they do right at the beginning with that historical note. It is an incredibly knowing story, the sense of Longman's knowledge of the period - they have a PhD in medieval literature - suffusing the whole without the need for the sometime-problem of historical stories where the author feels they must demonstrate the research on the page no matter what. In The Wolf and His King, that knowledge is in every word, and so crowbarring it in would be redundant.

But it isn't a perfect story, though very accomplished. In the original poem, Bisclavret is betrayed by his wife, who steals the thing that allows him to return to human form, and marries another knight in his absence, when all think him dead. Longman cleaves close to the facts of the original, and while it works in all other places, when it comes to the wife, it feels a little of a let down. When first we meet her, she is sweet, kind, loving, understanding. It is very clear why Bisclavret falls in love with her - she sees the man and only the man, he thinks, not the wolf within - and why she with him, and their courtly romance does feel perfect and lovely, even up to their fumbling but passionate marriage bed consummation. But once it switches, once the story requires that she betray him, she (and the other knight, who in this telling is Bisclavret's cousin, who knows his nature and has helped him until they fall out) becomes suddenly unknowable to the story. Her motives become opaque to us, and any sympathy the story had for her - which, in the beginning, it did aplenty - is absent. Her suffering as the wife of a man who keeps disappearing for days and won't tell her why is not explored, and she is granted no grace. For a book so strong on the interiority and humanity of its other characters, this feels like a failing.

It doesn't fit the schema set up that she might have chapters in her perspective, but I almost wish she did, or the cousin. But we get to see their betrayal only through the eyes of the king (who doesn't know until it is revealed) or through the experience of the wolf, who cannot provide emotional depth and understanding the way Bisclavret as a man can. The wolf only wants revenge.

And so the bloody culmination and revelation feels... a little undermined. Thankfully, the story has as its climax not that but the aftermath, ensuring that there is a genuine emotional payoff waiting in the final chapter and epilogue, but it does mean that all rings a little hollow in contrast. The king, and Bisclavret, have both been characterised by their gentleness, their courtesy, their dedication to peace or understanding of things which many would not. That it does not hold here, for those they have loved, however understandable that might be, seems like a betrayal, almost, in order to remain true to the shape of the original narrative.

But for all that, I could not help but love it nonetheless. As well as this repeated theme of what a medieval king was and could be, there is another thread about love and perception. Bisclavret falls in love with his wife because she sees him only as a man. When he meets the king, and continually afterwards, he notes that the man seems to see through him. His gaze pierces him, flays him, unmasks him. He fears he sees the wolf inside. And, in the end, that knowing gaze is the one he needs, not the one that only sees the surface. It's a little corny, but well... it is an Arthurian-inspired romance. We have to have some high ideals in there, right?

The Knight and His King is, in the main, an incredibly accomplished novel, full of linguistic control, beautiful atmosphere, vivid prose and a fully realised impression of a mythic medieval court. Longman does a difficult thing of managing to wed the right quantity of realism with the stylisation and formality of a courtly romance, in the old sense, resulting in something that feels distinctive and emotionally authentic, even as it holds true to tropes that have been around for nearly a millennium. It is also, for all its formality, an incredibly intimate, personal and passionate book, as only something with such a committed interiority could be. Longman understands, and I emphasise, that duty, honour and fealty are just incredibly sexy things when done right. And here, they absolutely are.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, two deeply feeling main characters, a world drawn straight from medieval myth

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Finn Longman, The Wolf and His King, [Gollancz 2025]

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

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 2

The gods watch over humans, but who watches the watchers?

Previously on The Legend of Lara Croft, we saw Lara learn to stop trying to save the world on her own and rely more on her allies. In season 2, we see her take that lesson to an unreasonable extreme and rely too quickly on a stranger who is obviously wearing a blinking neon sign that says, “Villain of the Season.”

This new antagonist, a rich entrepreneur named Mila, describes herself as being in the business of saving the world. To most people, that lofty goal takes the form of selling a new form of plastic that degrades more quickly. But in secret, she’s behind a series of thefts of religious relics, because her idea of saving the world is amassing enough supernatural power to press Delete and Reboot on reality. That’s why she’s collecting the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Orisha Masks: with the magic of all the Yoruba gods, she’ll become an uncontested force to deal with.

This plot sets for itself a very unstable tightrope to walk. Lara is still the star of the show, so she has to be the one to try to stop Mila from remaking the world. However, as a rich white Brit, she’s a distasteful choice of hero to save Yoruba relics from misuse. Even though the script takes care to have her eschew her late father’s less respectable methods, it still has to avoid portraying her as so ethical that she might come off as a white savior of Yoruba culture.

So the show’s solution is to have its main charater arc happen to someone other than Lara. This time there’s no personal lesson for her to figure out, so she cedes the moral spotlight to a new character: the human incarnation of Eshu, one of the Yoruba gods. At some point in the past, he had a moment of weakness and failed to protect his followers from a colonial invasion, and since then he’s lost his self-confidence and self-respect. On one hand, this is a compelling backstory for a character to deal with. On the other hand, it detracts from the thrill of the season’s climax, because Eshu happens to possess exactly the repertoire of divine superpowers that can immediately stop Mila, so a whole season’s worth of tragic losses could have been avoided if only he’d heard the requisite pep talk a bit sooner. That’s the core weakness of this plot: Eshu could have saved the day any time he chose to. All that was stopping him was low morale.

Because the focus moves away from Lara’s choices, this season doesn’t animate its action scenes in the style of a videogame like the first season did. Lara can’t be the hero in this story, because that would be horrendously problematic, so the role she fulfills is as a catalyst for Eshu’s return to heroism. It’s nice that she shares with him all the personal growth she acquired in the first season, although it feels strange that a god would need that kind of lesson.

In a way, the plot of this season resembles the plot of Eternals: someone is hunting down the gods in the present day, when they’re more or less retired after centuries of watching over humans, and the question implicit in the call to action is whether the human world deserves to be saved. Whereas the first season had humans debating whether divine powers could be trusted, now it’s the gods who debate whether humans can be trusted. That’s a neat way to carry a theme full circle.

One last, welcome addition to the show is the character of Fig, a professional assassin who works for Mila and ends up occupying a niche as Lara’s equal in martial arts. At every exotic location our protagonists visit, Lara has a fight with Fig that tests both of them in skill, strategy and endurance. It’s an exciting tension to follow, and apparently a thread that will be extended into a future season. So  even after searching for treasure in sunk ships, mounting a village’s defense with meteorite armor against modern guns, evading a shark in bloodied waters, and making it alive out of a crumbling Viking fort, there’s still much more to tell in The Legend of Lara Croft.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 1

For what does it profit you to raid all the tombs and forfeit your soul?

With the tiniest lip service to the ethical problems related to tomb raiding, the Netflix animated series The Legend of Lara Croft asks what that kind of life does to a person. Usually, in a Tomb Raider videogame, you’re mostly worried about the right timing of an acrobatic stunt and about the remaining number of bullets in a shotgun when angry dobermans come barking at you. In the show, it’s a given that Lara will succeed at everything, because she’s just that awesome, so the stakes become personal: is tomb raiding a worthy pursuit when it can get your friends killed, when it can attract the worst kind of enemies, when it can become an easy substitute for processing difficult emotions?

The adventure for the first season is nothing exceptional: it’s a globe-trotting quest to collect all the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Peril Stones before the bad guy does, because if one individual accumulates that much power—I’m sure you’ve fallen asleep by now. For the most part, the adventure is an excuse to boast gorgeously drawn scenery from every corner of the world, including Mesoamerican jungles, Mongolian steppes, Chinese rivers and French catacombs. The quality of the landscape drawing is one of the high points of the show.

Also, it’s fascinating to watch the flow of a videogame narrative play out in television. In every episode, Lara has to solve a puzzle rigged with traps, or fulfill a side quest to find some lost children before the villagers will help her, or jump between areas of a room in a precise sequence, or frantically run around a dinosaur to shoot it dead before it eats her. Some of these sequences are animated to have the “camera” follow Lara’s movements just as if they were happening in the game, and that’s a nice degree of attention to detail.

But what really makes the story interesting is Lara’s inner journey. At the start of the series, one of her traveling companions is killed, and she spends subsequent episodes processing her guilt and learning the difference between protecting her loved ones from the ugliest bits of tomb raiding and pushing them away for fear of losing them. She’s incredibly lucky to have the excellent friends she has, because their support stays unwavering through her worst tantrums. She eventually comes to realize that choosing the tomb raiding lifestyle is something she needs to do for reasons that matter to her, instead of doing it out of loyalty to dead mentors. In particular, she needs to learn to not use her adventures to distract herself from her grief and anger, because that’s the same mistake that the villain makes in his own quest for revenge, so he serves as a dark mirror of what she could become.

So, in between climbing cliffs and dodging bullets and deciphering clues and wrestling crocodiles and sneaking in secret lairs, she has valuable conversations with her allies that help her grow beyond her learned coping style. The messy feelings she harbors about the burden of the Croft name get resolved elegantly when she decides that she doesn’t have to follow the template of how her father defined the Croft legacy: the name belongs to her now, and she gets to define it in her terms.

I don’t know whether the Holy Grail of a good videogame adaptation has been found yet, but The Legend of Lara Croft clears the bar of not sucking. There’s enough dungeoneering for those who like dungeoneering, enough drama for those who like drama, and enough comedy for those who like comedy. Tomorrow we’ll see whether season 2 can stay the course.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Anime Review: My Hero Academia — The Final Season

It’s the end of an era and My Hero Academia sticks the landing in the final season

It’s hard to believe the iconic anime My Hero Academia has come to an end. After multiple feature films and eight seasons of escalating battles, emotional struggles, physical loss, and societal betrayals, the series has wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t hesitate to lean into the imperfections of the characters and the reality of loss, while still leaving viewers with a profound sense of hopefulness. The long-running series follows the adventures of Izuku (Deku) Midoriya, a determined boy whose dream of being a hero inspires a diverse range of heroes, antagonists, and ordinary people, while he battles his own inner demons. MHA started out as a traditional underdog shonen anime with bright animation, fantastical character designs, and a feel-good plot. It seemed to be the kind of comfort adventure anime to enjoy without a lot of emotional exhaustion or complexity. Soon retail stores and cosplayers were diving into the show’s colorful palette and fun costumes. But early on, MHA began to dig deeper into its characters’ psyches and into the problems of families and of society as a whole. In between the energetic fight scenes and inspiring training montages, the show dealt with child abuse, domestic violence, racism, and mistrust of the government. After eight seasons and a significant last episode time skip, the characters grow from optimistic children into mature, flawed, emotionally complex adults. The last episode delivered an unexpectedly thoughtful and quietly powerful ending, one which embraced both imperfection and hope in its final message that everyone can (and needs to be) a hero on some level. This full-circle moment from the first episode of the first season was a powerful way to end the saga and answer the question of what it really means to be a hero.

[Spoilers for earlier seasons] My Hero Academia is the story of a near-future version of Earth, where a genetic mutation eventually causes most humans to be born with some variation of special powers (“quirks”). Those with particularly strong powers are sent to academies to be trained as licensed superheroes (simply called “heroes”). The protagonist, Izuku Midoriya (a.k.a. Deku), is one of the few children born with no special power (quirk) at all. Not even a minor one. But he idolizes the ridiculously brash and popular number one ranked hero, Toshinori (a.k.a. All-Might), and dreams of somehow becoming a hero to fight the violent superpowered villains who plague the country. After a dangerous act of bravery, Izuku is secretly gifted a transferable superpower from All-Might, who can no longer fully maintain it due to a critical injury. Izuku now has the potential for super strength, super speed, and super agility. He enrolls in UA, the top hero academy, where he trains his body to accommodate and control the enormous and dangerous power he’s been gifted. While at UA, he builds bonds with his teachers and friendships with his fellow students, who have a range of powers, personalities, and complicated backstories. But the idealistic setup is upended when a group of superpowered villains directly attack the children at the school, leading to a long term-battle over the next seven seasons that exposes upsetting truths and pits the young heroes not just against the villains but also against society itself and their own personal traumas.

MHA starts out as a kid-friendly, colorful, inspiring hero adventure with a simplistic plot: heroes versus villains and natural disasters. In fact, the main antagonists are a criminal group simply known unironically as “The League of Villains.” But, like all good shonen, the story quickly takes an intense turn. Deku’s powerful but stoic classmate Shoto is a victim of child abuse with a disturbing backstory which involves domestic violence by his father, the number two rank hero, against his mother, who is also a hero. Deku also encounters a child, Eri, who appears to be kidnapped and abused, and he struggles to help her in the face of societal denials that anything is wrong. When the heroes lose a major battle, much of society turns against them and against Deku in particular. The country begins to question the usefulness and trustworthiness of heroes and the government. Viewers see how easily people can be manipulated when fear and distrust take over. The fantastical character design of some of the heroes turns into an exploration of racism, as Deku learns about the bigotry faced by his classmates who are heteromorphs, those whose quirks create unusual physical features. We also see Deku’s journey to physical and emotional resilience while holding on to his core values. And we see Deku’s childhood friend and antagonist Bakugo progress from a loudmouth bully to becoming a true hero who is willing to sacrifice everything.

Building on all this, the final season dives into lots of climactic emotional intensity and plenty of powerful moments, including the final critical battles against the two main villains, with Deku versus the tragic and tortured Tomura, and Bakugo versus the sociopathic All For One. The final storytelling is elevated, showing the full heroic redemption arc of former antagonist Bakugo. We also see Deku’s maturity as he faces devastating physical damage and a high cost for his choices. The animation and music are powerful, and the character design of the two final heroes is symbolic, making them look more serious, mature, and less cartoonish in a way that reflects their inner development and the intensity of this final fight for their lives. The entire UA class gets in on the action, and the final battles also provide an opportunity for cameos from prior side characters from the MHA feature films or from earlier seasons. So many familiar faces cheering on the heroes is a nice way to signal the end of the larger story.

Unfortunately, a drawback of the series has been the two-dimensional treatment of the main villain All For One. However, in the final season, through a flashback, we finally learn the full backstory of All For One (a.k.a. Zen) and his peaceful younger brother Yoichi, the original owner of Deku's transferrable power. We see how their desperate childhood led to abuse, violence, and to Zen’s obsession with power and control over Yoichi. That twisted love and obsession ultimately fueled a decades-long battle between the brothers that reshaped the fate of the heroes and the country. There is a nice symmetry in the brutal Zen having the power to take while the kindhearted Yoichi has the power to give, with those opposite concepts defining “evil” versus “good” in the series.

For a show that started out playfully, the ultimate story arc and messaging became surprisingly insightful, particularly in this final season. The perpetually optimistic Deku had dark moments in prior seasons and eventually became an outcast vigilante. In season 8, Deku again experiences significant loss, and he is forced to make peace with an imperfect reality. In an intriguing scene, Deku talks with Spinner, an incarcerated villain, who calls Deku a murderer. Instead of arguing or crying about it, Deku calmly admits that he is indeed a killer when needed. The two have an odd conversation that acknowledges their significantly different worldviews but sparks inspiration in both of them.

The final season emphasizes the need for a cross-section of people to create the world we want to live in. Not just physically powerful fighters, but also engineers, teachers, people of different abilities, and ordinary members of society, because, as the final season shows us, physical power may be flashy and fun, but it is fleeting. Eight seasons ago, MHA began with a tearful Deku asking the cliched question, Can I be a hero? In a key moment in the final episode, two random characters, an aged grandmother and an abused boy, have an interaction that answers that question: Not only can ordinary people be heroes, but they need to be. Not in flashy ways, but in small, ordinary acts of compassion and courage. In the final season, many of the former heroes have suffered irreparable injuries and are gone from the traditional arena. But in that full-circle moment with two random people, we see the way small acts of kindness or courage can literally change the world. A major theme of the show is to go beyond our comfort level to do the right thing. Hopefully, it will help all of us to better understand what it truly means to be a hero.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Ultimately satisfying despite some sad moments
• Solid ending with profound messaging
• Big fights, big emotions, and quiet introspection lead to a powerful final season

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

Book Review: Rumor Has It by Cat Rambo

The Disco Space Opera (a.k.a. You Sexy Thing) universe continues with more relationship-based SF, this time at an amazing space station

The crew of the You Sexy Thing has been through a lot in the previous two books, often self-inflicted. Like when Talon decided to make a clone of Thorn, the twin brother he misses so dearly. Or the often untrustworthy plans of archaeologist (and thief) Jezli. Or the drama-inducing hijinks orchestrated by the You Sexy Thing herself.

But now money is tight (again), and the best chance for the ship and crew to get money for needed repairs and just remain flightworthy is to visit the very expensive Coralind Station. The group mind find some peace in the gardens there, a chance to make some money with a restaurant, and get themselves back on their feet. Tubal Last, their enemy, is still out there, and is up to something—after all, The Devil’s Gun didn’t work when fired last time against him. But this time, the plan is for a peaceful rest at the station.

Things, once again, will not quite go to plan.

This is the story of Rumor Has It, the third book in Cat Rambo’s space opera universe.

The magic and secret sauce of Rambo’s work is her work on characters, first and foremost. Given that this is a crew that has been fused together by a variety of circumstances and adventures, it’s not a unified whole, but rather much more like a trail mix of a variety of ingredients, some of whom do not always get along with each other; and there are also centrifugal forces threatening to rearrange or break up our set of characters. In the main, all the action and drama is driven by the constraints and circumstances forced upon the crew and by letting them bounce off of it and each other. While seeing Niko have to navigate the bureaucracy of the bank is fun, it in is moments like the conflict between Thorn and the clone of his brother, who calls himself Rebbe, where the real strength of the series lies. Given that the ship is parked at the station and various groups go out into it, we get a variety of these types of character moments and dramas and scenes between members of this found family as they try to make their way.

And this is where I want to bring up the whole idea of Found Family. This is where Rambo excels, this group of misfits that the “Ten Minute Admiral” has indeed cobbled together (with some losses as well as additions) over the course of three books. They squabble, fight, protect and love each other with all the drama and verve of the archetypal found family in space that we need and deserve.¹

And one further joy, speaking of love and relationships, is the gleeful and unapologetic queernormness of the characters, both aboard the You Sexy Thing and in the characters they meet. This is the space opera found family where you can much more easily find someone to identify with, given the panoply and diversity of relationships, genders, and identities we get on the ship (and the ship itself as a sentient character to boot). And with Rebbe, as mentioned above, we get the whole interrogation of finding and forging an identity, especially when others already have strong opinions on what that identity should be, whether Rebbe likes it or not (he does, in fact, not).

Hand in hand with these strong characters is the rich worldbuilding of Coralind Station, a lush place with a large number of gardens of various kinds where, again, much of the plot and character drama takes place. Why have a character blow up in a sterile white 2001: A Space Odyssey space when you can instead have it happen in a lovely, flowering garden? Or a garden devoted to water features? Or any number of a hundred types of garden. We get descriptions and scenes set in a few of these, and mentions of a bunch of more, and a strong implication that the rest of the ones unmentioned are as scenic and amazing as the places we do see. Rambo expertly has a playground of the imagination and describes what we see and what we might see in a way that the reader can imagine more beyond the boundaries of the actual novel.

So, food. Readers of Rambo’s previous two novels will not be surprised that her focus on food has returned. The plot revolves around yet another pop-up restaurant and trying to adapt to their most challenging and biggest stage yet. And even amid restaurant shenanigans, sharing food is a bonding event throughout the book that helps develop the characters and the world in an engaging and immersive way. The preparing and sharing of food is shown as an act of intimacy, of love, and it is something more science fiction could stand to do, even today, decades removed from food pills.

One last thing I want to mention, something I wish more writers and publishers would embrace for series like this, is keeping the reader up to date. It had been a while between my reading of Devil’s Gunand this volume, Rumor Has It, and while some things were crystal clear in my mind, other details were somewhat less so. Fortunately, the author provides a recap of the plot in the first two books, as well as “Where are they now?” descriptions of the characters. I found this enormously helpful in getting myself settled into the Disco Space Opera verse and rolling right into their latest adventure.

So the obvious question is: Could you in fact start here if you didn’t want to start with the series? I suppose in theory you could; besides that opening forematter, the author does a lot of good in folding in previous plot and character beats into the present narrative. But such a reader would miss some things—like just why Tubal Last is such a threat, or the character development that the ship as well as the other characters have undergone to get to this point when they visit the station. I think it’s doable but not ideal (I’d point you toward You Sexy Thing and let you take it from there).

The series by its nature is episodic and (so far) continuing. Given the denouement of this book and how things are shaken up (yes, yet again), I look forward to more novels in the Disco Space Opera verse.

Highlights:

• Deeply immersive setting that spurs the reader’s imagination
• Engaging, inclusive and diverse found family set of main characters
• Heartwarming and engaging space opera

Reference: Rambo, Cat. Rumor Has It [Tor, 2024].

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

¹ So I keep seeing a certain ’90s television show (with a movie) that keeps getting brought up again and again as the model for Found Family on a spacecraft among the stars. And I am here to tell you, friends, that the You Sexy Thing is a far, far more relevant, queer-friendly, diverse, and interesting found family to use for your comp than that show. You can’t take the skies from Niko Larsen and her crew.

Book Review: Wrath by Shäron Moalem and Daniel Kraus

Imagine Pinky and the Brain, minus the comedy, plus lots and lots of gore

Rats are fast learners, can survive on almost any food, can adapt to almost every climate, can squeeze into almost any space, and reproduce amazingly fast. The number of rats in the world is around the same as the total human population.

Fear the day they organize.

In the novel Wrath, written as a collaboration between a PhD geneticist and a veteran horror author, a cutting-edge biotech company has—sigh—disrupted the fancy pet market. After launching a series of transgenic novelties such as pretty glowing fish, chattier parrots, and ponies that are more pleasant to ride (not to mention a few off-the-books critters for the US Army), its newest creation is sure to catapult it to financial superstardom: a breed of rats with human genes for intelligence. Rat voices are too high-pitched for the human ear, so these smart rats come with a tablet app for them to type their thoughts. It’s the perfect companion for anyone who ever wished their pet could talk back.

Somehow the genius techbro didn’t expect the smart rat to form an opinion on the ethics of animal experimentation.

It’s become difficult to write a compelling techbro without resorting to the same tics of personality that we all know and hate. Our fancy pet salesman Noah is interchangeable with every other techbro you’ve met: a proud workaholic with a short temper, a monumental ego and no tether to the real world. If he sets a launch date for a new product, it absolutely must be met, quality control be damned. In several flashbacks (which could have been placed at better locations in the novel to improve its pacing), we learn about his scary, violent childhood and the small town life he left behind to dedicate himself to making piles and piles of money. Now he has everything, but he feels chronically dissatisfied because he never learned to connect to other people, and he simply doesn’t register the humanity of anyone on a lower income bracket. He spent his youth grinding his way to the top of the food chain, and now sits  there alone.

His accomplice in the fancy pet business is Sienna, a genetic engineer who believes in the mission of improving animals with almost religious zeal. She has invented a practically flawless technique of gene editing that gives much more predictable results than CRISPR, so whereas Noah is the public face that gives carefully tested speeches to move the masses toward needing more transgenic pets, Sienna is the brains of the operation. Unfortunately, her backstory is rather uninspired: her obsession with curing her infertility strained her marriage to its breaking point, and now she makes creatures in the lab to replace the children she can’t have. It’s tiresome that in the 21st century, in a novel that isn’t about motherhood, the only prominent female character is defined entirely by her desire for motherhood. More attention could have been given to her world-saving ambitions, which are only mentioned in a mocking tone.

Another point of view we follow is that of Prez, an experienced rat catcher who ends up employed as chief of security at Noah’s lab and always has relevant rat-related trivia to contribute when the story needs to explain a concept to the reader.

And then we have a lucky random passerby: Dallas, a boy whose miscalibrated hearing aids allow him to hear the transgenic rats’ high-pitched pleas for help. After finding himself in the right place at the right time, he rescues the star specimen that Noah was planning to showcase at a huge event, with two main consequences: Noah’s company suffers a costly public humiliation, and the smart rat gets a quick tour of how badly we’ve been treating other species. When this rat makes contact with the millions of fellow rats that inhabit New York, humankind’s thus far uncontested supremacy will topple.

The novel is practically divided in two parts, before and after Dallas rescues this rat. In the first part, we follow Noah’s despotic rule over his tiny kingdom, peppered with too many flashbacks that flesh out characterization at the cost of an awkward narrative rhythm. In the second part, we’re introduced to the rat as another narrator, a voice whose quickly growing intelligence is skillfully conveyed via increasingly complex sentences. The eventual revenge of ratkind takes up a lengthy portion of the book, and it generously splatters the page with countless slit throats, torn ears, ripped fingers, gouged eyes, and furry wave after furry wave of unrelenting, methodical, sharp-toothed hatred.

The way the conflict resolves feels a bit too convenient, almost frictionless, but it doesn’t erase the effect on the reader’s mind of the horrible images of a New York overrun with gray blankets of rats filling the streets and mutilating any human body they find. Next time you meet a rat in the city, maybe try to not give it a reason to hold a grudge against you. Who knows what secret conversations they’re having in the sewers.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Moalem, Shäron and Kraus, Daniel. Wrath [Union Square & Co., 2022].

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

Book Review: Babylonia by Constanza Casati

Imagining the life of a historical figure whose life has been imagined and reimagined far more than the actual historical facts about her: Semiramis.

A young woman, in a nowhere town at the edges of Empire, daughter of a mother who has killed herself, living under the house of a father who can’t wait to marry her off and get rid of her, a young woman who dreams of a better life. But when her theft of a murdered governor’s rings brings her to the attention of a court official come to replace him, the young woman has a chance to not only escape her common life, but to transcend it entirely.

The book is Babylonia, by Constanza Casati.

This is Casati’s version of the story of Semiramis. Constanza Casati, known for her previous novel detailing the life of Clytemnestra, takes a further step toward historical fiction with this novel. What we know about the actual Semiramis as a historical character with attested resources is pretty thin, to be honest. We know there was a woman whom Semiramis was based on, with some authority in the otherwise fiercely patriarchal Neo-Assyrian Empire of the 8th century BC.

But beyond that and a few inscriptions, there is only a small amount of factual evidence about the real person behind Semiramis. So what Casati does here is invent out of whole cloth (but with a rigorous look at Neo-Assyrian Empire life and culture and society as far as we know them) a commoner background for Semiramis, trying to improve her life by any and all means, convinced she has a better destiny. I am reminded of Alma Alexander’s heroine Calladora (from her novel Empress) based on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, who likewise was convinced she had a better destiny than the common life she was born into. Casati’s invented Semiramis is right in Calladora’s mold.

But given the lack of actual facts of Semiramis’ life, what Casati does do is to fold in the heavy mythic tradition that Semiramis has accumulated around herself, far more than the actual historical record. It is Casati’s own thesis in the book that the strange event of a Queen on the Neo-Assyrian throne had an afterlife far beyond the historical record itself, inspiring a lot of authors, including right in the Classical era, to start inventing aspects of her life.

Diodorus Siculus is our main culprit here and our main ur-text for traditions on Semiramis, although the mythmaking on her began centuries earlier. He collects a lot of the myths, especially her superhuman ones, and medieval and later writers, knowingly or not, owe a debt to him. But really, once you start digging and getting interested, she is a historical personage that doesn’t have a lot of real facts about her.

Casati uses this mythology about Semiramis, in the same way she did with the Homeric tradition as well as Greek plays and myths in Clytemnestra. Just like that previous novel, she keeps the focus on realism, with no fantastic elements whatsoever, but immerses the narrative in a world where fantastic elements are accepted as part of everyday life. Take Semiramis' mother Derecto, who kills herself at the beginning of the book, abandoning her child. In the novel, she’s an ordinary mortal and distraught woman. In the mythic sources above, she’s a river goddess, or a water goddess or otherwise semi-divine, (and thus so is Semiramis). And in the narrative of the novel itself, especially as she rises to power, these myths come to be believed by people. The novel is not just the rise of Semiramis’ power and position and prestige, it is the very story of how the myths were shaped to begin with, how the pieces and inspirations for those myths were constructed.

But there is also a relationship triangle here that Casati takes from one of these mythic romances and remakes as her own. The points of view (with a few exceptions) bounce between Semiramis, Onnes, the “new governor” who brings her to the palace, and Ninus, the King of Assyria. A lot of the middle and end of the book is the tensions between these three characters as they resolve their feelings for each other, or at least come to terms to admit them. Given that this is a strongly patriarchal society with very strict laws, mores, and customs, this does not go well and provides a lot of the meaty drama as Semiramis tries to survive and thrive in a strongly patriarchal court.

Besides these, the most fearsome, ferocious and off-the-page character doesn’t get a point of view, and that is Ninat. Ninat is the queen mother, mother to the current king, wife of the king’s father (Shalmaneser) and is a ruthless and determined political operator and a survivor. In what is the very epitome of a “deadly decadent court” of intrigue, Ninat has survived and even thrived. She does not take the arrival of Semiramis well at all, as well as she might. She is barely controlling her son as it is at the moment and the arrival of Semiramis is a destabilizing factor that she cannot afford. We don’t get a point of view from her, which is a conflicting choice in my thinking. I would like to really know what she is thinking, given her adversarial role toward all of the characters that we do get a perspective of.

One gripe I have is with the title of the book. Babylonia: A Novel. If I told you nothing else about the book, what would you think the book was actually about, or who it was about. I, who have a modest general knowledge of ancient history, would not have guessed Semiramis as any of a dozen guesses. The historical Semiramis (Shammuramat, which is the Queen name that Semiramis takes by the end of the book upon her ascension) has no real connection to Babylon.

The mythic sources mentioned earlier have Semiramis doing everything and anything, including having her name on one of the gates of Babylon (Herodotus, predictably). But Babylon is never the focus of her wide ranging adventures, exploits and rule. And in the novel itself aside from Semiramis’ encounters and confrontations with a prince of Babylon, Marduk, Semiramis in the novel itself neither visits nor has any real connection to Babylon at all. When she gets crowned Queen, she is crowned Queen of Assyria and Queen of Babylon but that is really an afterthought and due to circumstances, not any real tie to the place.

There is one exception to all this, that might explain it and it is part of the Semiramis mythic literature I have not mentioned as yet. “The Whore of Babylon” is a mid 19th century text by a minister, Christopher Hislop, a religious anti-Catholic pamphlet that mixes, matches and invents a lot of Near Eastern history and mythology together to “prove” that the Catholic church is actually a polytheistic descendant of Babylonian religion. In the course of this, Semiramis is the titular Whore of Babylon and (somehow) is responsible for Goddess worship, which explains devotion to the Virgin Mary, et cetera.

So if I follow the title “Babylonia: A Novel”, it seems to be using memories of that pamphlet and its mischaracterization of Semiramis in order to come up with the book title. And I think it is an atrocious idea. For a novel that tries to reclaim Semiramis in a modern, and feminist sort of mold and story, and as we have seen in my review, does well at it, to revert to one of the more inventive and slanted and disgusting characterizations of someone we actually know very little about it is more than disappointing... it undercuts the actual project of the novel. It buries what you are trying to do with the book.

The novel is not meant to be a definitive entire life of Semiramis. The novel ends, basically, on her ascension as full Queen Regnant. Given that, again we know very little about the real Semiramis, who, like Clytemnestra (in the author’s previous work) is much more a character of myth than of actual fact, I am quite satisfied. In a touch that reminds me a bit of works like I, Claudius, we even get a strong implication at the end as to who is telling us this story, and given their thread through the book, you will not be surprised. It makes a lot of sense.

So what Casati does in the novel, ultimately, is not terribly different than what she does in Clytemnestra but is an extension of the same. There are more historical facts behind the person that the semi-mythical Semiramis is based on (Shammuramat) but there is so little that Casati is even freer in her invention that she was with Clytemnestra. There are definite parallels between her Clytemnestra and Semiramis (one could say that, based on two novels, that the author clearly likes to write a type). After all, a line from Clytemnestra certainly does apply to Semiramis throughout to the end of the book: “Queens are either hated, or they are forgotten.” Semiramis, like Clytemnestra, knows which one she would rather be.

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Highlights:

• Non-fantastical Near Eastern story of a character who is mostly mythical

• Strong feminist story in a culture even more patriarchal than her last novel

• Some elements of the book, including the title, undercut author’s intentions

Reference: Casati, Constanza, Babylonia: A Novel, [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025]

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