Book Review: The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

A good entryway to non-Western fantasy for readers in search of new ground

When I was a kid, most epic fantasy novels were decidedly Eurocentric. A lot hewed close to the Tolkienic blueprint; others diverged from it, but rarely from its Eurocentrism. Over the past three decades, fantasy authors have grown more daring in terms of the source material they draw upon, and more willing to explore the world and its rich tapestry of mythical traditions, so to speak.

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah is by no means the first work of epic fantasy to draw from The Thousand and One Nights for inspiration, but it is an excellent place to start for readers seeking something new and fresh, yet also familiar. After all, while these stories are not as central to Western culture as they are for the peoples of the Middle East, they long ago entered into our own cultural discourses—through art, books, film and so forth. Aladin’s lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor—not everyone will have read or heard the actual stories, but few people who read books (or blogs about books) aren’t at least passably familiar with these myths.

The Stardust Thief centers on Loulie al-Nazari, more popularly known as the “Midnight Merchant.” She is a famous collector—and purveyor—of magical relics, and as such is a celebrity in the great city of Madinne. Wherever Loulie goes, so does her companion Qadir, a jinn who can take the form of a human or a lizard. As the book progresses, we learn that Qadir saved Loulie’s life and gifted her an enchanted compass, a relic that leads its owner to other relics and the source of Loulie’s trade.

The city is ruled by a cruel and mercurial Sultan, whose son Omar bin Malik leads the Forty Thieves—a group of assassins who seek out and kill whatever jinn try to enter the city and pass for human. We learn that, in doing so, Omar obeys the commands of his father, the Sultan; and that wherever jinn blood spills, an oasis forms. This too, it seems, is at the heart of the Sultan’s rule—an onslaught of violence that transforms the city’s desert environs and enriches its inhabitants. This is clearly metaphor.

The Sultan, however, is restless and greedy. He hears of a famous relic hidden deep in the dunes of the Sandsea, far outside Madinne’s imposing walls—a lamp that cages a jinn, who will grant wishes to whatever human possesses it. He summons Loulie to his palace, coercing her to seek it out—and sends Omar with her to make sure she does not betray him. But Omar has other plans…

Since this blog’s inception, I have ruminated on the nature of imaginative genre fiction and why I’m drawn to it; why, in comparison, mimetic fiction often seems so dull and dreary. In part, it is the opportunity to “travel” to and “inhabit” different worlds. Given the sorry state of our own, it’s no surprise that readers increasingly want to imagine something different. But even the most imaginative epic fantasy (or science fiction) draws upon and ultimately is a vehicle for understanding the world we actually do inhabit. Sometimes this is hard-hitting and serious; other times, it is like a lightbulb that illuminates a part of the house you’ve never really explored.

That’s ultimately how I think about The Stardust Thief. This is a good story, with a brisk pace, centered on strong characters in a world you immediately want to get deeper into. It isn’t a work of high-minded literary fiction, but its prose is smooth and never gets in the way of the story. Its cliffhanger ending implicitly offers you a difficult choice: to go straight into the sequel or go find the latest translation of The Thousand and One Nights and explore the novel’s source material. At a high level, The Stardust Thief is a fun book that I wholeheartedly recommend to fans of epic fantasy who are looking for a fun summer read.

With that said, it’s not perfect. A few major character decisions are confusing; the goal is clearly to surprise the reader, but there’s a difference between a surprise that makes sense in retrospect and one that just leaves you scratching your head. Some of the interpersonal relationships are not well developed, which in turn makes character motivations more opaque than I’m guessing Abdullah intended.

Overall, though, this is a fun read that I highly recommend for readers who are looking for a good escapist fantasy novel that tries and mostly succeeds in treading new ground.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Fun, escapist “Arabian Nights”-derived fantasy
• Likable, relatable characters—but sometimes their motivations are unclear and confusing
• Different take on magic in a fantasy setting, which feels fresh

Reference: Abdullah, Chelsea. The Stardust Thief [Orbit, 2022].

POSTED BY: The G—purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

Anime Review: Gachiakuta

Classic story elements reimagined with unique animation, heavy social symbolism, and diverse characters

Imagine a world with extreme class stratifications and aggressive indifference to the environment, where policing is extreme and justice is arbitrary. Gachiakuta brings viewers a new allegory for society’s shortcomings by using a fantastical concept to deal with real life issues. With heavy symbolism and archetypal characters, a gray world of trash, treasure, graffiti, and monsters becomes the dystopian setting for an angry child’s coming-of-age story.

Young Rudo lives in an elevated world called the Sphere, where society is divided into two geographically separate classes: the wealthy, snobbish elite and the poor, struggling working class that is despised by the elite. The community is policed by white-uniformed officers known as the Apostles. Rudo is an angry antisocial orphan being raised by his compassionate and thoughtful foster father. His biological father was executed by the elite’s police system, and the fate of his biological mother is not explained. His only connection is a pair of unusual gloves inherited from his biological father.

Rudo is an outcast even in his outcast community. He is obsessed with secretly repairing discarded items from the garbage, although doing so is not allowed in their society. In a moment of courage, he gifts a carefully repaired toy stuffed animal to a young girl who is his only friend in the Sphere.

Rudo’s poverty-stricken outcast existence is upended when he comes home to find his beloved adoptive father murdered. In the Sphere, those believed to be criminals are hung over an abyss and publicly dropped to their deaths as the preferred form of execution. Rudo is quickly blamed for the death, despite opposing evidence, and is sentenced to public execution even though he is only a child. No one supports him or comes to his defense, not even the girl he befriended. However, he somehow survives the very far fall to the hellish surface world below, which is covered with the bones of other victims, dangerous garbage, toxic air, and lethal monsters.

He is rescued by Enjin, a charismatic masked young man who helps Rudo survive in his new world. Enjin is part of a group called the Cleaners, specially gifted people who destroy the monsters in the wasteland and allow semi-safe communities to be created in other areas of the dismal surface world. The Cleaners use spiritually infused objects to channel their powers into individual weapons called vital instruments. Rudo’s special fighting prowess, through a series of unfortunate events, alerts Enjin that Rudo also has the power to be a Cleaner. However, Rudo just wants to find a way to return to the Sphere to kill those who wrongfully condemned him and those who murdered his adoptive father.

Throughout his time on the surface world, Rudo hones his fighting skills and reluctantly builds friendships with an eclectic team of fighters, support workers, and artists in the grungy Cleaner community. He also encounters various antagonists, all with unique motivations and some with disturbing and upsetting backstories.

Gachiakuta initially seems like a traditional coming-of-age shonen, drawing on elements of classic stories such as Naruto, Black Clover, and My Hero Academia. However, the show subverts the trope of the idealistic, determined hero by giving us Rudo as a protagonist who is (understandably) angry, cynical, distrustful, and violent. Rudo is the hero we would get if we let Naruto’s Sasuke or My Hero Academia’s Bakugo take the lead role. Rudo is also intensely immature. On the surface world he is dazzled by sweets (which he had never tasted before) and embarrassed to have a girl in his room. However, his true nature is anger. In one unexpected scene he loses control and beats a defeated opponent almost to death with his fists. In addition, his wrongful execution and the disturbing backstory of antagonists such as the child-like Amo, along with the surreal landscape of garbage-based monsters, make Gachiakuta seem closer to more mature and violent stories such as Hell’s Paradise.

Gachiakuta also stands out for its distinctive art style and character design. The intense facial features fit the cynical, fantastic vibe of people building a life out of decay and garbage. The characters are drawn with stylishly grunge clothes that fit the apocalyptic background. If aspects of the anime experience feel vaguely familiar, it may be because Gachiakuta is from the amazing Kei Urana. She worked with Atushi Ohkubo on Fire Force, and some of the story’s elements and design style resonate in a way that almost makes the two shows seem like different parts of the same larger universe.

The story of Gachiakuta also leans into very strong use of symbolism. Rudo is cast off by society and treated like garbage, but is saved and mentored by his foster father. In the same way, Rudo is obsessed with saving and repairing physical items that have been cast away as garbage. In the Sphere, the separation of the elite and the working class is symbolic of racism and classism. In the surface world, art, runes, tattoos, and graffiti are sacred expressions with physical power, and artists are essential to their society’s survival. Community is another strong theme, with Rudo building bonds with the confident Enjin, cynical Zanka, and cheerful Riyo. There is also a nice exploration of community, with the Cleaner team being made up of not just fighters but also equally important statisticians, support workers, and artists. The anime also has several distinctly Black characters in key roles, including the Cleaner’s team leader Corvus, the intellectual Semiu, and the antagonist raider Jabber.

Beyond the engaging art style and thoughtful social symbolism, Gachiakuta also has plenty of the usual shonen fighting and action, with dramatic monsters in the wastelands and lethal human antagonists trying to steal the weapons (vital instruments) owned by others. However, the show also delves into difficult subjects, including a particularly unexpected and heart-rending episode about sexual abuse.

With so many thoughtful visual and emotional elements, Gachiakuta is a unique storytelling experience that continues to build as each episode progresses. The worldbuilding is intense and sometimes slows down the narrative pace, but the overall effect of the symbolism and social commentary is unexpectedly powerful and fascinating as viewers follow Rudo through his resurrection into a world of outcasts and rejects who, despite society’s hierarchy, turn out to be the real heroes.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Unique art style and heavy social symbolism
• Antihero energy
• Diverse characters and mature topics

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

Book Review: Of the Emperor's Kindness by Chaz Brenchley

A new and modern approach to fantasy of manners. 

Malance, as I like to say in these reviews, has a problem. One year into the job, she’s the ambassador of Verantha to the court of the Emperor of Feremandas, the older, larger and more stately of the two competing empires in this part of the world. Her problem is that Verantha does not physically exist in territory any longer and has not for years, it has been absorbed by the rising, burgeoning and grasping Empire of Clath. Clath is dead certain that Verantha is just now a province of their realm and Malance’s existence and role is a joke or worse an insult to Clath. It is fortunate, perhaps, that Malance has a balance of the Feremandas Emperor’s favor, and is in a relationship with his niece. But when refugees from her vanished homeland arrive, Clath’s response may put her at odds with their plans, a rather dangerous position to be.

This is the story of Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley, projected to be first in a series.

I am going to look at this book through the lens of a subgenre of fantasy that had risen, peaked and in these days where seemingly the majority of fantasy books published are either grimdark or romantasy¹. That subgenre is the fantasy of manners, or even mannerpunk. It was first recognized in the early 1990’s as a category by Donald G Keller, describing a spectrum of books from the 1980’s by authors like Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kate Elliott, Ellen Kushner, Caroline Stevermer, and others.

Fantasy of manners is fantasy by way of, to use contemporary references, works like Downton Abbey, although at the time authors such as Dorothy Dunnett, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, and Georgette Heyer were seen as inspiration and progenitors for this type of fiction. It’s fantasy where (generally) the supernatural elements are a light touch or even entirely non-existent, just taking place in a secondary world. The focus of these works is intensively social. While there can be action and adventure in these works and often are, that is not the propelling power of these novels.

Instead, fantasy of manners are social novels, focusing on social constraints, social relationships and conflicts, the growth and development of social contacts, and in general are relentlessly about the people, first and foremost. Fantasy of manners novels are, in my experience, either urban, or take place in tight social spaces (c.f. Downton Abbey or Bridgerton).The conflicts that erupt are not orcs coming over the barricade, it is the cut and thrust of words at a party, the scheming to bring peers on side for a petition or power play. To maneuver socially even as the threat of violence within the peers might erupt. But that violence and action is subordinate to the social conflicts and interactions.

All this is what fantasy of manners does. Fantasy of manners is a subgenre then that can be subtle, with the reader having to do legwork in picking up clues from context and deciphering what precisely is going on in the machinations and social maneuvers. It is a subgenre that you immerse yourself in a party, and try and figure out as you are reading the description of the party just who is aligned with whom, and what is happening even as it slowly unfolds.²

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at Of the Emperor’s Kindness. Our protagonist Malance is the ambassador of Verantha, and we see her go about her duties, such as they are. She’s the ambassador of a nation that no longer exists and so she has no official duties at the beginning save to attend court like the other ambassadors do. This is complicated by her relationship with the emperor’s niece, a force of nature of her own.

We remain steadfast within Malance’s point of view as events unfurl but the plot and subsequent series of events are relentlessly social in nature. There are clashes with Clath, of course, but it is the titular kindness of the Emperor that really kicks the ball rolling on the plot, as well as the arrival of the refugees. Malance, a young woman who never expected to be anything other than a dusty young ornament at court, is plunged into social conflicts, and perhaps, a rising conflict between the two great empires of Feremandas and Clath. There is plenty of backstory here and revealed worldbuilding. Clath is an up and coming empire, just about ready, or so they think, to start to possibly take on the older, established Feremandas. And Malance, as you guess, is right in the center of that.

Like fantasy of manners of prior years and authors, the plot is very much more of a skeleton for the social immersion that the novel provides the reader. We are put entirely into Malance’s life and circumstance. Like the novel’s progenitors, there is a lot of sensory detail that the reader is introduced to, from the foods of Verantha, to the look and feel of Malance’s house, to the opulence of the Emperor’s palace, and the feel of the city. This is, in fact, one of those books where you can get immersed into the world and worldbuilding and the characters, and that is what and who the book is for.

 
The book is not in line with the main contemporary strands in fantasy, which may be a hindrance for readers who have grown up on relentless grimdark action, or the widescreen of epic fantasy, or coming from the heights of urban fantasy, or have crossed the porous border of romance into fantasy by way of the growing field of romantasy. There is a relationship between Malance and Vivi, a queer loving one that goes through challenge and change as things unfold, but it’s not a romance or romantasy--the relationship is there at the beginning. It’s not epic fantasy either, with a widescreen canvas, we never really leave Feremandas City, really, at all.

A key to novels like these, as you might imagine, is a sympathetic protagonist. I am pretty sure that a unsympathetic fantasy of manners protagonist could be written, but they would have to be so magnetically interesting as to overcome their repellent nature. Malance is much more in the traditional vein. We feel for her and her plight, seemingly the “last Veranthan” right away, and as the complications of the Emperor’s attentions, and the plotting and maneuvers around her rise, we feel for her and her situation. The author does a great job, using tight point of view, of keeping us in her head, and keeping her someone relatable for the reader. Malance grows into her strength and role as challenges mount, and while characters like Vivi threaten to overwhelm the narrative at points (to say nothing of the emperor), Malance rises to the challenge, on the strength of the writing.

While the subgenre of fantasy of manners may have peaked in the 1990s and the field has largely moved on to the aforementioned other subgenres, there has been and is relatively recent fantasy written that if not labeled as fantasy of manners, is certainly in the tradition--authors like Freya Marske (A Marvellous Light), the fantasy novellas of Aliette de Bodard, too, and the works of Stephanie Burgis. Also, too, the Glamourist Histories of Mary Robinette Kowal align with this book. Readers who enjoy those works are likely to enjoy Of The Emperor’s Kindness as well.

Does the novel innovate the fantasy of manners sub-genre? Like some of the more recent of the works listed above, it is more openly and boldly inclusive than what was readily publishable in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s. Not just the Malance-Vivi relationship in specific, but in general the novel and the world it presents to the reader is queernorm through and through.

 
Readers who are looking for more action, more and more complicated plot (although to be fair, it is deceptively simple since we stay in Malance’s point of view) and more magic are not going to find favor with this book. This is a book for readers who do want to read paragraphs discussing the social implications of livery and colors worn, for readers who will be fascinated to see how Malance’s household has to adapt, change and grow after a series of gifts from the Emperor, and readers who will enthuse to see the social machinations at court and within Malance’s own household.

As for myself, having read and am still reading a swath of fantasy of manners, Of the Emperor’s Kindness brings a breath of new air to the subgenre, showing that it can still have a strong and major place in the empire of fantasy. While the ending of the novel does feel like a closing point and a place to exit this world if one should wish, I am curious enough about Malance and her world to want more.

--

Highlights:

• Unapologetic Fantasy of Manners
• Strong attention to immersive detail
• Engaging and well written protagonist

Reference: Brenchley, Chaz, Of the Emperor’s Kindness (Wizard Tower Press, 2025)

¹The thought of a romantasy grimdark book has just occurred to me. I am not sure such a book would quite be for me.
²Sculdun's Investiture party in Season 2 Episode 6 of Andor (What a Festive Evening) is where Andor approaches Fantasy of Manners, but in a Science fiction setting. In keeping with science fiction, A Civil Campaign by Lois M Bujold is entirely and completely SF fantasy of manners.

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

Film Review: Tron: Ares

A story about the ephemerality of life shouldn't be as instantly forgettable as this

The threequel Tron: Ares looks and sounds more expensive than it has any right to be. While the idea of transplanting the franchise’s iconic motorcycles and frisbee fights from cyberspace into the material world is undeniably interesting, the movie wastes its special effects extravaganza in telling the most generic tale of AI independence. To namedrop Frankenstein without any of the pathos is hubristic enough; to lift the plot of Blade Runner for mere nostalgic fanservice is sacrilege.

The plot is a simple case of corporate espionage between two software megacorporations racing to be the first to crack the secret of energy/matter conversion. Both have succeeded at 3D-printing physical objects from pure light, but for some contrived technobabble reason, these creations can’t sustain their existence for longer than half an hour. When the Designated Ethical CEO finds a piece of code that fixes the problem, the Designated Evil CEO deploys his AI assassins to steal it.

The ensuing chase sequence is executed with admirable technical virtuosity, but it feels redundant to go to so much trouble to retrieve a physical flash drive right after the villain demonstrates his ability to remotely copy data from his competitor’s servers. Instead of drawing so much unwanted attention trashing half a city, he could have simply waited for his target to add the code to her systems and then stolen it. But we need to bring the AI assassins to the real world so the next piece of drama can happen.

The titular Ares is a self-aware security program that our villain is trying to market as the ideal soldier: an obedient killing machine that doesn't eat or sleep, and can be reprinted infinite times if it’s killed. Somehow we’re expected to buy that this genius inventor didn’t anticipate that something that is self-aware could eventually form its own goals that don’t involve dying and dying again. During its brief presence in our realm, it quickly notices the sensory delights of corporeality and starts scheming to seize the permanence code for itself.

Unfortunately, this Blade Runner-derivative tale of an artificial person hoping for a longer lifespan calls for more acting skills than Jared Leto can be bothered to bring to the role of Ares. Even as his character learns about ineffable feelings, such as developing a personal aesthetic taste, or improvising a horrendously insensitive psychoanalysis of the woman he just kidnapped, Leto maintains a resting bored face that proves contagious to the viewer.

After an overcomplicated romp through cyberspace, the real world and then another cyberspace to obtain the permanence code, he ends up in a one-to-one fight with his fellow AI assassin who is still loyal to the villain. This climax is utterly unsatisfying because (a) the actual victory is won by secondary characters who spent the entire third act typing code in an office, and (b) it never occurs to our hero Ares that he could copy his own permanence code to save his former friend.

Anyway, with the Designated Evil CEO’s plans thwarted by his own absurd recklessness, Ares is free to experience humanity and… die of destitution, I guess. Meanwhile, the Designated Ethical CEO proceeds to take advantage of finally stable 3D printing to singlehandedly solve world hunger, the energy crisis and all diseases, which I suspect is a bigger story we’d rather have watched than this one. At no point does Tron: Ares make us care for the inner life of sentient digital minds. But hey, the motorcycles look cool.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Contributors Wanted

Do you want to write for Nerds?

Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together is looking for 3-5 awesome individuals to join our team of regular contributors! 

What do we want? We're looking for volunteers who can offer at least 1 review or feature per month to our schedule, as part of our regular Monday-Friday blog content. We're particularly looking for contributors able to cover comic books and graphic novels, or those with interests that range broadly - though all contributors are free to write about SF/F novels or anything else relevant to geek culture. 

What do you get? Nerds of a Feather is a fanzine, which means we means we do not seek or generate revenue. Rather, it is a fanspace run by fans, who work as volunteers. However, joining us does mean opportunities for free e-books and the potential for other free stuff, as well as the fun and support from joining a dynamic and flexible team of enthusiastic nerd bloggers at this here little Hugo Award winning fanzine.

We're looking for people who: 

(a) write well in long form (900-1500 words) and don't need extensive copy-editing
(b) understand and are ready to engage with our established formats and review scoring system
(c) are otherwise good fits with our voice and style

We are not, however, looking for automata who agree with the rest of us on anything and everything.

One of our goals is to feature a diverse range of voices on the topics that matter to us. As such, we encourage writers of all backgrounds to apply.

Caveat: we know lots of you have other awesome projects you want everyone to know about, but since these are regular contributor positions, we would like to emphasize that this would not be an appropriate forum to use for that self-promo.

Process: send an email to NoaFeditors at gmail dot com telling us what you are interested in doing and why you'd like to join our team. Please also send a writing sample, which can be either embedded into the body of the email or links to published work. We will try to respond to everyone as quickly as possible.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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NoaF Team

Graphic Novel Review: The Power Fantasy vol. 2 by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes

The tensions increase in a stalemate between superpowers, as does the backstory and the drama of all kinds. 

The second trade volume of The Power Fantasy series of comics, Mutually Reassuring Destruction continues to follow a group of super-powered individuals from the twentieth century in their stand-off and power jockeying, against the backdrop of a world already gravely marked by their exercise of power.

Where vol. 1 (reviewed here) gave us the premise and initial setup, however, chucking out the ideas and the groundwork to lure us in, vol. 2 goes back to consolidate those ideas into something with further depth and texture. The key part of which is taking the "Second Summer of Love" - a catastrophic event which wiped out all of Europe - and giving us the backstory that led to the destruction, extremely well-placed as well as much-needed for the emotional depth it provides.

This backstory section is critical in a lot of ways, but I want to first highlight the thing that most makes it stand out against the rest of the story at first glance - the art. Caspar Wijngaard was a strong part of why volume 1 captured me, and that continues throughout volume 2, but never more so than in the Second Summer of Love and the character at the heart of it, the Queen. This section is awash in trippy rainbows, swirling colours and abstract motifs, and has, at the centre of it all, the distinctly non-human Queen. Thus far, the superpowers we have met have been at least human-base, if modified (Eliza) or obscured (Magus). The Queen is... not that. What she is is not fully explained either, but her visuals are a point of complexity and mystery that underscores how little this group of people - and the world - understand about their superpowered nature and origin. This is not "mutant gene" territory. At least one of them is theoretically from heaven. But that fact isn't taken as true whole cloth - quite frequently characters say that she "claims" that as backstory. Taking us visually that extra step away from human baseline - along with some other turns of the narrative - just adds greater depth here to the sense that none of this is cleanly explicable. I love mess, and The Power Fantasy is rolling in it like a delighted pig in muck.

The majority of the volume is given over to this and other vignettes which dot through time, and for a significant part of the story, the pacing has a sense of circling - lingering on certain ideas from different angles yes, but also the nervous hostility of two predators pacing around one another, assessing, waiting for the moment to strike. Big Cold War vibes continue apace, then. Had that been the whole of the thing, I might have been less satisfied, and wondered if volume 2 was being wholly given over to this consolidation and scene-setting, in service to reveals and action in story to come. Many a comic series has done likewise - one of the hardest things, in my opinion, about a long running series of graphic novels is to manage the pacing so no volume feels insubstantial on its own, subordinated to the needs of the greater plot. I would not have held it deeply against The Power Fantasy to do likewise. But no. The end section delivers a rush of drama and narrative crescendo that makes this volume feel like a complete emotional arc, as well as all the work being done to pick up threads from before and lay foundations for later. There is one particular page of beautiful work in which that dramatic arc reaches its destructive peak that I just had to sit with, enjoying just how well it combined its focus on the significance of the moment and the aesthetics of it, how the two really do pull together to serve the story.

Thematically, the focus remains firmly on the morality of power. It had already been put front and centre, and that isn't going away, but a new thought has entered the chat. In my review of volume 1, I said that that no one here is free from sin and boy howdy has that come to call in volume 2 with Eliza. We met her briefly before, but now she gets far more time in the spotlight, with her deeply held christian faith and her powers that come straight from hell, and her morality that burns bright because of/despite/throughout this. The Second Summer of Love was her crisis point and origin story, and its legacy continues to haunt her. As we learn about her, about her choices and her actions, she stands vividly for the fact that everyone in this story has fucked up and is fucked up. No one here is unalloyed good. She is haunted by her mistakes, and has taken herself off to a place outside the world, constructing an edifice of her own remorse and regret in which to do penance, and demanding an accounting of sin from those who try to visit her. Which makes her sound deeply unfun to read along, but nothing could be further from the truth. Her existence at a crossroads of faith and identity is extremely compelling, and casts a light which causes shadows to spring from those around her - her faith, her bringing her faith into all these questions that have been the centre of the story already, causes us to re-evaluate the premises we've already been given.

Alongside and in contrast to her, the character of Magus also continues to develop. I picked up previously his parallels with Wōden  in WicDiv and those haven't gone away, but the longer we spend with him the messier that comparison (productively) becomes. They draw on similar motifs and ideas, the fusing of technology into irrational systems of magic, the direct exploitation of others for power, but go in very different directions ideologically, especially in the partial resolution of the some of hints from the first volume that his journey from anarchist to dickhead techbro was... not what I was expecting.

And I think that's the thing that makes this stand out so much. Magus is one of the two closest characters to anything that resembles a potential "villain" in a usual narrative sense, and we are given so much information about both of their positions, their backstories and their moral philosophies, that even when we can't sympathise with their choices, we always understand how they resulted from the premises and processes that went into them. I'm not saying anyone in this story is a morally good actor - indeed, I think the whole point is that none of them completely are - but all of them are shown to be relatively rational and well-intentioned characters. Their differences come from their ideas of what good is, and the scope of their framework, what they consider the stakes to be. And it's this that Eliza's presence complexifies - her unshakeable faith, and her bringing both god and hell into the equation. As named specifically on the page, the idea of eternity is now on the table and that changes things. What does justice, punishment and good look like when you have to consider that suffering can be unending? What is a reasonable sacrifice when that's what it costs? And this, at least to me (with my relatively limited superhero comics background) feels fresh and thoughtful, because it takes the premise and the terms of the problems on the page genuinely seriously. All these factors would be a headfuck if you had this kind of power and were determined to be a force for good.

It did also, at several points, make me wonder if Kieron Gillen has just been having a little obsession with utilitarianism and its relationship with problems. And I'm cool with that.

There is a risk that anything this philosophical will get wanky, but for me at least, The Power Fantasy, is still staying plenty on the right side of the line. If anything, I put the book down realising that most other superhero media should be doing the same sort of grappling with power and isn't. Obviously plenty of this kind of media can be taken as clear analogies for all sorts of real world problems of varying scope, that isn't new, but the thing I'm taking from this is how much benefit there is to doing that my taking every single part of the equation dead seriously, and thus giving it time and the characters space to develop it to some kind of conclusion. The fights and the explosions and the romantic entanglements - because there are all of those - aren't vying for ground with the philosophical and moral musing, but forming the groundwork and fuel for it to be productive. The morality matters not just because the stakes are high, but because the people thinking it through are really people, and the space is given to ensure that comes through clearly on the page too.

The closure we get marries all of these up, too - it represents the culmination of arcs that matter both morally and personally - from which comes its success. But this is only vol 2, so any closure it has is going to be small scale, and indeed, the ending leaves a hint at the reduced scope of its conclusion. For all that we've had consolidation, we're still setting up some of the ideas that feel like they'll come more into play later on, and I'm still excited about all of them, but glad to see that vol 2 still gets to be a complete thread of its own, rather than entirely subservient to the larger plot. I said in my review of vol 1 "This is, quite clearly, not going to be a series for easy answers or simple debates." and that has only got more true.

I am interested, though, in how we'll reach any kind of conclusion on the broader scope of the problems in a later volume. I struggle to envisage where this goes to have narrative closure that truly encompasses it all. But I have faith. Everything I've seen so far here indicates that The Power Fantasy is being taken seriously as a thematic and a narrative project, and that any conclusions will ensure both parts are being served and supported. Which makes my inability to envisage where it's going pretty exciting. I have no idea where this is going, and I can't wait to find out.

--

The Math

Highlights: 

• a few stunning full-page spreads and gorgeous moments that really sell the atmosphere of the story
• hell turns up to make things all the more complicated
• some proper sexy character arcs

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 2: Mutually Reassuring Destruction, [Image, 2025].

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

Film Review: One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has made an absolute masterpiece about rebellion, standing up to power, and hope.

I went into One Battle After Another cold, which is an experience I highly recommend. Even seeing the trailer doesn't truly prepare you for this 2-hour and 42-minute magnum opus. It revolves around a modern-day revolutionary sect called the French 75 as they carry out immigration liberation and general anti-capitalist insurgency tactics. Ghetto Pat (Leo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are active leaders in their movement. I don't want to get into a detailed plot summary because a lot happens, but I do want to talk about three things that One Battle After Another does really, really well – and what I can't stop thinking about. 

It powerfully depicts the de-centering of white men in leftist organizations

From the trailer, you'd think Leo DiCaprio would be the brains behind everything in the radical French 75. That couldn't be further from the truth, as he's essentially a bumbling, stoned Big Lebowski-type dude, although he is well-meaning. When compared to his partner and lover, Perfidia, he's all soft and scared, a forever second fiddle to her powerful presence, mastermind planning, and pure passion for the cause. Seeing a woman of color in charge of a paramilitary organization doesn't happen very often, and it's extremely moving. It's very much a "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" viewpoint. Of course, the movie is directed by a white man and features white male main characters, but they're not the emotional or competent core of the film. Those roles belong to Perfidia, Willa, and Deandra.

16 years after he's gone underground into hiding with his daughter, Willa, Bob's forgotten nearly everything he trained for, including much-needed passwords in the case everything goes to hell. There's a brilliant scene in which he spends 10 minutes arguing on the phone with another agent about a codeword, while behind him, the Sensei (Benicio Del Toro) is silently and quickly organizing migrants into a safe shelter to avoid a raid. It's a powerful moment that contrasts chest-beating bravado with the actual everyday work of committing to a cause. In today's political climate, Paul Thomas Anderson is sounding the alarm on performative activism, and it's invigorating to see. 

It forcefully shows the banality — and stupidity — of evil

The central conflict in the film revolves around Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and his quest to join the Christmas Adventurers, a white supremacist secret society. However, Lockjaw and Perfidia have a child together, Willa. If it were to come out that he has a mixed-race child, his acceptance into the CA would be in jeopardy. 

First, we have to talk about Sean Penn in this movie. His performance is absolutely stellar as a pent-up, military-chafing, chauvinistic pig. He's going to win an Oscar for his performance in this, as he's almost unrecognizable. The way he casually throws around racial epithets in his quest to arrest undocumented immigrants is stomach-churning and absolutely classic villain coding. When he meets up with the secret society of white supremacists, they're bumbling buffoons who are obsessed with racial purity, and he desperately craves acceptance into their secret club. These people, of course, are horrible humans, but the way PTA portrays them is to cast a spotlight on their absolute absurdity, down to greeting each other with "Hail St. Nick." Despite all their power and evil machinations, they're deeply uncool, incompetent, and can't even live up to their own self-made, racist expectations (as in the case of Lockjaw).

It brings back a classic cloak-and-dagger feel to film

I love old movies about the secret tactics of the French resistance like Army of Shadows, and One Battle After Another brings that same energy and feel to the modern era. From the complicated cell structure of insurgents to actual secret tunnels under houses and between buildings, the day-to-day work of secret organizations is painted with a masterly brush. I suppose I never really thought about modern organizations doing such cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it makes sense and also really brings it to life. 

Bob (Leo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa go into hiding for 16 years, but he never forgets (most of) what they're running from. They, too, have secret tunnels, MacGuffin-type transmitters that glow green when someone trusted is nearby, and rendezvous points for when shit goes down. Bob instills all of this into his teenage daughter, who sort of believes him but also thinks he's just a paranoid, stoner old crank. When the time comes and she's faced with a do-or-die type situation, she calmly accepts the protocol and trusts the other person with her life. It reminds me of Sarah Connor training John Connor all of his life for the day SkyNet goes operational. 

My favorite tiny but poignant moment is when the Sensei is closing up the hatch of a secret tunnel. It's a brief scene, but when he pulls the hatch down on top of him on the floor, a small rug effortlessly and magically unrolls down on it, completely covering their tracks. I don't know why this little flourish is so amazing, but it really captures how detail-oriented a resistance must be if they're to succeed. And in turn, how Anderson really mastered the feel of it via film.

Overall, this movie is incredibly moving, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and occasionally scary in how prescient it is to our current political climate. The run time is definitely long as it inches toward 3 hours, but I didn't even get up to go to the bathroom once. That's how much it enthralls you. I look forward to seeing it again to relive some of the blink-or-you-miss-them, adrenaline-fueled scenes and car chase sequences. 

--

The Math

Nerd Rating: 9/10

Highlights: How much Bob and the Sensei drunk-drive with Modelos; Perfidia's one immaculate eyelash, and Lockjaw's mouth gymnastics in any given scene.

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.

Book Review: The Stardust Grail, by Yume Kitasei

A perfectly reasonable space adventure

Some books do exactly what they say they will do, and nothing more. The Stardust Grail is one of those. Its hook has all the right trimmings to beguile the willing reader: a graduate student protagonist, a reformed thief, multiple heists, androids who want to be human, wormholes, ex-soldiers with fancy armour-tech, squid-tentacle aliens, hive minds, shady organizations, plagues, and ray guns. All these components are woven together into a quest narrative for a MacGuffin whose recovery spells the difference between survival and extinction, and indeed the fate of galactic civilization. It’s practically a paint-by-numbers example of a sci-fi space adventure. This is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not particularly surprising.

Our main character, Maya Hoshimoto, used to be a thief for hire, travelling around the galaxy with her partner Auncle, a member of the dwindling alien species known as the Frenro. Together they made a reasonably satisfactory living stealing cultural artifactes for clients, until Maya decides that she wants to build a different life for herself, and returns to graduate school in… cultural xeno-anthropology? Something like that. The specific field of study is never named, but it’s one that involves examining alien cultural artifacts, which her practical stealing experience has equipped her to understand very well. (Readers with experience in academic publishing are encouraged to skim past the bit where Maya’s academic advisor tells her to write an entire article for submission to a prestigious journal in the space of two days, and her research consists of getting a librarian who is entirely unconnected to the project to select some books on the right general topic for her.)

One day, the special collections library where Maya works receives a bequest containing a lost volume of the journal of Dr. Huang, a wildly famous human space explorer from the previous century. The same day, a visiting researcher, Dr. Garcia, approaches Maya and reveals that the entire transportation web of wormhole-flavoured nodes that ties the galaxy together is breaking down. He further reveals that he knows about her criminal past, and threatens her with exposure unless she helps him and the fascist-leaning organization he works for track down a MacGuffin referenced in Dr. Huang’s journal, which for Reasons is the only hope of restoring the transportation web. And, to complete the trifecta of inciting incidents, Auncle returns, and begs for Maya’s help recovering the same missing MacGuffin, which can not only create new nodes, but also an object that is essential for the Frenro’s ability to reproduce. Behold, an ethical dilemma: save the entire galactic civilization from utter collapse, or save the Frenro species from extinction?

As ethical dilemmas go, this is a pretty good one, in part because it avoids the more common plot-driving dilemma structure, which pits smaller, personal obligations against much larger societal stakes. Typically, we get protagonists agonizing over questions like Do I stay home with my family or answer my country’s call and do one last spy mission for the good of AMERICA? Or Do I obey commands and do my duty or do I give up everything, abandon the mission, and rescue my best friend/beloved? These personal-vs-big-stakes dilemmas are common in fiction, because they make the protagonist’s dithering believable while still making it possible to enforce a narratively correct decision. But precisely because the narratively correct answer is obvious, the dithering gets awfully tiresome to the reader. Of course you’re going to abandon your family for one last job, otherwise there won’t be a plot! Or: Of course you’re going to abandon the mission and rescue your friend, otherwise we’ve wasted chapters and chapters of backstory about why your friendship is so important! Quit Hamleting about, unholster your raygun, and go kick some betentacled tushes!

[pant pant pant] Sorry, got worked up there. Anyway, the point is: Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, because both sides of her dilemma are personal and also carry genuinely huge stakes. On the one hand, recovering the MacGuffin to restore the Frenro’s ability to reproduce is personal because Auncle, Maya’s dearest friend in the world, is Frenro, and desperately wants to raise children. If she recovers the MacGuffin and turns it over to Dr. Garcia, she is destroying her best friend’s chances for reproducing, which is a terrible betrayal. She’s also causing an entire species to go extinct. That’s a heckuva bad outcome on both levels.

On the other hand, rebuilding the galactic transportation network is personal to Maya, because she is living on Earth and her family are living on a different planet. The breakdown of interstellar travel means she will never see her family again. It’s also huge stakes because, remember, the entire galaxy depends on this network. If it continues to break down, all worlds will end up isolated, and not all worlds are self-sufficient. Entire planetfuls of people may die. The urgency of this all is rather nicely backed up by a resonance with Maya’s own personal history. Her childhood was marked by scarcity that is an inherent part of trying to subsist on a colony planet where humans did not evolve. Everything was made even more difficult by a horrific disease that swept through the galactic civilization, killed many, and left others—including Maya—struggling with permanent consequences. (This is a 2024 publication. The covid-coding is not a coincidence, I'm sure.) Quarantines were instituted; people starved. Maya therefore knows firsthand the devastation wrought by a much smaller version of this looming total isolation. That is another heckuva bad outcome associated with losing interstellar travel.

So: on the whole, the character motivations, interstellar politics, and betentacled aliens are all very competently accomplished. Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, precisely because there is no good outcome. There is no choice she can make that satisfies either personal or societal constraints. But precisely because there is no good outcome, in a book that is not intended to be any kind of grimdark, it also became clear before the halfway mark that there was only one way the dilemma could be resolved without betraying the entire value system the book presented to us.

This book delivers on everything it says on the tin. But it doesn’t deliver anything more. And at the end, when I arrived exactly where I had predicted hundreds of pages earlier, I found myself wondering whether all those museum heists were really necessary to get there.

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

Highlights:

• Believable dilemmas
• Tentacled aliens
• Overpowered MacGuffins
• Lore

Reference: Kitasei, Yume. The Stardust Grail [Flatiron Books 2024].

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 

Cult Film Review: In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

Cosmic horror without the Lovecraft

 

This month, just in time for Halloween, the Criterion Channel launched a John Carpenter retrospective. I took the opportunity to revisit 1994's In the Mouth of Madness, one of the strangest John Carpenter films... and I feel like that's saying something.

Fresh off of Jurassic Park in 1993, Sam Neill went to work for John Carpenter, playing insurance investigator John Trent. We meet Trent ranting and raving as orderlies at an insane asylum drag him into a padded room. The next morning, when asylum psychiatrist Dr. Wrenn visits Trent to get his story, he opens the door to find Trent has drawn symbols all over his room, clothes, and face, and he begins to unfold his tale of madness.

John Trent was not always the raving maniac Dr. Wrenn sees before him. No, indeed. Trent was once a successful, can't-bullshit-a-bullshitter insurance investigator. The popular horror author Sutter Cane, Arcane Publishing's biggest literary star, has disappeared, and Arcane wants Trent to find him. Trent reluctantly accepts the assistance of Cane's editor, Linda Styles, but believes from the start that this whole thing is a fakeout—an elaborate publicity stunt designed to generate headlines for Cane's new novel, In the Mouth of Madness. Trent tries to do his research, grabbing copies of all of Cane's novels, but they're too scary. They wind up getting inside his dreams, and maybe even into his waking reality. Maybe everybody's waking realities. A spike in violent crime seems to be tied to people who read Cane's books. And it comes home for Trent while he sits at a restaurant and a man wielding an axe smashes through a plate glass window, coming for Trent before the police shoot the attacker. It turns out this madman was Cane's agent, and right before he raised the axe over Trent's head, he asked a question everyone seems to be asking:

"Do you read Sutter Cane?"

In the same way that Stephen King sets much of his work in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, in the film Sutter Cane sets his work in the idyllic New England town of Hobb's End. Trent realizes that design elements consistent across Cane's various novel covers fit together and form a map to the fictional town. So he and Styles set off to follow the map and see where it takes them. After trading off behind the wheel, Trent falls asleep in the passenger seat, and while Styles drives, things get weird. A figure looms up out of the darkness, the road seems to vanish, the figure returns, but different, then again, then there's a crash, or is there? The radio distorts, goes out, the night seems to bend around Styles, and then... poof. It's daytime and they're in Hobb's End.

That's all the plot summary you get, because after that, the film begins playing with reality in very interesting and increasingly labyrinthine ways. If you haven't seen the film, I don't want to take any of the fun out of it. But extremely telling is the exchange about Cane's books that Trent and Styles have on the road right before he hands over the wheel:

Trent: What's to get scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.

Styles: Well, it's not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane's work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.

Trent: Whoa, we're not talking about reality here. We're talking about fiction. It's different, you know?

Styles: But reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority.

I have to be honest: that line hit a little closer to home these days than it probably did in 1994. I do remember renting this movie (on VHS!) when it came out, and when it ended, I felt so perplexed, so surprised by the final moments of the film, thinking that I must have missed something, that I rewound it back to their arrival in Hobb's End and watched it again. Watching it this time, having vaguely remembered that experience from 30 years ago, I was a little more prepared to simply go on the journey that Carpenter and writer Michael De Luca wanted to take me on.

If you are a fan of Carpenter and/or Stephen King, this movie is a ton of fun. Carpenter throws in a number of signature visuals that are reminiscent of The Thing, and the movie really nails the Stephen King vibe, not only with the setting but down to the author font on the paperbacks. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is the way it manages to give the viewer a full-on cosmic horror experience without H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, there are a ton of homages to Lovecraft, but it's not his mythos, not his settings, and not his baggage.

Like many people, I can no longer enjoy the work of Lovecraft—certainly not the way I could at maybe 13 years old, reading paperbacks with evocative titles full of odd, elliptical stories that hinted at a hostile cosmos and latent dangers outside of the realms of our perception. But Lovecraft's racism and eugenicist views, which revealed themselves in tropes I wasn't equipped to fully understand at that age, make the experience of reading him one I can no longer find much joy in. And while there are a couple of good ones, Lovecraft film adaptations tend toward the schlocky and cheap, as name-recognizable IP in the public domain might lead you to believe.

So I'm grateful to John Carpenter for In the Mouth of Madness. It scratches the cosmic horror itch in a satisfying way, and wraps it in something of a puzzle box narrative that's akin to a film like Mulholland Dr. but very much in the horror genre. I'm happy to recommend this without having to caveat it.

In the Mouth of Madness is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel (October 2025), and Tubi with commercials.

TV Review: Tomorrow and I

In the future, humanity is the same, but we find new ways to complicate our lives

The anthology miniseries Tomorrow and I, produced in Thailand and released last year on Netflix, explores near-future scenarios where personal identity, social mores and class divisions intersect with digital tools, biotechnology and climate change. Although the stories told in the four episodes have universal appeal, they are related to topics that are deeply important in today’s Thailand: the struggles that trans people still face in conservative families, the government’s hypocrisy that keeps sex workers out of the formal economy, the rapidly changing attitudes about the place of religion in the 21st century, the dangers of rising sea levels for a coastal country, and the slow distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

The first episode, Black Sheep, is a bittersweet tale of selfless love. The story is about a closeted trans man who has been so far resigned to a life of unhappiness. He finds a measure of satisfaction in his job as a doctor who does cutting-edge research on 3D printing of organs for transplantation. It turns out that growing living tissue into the desired shape works better in microgravity, so he’s been recruited for a space mission where his experiments have more promising chances. However, his return trip results in a fatal accident, and that’s when his husband sees an opportunity to use forbidden cloning technology to bring him back—this time in the right body.

We don’t learn about the protagonist’s gender dysphoria until after his death, when the cloning technology scans the memories from his brain. Most of the episode actually follows the husband, whom we see grieve for a while before he comes up with the cloning idea. There’s a very interesting scene where he argues with his in-laws about the process: they strongly oppose it for religious reasons, and he has no time for talk of the afterlife. The Buddhist doctrine that the material world is full of suffering takes a central place in the discussion.

This episode makes good use of the narrative rule that victories must have a painful cost. For our astronaut doctor, it’s the legal limbo of existing as a cloned person (not unlike the real-life legal limbo of trans people in Thailand, who still can’t change their ID to one that reflects their true gender). For the husband, it’s a prison sentence for stealing the head from the morgue, and after that, the separation from his spouse, who miraculously got his job back, but is now permanently stationed at a lunar research lab.

Pros: Great casting for the role of the astronaut doctor, with separate actors for the scenes before and after resurrection/transition.

Cons: The reveal of this character’s history of gender dysphoria is handled without much tact, almost crossing the line into sensationalism.

The second episode, Paradistopia, is a warped reflection of real life through a neon lens. The protagonist is a businesswoman who founds a sex robot factory with the dual goal of relaxing the tight social expectations regarding sex in Thailand and giving less arduous white-collar jobs to aging sex workers. The story of her rise to commercial success is interweaved with flashbacks of her childhood as the daughter of a sex worker, struggling to finish her studies and dreaming of leaving her slum behind. In the present, she’s returned to the same slum and transformed it into a proud red-light district where every desire is catered to with the latest robotic technology.

There are several scenes of talk shows discussing the planned launch of a robot brothel; cabinet members warn that men who get too used to consequence-free interaction with a machine may carry the same behavior to their real relationships, while our protagonist insists that Thailand needs to develop a more open attitude about the varieties of erotic desire. These scenes have the clear intent of inviting the viewer to side with the protagonist, but she’s not above playing dirty herself. She bribes several government officers to secure the legal permits for her robot brothel, and even orchestrates a false-flag smear capaign against herself to draw public sympathy.

The resolution of this episode is rather abrupt and inelegant, but it does pack an implied punch: just because the authorities aren’t ready for a world with robot sex doesn’t mean demand will magically vanish.

Pros: The fabulous retrofuturist aesthetic in every detail.

Cons: The cringeworthy attempts at humor.

The third episode, Buddha Data, is about the meeting between digital culture and ancient tradition. We follow a Buddhist monk who starts questioning his purpose when the whole country becomes obsessed with a new mobile app that adds gamification to acts of charity. The creator of the app resents the Buddhist priesthood for cheating his parents out of all their possessions in the form of offerings, and has given himself the mission to bring actual, material consequences to good deeds. Instead of accumulating merit for the next life, users of his app receive karma points they can exchange for discounts. It doesn’t take long for some people to perversely game the system and earn points for technically fulfilling the quests.

So our monk, who happens to have coding experience, teams up with a former colleague and launches his own spiritual progress app. While his competitor turns charity into a performance for selfish motives, this app guides the user through the steps of enlightenment with the help of wisdom extracted from the brains of veteran monks. All seems to go well for this project, until a scandal blows up and brusquely reminds the viewer that scanning a monk’s brain is no guarantee of holiness.

Pros: The dialogue scenes between the monk and his robot sidekick.

Cons: The plot relies on too many convenient contrivances.

The fourth episode, Octopus Girl, is the show’s pièce de résistance, although the budget was clearly spent more in set design and casting than in scriptwriting. We’re introduced to two adorable schoolgirls who live in a slum during a worldwide three-year-long rain caused by a collapsed climate cycle. Most people have become accustomed to the perpetual rain, and some animals have begun showing impressive adaptations, but tropical diseases are out of control. The United Nations have developed a vaccine prepared with octopus genes; the only side effect is that your face grows little tentacles. In Thailand, the comically inept Prime Minister makes a big show of banning the vaccine from the country while proposing instead to enclose flooded towns under glass domes.

Meanwhile, our girls sneak into a TV singing contest and steal the nation’s hearts by bringing attention to the way the government neglects poor neighborhoods. The scenes in their slum have a cute slice-of-life vibe that is only hurt by the tonal mismatch of a sense of humor more appropriate for an audience of children (which is hard to believe, given this is the same series that had an episode about sex robots). But the biggest tonal whiplash is the episode’s ending, which just wipes off all the goodwill the episode has laboriously tried to earn.

Pros: Excellent set design.

Cons: Very strange humor, needlessly mean ending.

Taken as a whole, Tomorrow and I is pessimistic about the potential of technology. Even when people seem to achieve their goals with the help of advanced genetics or robotics or informatics, the situation invariably turns more adverse and the achievement becomes unusable or unenjoyable. However, this doesn’t mean that the stories take a nihilistic stance about the human search for happiness. This is no Black Mirror. What these stories are saying is that, while technology makes our faults more notorious and therefore more consequential, that doesn’t negate the sincerity of our efforts. Fundamentally good people find themselves in defective systems that don’t allow for neat, clean solutions.

The nuances of this humanist stance are hindered by the show’s painfully simplistic and obvious dialogues. I must admit that I watched with English subtitles and can’t understand Thai, but to the extent that each plot can be followed, what is gained with great visual effects is lost with lackluster scripts, by which I mean that the characters’ reactions can get too melodramatic, or too predictable, or too hackneyed. One can believe that the future will be hard to navigate, but not that we will lack the capacity to describe it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: All that We See or Seem, by Ken Liu

A challenging novel that fearlessly faces a world full of AI

Julia Z is a hacker, and a good one. She has a mysterious past, but now, with the arrival of a client that needs her help, Julia is thrust into a dark world that, even given her technological skills and prowess, she could never have imagined. Julia’s story is the story of All that We See or Seem, the start of a new series by Ken Liu.

The title is a key to understanding and unlocking what Liu is after in this book. The phrase “All that We See or Seem” comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream:

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow—

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand—

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep—while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

This is a story about dreams, both metaphorical as well as literal. The novel runs on the rails of a plot involving a lawyer, Piers. His wife Elli is an oneirofex: she can help shape shared dreams, with individual clients, as well as large groups. But his wife has now disappeared. Worse, a mysterious entity known as the Prince¹ is demanding Piers turn over some at first vaguely defined information from his wife. The Prince not only doesn’t know where Elli is, but her disappearance is what triggered him to send his demands: he is looking for her, too. And so the race is on to use the information in Elli’s files and clues... and dreams, to find her before the Prince does.

At least, that is the ostensible plot of about two-thirds of the novel. A little context and background, first: What a lot of this novel is about and focuses on is the everyday use of LLMs and related technologies. The sort of AIs that we are seeing today are extended, developed and ubiquitous. Liu isn’t advocating for these technologies, mind you, but he does fearlessly lay out a world with AIs that act as personal assistants, legal researchers, and the like. The technology is seen as noncontroversial, but it is everywhere. Julia and Piers and the other characters swim in this water. They can’t imagine a world where they don’t have to manipulate and swim through AI stuff—be it dating apps to shopping.

But then there are dreams. The manipulation and crafting of shared dreams is shown to be a hot new technology (that Elli managed to be an early user and tastemaker for) and one that is absolutely human-made. It’s made clear that Liu thinks that in this new future anything that requires human craft will command a premium. Unlike most other creative arts, dreams are something an AI absolutely can’t replicate.

And yet, consider the poem that the title of the book comes from. It suggests that Elli’s craft (even if you can record them) is an ephemeral one. Sure, it can be recorded, but in the end it is a gossamer art, which could be destroyed by a touch. And there’s a desperation to try and hold onto something real from the dream.² Or is everything just a dream?³ Is it all ghosts and shadows, be it the AI-invented variety, or human-derived ones?

And now I’m going to get spoilery and discuss the phase shift in this novel, because, frankly, I don’t think that it actually works all that well.

HERE BE SPOILERS.

Still here? Okay.

Up to about the two-thirds mark, the story has been Julia and Piers as they try and track down Elli. It’s all from Julia’s point of view, with a couple of swerves here and there for brief bits with the antagonists—the Prince, as well as one of his lead henchmen. The pair get closer and closer to Elli, and have figured out why, as well as what the Prince wanted. And then they track her down, at the same time as the Prince’s forces do. The technothriller of the first two-thirds of the novel comes to a head.

In the ensuing course of events, both Elli and Piers die. Dead. Julia barely survives herself. And then the novel shifts into something else entirely (which I will not discuss, since I’ve brought you to this spoiler and will not go farther). Julia takes the lead, and the rest of the novel plays out. And I’m not sure that this gear shift works into what turns out to be an entirely different plot. It might be, if I squint, an extension of the original plot, but what gets revealed and explicated in that last third and what Julia deals with is not set up as well as I think it is. And to kill not only the MacGuffin but a primary character as well, leaving Julia at a nadir, feels like a bad gear shift, to be honest. We get to learn more about Julia and her past in the last third, and I realize that this series is HER series, and this is needed to flesh out her character some more.

So this feels like a “rebirth” and a “return to her origins,” which is fine, and the novel does eventually hit its theme in this last third, but the jettisoning of both Piers and Elli and the whole swerve from what the novel was trying to do… I don’t think the join between the parts exactly works. The last third on his own has some interesting ideas, too, which makes the clash all the more frustrating. The ideas don’t match the first two-thirds, and I think they aren’t as good, but there’s some intriguing stuff here. Liu’s speculation on these technologies and what they mean holds your attention—and may horrify.

SPOILERS END.

And then we come to the novel’s setting. This is a near-future world where AI is ubiquitous, and the focus of that worldbuilding (aside from the dream technology) is the use of AI. At a time when LLMs and related technologies are controversial, a novel like this can be hard to take. Liu makes it clear there has been a human cost to the use of this technology, but for the most part, he’s not judging it (negatively or positively). This makes the novel tricky, since this is such a contentious technology now, and in Julia’s world it’s everywhere. We get a lot of immersive detail in this future society, and it holds a bit of horrid fascination for me. But I can see how it might absolutely turn off some readers. If the very idea of ubiquitous AI makes you twitch, this is definitely not a book for you.

Also, most of the worldbuilding around the dream technology, which is free of any concerns regarding AI and its consequences, is in that first two-thirds of the book. The last third, again, takes things in a different direction, but it didn’t quite have that spark for me.

So in the end, though, this novel doesn’t quite work for me. It’s not so much the AI technology but the shift at the two-thirds mark that changes this to a completely different book, and while that last third is not weak, I just don’t think it is as strong. Jettisoning a lot of what makes the first two-thirds works, characters and otherwise, makes that last third less worthwhile.

Caveat lector!

Highlights:

• A novel that puts an AI future front and forward with a lot of clever speculation and worldbuilding
• A slowly unfolded main character
• A headscratching two-thirds turn

Reference: Liu, Ken. All that We See or Seem [Saga Press, 2025].

¹ It is very weird, personally, for a character with an online name of The Prince to appear as the antagonist in this novel, given my internet name of Princejvstin.

² And yes, the movie Reminiscence, which goes into memories and dreams, has entered the chat.

³ Ken Liu’s translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time now enters the chat and really feels important to this novel’s existence. Did that translation inspire Liu to write this novel? I wish I knew Liu well enough to go and ask him directly!

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

Anime Review: Kaiju No. 8 — Season 2

A shift from character and comedy to action and intensity

After an entertaining and engaging first season filled with the right combination of comedy and action, Kaiju No. 8 successfully earned a nomination for Anime of the Year, joining powerhouses like Frieren, Solo Leveling, and The Apothecary Diaries. Season 1 gave us the unusual hero origin story of Kafka, an older, ordinary, working-class person who gets a last chance to chase his childhood dream of becoming a kaiju hunter. But when an unexpected attack turns him into a kaiju, he has to fight to remain a hero while keeping his newfound intermittent transformation a secret from the rest of the defense force. In season 2, Kafka’s kaiju secret is out and he must find a way to rebuild trust with his teammates and the rest of the defense force as they all take on a terrifying new enemy who seems unstoppable. While the first season focused on relationships and character motivations, the second season is primarily action. The pivot from character introspection to action results in a season 2 that is fast-paced and entertaining, but not as fully comedic or relationship-driven as season 1. However, the relatively short season 2 and the cliffhanger ending make it clear that viewers are still in the building portion of the larger story arc.

In season 1, thirty-two-year-old protagonist Kafka became part of a found family of much younger new recruits competing for a spot on the Kaiju Defense Force. Kafka’s best friend and confidant Reno supported Kafka as he used his kaiju transformation to secretly help his comrades out of lethal situations. However, an unexpected attack in a major battle forced Kafka to reveal himself publicly as he risked his life to save his team. Season 2 begins with Kafka’s role in the defense force redefined to include tests to use his kaiju powers to help in the fight. However, his fear that he might irreversibly lose control inhibits his ability to fully use his hidden strength. He also gets the bad news that repeatedly transforming will dramatically reduce his life expectancy. These new obstacles arise just as the unusually intelligent Kaiju No. 9 plots to destroy all humans in the country. Whereas season 1 focused on kaiju as mindless beasts, season 2 introduces thoughtful, strategic, super-strong monsters who are intentionally destroying people in coordinated mass attacks. As the human body count grows, Kafka has to decide if he can rise to the challenge.

Although season 1 was reasonably violent, season 2 is far grimmer as it brings viewers into the bleakest moments of the narrative. There are still some very funny moments, but comedy is no longer the primary story element. The original squad of diverse personalities is disbanded in season 2 as the original team of recruits is split up and sent to different squads. Some previous regular characters mostly disappear from the story as new characters compete for screen time. Although the cruel and creepy Kaiju No. 9 appeared in season 1, it now takes on a lead role as the main villain coordinating a team of similarly intelligent and homicidal monsters. As a result, the on-screen body count is specific and violent rather than vague and abstract. Additionally, the previously sassy and strong Shinomiya has a personal loss that drives her to greater seriousness in the ongoing battle.

All this intensity makes the 11-episode season seem very short, as the fast-paced stories fly by and end in an abrupt moment of mounting tension. Fortunately, despite the more serious tone, there are still some very funny elements that balance out the intensity. New character Gen Narumi is the pink-haired squad leader who is hilariously video-game-addicted and social-media-obsessed. His superficial immaturity stands in stark contrast to his cold-blooded killer skills on the battlefield, and the juxtaposition of both elements makes for great scenes in season 2. Shinomiya’s interactions with Narumi are entertaining as she moves from intimidated to irritated with Narumi’s immaturity. Additionally, the previously serious vice-captain Hoshino gets lots of funny moments. The season starts with a standalone short film called Hoshino’s Day Off, in which the members of the original squad secretly follow the vice-captain around on their mutual day off to see what he is up to as he engages in a series of suspicious activities. The short film (which was previously released in theaters) is a fun break from the carnage and a last look at the old squad working together during a comedic adventure. Also, each episode of season 2 has a post-credits scene featuring Hoshino as a late night television host interviewing various characters. One micro-episode references Narumi’s social media obsession, and another segment comments on the poor amount of screen time given to previously regular characters. The micro-episodes are a self-aware and amusing palate cleanser after the intensity of the primary stories.

Beyond the battle intensity and the still present comedy, season 2 has some moments of introspection. Kafka and Mina have a quiet lunchtime together for the first time in the series and reminisce about their childhood fears and dreams. There is also a poignant moment when Kafka admits to Shinomiya that he hasn’t looked at his phone messages because he is afraid of what his former teammates think of his monster status. Those quiet moments are a reminder of why Kaiju No. 8 retains its appeal even as the narrative tone shifts from comedy to intensity. Although the season ends in a moment of mounting action, it will hopefully lead to a worthwhile payoff if fans are willing to endure the wait for season 3.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• More intense action, less comedy
• Lots of hero angst but reduced focus on relationships
• Strong new character, less time for prior regulars

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