Interview with Natania Barron

Today, Paul Weimer talks with his longtime friend, Natania Barron, about her Queens series.

1. Can you introduce yourself to our readers unfamiliar with you and your work?

I'm Natania Barron, a fantasy author and fashion historian who loves monsters, magic, and mayhem. My books are almost always historical in some capacity, unapologetically queer, and full of fabulous costumes, adventures, and found family. My background was originally in academia, primarily focused on medieval literature, but I'm a big fan of the 19th century as well. I read voraciously, garden enthusiastically, and love traveling. At present, I live in North Carolina with my family.

2. You've written a fair amount of fantasy before tackling the Queens series. Why the jump to Arthuriana? What's the appeal?

This is the funny part about publishing. Chronologically, I've been working on the Queens series longer than almost anything else. The first draft of Queen of None was written in 2010, but it languished with me for about ten years, living in a state of limbo. It was, in many ways, the thesis I wish I'd written in graduate school, resurrecting a character I'd found in Geoffrey of Monmouth--which is a 12th century quasi-history that features King Arthur--named Anna Pendragon. Anna was the full sister of Arthur, with the same parents (Igraine and Gorlois). So, in a sense these books have been with me all along. In fact, keen eyed folks will notice quite a few Arthurian nods in some of my other works, including in Pilgrim of the Sky and These Marvelous Beasts.

Arthuriana has always appealed to me, as I grew up loving fantasy and it was a natural progression in my academic pursuits. For me, it's about the tension of the Matter of Britain (the fancy term for Arthuriana) between the golden age and its inevitable fall, the strong king and the affair that shook the kingdom, the ever-changing characters who go from most renowned to reviled and back again. Courtly love itself is walking contradiction! I often speak of Arthuriana as an amoeba, and certainly as fanfiction. From the 12th century onward, it traveled across Europe and beyond, capturing imaginations right and left. And every time it was retold, it changed shape. I mean, truly, so much of what we know about King Arthur are not Welsh or English in nature, but decidedly French. This amalgamation of myth over the next near millennium has shaped so much about how we think about fantasy, kingship, and romance. And it's delightfully episodic, so you have the opportunity to zoom in or out in the story as much as possible, which is wonderfully appealing as a writer. I'd love to continue the series at some point in the vein of what Joe Abercrombie does with his interconnected novels, and I feel like the genre is absolutely built for it.

3. The central logline of the trilogy are three Queens. What prompted you to tell your take on their stories in the Arthurian Cinematic Universe

Women are both plentiful and invisible in much of the Matter of Britain. They are most often used as mediums for succession, or as political pawns. Mothers, in particular, are everywhere and yet nowhere. Once a woman has done her duty to have a child, typically by a knight or king, she is of no use in the narrative. But their stories matter, and they're all there in the margins. The three women in the story are all queens in their own right, or should be, but their queenliness is more than their genes. Anna surrenders her throne; Hwyfar learns to claim her own; Morgen's realm is not of the mortal plane. Anna is a mother, Hwyfar is a maiden (in that she is unmarried), and Morgen is the crone. They are all powerful, but in vastly different ways. And their actions and alliances shape the very foundations of the overall myth. That was one of the really joyful parts of writing the third book, which occurs 20 years after the first, being the ability for me to tie up all the loose ends. And usher in a new generation! Because that's one of the other fun things about writing in this genre: it takes place over a fairly long stretch of time, and there are different phases of folks involved.

4. The time frame of most fantasy novels is months, or even weeks. Having books that take place over years or lifetimes is rare. What models and inspirations in fantasy and mimetic literature did you have in telling the lifetime stories of your characters

Well, in-genre there is certainly T.H. White, who has a similar approach in The Once and Future King. Each section follows a different character or characters, and we begin with Arthur as a boy, and the story reaches all the way until his departure to Avalon. I think, if I'm being academic about it, it's sort of woven into Arthurian DNA to both expand and contract time as needed. In my approach, the first book spans about 10 years; the second is just a few months; the third is a few weeks. But there are breaks of time between each one, so I can zoom in and zoom out as needed. The timelines get more complex, though, even though the time spent is less. By the time we get to Queen of Mercy, there are even dual timelines to contend with, as Morgen's story is happening in the background of the story happening at Carelon with Gawain, Hwyfar, and the triad of Galahad, Percival, and Llachlyn. I don't think anyone does complex timelines as well as N.K. Jemisin, I'd say, outside the Arthurian genre.

5. Maiden Mother and Crone is an interesting alignment for your Queens. What other mythic models and frameworks might readers look for in the trilogy?

Oh, there's so much. In fact, there are so many mythological Easter eggs that I stumble into some I had totally forgotten about when I'm re-reading or listening to the audiobooks. A big theme in the stories is around the contradictions of chivalry and courtly love in the face of a world experiencing magic that is both vanishing and changing shape. I poke plenty of fun at Arthur's very simplistic view of Christianity, but show how well it molds to certain minds looking for straightforward answers. The magic of Avillion is complex, old, and very matriarchal--save that their king is a man. There are heroes, and there are anti-heroes, but there are very few true villains in the story. One of my favorite frameworks is the escape to the wilderness/descent into madness cycle that you see very often in the Matter of Britain. Both Lancelot and Yvain have moments where their minds, essentially, experience a psychotic break. The wood is both healing and challenging in their subsequent adventures. I got to work through Yvain's story a bit in the last book, which was quite the adventure.

I suppose, the biggest theme is the magical woman--the woman of both actual and perceived power. So often, especially Morgan le Fay is associated with seduction and sexuality, and I wanted to change that. In much of the Arthurian canon, powerful women are rarely revered. They are feared, othered, and often looked at as obstacles rather than healers or wise women. In the Vita Merlini, which is from the 12th century and her first large appearance in literature, she's a powerful woman who clearly comes out of the Celtic past, an herbalist, and respected for her work. She's not described as wily or difficult or hedonistic. That all comes later. So I wanted my version of Morgen, who appears within the first chapters of Queen of None, and conveys throughout, in a similar way. She chooses, when Merlin spurns her, to work as a midwife at Carelon. Her magic is not just the magic of Avillion, but blended powers she learned from Merlin as well as her own connection with Death itself. She is called the "midwife of souls" for that reason, and I pulled a lot of my inspiration from the triple-goddesses of death you see in some religions, and especially in Celtic lore.

6. Arthuriana is a vast place and perhaps daunting for readers to find their way in, at least beyond the usual ones. Where you do suggest readers who have read your trilogy wade in next?

Some of the books I suggest run the gamut from faithful retellings to general vibes, and I love that. There's a Palamades even in Gideon the Ninth and plenty of Arthurian echoes. Tracy Deonn's Bloodmarked series is a fantastic YA modern take on the Arthurian inheritance. Of course, Lev Grossman recently wrote The Bright Sword, which has a lot of the humor that I love in writers like T.H. White, but shaped in a way that is very much his own

7.  The sheer diversity of differences in the Arthurian mythos from book to book and story to story is breathtaking, and your works add to that tradition.  Why do you think that remixing and reinterpretation is so popular?

Given the time it was created, it's surprising to many how diverse and far-reaching Arthuriana is. As a medievalist, that's not shocking. The medieval world went far beyond the borders of Britain. And indeed, the West's "Dark Ages" were far from homogenous (or, as the quotes indicated, "dark" to begin with). Indeed, in the Middle Ages, people were asking many of the same questions we're still positing about gender, religion, faith, power, and patriotism. Because of all of this, and its historical context, Arthuriana is built flexibly, diversely, and with a great adaptability. In many ways it's similar to the adaptation and appropriation you see when the Catholic Church really sinks its teeth into the West, and you see all these Celtic and pre-Christian figures remixed as saints. It's deeply location-based and very personal. Knights, ladies, villains, monsters... these can all be absorbed into Arthuriana, as well. We like our own context, and the way these stories are written and shared really welcomes such remixing.

And what's fascinating to me, at least, is seeing it reshaped to either combat or acquiesce to current political, religious climates, etc. Courtly love was adored by the French, and during the 12th and 13th centuries, Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship was seen as sacred even though it very much lived outside the Christian marriage pact. But it shifts, especially by the time you get the Malory--and of course, it's primarily Guinevere who is demonized in that instance. Women are blamed for their power over men, rather than men given responsibility for their actions. So these changes aren't always for the better, but they do tell us a great deal about the cultures from which they're told. I'm curious to see what direction Arthuriana goes, considering the current political climate. Might vs. right has never been so essential.

We see it happening in real-time, to some extent, with comic books and superhero movies, film, and books, in the 20th and 21st centuries. They're, of course, building on thousands of years of myths, but given the acceleration of media production, we get remakes and retellings at breakneck pace. We no longer have to wait for the next minstrel hit to literally travel leagues, changing all along the way to better suit the audience.

8. What's next for you now that you have completed this trilogy?

The third book in my queer Regency witches series (Love in Netherford) is called The Game of Hearts, and that should be out later this year or early next. Then, well, I'm always working on something. I have a secondary world romantasy that needs some revisions, but I also haven't given up on Arthuriana yet. Lately, Palomydes, Tristan, and Isolde have been gnawing away at my consciousness. I've even been dreaming about them! And lots more of the Questing Beast. In addition, I have a few nonfiction projects I'd like to tackle. Ideas are never the issue!

9. (and the soft outro): Where can readers find you and your work?

My website is nataniabarron.com, and I'm @natania.bsky.social on BlueSky, @nataniabarron on Instagram, and @nataniabooks on TikTok. Both the Queens of Fate series and the Love in Netherford books can be found online, or at my publisher's website (Solaris/Rebellion - https://rebellionpublishing.com/)

Thank you, Natania!

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

Book Review: Red Sword by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur)

A gut-punch in book form.

A while ago, Molly Templeton wrote a piece at Reactor about not needing to understand everything in a book that I vibed with so very hard - I am quite a "roll with it" reader in many ways, and it is lovely to have someone put good words around an experience you've had. It came back to me as I was reading Red Sword, the new novel from Bora Chung, because not only is it a story without a lot of handholds to find while reading, but is in fact one where the confusion is emphatically part of the point. It is a story that languishes in that feeling of ignorance, of lostness, and does something fantastic with it.

The story begins with ignorance - the protagonist is on an alien world, at a loss about most of the details, knowing only that she has been brought there by an imperial power who have violently coerced her into this place to fight. What then proceeds for a large chunk of the novel is action absolutely devoid of context. Things... happen. The protagonist endures and experiences. We the reader experience alongside her. We have just as little context as she does, must endure the bafflement along with her. The events that she experiences and endures are confusing, traumatic, violent and often horrible. The novel is full of sequences of fighting, of death. People - many of whom the protagonist knows by description rather than name - are forced to fight an overwhelmingly superior enemy without guns, and die horribly in the act of it, beginning in the first few pages with an unnamed man the protagonist has come to love during their mutual imprisonment on the ship that brought them to this planet to fight.

Her experience then is shaped not by understanding but by inexplicable bloodshed and death. For a cause she doesn't know, let alone support, in a place she doesn't know, with rules she doesn't know. But she keeps being pushed back into these violent encounters, suffering at the hands of the imperials who brought her here as well as the mysterious white aliens they fight.

Already, I think it's clear this sounds like a grim story. It is. It's apparently inspired by the stories of Korean soldiers who were sent to fight in Russia for the Qing Dynasty, and that sense of powerlessness, of being dragged into an outside conflict, comes through at every turn. But it's not just the events and the thematic resonances of this that reinforce it. It's the language.

This is a translated novel, so it's never going to be clear (particularly to me, who speaks no Korean), the extent to which the object that comes into my hands owes its phrasing to Bora Chung or to the translator, Anton Hur. But whatever portions they poured in to the alchemical pot that made this worked perfectly, and particularly in one specific way: the sparseness of the prose. Now I am normally a fan of ornate. Give me something deliciously overwritten and I will, like as not, go mad for it. But Red Sword goes hard in the opposite direction, and is just as brutally impactful for it as something embracing adjectival rococo. To the extent that... I don't even quite understand how it's doing it. How using simple sentences, direct statements, with flat tonality, somehow turns into an emotional gutpunch. There are brief moments that make sense - after a paragraph of text, the contrasting bluntness of a single, brief sentence character death obviously has the benefit of contrast. But it's not just those individual moments. It's the whole thing. All of it is in this almost detached, distant, plain language. And yet it manages to be some of the most emotionally affecting.

To give a specific example, there's a long section in the middle of the book, where the protagonist is thrown from violent situation to violent situation on a foggy field of battle. She doesn't know where she's going or what's going on, and she is simply trying to survive situation by situation. It culminates with a scene of her smashing a weapon into the body of an imperial soldier over and over and over and over again, before cutting to a section break, and then opening the next with her being distracted from almost a reverie by a female scream.

I put the book down after reading that section, hit with a sudden certainty that what I just read was a vivid depiction of someone in shock.

That's what Chung and Hur's prose does here - it situates you emphatically in this experience of living moment to moment, contextless and confused, and by doing so in such blunt terms, hammers home the reality of that experience. Like the protagonist, you are completely at sea in the horror of it all. Her emotions echo out to the reader through this sympathetic experience. The detachment isn't detachment; it's indicative of the real emotional toll being exacted by the horrors she faces. And it is so powerfully done, it cannot be quickly consumed. For all its simplicity, it is prose you need to sit with and digest. I can't quite figure out how its doing what it's doing, but I can absolutely revel in the experience of it.

As the story goes on, some context does leak in. There is some sense of clarity and closure by the final part of the story, but even then, that feeling of being lost never truly ebbs. The bones of the context are there, but we don't have the fleshing out of exposition that would be my expectation of the usual speculative novel. There's no grand speech laying out motive. Only snippets, and even they form a small part of a larger picture unseen, only speculated. But we don't need to have the architects of all this misery come to speak their peace. We see someone experiencing its effects. What does the context matter in the face of the facts? What do the explanations matter in the face of the suffering?

A lot of this, I think, also comes down to trust. Chung lays actions out simply and clearly, with short snippets of dialogue, and mostly expects the reader to infer meaning from how they interact, how those pieces of dialogue or the rare intrusions of meta interact with one another, or to infer that meaning is, at this point, unattainable. Explanations come predominantly at the granular level - how the protagonist got out of the river, how she broke her sword, how she shot the gun. Overarching plot theorising? Not so much. But these moments piece together into a whole, and that whole shows us those effects. We see what this empire is by what it does.

And so I think this is a novel that makes an art out of incomplete understanding. It would be a worse book if the underpinnings were explained at any point, and especially the start, because it would rob us of the chance to ride along with the protagonist and be lost with her, to flow with the story as she flows with it, in shared confusion. It is that shared experience that absolutely makes the story what it is, and allows for some incredibly powerful moments. I do not think I have read scenes of violence in a story - especially as someone who generally finds battle scenes and extended fights tedious - that have affected me quite so strongly, and I think it is precisely because I have to experience them situated in the moment with the character, rather than trying to fit them into a broader context, or seeing them as a moving part in a puzzle, a set piece hurdle to traverse. They're not. The violence is, the experience of that violence, is the point. The protagonist's experience is the point. When the story reaches its conclusion, a number of questions open up about personhood, about who gets to be real, and about the disposability of human life in the endless grind of the imperial machine. Those questions are better served by the time spent paying attention to the material consequences of those imperial decisions.

Red Sword is deceptively simple. Its simplicity is its power; its contextlessness is the point. By removing all the guardrails, it forces the reader to confront the brutality of the experiences of its protagonist, and reckon with them purely as they are, before coming to any kind of broader conclusions about the wider politics at play. The human first. The real, lived moment first. The consequences first. Only then context, a little, but even that ultimately serves that larger section of the text. Chung has turned confusion into an emotional weapon, and drives it home with every brief, brutal sentence. I may not have always understood it all, but I felt it.

--

The Math

Highlights: 

• some of the best writing of violence I've come across in a book
• vivid, clipped prose that shocks you into emotions
• immersive perspective

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Bora Chung, Red Sword, [Honford Star, 2025]. Translator: Anton Hur.

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

Book Review: City in Chains

A well-executed fantasy story that is fighting yesterday's battles

I am going to be up front with the reader here and now: I cannot ever be fully objective about the oeuvre of Harry Turtledove. When I was an impressionable fourteen year old, I learned of his WorldWar series. For the unaware, that is his eight book series about an alien invasion that happens to land in the particularly eventful year of 1942. I inhaled those books, and then the eleven books of his Southern Victory (also called ‘Timeline-191’ or ‘TL191’ among online alternate history fans due to its point of divergence revolving around special order 191) series beginning with How Few Remain. I have read over forty of his books, as of writing, and he is the writer that gave me my enduring love of the alternate history genre. He is in a sense what I aspire to be as a writer, with several different speculative genres coexisting with a solid historical bedrock under all of them. I would not be the writer or indeed the man I am today without the hours and hours I spent reading his books, getting lost in his worlds. Not for nothing, his books consistently come with the blurb calling him “the master of alternate history.”

In the alternate history circles I frequent, the man’s work has something of a mixed reception. They say he relies too much on historical parallelism, such as his Southern Victory series quite clearly reenacting European history in the first half of the twentieth century in an American setting, or his Atlantis trilogy reenacting the early history of the United States on a landmass that consists of our world’s Nova Scotia to Florida, having drifted off of the mainland in prehistory. The man has had some deeply bizarre sex scenes in his work, some involving real people (although I will argue that Robert Conroy’s sex scenes are leaps and bounds worse). His work at points has had some very repetitive characterization (such as how often Sam Carsten is sunburned), as well as a few stock turns of phrase (“he said it with inevitability, like the sun will rise tomorrow”). As I have grown from an impressionable fourteen year old to a jaded twenty-eight year old, his books from the 2000s come off to me like the Star Wars prequels; with hindsight, I can see all the myriad flaws that others have pointed out, and many things could have been done better, but I still find myself enjoying the experience, and in awe of the worlds they opened up to me.

Much of the weaknesses of his big series are often connected to the fact that he had to pay for the college educations of his three daughters in quick succession, and writing is his sole source of income. He had to churn a lot out, and quickly, to give his children a future, and I can’t be mad at him for that. His work since then has been leaner, less dependent on well-trod periods of history, and with less bizarre weirdness (but plenty of fascinating weirdness). His book Three Miles Down (reviewed on this site by Arturo Serrano) is easily his most personal book, being a look at the Los Angeles the man himself grew up in, with plenty of wistfulness and added aliens. His Alpha and Omega is delightfully weird. Now, dear reader, I shall get to the point: his most recent novel, City in Chains.

This is one of Turtledove’s straight fantasy novels, with no direct textual reference to our history. However, those with familiarity with the periods that he likes to write about will see the inspiration, as the novel is rather clearly a pastiche of occupied Paris during World War II. The city is Lutesse (no relation to certain peculiar characters in the Bioshock series) in the Kingdom of Quimper, a name which it shares with a city in Brittany (mention is also made of a battle at a place called Carentan, which is also real, and I learned from the mission in the original Company of Heroes). This city, and this kingdom, are under the occupation of the villainous Chleuh, and the quotidian cruelties have become part of the fabric of life.

The exact aesthetic of this whole shebang is a little bit confused, or so I thought. There are trains, but the occupying forces are primarily still using crossbows. As such, the novel feels like an odd mishmash of the Middle Ages and the 19th century with some tropes of World War II fiction thrown in. Of the latter, the most obvious of these is a sort of magically-infused crystal that occupies the role of radio in the historical fiction that inspired this novel. Nighttime bombing raids are in this world nighttime dragon raids; there is a brief plotline where a dragon rider, having been shot down, is secreted away in the basement of one of the main characters and later handed off to the organized resistance (a plotline which, sadly, is ultimately underdeveloped). The whole thing is a mishmash, one with a lot going for it, but overall Turtledove neglects to really describe what this city looks like, smells like, sounds like. The entire project feels more than a little threadbare, abstract even, rather than something concrete.

The book does shine, however, in its two main characters. One of them is Malk Malkovici, a junkman of the minority Old Faith sect who is a refugee from persecution in another country now occupied by the Chleuh. The Old Faith is the target of genocidal persecution by the occupiers, who are sending them to vaguely described but clearly ominous camps in the east, territory occupied by the Chleuh and conquered (albeit apparently temporarily) from a strange monarchy that believes that the gods have declared that wealth needs to be shared. It becomes clear quite early on that Malk is a member of the group that is this world’s analogue for Jewish people under Nazi occupation.

What makes life more complicated for Malk is that his services as a collector of junk, including various types of metal, is in high demand by the occupiers who hate him and, on an ideological level, want to kill him. He and his family are complicit in the occupation and from there the mass murder and the genocide. He has rapport with officers who come to buy his wares, as well as a collaborating policeman whose beat is his neighborhood, and tries not to advertise his religious beliefs. He is wracked by the knowledge that he is, however indirectly and however reluctantly, complicit in evil, but he knows there is a huge price to pay if he were to stand up for himself.

The other main character is Guisa Sachry, a rich man, a great actor, the head of his own theater troupe, and the greatest star of the Lutesse theater scene. He has a much younger wife (his third) and had planned to keep his head down throughout the occupation with inoffensive slice-of-life plays until an officer of the Chleuh military came knocking, ‘asking’ him to appear as one of the Lutesse luminaries at a parade honoring the city’s new rulers. Knowing he stands to lose a lot, perhaps even his life, if he says no, he goes along with it. He is then asked by the occupation to write a play glorifying the occupation and demonizing the resistance. He does so, reluctantly (and the solution he devises to this is a very clever one on Turtledove’s part, one that he is capable of creating because he knows how people interact with the historical and cultural context in which they live), and from there is pulled head first down the vortex of collaboration.

Guisa Sachry is not a good man, and the narrative correctly emphasizes that fact again and again. He hires a dancing girl from another company on the condition that she have sex with him. He is deeply and profoundly unpleasant to his wife, with whom it is clear he doesn’t really love, and the feeling is mutual. He is ruthless to his underlings and sycophantic to the men who pay him off. But it is with that sycophancy that the novel really furnishes its theme, that of complicitness.

Both Malk and Guisa are men who are constrained by structural factors from acting free of the occupation. Malk dislikes working with the Chleuh out of his religious beliefs and his own moral principles. Guisa, on the other hand, has no principles whatsoever, and his own naked self-interest is what compels him to comply; even if he is the ethnic majority in Lutesse, the Chleuh would still make an example if he were to fall out of line. Both don’t want to collaborate, but both are forced into collaboration, their distinct characters and distinct paths nevertheless reaching the same destination.

As a longtime reader of Turtledove’s work, Guisa Sachry as a character reminded me strongly of another one of his characters: William Shakespeare, as portrayed in his novel Ruled Britannia. That novel is set in a world where the Spanish Armada succeeds, and England is under the cruel yoke of Philip II. This version of Shakespeare is a covert sympathizer with the English resistance who is coerced by the Spanish to write a play glorifying Philip, while simultaneously writing a play about Boudica, the ancient queen of the Iceni people who lead a failed rebellion against the Romans, and a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Spanish. Shakespeare, as portrayed by Turtledove, is a man with a strong moral conscience who is forced into collaboration, but takes covert action to resist. Guisa Sachry, on the other hand, is a man with no moral conscience at all, and his arc is almost that of a foil to Shakespeare’s in the earlier novel.

At its core, City in Chains is about collaboration. Many Americans in recent months have been beating the drum against collaboration with the new Trump administration, filled to the brim with neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a rogues' gallery of some of the most unpleasant, most boorish, most malevolent, and most stupid people on the planet. We have, rightly, been infuriated with the spinelessness of Democratic Party leaders in not taking a harder line against the wrecking of the federal government or the evisceration of trans rights in this country, to name but two examples (but a part of me thinks that Ta-Nehisi Coates was right in saying that you can’t really expect a party that had no spine to stand up against the genocide in Gaza to have the spine to stand up for democracy). We are in a moment where the moral imperative is not to comply, but to resist. Releasing a book like City in Chains in a time like this is an interesting decision, and one that is revelatory.

Harry Turtledove is an outspoken liberal on his social media; before he decamped from Twitter, his pinned tweet was “I didn’t mean to be topical” repeated several times. He is consistently good and well intentioned, if not radical, on racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and is blisteringly critical of the current administration. I remember that, in his novel Alpha and Omega, a novel set mostly in Israel (and released a few years before the current genocide), he states frankly, but does not dwell on, the the second-class status of Palestinians in that country. I do remember one particular interaction I had with him on Bluesky where told upcoming writers to share their new works, and I shared Broken Olive Branches, the anthology in which I have a story raising money for refugee relief in Gaza (and discussed on this blog here). He liked and boosted the anthology, for which I am grateful to him. In terms of his historical interests, he has been blisteringly critical of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates.

But the man is not without his blind spots. His portrayal of race is very much that of an older white liberal; his novel Guns of the South has been taken to task by multiple critics in recent years, such as by Monroe Templeton on the Sea Lion Press blog (which, for full disclosure, I have written many articles for in previous years). As an Asian-American (half Filipino through my mother), I was more than a little irritated by the fact that his Hot War trilogy, a series about World War III breaking out over Korea, has no Asian viewpoint character; the only Korean character is the plucky sidekick of a white American soldier.

Ultimately, I think the core of the issue is that Turtledove’s view of World War II is very much that of old war movies, where brave soldiers fight for justice, and innocent civilians bear the brunt of the ultimate evil. The conflict becomes a great moral drama between justice and injustice (in fairness to him, Turtledove has always been frank about American racism both in that period and in other periods). In that regard, he glorifies the resistance fighter and denounces the opportunist, but fundamentally casts the thing that they are resisting as a foreign force, an invader.

This is a view of fascism that has been superseded in the historical literature by a view that situates fascist regimes in the broader context of the imperial world of nineteenth-century Europe. Aimé Cesaire, in 1950, published Discourse on Colonialism, which made the argument that colonialism made Europe a savage continent, one that had come to accept racial hatred and mass murder as de rigueur, a formulation that culminated in Nazism deciding to do those things to other Europeans. Cesaire’s English translator called this a ‘boomerang effect,’ an abstract but effective translation of the original French phrase ‘choc en retour,’ literally ‘return shock.’ Not long after Cesaire, Hannah Arendt argued in her magnum opus Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazism was the confluence of millennia of European antisemitism and the race thinking of imperialism. Hitler himself openly stated that the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was explicitly modeled on the United States.

Here I shall analyze City in Chains as a critical work, in the manner that Phoebe Wagner on this very blog discusses Andor. In attempting to critique modern fascism, he falls into myths of the original fascism. Contemporary American fascism is not something that was imported from Europe; Trump is not merely the achievement of Russian propaganda, but rather a culmination of centuries of American bigotry. A president who is promising ethnic cleansing cannot be considered a break from a country that systematically expelled its indigenous populations from their homelands. A movement that is backed in no small part by violent militias cannot be considered a break from a country that has enforced slavery, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession with heavily armed mobs, some of which called themselves militias.

As a narrative device and as abstract philosophy, the theme of complicitness in this novel succeeds. As a description of complicitness in today’s injustices, it falls flat. This novel has a model of the theme that could work perhaps most perfectly for Ukrainians under the Russian jackboot (and Lord knows they need it), but not in America or Western Europe. For the latter, the complicitness we face is different and in some ways more totalizing. Does the company that makes our food give money to pay tribute to Donald Trump? Is the fast food place we go to supporting the IDF as they raze Gaza to the ground? Is our laptop made in a slave labor camp in Uyghurstan? The complicitness we face now is our own convenience, our survival on a very basic level. What we are complicit with is capitalism, and capitalism gives us no choice. This is the essence of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

That is the sort of question that City in Chains has no answer for, as it is uninterested in probing the broader systemic reasons for why this occupation, this war, this genocide are happening in the first place. We only get broad descriptions of the prewar status quo, and most of that is a pretty clear parallel to interwar Europe. If Quimper is France, as its name will show, there is no Algeria, no Senegal, no Indochina, and from there no equivalent to the American insistence that the first Allied troops to enter a liberated Paris be white. According to this novel, the enemy is foreign, alien even, and it requires of us no introspection, no questioning of basic assumptions. In valorizing resistance to complicitness with a foreign evil, it leaves open the door to complicitness with a domestic evil, letting us be comfortable in satisfaction while continuing to play our own little part in keeping evil alive, be it through our purchases, our tax dollars, our employment, our voting, or our own personal conduct. The parallelism that is one of Turtledove's standard tricks works to the detriment of the broader moral indignation, and as such cannot even really be said to critique contemporary fascism.

As such, the basic narrative scaffolding of City in Chains is perfectly entertaining as fantasy fiction, but as an answer to the current moment it feels woefully out of date. The novel on some level feels like it’s fighting previous battles, not the current battle. Its portrayal of the struggle against fascism is what America of previous decades wanted World War II to be, and what modern white liberals want the struggle against contemporary fascism to be. It is a book that is fascinated by abstract questions of morality in years gone by, while not having much to say about concrete questions of morality in the present. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how the current moment is the compounded result of previous historical moments, and how the problems of today are deeply structural. It is a book I enjoyed very much, and it has some very smart moments, but on the whole the novel reveals the weaknesses of Turtledove’s worldview in an age of resurgent fascism.

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Reference: Turtledove, Harry, City in Chains [Aetheon Books, 2025]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Fountain of Youth

A star-studded rehash of familiar archeology adventure tropes

Tropes work for a reason. They give us predictability with a twist: a familiar premise or character type presented in a new way that both comforts and intrigues us. Fountain of Youth is a film of tropes but without the twists. It’s a story we have seen before but without any storytelling innovation, or vague attempt at cleverness, or character development. It’s the sort of story that would work best as a series pilot for a streaming service—a mid-level story set up with more meaningful content to come. Unfortunately, it is in fact a film, not a series pilot. So, unless it turns into a film franchise, the limited character development and storytelling are all we’re going to get. If you have ever seen Indiana Jones, The Mummy, or even Romancing the Stone, you already know the entirety of this film. 

Protagonist Luke (John Krasinski) is on the hunt for the Fountain of Youth (more like an elixir of life) at the behest of billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson). To find it, he has to steal priceless works of art to get the clues to find the…things that lead to the other thing to find the fountain. Luke is aided by his trusty sidekicks Patrick (Laz Alonzo) and Deb (Carmen Ejogo), and enlists the help of his inexplicably whiny sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) who is a museum curator. Luke and Charlotte grew up with an archeologist father who frequently took them on adventures to find historical treasures so these adventures are familiar to them. Luke and his crew are opposed by the mysterious, and generally awesome, Esme (Eiza Gonzalez) and the sharp-eyed Inspector Abbas (Arian Moayed). They are also joined by Charlotte’s school-aged, music prodigy son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) who is caught in the custody battle between Charlotte and her soon to be ex-husband (Daniel de Bourg). Along the way, they navigate dangerous locales, law enforcement, and a persistent art-heist crime gang led by gang-leader Kasem (Steve Tran). Protagonist Luke doesn’t really have a backstory or any meaningful external or internal motivation. But he periodically has visions of himself having symbolic encounters with the fountain of youth. If you’ve watched any films in this genre, you know where the story is heading. 

Despite the star-studded cast, Fountain of Youth has some challenges. The film is a comedy adventure but it lacks genuine humor. Instead, it relies on cliched one-liners and catchy come-backs from Luke and the other characters. The plot was so unapologetically predictable that I found myself saying lines before the characters did or announcing scene elements prior to their appearance. The incredible Natalie Portman is trapped in a stereotyped role of the hysterical, fish-out-of-water woman who constantly complains while still going along with the much-cooler-and-braver male lead. It’s a frustrating and annoying trope, especially since the premise of her character is that she is also an experienced adventurer and archeologist. At one point Luke tells her he knows her “no” really means “yes.” The comment stands out as surprisingly sexist, even in a film already filled with problematic content. Given contemporary discussions of the ownership of historical artifacts, Fountain of Youth takes the position that anything goes if you really need or want something. Charlotte periodically shouts “you can’t do that” before she inevitably goes along with Luke’s theft. Despite the diversity of settings in the international chase to get the “things”, the characters of color are all mostly played as objects to be overcome or played as obligatory side characters with no introspection or development. Overall, the film feels like a rom-com without the rom. 

Despite its shortcomings the film had some enjoyable elements. Although many of the visuals were underwhelming, some of the special effects were fun. In particular, there is a moment where multiple flights of stairs appear in the obligatory forbidden temple scene. Many of the other special effects are ordinary even compared to classics such as Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the pop-up stairs were an appealing scene. Additionally, a plot novelty in the film is that the two leads are siblings rather than romantic interests. It’s a nice change from the usual premise, and it would have been nice to lean into that but it’s mostly glossed over. Arian Moayed’s Inspector Abbas is the best written and best executed character in a sea of underdeveloped potential and restrained acting. Esme and Abbas end up stealing the show as the most appealing characters. Another pleasant surprise is Stanley Tucci who makes a very brief appearance in the film and plays the part with enough quiet gravitas to convince me that his acting range is infinite. 

Overall, Fountain of Youth is a fine way to spend two hours if you have nothing else to do or if you are multitasking. Despite moments of adventure, fun, and enjoyable effects, the overall film feels like a rehash of familiar tropes without anything truly new or clever. But sometimes, that may be exactly what you are in the mood for.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Highlights:

• A rehash of familiar tropes
• So much underused star power
• Predictable comfort watching

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

The October Daye Reread: A Killing Frost

Welcome back, dear readers. Today we’re going to revisit the fourteenth novel in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series: A Killing Frost. We are now in the midst of a real push to catch up to publication (after this there are four books to go), though I don’t think I’ll make it before September’s publication of Silver and Lead. *That’s* a book I’m absolutely excited to read.

Astute readers will note that I did slow down the pace of my re-read after last writing about The Unkindest Tide in December. That was my incredibly anticipated return of the Roane novel, which was a delight.

A Killing Frost is something different and I’ve been very open about spoilers throughout this re-read, in part because there are some truly groundbreaking events that occur over the course of the series and this book has perhaps the biggest. If you’ve been following along you probably know what’s coming but if not, I am going to spoil the hell out of this book and about the second biggest, as well as speculate on what will be the third biggest event of the series when it happens.

It’s all happening.

Let’s go.

Three books ago, The Brightest Fell, featured Toby’s to find and bring home her long lost sister, August - a sister so long lost that Toby didn’t know that she had one until fairly recently. The cost, because there is *always* a cost, was that of the even more recent redemption of Simon Torquill, August’s father.

See, August was lost more than one hundred years ago when *she* embarked on a quest to find and return Oberon to Faerie. Oberon, one of the Three, the father and co-creator of all of Faerie. He’s been lost for some five hundred years, clearly doesn’t want to be found, and the price of August’s failure was that she lost her way home. Home, in this instance, means the entire concept of home, of her family, of herself.

In the Brightest Fell, Toby had to bring August home but because August never found Oberon she had no concept of home and being whole, or even who her father was. To bring August truly home, Simon took on August’s debt. Simon lost everything that he regained, had no idea of anything other than his initial service of villainy but worse, this time he didn’t even know why.

I wrote about all of that and the tragedy of Simon Torquill, but that brings us back to A Killing Frost. It’s Simon’s turn. October is a Hero and that means big quests. Bringing Simon back to redemption is the quest du jour of A Killing Frost but it’s not that. August failed to find Oberon. Simon will never look, but Simon needs to find Oberon.

This is the book where Toby find Oberon.

It’s staggering, really.

There’s a quest.

That’s not what I want to talk about so much as I want to talk about Maeve. Maeve is one of the Three, one of the mothers of Faerie along with Titania. Because I’ve been spoiling stuff throughout the re-read we know that Titania has been under an incredibly powerful (cast by Oberon, natch) gaes and currently incarnated as Toby’s friend Stacy. More on this in a moment,as well in the entire book Be the Serpent.

But Maeve. We’re still speculating on Maeve because through eighteen novels so far published Maeve has not yet returned to Faerie. We know that she’s been missing since Janet and Tam Lin broke the Ride, which led to Titania’s banishment and Oberon’s abandonment (honestly, if this is all too mumbo jumbo for you, don’t worry about it, it matters and it absolutely doesn’t).

There have been hints of Maeve throughout the series and in The Unkindest Tide we’ve seen there is something deeply wrong with Marcia, an ostensibly changeling with only a tenuous tie to faerie and I think she’s Maeve.

“Hi,” I said brightly. “Maeve, right? I’m a friend of your daughter’s. Antigone, I mean. The eldest. A *good* friend. I helped her bring back the Roane. She’s not sad all the time anymore.”

So - on the road to find Oberon Toby gets stuck in an area with ties to Maeve and so Toby calls for Maeve’s help AND GETS IT. I’m not sure this can be overstated. Maeve doesn’t appear but her magic clearly aids Toby with what she needs to move forward. It’s another reminder that Maeve may be more aware and closer to the surface than anyone truly suspects, especially in comparison to how deeply Oberon and Titania are buried.

It’s not possible for roses to look amused, but these ones came remarkably close.

What I’m really curious about that, besides if I’m right about Marcia, is how much does Maeve know about what she is responding to. Does she know the specifics of what is going on and how her magic is being used or does it just respond to those who call upon her while in her spaces? How aware is Maeve of who she is?

This brings us to Titania because hey, I’ve already read this book and what I find most fascinating is the speculation. We’re two books away from everything blowing up and Titania returning like the villain she absolutely is.

There have been hints about Stacy over the course of the series, but here’s the big one:

“She’s always been weird about the idea of any of us dating,” she said. “She saw me holding hands with a Hob changeling I went to high school with once, and she lost it. Like, complete maternal meltdown. Way out of proportion with a little completely innocent hand holding. I never dated after that. Technically, I’d never dated before that.”

Something about that story didn’t add up. I’d never stopped to think about it before this, but it had never been my business.

This was all incredibly new information for Toby about her closest friend and she’s deeply suspicious. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of time for the suspicion to take hold, it’s really just foreshadowing for when stuff goes down in Be the Serpent. McGuire is laying down a hard piece of evidence right here.

“Titania’s fucking ass, is that *actually* fucking *Oberon*?” he asked, in a voice that managed to remain reverent, despite the mortal profanity.

The main event comes as Toby pulls everything together at the end. She figured out, or at least she’s staking her sense of identity on the idea that she is right, that Officer Thornton, a semi random character who got caught up in faerie, was actually Oberon who magicked himself into forgetting. Oberon was right there, in the Luidaeg’s house, for months now.

The Luidaeg bit her lip as she stepped toward him, black tears escaping from her eyes and running down her cheeks. They left tarry streaks behind, like she was crying off her mascara, but she was actually weeping the color out of her irises, leaving them driftglass green and clearer than I’d ever seen them.

“Daddy” she asked, in a voice that was barely bigger than a whisper. It shook on the second syllable, breaking.

It’s a heck of a moment that McGuire pulls off here. How do you write the return of what is functionally THE supreme being of the series, a character that is far more myth than reality and who is so far beyond any of the barely mortal fae that it can hardly be fathomed? It’s so very well done.


Random Notes and Random Quotes

**“It doesn’t matter what I wear to the wedding, we both know it’s going to be completely covered in blood before we reach “I do”.”

**“Language,” I said, in my primmest tone. “I’m asking important questions about the nature of Faerie here, and we’re still walking” - I love deep questions about the nature of Faerie

**I was never going to get a happy ending. Heroes never do.

**“I’m not sure I’d brag about being Titania’s favorite,” I said. “It seems like an honor with very few selling points.”

Evening scowled, red, red lips pursing in a moue of displeasure. “I’ll thank you to keep my mother’s name out of your mouth.”


Next up on the reread will be When Sorrows come, in which a wedding request actually occurs, Toby wears a magic wedding dress, we learn some fae political history, and Evening Winterrose is still the worst.

Open roads and kind fires, my friends. 

 

Previous Rereads

Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
A Red-Rose Chain
Once Broken Faith

The Brightest Fell

Night and Silence

The Unkindest Tide


PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E6

As things heat up on Ghorman, episode six provides an important look into Luthen's character.

Episode six, “What a Festive Evening” marks the end of the second small arc out of four. The next arc is, arguably, the most important of the show and a high point in U.S. television. While this episode does not contain the gravitas of the next three episodes, it still has an important job of showcasing that Luthen’s ability as a leader is rarely rooted in kindness or empathy.  

Luthen picks up Cassian still disguised as a fashion designer after his interview with the Ghorman Front, but he’s surprised and disappointed when Cassian says to not be involved: “They started too late, now they’re rushing.” Luthen pushes back, which leads to one of the great exchanges that starts to shift Cassian’s thinking:

Cassian: “I’m thinking like a soldier.”

Luthen: “Think like a leader.”

With Luthen, Cassian obeys orders. He doesn’t think beyond that. He goes where he’s told and completes missions with great success. In order to become the Cassian of Rogue One, though, that will have to change. In season one, Cassian goes from a-political thief to becoming part of Luthen’s team determined to defeat the Empire at any cost. In season two, he needs to become the leader able to inspire a group of rebels to sacrifice themselves to deliver the Death Star plans. This exchange with Luthen begins to mark that change in Cassian. 

But, Luthen doesn’t listen to Cassian. On Ghorman, Vel (Faye Marsay) has now arrived, unbeknownst to Cassian. She’ll be working with her former lover from the Aldhani heist, Cinta (Varada Sethu). Vel told Luthen she’d only take the job if Cinta were on it. Their love rekindles, and they both realize that it is Luthen keeping them apart. Much like Luthen’s meddling with Cassian and Bix’s relationship, Vel says that she and Cinta are worth more to him apart than together. To Luthen, they are tools in his mission to destroy the Empire at any cost—not to support them as full human beings.

Together, Vel and Cinta try to teach the untested Ghorman Front how to run an operation. While the Ghormans chafe under their orders, they agree to work together and do as they’re told, including remaining unarmed. At first, the heist to steal the secret imperial weapons—organized by Syril to trap the Ghorman—goes smoothly, until one of the Ghorman, Lezine from the townhall, arrives and wants to know what’s going on. Another Ghorman pulls a gun on him, a struggle ensues, and ultimately Cassian’s prediction comes true. They weren’t ready. They didn’t follow orders and brought a gun when only Vel and Cinta were supposed to be armed. 

The gun goes off—and Cinta dies.

As they escape with Lezine carrying Cinta’s body and Vel struggling to contain her emotions, she says one of the great lines of season two. To the young rebel who accidentally shot Cinta and is now breaking down into tears, she says: “This is on you now. This is like skin.”

Meanwhile, Luthen and Kleya have their own problems as a listening device they planted in an antique in Davo Sculden’s home is about to be discovered. They get dressed up and party with the Imperial officers and politicians, including Mon Mothma and Director Orson Krennic. In one of the standout performances of the episode, Kleya must sneakily remove the bug right in front of Krennic. Much like this whole three-episode arc, this party sequence leans into Tony Gilroy’s previous work on spy films. As the tension rises, though, we also get to see two incredible actors traded barbs from opposite sides of the aisle as Mothma needles Krennic. She greets him immediately with: “How pleasant to see you free of the witness stand,” which prompts the snarky back and forth. 

While Mothma is unaware that Kleya is trying to remove a listening device, the rising tension between her and Krennic is the perfect cover for Kleya, leading to one of Krennic’s great lines: “My rebel is your terrorist, something like that.” Of course, this is the great irony of watching any Star Wars property in the twenty-first century. The actions the “good guy” rebels take are what the U.S. government would label as acts of terrorism (this is especially clear in Rogue One where Saw Gerrera’s forces are dressed to look West Asian). While many commentators have made this connection between rebel/terrorist in the past, Andor including it so openly in the dialogue continues to build the antifascist narrative as clearly as possible.

The episode ends on two high notes. As Luthen and Kleya walk out, they joke that they should have offed Krennic at the party, which, considering all the pain that Krennic and his Death Star cause, is a darkly funny moment. Additionally, the episode ends with a delightful moment of revenge. Luthen sends Bix on a mission to kill the man who tortured her. We learn earlier in the episode that his method of torture was so successful that the Emperor wanted to expand it—but Bix gets there first. She puts him in the chair and leaves him to the same torture he put her through. On the way out, Cassian blows up the building as they walk away in an epic shot. One of my favorite small details about that moment is, on the soundtrack, Nicholas Britell titled that track “The Bix Is Back.”

While this trilogy of episodes doesn’t end on the high note of “Harvest” in the first arc, it does set up the viewer for some of the best television I’ve seen in years—perhaps some of the best storytelling Star Wars has to offer. Importantly, we see Luthen beginning to crack. While he’s been effective in building the rebellion in the early stages, as it continues to grow and face opposition, he and Kleya struggle, even leading him to say to her: “We’re drowning.” He’s never been the comforting type to Cassian or Bix, but as he struggles to defeat the Empire at any cost, the people under him suffer. 

But even so, the rebellion is growing and spreading….

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

Goodbye, Fifteenth Doctor. Hope to see you soon, Doctor Who

A clumsy finale should not overshadow a cleverly written season and a fantastic protagonist

Recency bias being what it is, viewers of this season of Doctor Who (season 2 or 15 or 41, depending on how much of a completist you want to be) will probably keep a stronger impression of the subpar conception and execution of its finale than of the much better ideas explored through the preceding episodes. This is unfortunate at a time when the show's future is still an open question. There's the upcoming miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, but how BBC and Disney executives will end up weighing the worth of the franchise is anyone's guess.

The first half of the finale, "Wish World," is actually a strong start, which if anything worsens the disappointment to follow. In this episode, the Rani locates the most powerful of the gods, the one who grants wishes, and pairs him with a disgruntled conspiracy theorist who embodies all the annoying traits of the manosphere. Together they transform Earth into a cisheteronormative dystopia so transparently fragile that mere disbelief destabilizes the foundations of its reality.

This is an interesting way of exploring the incongruity of contemporary fascism: it is so contrary to human nature that it needs a continuous, exhausting pretense to stay barely functional. Of course, the Doctor (particularly this Doctor) loses no time in rebelling against such a bland and boring life, and that's precisely what the Rani is counting on: the Doctor's disbelief has the power to completely break down reality, and beneath the cracks is the hidden dimension from where she hopes to rescue Omega, the banished founder of Time Lord society. This reveal leads to "The Reality War" and the quick unraveling of what up to that point was a promising plot.

The Rani and Omega are so underutilized in this two-parter that they could easily have been replaced by new characters without changing anything about the plot. It's not like these two had a lot of runtime in classic Doctor Who, but their weight in terms of lore deserved a more expanded treatment in their reintroduction. Instead, we get a rehash of "The End of Time" from 2010, when the Master almost helped the Time Lords return to our universe, only for the Doctor to slam the door in their faces. Replace "Master" with "Rani" and "Time Lords" with "Omega" and you get the idea. Once that problem is dispatched, there's still a lot of episode left, and it's dedicated to what actually mattered all along: the fate of Poppy, the little daughter of this season's companion Belinda.

We first met Poppy in "Wish World" as a putative child of the Doctor and Belinda, and the dilemma at the end of "The Reality War" is that restoring the baseline reality might delete Poppy from existence. After a barrage of technobabble, the Doctor saves both reality and Poppy, at the cost of one of his lives, and then learns that Poppy isn't actually related to him. This is a notable difference between the style of current showrunner Russell T Davies and that of his predecessor Steven Moffat: whereas Moffat relied too often on giving supporting characters a cosmic destiny, Davies is more comfortable with letting them be ordinary people. Even when companion Rose Tyler became the Bad Wolf, or companion Donna Noble became the DoctorDonna, they immediately had to be depowered for their own protection.

Also, the resolution of Poppy's story follows a thematic line that has been present since Davies's return to Doctor Who: stories about lost children. Episodes like "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" were the most obvious examples, but if you look closely, all through these two seasons with the Fifteenth Doctor there have been various iterations of a child separated from their parents or vice versa. Davies has taken the thread left by the Chibnall era, which redefined the character of the Doctor as a lost child, and extended it to a point where it could connect with one of Davies's own signature moves: giving the Doctor a cosmically small but personally meaningful reason to sacrifice his life. In 2005's "The Parting of the Ways," after the Daleks have already been defeated, his Ninth Doctor still chooses to die to save Rose. In 2010's "The End of Time," after the Time Lords have already been defeated, his Tenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Wilfred. Likewise, in "The Reality War," after Omega has already been defeated, his Fifteenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Poppy.

Despite this neat bow with which Davies ties up the seam between Chibnall's work and his own, the execution of the season finale is too chaotic to be satisfying. The Time Hotel from "Joy to the World" makes an entrance as a deus ex machina, only to quickly be swept to the side for the rest of the episode with no more function than dropping an obvious tease for future plots; Rose Noble literally appears out of thin air as a didactic device and does nothing else; Susan Foreman's random appearance in "Wish World" is left hanging in the air; and Belinda is put in a box for most of the final battle. In fact, the way Belinda's arc concludes comes off as too underwhelming for the symbolic importance it should have. During the entire season, she provided an interesting counterpoint to the usual Doctor/companion dynamic, in that she very emphatically did not want to explore the universe. Her vehement urge to return home raised the question: what could be so important in your normal life that you'd throw away a trip through time and space? The finale answers: she has a child, and that's more important to her than billions of galaxies. It's for that child's sake that she can't wait to leave the TARDIS. It's for that child's sake that the Doctor gives his life. It's a potent statement to close the season with. And yet, the final scene in Belinda's home, once the proper reality has been restored, presents us with a muted version of Belinda, without the energy and the spark that distinguished her character. She is more interesting to watch in all the episodes preceding the finale, which deserve a rewatching as great pieces of science fiction in their own right.

Finally, the return of Billie Piper in the last shot of the finale feels like a desperate choice, on the same level as David Tennant's return two years ago. Don't get me wrong; she's a great actress. But bringing her back at this precise moment gives off the vibe of a calculated tactic to wish the show into continued existence. It's hard to tell whether this idea came from Davies or from Disney; Davies has a known tendency to repeat himself, and Disney has a known tendency to be self-sabotagingly risk-averse. The worst thing that can happen to a show about an alien who can cheat death via endless reinvention is to get stuck replaying its greatest hits.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon

A woolly, wild space opera that boldly strides into high-octane multiverse space opera

When it comes to dealing with, and coming to terms with, books like Caspar Geon’s The Immeasurable Heaven, one has to immerse oneself in a text and a world that pushes the bounds of the comprehensible. I am going to discuss the book in those terms before trying to touch on anything else.

There is a theory of writing and reading genre fiction regarding how speculative a text can be before readers check out completely. You cannot, the theory says, provide too many shifts from reality before the average reader gets overloaded with the strangeness. Imaginations, in this theory, are not quite boundless. And I have found that I do love a sense of wonder in my SFF, and perhaps more than most, I have limits, too.

So where does The Immeasurable Heaven fit into this? Definitely into the deep end. Very much in the deep end.

We have big depths of time than the original series, with events that might, if I read the book right, take place in objective time over hundreds of millions of years in the baseline reality. We have vast numbers of solar systems in a distant galaxy in a far future where even supernovas have been engineered out of existence by a post-AI species that lives in stars, the Throlken. Oh, and the fabric of space itself is different now. The Throlken are basically the rulers of the galaxies, who live inside stars and enforce their laws remorselessly. They aren’t omnipotent or omniscient, although they are amazingly powerful. That’s a big enough canvas for most writers, but the author also makes this into a multiverse. For, you see, what I just described is the Surface, the base level of reality.¹ Below it are levels of reality called Phaslairs, created when choices are made and decisions split universes in a Everett-Wheeler-type formulation. These Phaslairs are always younger than the levels above. So the author provides us with a canvas not just of one large universe, but thousands of underlying levels of reality.

On this canvas with enormous potential, the story revolves around the Well, formerly known as the Inescapable Hole. While there are other ways to get down into the Phaslairs, the Well is a hole punched through realities and it’s the easiest way to head into universes below ours. These universes are younger, often very different, and while some of them are ruled, too, by the Throlken, some of them are “lawless” and most definitely are not. One other important thing to know about the Well and the Phaslairs is this: its a one-way trip in and down. Once you enter a younger universe deeper in, you can’t go back to an older upper one. Information, however, can and does pass up and down Phaslairs, but physical bodies and existences do not.

Or so it was thought.

The inciting incident for the book revolves around a Primal Scream that is captured by instruments at the Well. And, more importantly, the detection of someone, or something doing the impossible and ascending layers of reality. Who is it? What is it? And what are their intentions?

Three main characters are tied to this impossible event. Our major protagonist is Whira. Whira is an agent of Thelgald, an Alm (basically a monarch) under the aegis of the Throlken. Thelgald wants to know the provenance of the Scream, and so dispatches Whira on a very secret mission to the Well. (Thelgald is quite aware that the Throlken will not want them or any agent of theirs meddling and upsetting applecarts). Whira takes the slow path of traveling on a passenger ship, Gnumph, that really is a sentient, giant, spore-like creature that travelers live inside of, to head toward the Well and make a descent and investigate.

Our next point of view is Draebol. Draebol also works for Alm Thelgald, but has long since gone down into the Phaslairs. Draebol is a licensed surveyor/explorer/adventurer who lives down seventeen thousand levels of Phaslairs, busily sending data up and getting payments for it. So Draebol keeps on keeping on, creating a grand map of travels and adventures to eventually sell for a handsome profit. This relatively regular if exciting life is interrupted by a sudden rush of attacks and pursuits by various authorities. The knowledge that a seasoned surveyor has is very important when everyone is nervous about someone breaking the laws of reality...

Which brings us to our third major POV character: Yib’Wor. He was once a sorcerer king, and a tyrant at that, before the Throlken rose to power, so we are on the order of *hundreds of millions* of years. He was eventually overthrown and cast into the Inescapable Hole to fall forever. But he did not fall forever. And so he is the antagonist of the book, the one that demands action from everyone and everything else, as he slowly tries to climb back toward the Surface against all laws of reality. He is our inciter of the conflict. His is the only point of view that is in first person, and we really get into his head. I got a Miltonian Satan-like vibe from him (after all, consider the title, and consider the impossibility of climbing back up, that he is attempting to do).

There is a wealth of other worldbuilding details here. There are infraspheres, pocket dimensions for all sorts of sport and entertainment, including what is for all purposes a science fantasy MMORPG that can be accessed by beings across the galaxy and down into the Phaslairs, too. There is smart matter, strange tech and weaponry (including weaponry that can push you down a level of reality instead of hurting you), and much more.

There is one last bit of strangeness, which might be the part where the book teeters into the limits of what a reader can hold. And that is, none of these characters we meet are human, and most of them aren’t even bipedal with bilateral symmetry. And sometimes, going down into Phaslairs, one changes shape and form, too. So this book is populated entirely by creatures and sentients utterly alien.² The author makes it clear and impossible to miss that you aren't dealing with anyone or anything even vaguely human.

Put all this together, and add the author’s immersive and descriptive language, and I can’t help but wonder whether the book pushes that limit of how many dissociative genre elements a reader can reasonably hold in their head and still grok the book. I would never, ever, want to give this book to a new reader of science fiction. As it was, while I was reading it, I set aside the SF audiobook I was consuming at the time, because I did not want a gear clash in my brain between the far-future details and the kaleidoscopic worldbuilding of The Immeasurable Heaven.

Let me give you an extended quotation. This gives a sense of when the story decides to drop you headfirst into its world. Really, this is my final argument for the book. If you want to (or think you can handle) a text that is filled with passages like this, and the mental brainspace to keep the picture of it in your head, this book is for you.³

In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair.

The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.

Finally, the book is complete in one volume. We get a complete story here. (One thing that I appreciated, and in fact found necessary in the Amarathine Spectrum books was that in The Weight of the World and The Tropic of Eternity there were summaries of what had happened before. It would be triply necessary if this were the first in a series, but it is not.) It is a rich, complicated setting with non-human characters, and one of the widest canvases I’ve ever read in an SFF novel. As noted above, it’s not going to be for everyone, and not for readers who have not read science fiction before at all.⁴ The book teases that (if it does well in the eyes of the publisher, of course) the author could tell more stories in this vast universe. There are throwaway lines, references, allusions, and side notes that could be expanded into full novels. But there’s also ample space to tell entirely new stories.

Given the absolute trashfire that our world is lately, maybe you want an experience like few others, in a setting completely alien to our own. The Immeasurable Heaven is here for you. Coming out of this book is like emerging from a deep Phaslair into the Surface world, having experienced a realm (realms!) extraordinarily different from what you knew.

Highlights:

• Pushes the boundaries of comprehensibility in a SFF work. Requires careful attention due to overwhelming alienness and detail.
• Enormous canvas, one of the largest possible in science fiction—and makes very good use of it.
• Multiverse? Space opera? ¿Por qué no los dos?
• If you want to immersively escape the world, this book provides that in spades.

Reference: Geon, Caspar. The Immeasurable Heaven [Solaris, 2025].

¹ In theory, anyway. It is hypothesized that there are levels of reality, Phaslairs “above” the “Surface,” but that they are uninhabited by any life.
² The touchstone for this book, with its levels of reality, multiversal outlook, and the changing of bodies, is the recent Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds by Darkly Lem. That book, too, with its enormous canvas and furious and fertile imagination, has a similar approach, where changing universes means changing bodies. That book mostly has its action on various planets or cities, although one universe has a long space-opera-verse chase scene involving spacecraft.
³ That makes me wonder and think. There are plenty of people who cannot visualize in their minds deeply. If I say “Picture an apple in your head,” some cannot see the apple, or see a very generic apple without detail, whereas there are people who can tell you what that apple smells and tastes like when you bite into it. I am moderately on that spectrum of sensory imagination, but know people who outrank me. Is this type of book harder for someone who is trying to handle all this detail? Or, conversely, are readers who can’t picture an apple the ones who would find the above easier, because they aren’t even trying to see the Translator’s lair?
⁴ I haven’t mentioned him to this point, but I think this is where Olaf Stapledon enters the chat, with vistas of time and space that this book dares to try. Stapledon’s is a much older and more compact style, and he would have told this story in a much shorter volume—but it would be just the ideas and not much of the meat. But that density of ideas and that vastness of time and space and willingness to really offer the reader that level of dissociation, that’s Stapledonian. This book follows proudly in that tradition even if its style is much more modern. But again: Stapledon is NOT for everyone. I daresay that if you don’t like Stapledon, this is not the book for you. The converse may also be true.

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

Film Review: Lilo & Stitch

If Disney live-action remakes were generally this good, they would still be making them

After the live-action Snow White bombed, Disney announced that it would be halting development on all future live-action remakes of its animated films. These live-action films were transparently cash grabs. Under capitalism, all commercially published art is a cash grab to somebody (not necessarily the artist); we know this, and for that reason, one of the greatest sins a film can make nowadays, in the age of digital reproduction à la Walter Benjamin, is to be an obvious cash grab. In that regard, the live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch is something of a zombie, the last shambling remnant of something that was vaguely abhorrent to begin with, and is clearly about to die. Even so, we are tempted to gawk at its remains, and even so, we go to see Lilo & Stitch in theaters.

When watching the opening scene on the Galactic Federation’s capital ship, the whole thing feels like it was made on a sugar high. It feels cartoonish, more so than the rest of the movie, as it is almost totally CGI, and more gallingly, the editing is extremely rushed. As soon as a line of dialogue ends, with a quip more often than not, the film cuts to the next shot. This is a persistent problem throughout the film, but it is most pronounced in the opening sequence. The camera, and by extension, the viewer, is given very little opportunity to breathe. Later in the movie, some shots could have been allowed to bask in the Hawaiian scenery, or have a moment of intimacy with any number of its characters. The film runs about 01:45, but after seeing this cut, I feel like another 15 to 20 minutes would have been justified so as to not feel like the film is running a sprint.

The plot, in broad strokes, is similar enough to the original for most of its runtime; it is the characters where there have been more substantive tweaks. I really liked Maia Kealoha as Lilo. She has superb comedic timing, without which several jokes simply would have crashed and burned in a manner not unlike the pod Stitch arrived in. She is also capable of great pathos, giving gravitas to the more sensitive moments, while still being a hellion as all children her age are (indeed, the way she gets back at Mertle in this film’s version of the beginning at the hula performance is, if anything, far more vicious than the original). She is a very good foil for this three-dimensional version of Stitch (a returning Chris Sanders, who provided his voice in the original film), who if anything is even more of a walking agent of chaos than before. It reminded me of James Mowry, protagonist of Eric Frank Russell’s 1958 novel Wasp, who is dropped on an alien planet with the express order of being a terrorist. Stitch, designed as a weapon, is something of an unwilling Mowry, but his orders, encoded in his DNA, manifest in his behavior anyway. He is also, fortunately, far more entertaining and far less goddamn irritating than the version of him seen riding a roller coaster in the previews at Regal cinemas.

This film changes the bumbling alien sidekicks Jumba and Pleakley from being obvious extraterrestrials in human clothing hunting for Stitch into technologically aided shapeshifters who don’t exactly understand how human beings behave. This change, I think, was ultimately for the best. There are bits in this movie where antics that would be funny in animation just look cartoonish (and not in a good way) in live action, but making these two characters apparent humans allows a new comedy of manners to enter the picture. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the fact that Pleakley, a male alien, is no longer in drag for his disguise in this film; I’m not sure how it could have been done tastefully to begin with.

Sydney Elizebeth Agudong portrays this film's version of Nani, who of the main characters is perhaps the most faithful to the original. She has the right balance of sharp adolescent wit, caustic fury at injustice, and deep, deep anxiety over her own fate that the role needed. But if her character is much the same, her arc is tinkered with, first subtly, then massively. One very good example of this is when the social worker says that she needs a new job or she will lose custody of her sister; in this incarnation, she finds a job doing something she loves, which is a key bit of support for her broader arc. It also recontextualizes one of the songs from the original movie, and in the best way possible.

Some characters are either added or changed in a substantial manner that moves them out of the way. Gantu is, regrettably, gone. There is a new social worker (Tia Carrere), who gets some good lines and makes the authority of the state seem not quite so horribly bleak. Fortunately, a version of Cobra Bubbles is here (Courtney Vance doing a pretty good Leslie Nielsen impression). One of the great writing missteps was giving this film’s version of David (Kaipo Dudoit) not much to do beyond saying funny things at the designated times; the banter and flirting between him and Nani in the original is much reduced here. He is made up for, fortunately, by a new character: David’s grandmother Tūtū (Amy Hill), who is established as an old family friend and neighbor of Nani and Lilo.

Now, I am going to spoil the ending, because there has been a lot of discourse about it, and it is worth discussing in some depth. In the original movie, Nani succeeds in keeping custody of Lilo, and overall Nani’s arc is primarily about being a caregiver and secondly about David. Here, she is given more depth as to her aspirations for her future, such as initially turning down a full ride to a prominent university on the American mainland so she can take care of Lilo. This is what sets up the change that has ultimately been the most controversial, for at the end, Nani ends up forfeiting custody of Lilo to Tūtū, leaving Tūtū, Lilo, and David to share a house while Nani goes to the mainland for college to study marine biology.

This has understandably made many fans of the original upset. Much of the original’s thematic skeleton is the Hawaiian idea of 'ohana, where families stick together and nobody is left behind. The new sequence of events does, on its surface, look like an abandonment, but I think that is a simplistic reading. Much of the social media discourse around the ending frames it as the state government ‘taking’ Lilo away from Nani, but the film portrays it as a far more mutual process that is built up to, through a new thematic emphasis as well as through Nani’s new narrative arc.

Much of the new film’s thematic work is about the crushing weight of poverty. After their parents died, Nani and Lilo live in a dilapidated shack where the former has to work several dead-end, degrading jobs not just to survive, but to raise a child. You see near the beginning that their house does not have a lot of food, for one, and few luxuries, so nothing like tea (as a joke in that sequence calls attention to). To be poor in America is to have your life interfered with in a million small ways by society and the state; the social worker is consistently an irritant, but she rarely brings with her anything that could actually alleviate this family’s poverty. You can see the pain in Nani’s eyes as she throws her full-ride scholarship letter in the garbage, knowing that a potential way out of poverty will have to slip from her grasp because of the immediate demands of childcare.

This is where I will risk sounding callous: the ending of the original movie was essentially a sentence of lifelong poverty for both Lilo and Nani, if we are being realistic. As native Hawaiians, they are more likely to be impoverished by other inhabitants of that archipelago. The demands of childcare would mean Nani would not have many opportunities to upskill for several years at least, and any path to do so may risk crushing debt. Furthermore, it did what a lot of Disney animated films have unintentionally done by encouraging a sort of martyr complex among young girls, telling them that their only value is in the care they give to others. Care is good and valuable, yes, but girls and women can, and should be encouraged to, have their own passions and their own ambitions for their lives beyond the domestic.

Much of Nani’s new arc is about just how taxing her life is, having to deal with the travails of poverty, of raising a child, and of dealing with the new arrival in her life, namely a furry blue alien terror weapon (as well as those who would like to take him away, and will hurt her and those people she loves to do so). Her entire bearing through this film is one of exasperation and of downright exhaustion. She, rationally, wants a better life than this, and she is almost denied, quite cruelly, a way to a better life. This is why I object to the characterization of the state ‘taking’ Lilo, for it is more accurately described as Nani realizing, correctly, that as a nineteen-year-old orphan, she is in far over her head in her current situation, and that she can do better for Lilo in the long run.

The reason why this new ending works is partially due to Nani’s new arc, but also due to the new character of Tūtū. The latter is a grandmother figure to both Nani and Lilo, as well as being a literal grandmother to David. She is already a member of the broader chosen family by the beginning of the movie, and so there is now another person who could naturally (by narrative logic) take stewardship of Lilo. She is what a lot of online conversation in this film ignores, for she is really the character who makes the whole thing plausible. She is trusted and loved by Nani and Lilo and is blood family with their friend David. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and Lilo accepting Tūtū’s help ultimately comes off to me as a very mature decision, as much as it hurts in the moment. As a message to a young audience, it shows that it is okay, good even, to ask for help, and to accept help, and to know when you are being overwhelmed, for that is kinder to both yourself and the people around you.

In the long run, I can’t help but think that the ending is the kinder one for Lilo. Sure, they may be physically separated, but with modern telecommunications they can talk regularly. Like many Hawaiians, Nani is going to the mainland to better her future, and with her new education she may well get a job where she can not only afford to live comfortably, but also care for Lilo far more effectively. If Lilo is six in this film, Nani will graduate when she is ten or eleven, which means that it is very possible that Nani will be able to provide her younger sister with an adolescence far more comfortable than her childhood. This is not nothing, given the brutality of poverty, as well as Hawaii’s current housing crisis. It is, I dare say, a great kindness.

I expected to write a brutally negative review of this movie. Walking out of the theater, I was surprised I didn’t hate it. The film ultimately ends up justifying its existence artistically (financially, I’m certain Disney is very happy right now, as this has already outgrossed Thunderbolts*) in a way many remakes simply don’t. Thematically, I would argue it is more adult. Visually, it takes advantage of both live-action and CGI to make Hawaii absolutely beautiful, and its performances provide an energy of their own. If all remakes Disney made were as good as this, they would still be making more of them, which is both great praise for this film, and great condemnation of Disney for getting into this mess in the first place.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.