TV Review: Paradise

We all have our ways of coping with death. Unfortunately, this lady has all the money in the world

Stop me if you've heard this one: after a worldwide disaster destroys the modern world as we know it, a few lucky survivors have moved to a secluded underground habitat to ensure that humankind will endure. However, some years later, the assassination of this small community's leader will risk exposing the secrets of the people who actually run the place, and it will be a random nobody's mission to pursue the leads while still dealing with grief over a lost love, a death our protagonist blames the authorities for. Whom can you trust after the world has ended? How do you even get away with murder in a secluded panopticon? And what's really going on outside the shelter?

The Hulu series Paradise isn't entirely unoriginal. It does a fine job of turning post-apocalyptic drama into a meditation on the various ways we learn to keep living after a loved one dies. Each of the few thousand survivors who live in this underground city has someone to mourn, and the extensive flashbacks that take up a good portion of each episode's runtime provide the necessary context for the main cast's seemingly extravagant choices. The viewer ends with a complete idea of what makes these characters tick, even if sometimes it's a broken moral compass.

All through this first season, characters remind each other (and the viewer) that the placid, uneventful imitation of American suburbia they live in doesn't make up for the billions of deaths that happened on the surface on a single, horrific day. If they were ever on their way to getting too comfortable, the loss of their leader is a shocking reminder that death still exists, and no shelter will ward it off. That realization hits especially hard for the billionaire who funded the entire project, a grieving mother who has embarked on a Quixotic mission to keep death away from her remaining child, the world be damned.

This is the most interesting character in Paradise. Normal people understand that death is a thing that happens and our efforts against it can only succeed so many times. But the founder of this underground city is the world's richest woman, and having so much unchallenged power tends to warp your idea of what's possible. One flashback reveals that, when she heard that environmental devastation was imminent, her first thought wasn't to look for ways to use her fortune to save the world; she looked for ways to use her fortune to save the one person who matters to her. She's already lost one child, and now she lives in permanent alert mode. To keep her living child safe, she'll let civilization go to hell if it comes to that. And as the season progresses, the viewer discovers how many deaths she'll consider acceptable for this monomaniacal goal.

When you believe you're prepared for the end of the world, but one day it takes you by surprise, whatever life you manage to build afterwards will be defined by your actions at the moment of crisis. Paradise builds on that idea, and it traces a few parallel plots that mirror each other: parents who make ugly choices for their children's sake, brokenhearted widowers with survivor guilt looking for absolution, desperate people pushed into impossible dilemmas. Although several characters are already dead by the start of the show, their presence haunts every episode. This is a story that relies very heavily on flashbacks, because the way the living characters are written requires the viewer to keep in mind the details of their past in order to make sense of their current actions. The screenwriters seem to be making an argument that every person, even the ones you dislike, is carrying some burden that explains who they are, and empathy for your fellow human requires that you acknowledge how their pain molded them.

Then again, how do you feel empathy for an unfathomably wealthy person who manipulates several scientific geniuses, hundreds of unsuspecting construction workers, and her own government into indulging her fantasy of safety? We've all heard (and some of us have been) parents who say they'd do anything to protect their children. That sentiment looks quite different when it touches someone who is actually able to do anything.

For a show about an entire underground city, Paradise doesn't look particularly impressive. Part of the reason is that the community is intended to remind people of home. Still, the set design is so lacking in an identity of its own (*cough* Silo *cough*) that some of the flashbacks in the outside world are easy to misread as taking place in the underground present. The show also suffers at times from clumsy dialogues and characterization, with some plot developments transparently contrived for the sake of drama. The songs selected as thematic summaries of each episode come too close to the cringey side of in-your-nose-ness. And again, the overuse of flashbacks is a sledgehammer against any hope of maintaining a sense of cohesive pacing.

The draw, despite these failings, is to be found in the performances. As our protagonist, Sterling K. Brown does a solid job of portraying barely contained fury under a face of professional equanimity. Krys Marshall, who has been fantastic in For All Mankind, is here a complex player in the murder investigation, struggling to balance her conflicting loyalties with her sense of justice. Gerald McRaney is positively frightening as the type of domineering patriarch who can bend a nation's fate. And pay close attention to Nicole Brydon Bloom's meticulously controlled performance. Just saying.

This first season ends in the right cliffhanger that was reasonable to expect, and I wouldn't object to seeing more episodes set in this strange, messy, delusional last hope of humankind. But let's say I won't exactly jump in exhilaration if it comes to happen.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: In The Lost Lands

Based on a George R.R. Martin short story, In the Lost Lands feels like a dystopian video game that's all style and no substance

As as sci-fi fan, I will forever be chasing the high of taking a chance on a film like The Fifth Element and being rewarded. It's rare that a standalone, non-franchise movie delivers these days, and I love supporting new ideas, however absurd they may seem. I wanted so badly for Jupiter Ascending, for example, to be great. (It is, but in a terribly silly way.)

Thus, when In The Lost Lands appeared on my radar, I was excited. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of video game movie renown, it tells the story of a decaying future civilization and a witch's journey. And like The Fifth Element (and all of Anderson's Resident Evil movies), it features Milla Jovovich, who is absolutely breathtaking on screen. She is Grey Alys, a sort of Jessica-from-Dune-type witch who also, for some curious reason, can never refuse a job. She teams up with Dave Bautista, who plays what is essentially the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Which brings to me the setting, arguably the most interesting part of the movie. I'm a sucker for a wasteland, and this movie seamlessly creates a world that is equal parts Mad Max: Fury Road, Fallout, and the aforementioned Dark Tower. The biggest debt is to Mad Max, as the looming citadel structure even features a craggy skull-shaped entrance and a fleet of black-smudged faces à la warboys. Everything is dusty, dirty, and church bells ring out in slagged iron cathedrals.

My favorite (and most interesting) part revolved around the clearly evil post-capitalist and christo-mechanical church faction—sort of a post-apocalyptic Templar deal. Their motivations and machinations aren't ever clearly explained, but the vibes are high. They're the bad guys, and they have on Templar smocks, have dirty faces, and wear aviator sunglasses.

Overall, the movie trucks along fine. There are a few interesting battles and fights, and the sweeping shots give "crumbling civilization" in some visually epic ways. At the end of the day, though, it's a movie cigarette—probably bad for you, but entertaining for a few brief moments. Folks familiar with Anderson will probably already know this.

The most unbelievable part of the movie for me wasn't the unexplained character motivations or gravity-defying stunts: It was the fact that three different women are attracted to Dave Bautista, the main gunslinger character. I've only really ever noticed him as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy, so it was wild seeing him as a leading man. 

Unless you're an Anderson head, you'll probably skip this one. But if you have some to kill, it's a perfectly fine movie to watch on a rainy Saturday and enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Review: Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

Jordan Carroll uncomfortably probes the connections between the field and the right wing of America

Jordan Carroll’s academic book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right sets out to do what it says on the tin. His thesis is that the alt-right, as constituted, has undeniable links to the science fiction field, which go back to its earliest eras, and whose consequences and ties remain to this day. He explores how the alt-right’s antisemitism, racism, sexism, queerphobia and other toxic beliefs have manifested, been encouraged, and grown in the soil of science fiction from its inception.

His thesis:

Science fiction serves as more than just a pop culture reference in fascist discourse
[...] the alt-right has interpreted science fiction to say that a fascist world is possible.

It was unfortunately inevitable. Some of the same impulses, ideas, beliefs and interests in the early part of the 20th century bore fruit in a number of, as it turns out, rather interconnected loci. The interest in space exploration (and colonization) bore fruit not only in the stories shepherded by Hugo Gernsback and, more importantly, John C. Campbell, but in the whole strain of the work of Wernher von Braun and his rocket program, first for Nazi Germany, and later, for the United States.

This interchange of conscious and subconscious ideas has had consequences for science fiction as a field, and that is what Carroll examines here. He varies between the historical perspective and that of more recent events. He leans on Alec Nevala-Lee’s book on John C. Campbell (Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction) to show how Campbellian science fiction has had some of these toxic themes and ideas right from the start, and that the alt-right has been looking at science fiction for models of a fascist future for a long time.

As Carroll notes, this pervasive toxicity has led to some very strange results. He notes The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, an out-and-out satire and a strike against the technocratic fascist impulses of science fiction that, quite frankly, probably wouldn’t get a publisher today. The book is not subtle with its points (or even in its cover). And yet, as Carroll points out, there are those on the right who take it as a model to emulate. Carroll also brings up authors like Pournelle and Niven, focusing on Lucifer’s Hammer and its rather lurid racial politics (just as one prominent example, the PoC cannibal army) as mainstreaming the ideas of the alt-right, all the worse because of its blockbuster bestseller status. The darker connections of racial and eugenic politics in science fiction (again, Campbell, but not just Campbell, that’s the point of this book) were kickstarted and encouraged by books like this.

And so, yes, he also naturally tackles Dune. Dune probably could have an entire book written on just its role in politics and science fiction—positive, negative, and neutral. Carroll focuses on how, despite Herbert’s attempt to show the horror and hell of Paul’s life and his role, the whole idea of a “God-Emperor” has been enthusiastically taken up as a role model by elements of the alt-right. They ignore the non-Western elements of the culture of Paul’s society (from the Emperor all the way to the Fremen) and delight in the power of Paul as God-Emperor with his Führerprinzip as something to wish for. And yes, Carroll drags in Warhammer 40K and how, for all that it is overtly a criticism of this grimdark future, like Dune, it is seen as an aspirational future by the alt-right.

Naturally, he also goes on to tackle The Turner Diaries, which is perhaps the most poisonous science fiction or science-fiction-adjacent book of them all. With its explicitly racist and fascist politics, Caroll calls it as a Bible of the white nationalist movement, and I think he’s absolutely right. This is the future the alt-right has always wanted. It’s a manifesto of the darkest order. I am myself reminded of “From my Nightmare 1995 to my Utopian 2050” by William S Lind as being absolutely in this terrible tradition. There is a whole strain of post-apocalyptic novels and stories that Carroll could have gone into that could come in for criticism or at least discussion in interrogating these ideas. Consider the underground city society of A Boy and His Dog and how the girls (and some of the men as well) all wear heavy white makeup.

In the more modern and recent context, Carroll looks at people like Richard Spencer, and also at people like Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day) and the whole saga of the Rabid and Sad Puppies (once again, relying on an excellent source, this time Camestros Felapton) to show how, in more recent times, this mixture of far-right politics and science fiction has been wrapped around each other. In this era, we don’t just get odious books by authors such as Tom Kratman; we get political action and activity in a direct fashion.

It’s not all doom and gloom, as he highlights authors such as N. K. Jemisin and her award-winning Broken Earth trilogy as countervailing reactions to the alt-right’s attempts to go from simmering beneath the surface to fuller control of science fiction. But in that, I think that Carroll missed a few tricks. The Rabid and Sad Puppies were a fulmination, a fungal bloom of these right, alt-right, far-right movements. But while that tide, as of the writing of the book, and as of the writing of this review, has receded, there is still a strain of writers and authors who attempt to, to various degrees, mainstream reactionary politics. Yes, I could drag Baen Books here, and I already mentioned Kratman, but there are less odious authors who are not quite as overt in these fascist-friendly futures, or futures that the alt-right can wish for.

And to that point, unaddressed and undiscussed in this book (it’s a slim volume, to be fair), some of those currents are present in a greater total mass as subtext (perhaps, to be fair, probably subconsciously) in much more mainstream science fiction. Carroll doesn’t consider or interrogate the problems that this subtext has had in the main run of science fiction. The emphasis on technocracy über alles, the devaluing (or just not even a consideration) of the importance and power of labor, a general rightward bent to the prevailing politics of societies, the overwhelming white-maleness of characters, even today, are all echoing consequences of the Speculative Whiteness. Admittedly, again, to dive into the vast pool of science fiction and try and disentangle even one of these particular fruits would make the book many times its size, and perhaps Carroll did not want to handwave in that particular direction without going into a deep dive. But even as he says that his book is a historical study, I think that not talking about this is precisely part of the problem. I spoke earlier of the soil of science fiction leading to alt-right science fiction blooming, but really, the soil itself has a taint in it. It takes effort for writers to try and detoxify their own work as best they can.¹

That said, and returning to a more positive bent, this is a slim, powerful, and sometimes rather damning look at science fiction and the poisonous and destructive politics of the alt-right. I’ve been aware of these issues for a long time, in a sometimes direct fashion (cf. my own small speaking role in the Sad and Rabid Puppies drama) and an indirect fashion (cf. my engagement and reengagement with Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, Anderson, et cetera, as well as reading the aforementioned book by Nevala-Lee). This academic work puts it all together, and then some, and presents it with the receipts, as it were.

This is an important book (and I don’t use that phrase lightly). Is it going on my Hugo nomination ballot this year for Best Related Work? Unquestionably yes. And even if you aren't the Hugo-nominating type, if you are at all interested in the field of science fiction and want to experience a more critical analysis of how it has proven to be a fertile soil for the alt-right and their fascist dreams, I strongly recommend Carroll's work.

Reference: Carroll, Jordan. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right [University of Minnesota Press, 2024].

¹ To give one example: take a look at the Expanse novels by James S. A. Corey... but then look at the TV adaptation, which took visible pains to address some of the problems of the novels. In many ways, it is superior to the source material for the changes and detoxification that it has done. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the books? Yes. But it takes a lot of capital (in all senses) to not only recognize the problem, but even try to address it.

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

Review: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

What if the President of the USA acted more level-headed than the current one?

Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel Night of Camp David has a particular distinction: one of the few novels I’ve ever seen that does not have its title on its cover. The novel is a reissue; Knebel was a novelist of some repute in the ’60s, as well as a famous journalist and liberal firebrand. The reason I’m taking the time to discuss this book, as well as the reason the book was reissued to begin with, can be seen on the cover: “What if the President of the USA went stark raving mad?” Made frustratingly, infuriatingly, and frankly depressingly relevant in the light of the current administration (it was reissued initially during the first Trump term), it has been brought back by Penguin Random House to make more money off of our national dysfunction.

Knebel’s novel has become “retroactive alternate history,” i.e. fiction that was, at the time it was written, a speculation of future events, but has now been surpassed by the inevitable march of time. This type of fiction is often of interest to those of us who are fans of alternate history; it provides insight into just how the past could have changed, if only from the vantage point of people in said past. There have been online works speculating about the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example (I wrote one in high school, and it won an online award). The end result is a sort of genre shift over the course of the work’s existence, one that was probably foreseeable by the author, who wrote a lot of political fiction (by that point, works akin to proto-Tom Clancy had already been written, such as George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands). As such, they have more in common, to the contemporary reader, with modern speculative work.

This novel stars a senator from Iowa with political aspirations who is asked away from the busy hubbub of national politics in Washington to speak with the President late at night at Camp David (the presidential retreat in rural Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Washington) to talk about the upcoming national election. The President asks the Senator if the latter wants to be his running mate, as his current Vice President is under the cloud of scandal. During this meeting, the President voiced his support for a law legalizing the warrantless recording and storage of all telephone calls in the country. That is the first of many erratic, authoritarian things that the President expresses over the course of the novel, leading the senator to look to see if something is amiss.

The 21st-century reader will note that we already have a system of warrantless collection of information that dwarfs anything beyond a simple pile of telephone call transcripts; if anything, this being the sign of looming insanity comes off as quaint, its proponent as rather tame next to the many horrible real-life cases that would follow, and the book's author as somewhat naive. This is one of a number of things that show the limits of Knebel’s imagination: he is that sort of white liberal writer who believed that ‘it’ could not happen here, in America, land of the free and home of the brave. He had an implicit faith in the American people that I don’t think has ever been warranted.

The novel works well as a depiction of the backrooms of high-level Washington politics, and it’s clear that Knebel knew his facts. He’s acutely aware of the wide variety of strange personalities that populate that world, from lawyers to activists, and how they grease the wheels of politics. Here, Knebel does not come off as so naive, as he shows you how even the most virtuous-seeming people in politics have skeletons in their closet (including the bright young senator around whom the narrative revolves). It does, though, show its age in how most of the politicians and indeed people on the Hill are white men, although there are women outside of formal positions who are nevertheless quite influential to the proceedings. There’s also a paucity of nonwhite characters. Knebel does have enough foresight to have a Black man as a major figure in Congress, but he seems to be the only one. Given that this was written in the ’60s, I’m not really sure we could have expected any better, but it’s noticeable.

Knebel is very good at pacing, and the book’s plot ticks along like a metronome. He was an accomplished writer of political thrillers and it shows here. There’s an economy to how this book uses its scenes, and not a single of them feels wasted, even ones that clearly diverge from the main plot. A drive around the country to find evidence feels earned, as does a vacation jaunt to the Bahamas for the senator. There’s an adept combination of different plotlines in the Bahamas, so that an absence never feels like an absence, but rather a suspension of the presence in the main plot that lets you look back at the significance of what has occurred up to that point. Many lesser authors could have made such a detour feel superfluous, but Knebel knew how not to.

Night of Camp David is both a perfectly enjoyable political thriller and a cautionary tale about speculating on the future. Like so many works that came before it, and not a few that came after, the passage of time has only laid bare a certain lack of imagination, less so of the author and more so of the age in which they worked. Knebel’s great weakness was assuming that the ‘normalcy’ of mid-century America would last forever, or indeed that it was ever really a thing to begin with. I absolutely see why the folks at Penguin Random House chose to reissue this novel so recently, but if anything, it serves to emphasize the sheer madness of the current administration, if not in actual mental state, certainly in its outlandishness. We’re living through times that our progeny will write lurid historical novels about, unfortunately, and an actual novel does as good a job as any to lay that truth bare.

Reference: Knebel, Fletcher. Night of Camp David [Penguin Random House, 1965].

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

Videogame Review: Civilization VII

The newest edition of the classic 4x franchise videogame arrives... but not without significant problems

One more turn.

That has been the promise and hope and goal of the Civilization games since the very first one in 1991. And Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time. As you can see, it’s right on the box for that first game. I played that first game, picking it up a couple of years after its release, and not terribly long before Colonization, and Civilization II.

I haven’t looked back since. I’ve played nearly every iteration of it ever since.¹ If I look at my Steam statistics, my #1 game played is Civilization VI. My #2 game is... Civilization V.

I’ve had a lot of fun playing the Civilization games. Cleaning up nuclear waste with Roman legions in Civ 3. Endless network games with my best friend Scott at his house. He had two computers, both set up with Civ 4. And when I would visit, we would play for hours. He always played Germany, always. I rotated civilizations (Rome was common but I liked to play a variety). He was frankly a better strategy player than I was, and beat me more often than I beat him. Endless games of Civ 5 and 6, solo and sometimes with PBEM games, also created emergent narratives. Fights against the perfidious Dutch. Launching nukes as Egypt to keep America from winning the Space Race. And on and on. And that doesn’t even get into the spinoffs.²

But with each of those Civs, the game changed, and now we can start to turn toward the real value of this piece in Civ 7. Sometimes the changes were radical and surprising. The punitive happiness mechanic in Civ 3 that was meant to try and reduce city spam, but often led to frustration. The stacks of doom mechanics in Civ 4. The big change in Civ 5 to a hex-based map and one unit per tile, plus the advent of religion. Civ 6 introduced districts, new civs, and late in its design, new game modes (zombies! and heroes! and barbarians that are there for more than being killed!). There have always been changes and updates, new mechanics, new ideas.

And so we come to Civ 7. To not bury the lede anymore, it feels like a *double* helping of changes, two games’ worth, in one leap from 6. Going from 6 to 7 feels like the change going from 4 to 6. Many in the Civ community have resented how much they have needed to relearn the game.

I don’t want to get too much in the weeds, but the major change that has caused the most social drama is that the it’s now three games in one. Instead of Building an Empire to Stand the Test of Time, it no longer does allows you to do that. You pick a leader... and then you pick a civilization in the Antiquity Age.³

All well and good, if a bit weird. But after a hundred turns or so of gameplay, the Age comes to an end. Your civilization did not stand the test of time, but the future has been prepared for. Based on the leader you picked, the civilization you picked, and other possible factors, you then transition into the next civilization for the next Age. The game doesn’t make this entirely clear, but there’s definitely a historical time gap involved here, and some of the choices, temporal-wise, are a little hinky. But you then proceed through the Exploration Age, which is a different sort of feel than the Antiquity Age... and then you do it all again, for the Modern Age. Same leader, new civilization. And this time, you’re going for a win condition.

So you wind up building a narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations,⁴ keeping the same leader throughout as sort of a “patron deity,” building on your accomplishments from the previous Age, until you’re in the final Age and try to achieve victory.

In my very first game, I picked Augustus as my leader. I started as Rome, of course, and went about my game. I got to the end of the Antiquity Age, surviving its crisis (basically toward the end of each of the first two Ages, a random game-wide problem hits all the players—plague, religious intolerance, barbarians, etc.). I decided to go for Spain in the Exploration Age. This showed off the new map mechanic: you can’t explore the entire world in the Antiquity Age, even if theoretically possible. The “Distant Lands” (New World) also appear in this age. I sent units over there, conquered, expanded... and for the Modern Age, I picked America. And went on to a victory. I’ve played several other full and partial games since, weaving this story of three civilizations and one Patron Deity. The game from which I’ve put these screenshots is me playing as Catherine the Great. I started with Greece, and then, because I had been so militaristic and had enough horses, transitioned to Mongolia in the Exploration Age.

I do like these beginning-of-Age screens. You can see the leader and the civization they are ruling. So yes, that’s Catherine the Great leading the Mongols (when I was playing Greece, you could see an Acropolis behind her).

So is it any good? Is it one more turn worthy?

Yes and no. There have been a lot of arguments about the release schedule and costs of the game and the DLCs planned. It does feel to me that 2K is trying to milk the cash cow here, and that, I think, hurt the development and release of the base game. The UI and appearance of the main game is severely lacking, as well as explanations of some key concepts. Just to give one example: some civilizations can build unique quarters, combinations of two buildings they can create. But the map doesn’t show where you’ve built one already—and if you don’t build it in the right place, you don’t get it. Whoops. Worse, the game doesn’t explain that if you place one of the buildings in a spot with another building, you’re stuck and can’t complete it. Just which things you do and don’t get when you transition Ages is not documented, either. Sure, some of this is a learning curve, but there’s no documentation in the game for it.

There are other things I notice the more I play. Like the maps: they’re built around your starting location, but that leads to “rectangular sameness” for a lot of maps, and some views lack things like navigable rivers. The story beats are good, especially the ones for individual civilizations, but there isn’t enough variety in them. And the game feels a bit incomplete without a couple of hallmark leaders. There is no Gandhi, of the “our words are backed with nuclear weapons,” for instance. Mongolia is here, but Genghis Khan specifically is not.

Which leads me to the Modern Age and the ending of the game. The game ends in the 1950s, with the victory conditions being project-based: build a thermonuclear device, or a world bank, or a world fair, or launch a manned flight. These win conditions are chronologically set much sooner than in previous Civs. You’re no longer trying to go to Alpha Centauri, and nope, no Giant Death Robots. And that’s sort of fine... except that at the end of the game, when you win, the game awards you leader points for the “Next Age”—one that’s not there at all. I’m frankly baffled by this. Was there going to be a fourth Age and they truncated the game? Is another Age coming in in a paid DLC? Is it just unpolished? Any which way, I’m annoyed.

The game does do things that a certain strain of people might consider “DEI,” and it has taken heat for it. Some don’t like the idea of Harriet Tubman as a leader. (She seems to get all the hate; you don’t need me to tell you why. And yes, in the screenshot above, I just declared war on her, because she's way ahead.) The choice of civilizations and leaders is interesting, but as noted above, we don’t get some classic ones that have been in the game for decades. We do get some interesting ones never seen before in a Civ: Aksum, Buganda, Chola, the Mississippians. The game acknowledges the continuity of some areas of the world by giving us a civilization in India and one in China for each of the three Ages. One time, I played as Confucius ruling the Han-Ming-Qing. That might be a pretty good route for a first-time player, as it’s easy to play without weird mechanics.

So should you buy this game? If you’re a super-fan of Civilization, you already did. If you’re a moderate fan of the franchise, I’m going to tell you no. Not yet. Not until the game is more polished, is on sale, and provides a better experience. If you’re new to the Civ franchise, I frankly think you should start with 6 to get to know what a Civ game is like. Sure, it’s 10 years old, and looks it, but it has a lot more to offer. I still play it.

But I’m not abandoning Civ 7. It’s still One More Turn for me. However, when I see gamer YouTubers say they’re “taking a break from Civ 7,” I get worried. And I wonder whether it will happen to me... and if too many people do, what will happen to the game? In this day and age, it’s way too easy to cut losses and not fix problems. I can hope that Civilization VII addresses its weaknesses. There have been many games that have taken a run at this genre. (Hello, Humankind, you had such potential. So sorry, Ara: History Untold, you were underbaked. Millennia... you just sucked badly.) Civilization IS the game-defining franchise for this genre. If they don’t improve and right the ship... there will be a big void in gaming if Civilization VII itself should not stand the test of time. I want it to succeed, but right now, it is most definitely not succeeding.

Nerd Coefficient: 6.5/10.

Reference: Civilization VII [Firaxis, 2K Games, 2025].

¹ The exception, since you might or might not know, is Civilization Revolution, which was never released for the PC. I didn’t have a Playstation 3 or other compatible device for it. So I do not have a perfect record of Civilization games.

² Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, possibly the best 4x game ever made, for example, had the rocket victory from Civ 2 lead you to colonizing Alpha Centauri, facing planetary threats with all-new leaders and ideologies. And there was a *storyline* behind the “good victory,” coming to terms with a planet that was far more than it seemed. And there were some ideas and mechanics there that have never really seen good use or at any use at all since and I wish they had. (You could raise or lower the land, for example. And underwater cities! And of course this idea of a narrative and factions that had some built-in conflicts from the get-go. One of the expansions had two parts of an alien race crash-land... who hated each other’s guts.)

³ You can also start in the Exploration or even Modern Age if you want.

⁴ This is really contentious, because a would-be Civ-killer, Humankind, had you changing civilizations 10 times over the course of the game. That game had a lot of problems, and detractors of that system hate it in Civ 7. But this all goes back to the “Rhyes and Fall” mod of Civ 3 that has influenced this idea that civilizations don’t have to, and shouldn’t, stand the test of time. It’s been around for over a decade, but now it’s really “canon.” And some people HATE that. But even so, said people never thought that I, as America, founding Boston in 2000 BC and going after Genghis Khan as America in 1000 BC, was historically accurate.

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

Book Review: Cheddar Luck Next Time by Beth Cato

A cozy mystery opening featuring an engaging protagonist, a murder...and lots of cheese. 

Bird Nichols has been through a lot lately. She’s been trying to get a custom cheese board business off of the ground. Her grandmother, not too long after her parents’ death, has disappeared and has been declared dead, with Bird as the heir to her California Central Coast house. Now, just as Bird settles in, a reprobate neighbor turns up dead, and the prime suspect is Grizz, an old friend to her grandmother, and a fatherly figure in Bird’s life. Now, Bird has to do what her grandma apparently did all of her life and get snoopy, or else Grizz could wind up brie-hind bars for a murder he didn’t commit. But who did, and why?

This is the story of Cheddar Luck Next Time, a murder mystery by Beth Cato.

Longtime readers of my reviews know that I commonly neither read nor review straight up murder mystery novels. It’s not my usual slice of cheese at all, although SFF murder mysteries ranging from Mary Robinette Kowal to Mur Lafferty to Laura Anne Gilman have attracted my interest and attention. I mainly “followed” Beth Cato out of genre and into mystery based on my enjoyment of her previous more straight-up genre work from the Clockwork Dagger series to most recently, her Chefs of The Five Gods duology.

The throughlines of the novel are pretty clear even for me, not fully immersed in all the nuanced protocols of straight up murder mysteries. Bird is an engaging young protagonist, single, trying to make a living with her passion. Trying to return to and live in the very small community she spent vacations in and living there, a community at turns both welcoming and suspicious of her. A real sense that her grandmother was, in the end, a meddler, and the community might see Bird falling into that role. And of course a murder mystery that, thanks to the friendship with someone she cares about as the prime suspect, pushing her inexorably toward trying to solve the mystery herself, even if that one client’s cheese board just will not wait. 

One thing I should note is that Bird is autistic (like her creator) and that autism is presented and represented in an excellent and engaging way. The author doesn’t let you forget it, in ways small and large, but its not the story of Bird, any more than what her hair color is. There is an author’s note at the end about autism and its importance in recognizing and diagnosing it, for herself, and urging readers who might have similar experiences to get themselves tested and diagnosed themselves. I commend this outreach on Cato's part.

I think the mystery is a fair one, with a small town, the list of suspect is pretty small, and the eventual murderer makes sense given the evidence and clues we are given throughout the novel. Again, my protocols are not so finely honed as readers of many mysteries, I can’t answer if someone who has read very many mysteries will finger the killer, or will care that they do, before they reveal themselves. My reaction when the killer was revealed was “that makes sense” rather than “wait, what?”.

There is also a cat, Bowser, who winds up inserting himself into Bird’s life, in the inimitable way that unexpected pets (especially cats) do. 

The writing quite supports what the author is going for in the book. Sure, there is a mysterious death, and some shady characters, and some peril for our heroine, but its meant to be a light and fun read and that’s the way the book comes across. I do think that this novel qualifies as “cozy murder mystery” based on my own reading. There is a murder and a mystery around it, but a lot of revolves around Bird’s regular life and her attempts to fit into her new surroundings. As mentioned above, the main character is autistic, and one of her mechanisms to interface better with the world is to talk to herself in a running commentary. This does allow us into her headspace and what she is thinking and a sense of her deduction of what really is going on. It makes it a comfortable, comforting read, neither a pulse pounding story nor a crackerjack intricate puzzle. This is a mystery story to relax with, and enjoy.

Foghorn, the fictional tiny town (more like a village) is the setting for our murder mystery, slipped into the Central Coast of California somewhere near San Simeon and Piedras Blancas. There are mentions of plenty of real places on the coast. There is a very strong sense of place, geography and physiography to Cato’s description of a place that she, as well as her protagonist, clearly have a strong connection to. Having Foghorn be a place that she’s not native, to, but visited as a child is an excellent choice to give her a tie to the tiny community and yet be something of an outsider as an adult. In any event, for me, the area reminded me of a vacation and trip from 30 years ago when I visited the region and it makes me wish to make a return visit to an underappreciated yet beautiful part of California.

The real star of this book is not the protagonist, or the murder mystery, or the setting, and it’s not even Bowser. The real star of this book is, in fact, cheese. The author is an expert and connoisseur of cheese (as much as she is of baking), and she pours that knowledge into Bird and her cheese boards. Every cheese that Bird enjoys throughout the book is a real cheese, and all of the pairings that Bird comes up with sounds real, authentic and delicious (did the author taste test all of these combinations? I would not be surprised in the least). In addition to Bird’s cheese business, there is a grilled cheese place in Foghorn called Quesoquick. Yes, the owner of the place, Dale, is cute, single and Bird and he hit it off but this is not a romance book. But its clear there is a could-be-more-down-the-road sort of vibe to their relationship. And, in addition to that, Dale and Quesoquick give even more chances for Cato to introduce cheese into the narrative.

Cheddar Luck Next Time is a light fun romp of a straight-up cozy mystery novel. The board of the novel has all the components for an easy snack of a read that is never over Leyden: an engaging main character, a quirky fictional very small town, a solidly plotted murder, a mild stab toward romance, and a heck of a lot of delicious cheese and cheese combinations. The novel’s components are all arranged by the author in an aesthetic and culinary pleasing way, delicious from the first to the last bite. Can a book be a mystery novel and yet teach you delicious ways to combine, pair and eat cheese? Yes it can, and does a Gouda job of it. Cheddar Luck Next Time is a light, quirky and fun mystery novel that shows off and ably demonstrates Cato’s love of the Central Coast region of California and yes, of course, delicious cheese and cheese preparations of a delicious and tantalizing variety.

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Highlights:

• Cheese, from the title to the last page. All kinds of real, hunger inducing cheese
• Light, frothy, and fun mystery. 
• Great sense of place 
• Did I mention Cheese?

Reference: Cato, Beth, Cheddar Luck Next Time, [Datura Books, 2025]

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

Book Review: The Artistry of Magic by Helen de Cruz

It takes a lot to know a person

One of the reasons why I’m so happy that Bluesky is a thing is that I get to discover the work of new writers. One such writer is Helen de Cruz, whose blog came up on my skyline some time ago back when that site was shiny and new and had invitations. I have followed their blog with great interest in the meantime; their writing is deeply, profoundly moral in a world that is intent on beating cynicism into the people at large (is that not what all authoritarianism is, on some level?). They have now released a debut fantasy novelette, after some short stories, The Artistry of Magic, in early February 2025.

The setting is the early modern Low Countries, in a fictional city; the city and its environs feel very much like fantasy cities, but there is mention of real countries and real events such as the French Revolution, so there is a dialogue with the real Enlightenment era that is threaded through this work. There are two major characters, Maarten and Johanna, one a wandering homeless magician, the other a librarian, who each reflect certain anxieties of that time, of the mystical versus the rational (inflected through fantasy, as Johanna very much engages with magic as if it were a science). The setting, a mishmash of the fantastic and the real, gives the whole thing an almost dreamlike quality, the feeling, almost, of a fairy tale. There is nothing in this story that is too dark for such stories (at least in their modern form), and it has that fictionalized early modern period that many such stories have. You can believe that something like this was happening off in some obscure Ruritania in some corner of Europe as the mob stormed the Bastille and the continent marched off to the largest war in its history up until that point. But, fittingly, the great upheavals are relegated elsewhere to provide mood, rather than to disrupt what is clearly a very personal, intimate story.

As the title of the novella signals, this is a love story between the two, star-crossed and from wildly disparate backgrounds, one a professional (and the professional is a woman here, rare for the time period and very welcome to the reader because of it). There is a very pleasant back and forth between them, a mutual intellectual curiosity that becomes a very strong personal curiosity, as the subject matter becomes intimately entangled with the people who deliver the knowledge to begin with. Much of this book is about knowledge, intellectual and interpersonal, and how those two can share their knowledge, and in the process share themselves. There is something very potent here about knowledge, about how it is always contextual, about how a story told is always inflected through the storyteller. Knowledge is a human thing, says de Cruz, and that is a message worth bringing into the foreground. Cold rationality never exists without the fiery passions of the human beings that profess to wield it.

There is a strong undercurrent here of class, and how different classes use and interpret knowledge. Johanna, being an academic in the course of her studies, deals with knowledge as a very formalized thing, what the Greeks once called ‘techne.’ Maarten, on the other hand, is worldly wise in a way that Johanna simply never had to be by virtue of being homeless. His magic is folk magic of a sort, what the Greeks called ‘metis,’ the sort of knowledge gained through experiencing a great many similar but not identical experiences, often manifesting as a sort of ‘gut’ knowledge that can be hard to put into words (I learned this framework in James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like A State and it has made a lot of things make sense). But more importantly, his life experience is one of being hated by society at large, of being an outcast, an opprobrium, a vagrant. One could describe Johanna as ‘middle class,’ in a sort of professional sense, and David Graeber once defined the middle class as the class of workers who believe that the apparatus of the state exists to serve them. The lower class, says Graeber, is the one that is aware that the state hates them and views them as a nuisance at best. Maarten is the sort of person for whom every day is one spent in a hostile environment (not to say that Johanna doesn’t have her travails, but they are of a distinctly different nature), while Johanna’s whole career is predicated on the fundamental legitimacy of the academic system and by virtue the state and early modern capitalism. Their love is forbidden on a social level; the classes are simply not supposed to mix, to keep the engine of exploitation running smoothly, but human connection throws a wrench in that system, as it so often does.

The Artistry of Love is a short, efficient book. It is a book that does not pad itself, and it can be read in a single sitting, as I did. De Cruz succeeds in packing a lot of insight, a lot of character work, and a lot of heart into such a small package. To love something is to know it intimately; to love someone is to know them, extremely intimately. Metis and techne are never isolated from one another, but dance together in quadrilles and tangos and lindy hops. Our emotions act on our intellect and our intellect acts on our emotions; nobody is entirely a cold computer, nor is anyone entirely a beast of pure feeling. The Artistry of Love is a cry to remember that linkage in a world that wants knowledge to merely be a tool to pass standardized tests and make CEOs even richer day by day. Knowledge is beautiful, this book says, and we would do well to remember that. De Cruz takes all of those threads and weaves them into a colorful whole. One could even call it artistic.

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Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Helen de Cruz, The Artistry of Magic, [Pink Hydra Press, 2025]

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Book 3, Assassin's Quest

Fitz finally takes action, but even being dead can't release him from Farseer expectations

Cover illustration by John Howe

 

 

 

 

And so we come to the end of the first trilogy in Realm of the Elderlings, and such a satisfying ending it is, too! Fitz is no longer the whiny, angsty, passive, helpless teenager that made Royal Assassin a bit of a slog. Don’t get me wrong -- he is still pretty whiny and angsty, but he’s also angry, and because anger begets action, he is no longer passive.

Evil Prince Regal and his court believe that Fitz is dead: after being beaten and tortured, Fitz is found dead in his cell (well, only mostly dead, with his mind safely tucked away in his wolf-companion Nighteyes), pronounced posthumously guilty on all charges, and his life in the Six Duchies is effectively over.

Even Burrich, who helps reintegrate Fitz’s mind with his body, ends up believing him dead, for slightly contrived reasons involving a scuffle resulting in a dead body wearing Fitz’s clothes. At this point, Fitz has no one. He has nothing. It’s a rough ride, to be sure, but it’s freeing, and what it frees him up to do is move the plot forward. And first on his to-do list is to kill Prince Regal. And that’s so satisfying! He’s a trained assassin. He has a target. He has a motive for succeeding. And his target doesn’t even suspect he’s still alive. These are the plot components that make a book just sing.

Since Prince Regal has moved house Tradesford, Fitz must leave the coast and travel inland as well to find him. And in this way we get to see more of the Six Duchies than we had in the previous books. We also get to see Fitz finally deploy some of his skills that he learned as an assassin. For a time he travels with a wandering minstrel, a blind harper named Josh accompanied by two his daughter and his niece, Honey and Piper. The family travel from town to town, singing for their supper, and doing, on the whole, reasonably well for themselves. Fitz assumes a fake identity, which he carries off convincingly enough, and with his memory trained by Chade’s assassin-teaching, he learns their songs quickly. Before long, Honey is propositioning Fitz in the night, and Josh asks him to join them permanently. And it’s a good offer: Fitz is good at fighting off Forged people, who make the roads unsafe; he’ll learn a trade that he could be good at; and Honey is super, super into him. He could find a place with these people; he could make a new life for himself. But he’s still mooning over Molly, his beloved (not to mention spying on her through Skill dreams in a way that feels awfully stalkerish, given the intimate moments he observes); and he’s still on his quest to kill Regal, and after that he’s going to need to find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.

During his journey to Tradesford, Fitz also encounters a community of other people with the Wit. It’s a brief sequence, but it’s a valuable deepening of this second type of magic system, which we haven’t learned much about beyond Fitz’s intuitive fumblings, and Burrich’s foreboding warnings. In this community, we see the other side of it: the cultural knowledge, the traditions, the understandings about how to bond with animals properly. Burrich was right, we learn, to try to prevent Fitz from bonding with those puppies as a child. Not because the bonding is wrong in itself, but because it is akin to marriage: children are too young for it. It is obscene and wrong to bond as a child, with a baby animal. Even now, adult Fitz is seen as awfully young to have bonded with Nighteyes. The Witted community offer Fitz a home, so he can learn their ways, to learn how to live well as a Witted, bonded man. But, as with Josh’s offer, he cannot accept. He must kill Regal, and then find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.

So here, again, we return to the theme of missed opportunities, of chances at happiness that Fitz might have had, if only he weren’t stuck into this miserable network of responsibilities and obligations that come with being a royal bastard. They've been present throughout the whole series. In the first book, Assassin’s Apprentice, Fitz impressed the court scribe, who offered him an apprenticeship, to become a scribe himself. But Fitz could not take it, because he was pledged to Shrewd, and because the royal family would never let a bastard, a possible claimant to the throne, out of their control. In the second book, Royal Assassin, Fitz wanted nothing more than to marry Molly and settle down with her; but that was even more of a non-starter than apprenticing to a scribe. If there’s one thing that a royal family wants to control more than a bastard, it’s the bastard’s reproductive options. Now, finally, Fitz has escaped all those official constraints on his autonomy by being officially dead, but he still can’t get away from the Farseers. He’s vowed vengeance against Regal, and he’s vowed loyalty to Verity; and those vows constrain him internally as much as any formal orders from the royal family. It’s dreadfully bleak, but also thematically coherent – and because these internal constraints force Fitz into action, rather than compelling inaction, it makes for a much more interesting story.

Naturally, Fitz’s attempt to assassinate Regal goes horribly wrong. In an attempt to reach Verity through a telepathic Skill link, he betrays himself to Will, Regal’s chief magician, and suddenly all the protection of being thought dead is gone. Will lays an obvious trap, and for all that Fitz is more active than in the previous book, he’s not any smarter, so he doesn’t identify the obvious trap as an obvious trap. He gets away, but at this point, even if he were going to pursue any offers of a new life, it’s now no longer possible, because Regal and Will know he’s alive. They promptly make use of their resources, and alert the countryside to a dangerous criminal armed with unnatural Wit, and make it clear that they will never stop hunting Fitz. And, because Hobb can never let any of her characters catch a break for long, evading capture is made even more complicated, because in the kerfuffle, Verity lays a Skill-reinforced command on Fitz: Come to me.

So after a brief stretch in which Fitz’s actions reflected only his internalization of the Farseer network of obligations, he is once again tied up with externally enforced pressures. He must kill Regal, or else Regal will kill him; but he can’t focus on that, because the Skill-based summons is impossible to resist. So he must go to Verity, while Regal’s men dogs his heels.

The bit after Fitz leaves Regal behind and goes into the mountains, seeking Verity – harassed the whole time by Regal’s pursuit, naturally–is tremendous fun. Not for Fitz, to be sure, but for me to read about. It’s got something for everyone. My own favorite sequence is when Fitz is captured by a group of Regal’s men, and – again drawing on his training – he puts poison in all their food, and watches them die slow, agonizing deaths over the course of the next day. They realize what’s happening too late to kill him in retribution, but not too late to beg him for their lives. But Fitz is an assassin, not a doctor, and has no antidote to offer them. I don’t know why I love this sequence, but I do. Something about the triumph of Fitz's competence over Hobb's authorial malice, perhaps. For once Hobb’s ability to give everyone a bad time is directed elsewhere than at Fitz.

But perhaps your sentiments are softer. Do you like whump? In another sequence, Fitz gets shot by an arrow while fleeing Regal’s men. Weakened, dying, he collapses at the feet of a shadowy figure, who lifts him in his arms and bears him to safety – only to be revealed as the Fool. When each recognizes the other, it’s tender and intense. ‘Gods, what have they done to you,’ the Fool says, ‘to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not know you, even though I carried you in my arms?’ Then he caresses Fitz’s scarred and broken nose, and says, ‘When I recall how beautiful you were,’ and drops a tear on his face. Which, ok, yes, rude, but also it’s great stuff, and really drives home how the Fool and Fitz are grown now, not children. Indeed, that’s one of the first things Fitz notices about the Fool: that his body and face are no longer a child’s. Now, at last, their intimate, sort-of-but-not-really-but-definitely-kind-of homoerotic energy has room to flourish.

But also – for all that the Fool is the only real friend Fitz has (besides Nighteyes) – it’s hard to miss that the Fool also sees Fitz as a cog in a machine. His perspective, in a way, is really not all that different from how the Farseers saw him. The Fool was born as the White Prophet, a vague status (at this point in the saga), originating in the Fool’s vague homeland, somewhere far away south. And as the White Prophet, he has always known Fitz as the Catalyst, whose role is to help forestall the myriad catastrophic futures that await the Six Duchies (and THE ENTIRE WORLD BEYOND). They might be friends – closer than friends – but the Fool’s impassioned speech about how his life had lost meaning when he learned of the death of Fitz, the Catalyst, has a distinct whiff of, ‘You died, and I was out of a job.’

There is so much more I could talk about. There's grumpy old Kettle, who knows a lot more about the Skill than you would expect; there's Molly's fantastic moment where she fends off Regal's men who have come to take her baby (begat by Fitz, and hence one of the Farseer line) by telling them that her bee hives are populated by Witted bees, who are murderous and deadly and angry and will sting them to death. I could discuss the slightly awkward but – I believe – well-meaning for 1998 attempt to highlight the Fool’s gender fluid nature, by introducing a character who insists that the Fool is a woman and uses ‘she’ pronouns for him. He’s very gracious about it – although I get the sense that that’s largely because he knows that it annoys Fitz and he’s a bit of a chaos goblin – but it still feels clunky. I could discuss the extremely uncomfortable sequence in which right at the end, Verity borrows Fitz’s body to make a baby with Kettricken, using the Skill to make Fitz appear like him, Verity (since Verity himself is not at this point up to the act). Whatever kind of consent is happening between Kettricken and Verity, it’s not happening between Kettricken and Fitz’s body – because Kettricken doesn’t know it’s Fitz’s body, and Fitz isn’t in his body during the event. It’s not great – but then Hobb doesn’t like making things easy for anyone, not even the readers.

But I don't have room for all that. There's just so much in this book, that's all so good, and rich, and engrossing. The revelation of who the Elderlings were, and what must be done to waken the dragons and save the Six Duchies, is beautiful and magical and achingly sad. Regal gets what’s coming to him, in a tiny little payoff of a very brief conversation from hundreds of pages earlier, which is satisfying as hell. And Fitz – well, he doesn’t get a happy ending. Molly is lost to him forever, because before he gets back she has moved on and settled down and found happiness for herself. But Fitz at least gets a kind of peace, released (for now) from the strictures of being a Farseer, and the obligations of being a Catalyst. Not forever. He’ll be back. But this portion of his story is done, and next month we will move on to The Liveship Traders. It is my absolute favourite of Hobb’s series, and I can’t wait to share it with you as spring unfolds.

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References:

Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Quest. [Harper Collins, 1998].

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

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

What if your cold war was six people each with superpowers equivalent to a nuclear arsenal? And they're each of them a total mess of a person.

In his new graphic novel series, Kieron Gillen is once again interested in the ethics and morals of those with powers beyond the mortal. Unlike his previous explorations in that regard (The Wicked + the Divine, Die), he has saved us all the time in figuring that out by slapping it right on the first page of this bad boy, explicitly, in an ethical debate between two superpowered characters about the fate of the world, and their own responsibilities to it, the people in it and to each other.

"Of course, the ethical thing to do would be to take over the world" - so goes the first piece of dialogue in the story. 

But, lest we worry this is going to be all mouth and no trousers, the rest of the volume - the first trade in what feels like will gear up to be a substantial series - serves not so much to back up the content of that debate but instead to problematise it, and no more so than if you're already familiar with Gillen's work. There are allusions in here particularly to The Wicked + the Divine that are, quite swiftly, undermined instead of built upon, or at least made more complex. This is, quite clearly, not going to be a series for easy answers or simple debates.

The world of The Power Fantasy is one of superheroes - people with extraordinary powers over minds, gravity, the usual set of strangenesses you get in any work of the genre. They can fly, fight, control, create. They began to appear in the mid-twentieth century, and the strongest of them, the Atomics, liken their abilities to the force of the bomb, and with good reason, as the legacy of their existence on the planet is shown to us mid-way through the volume, written large on the landscape in brutal form. They are, then, a threat, to the world and to each other. There are allusions to threads of X-Men too, of a United States wanting to control and harm those within its bounds with these powers, alarmed by the threat of external actors. All of this is incredibly familiar. Except... there are twists, here and there. There's an irreverence, or at least humanisation, of the powered characters that felt unusual even from the first page. They are not their powers, sensationalised by fantastical names (at least, not those first two we meet). They are two people, walking on a city street, having a conversation, wearing normal clothes, with normal names. When more do show up as larger-than-life personalities with nicknames and cults teams families associates, they are not united as a common force with a specified aim, they're not fighting crime or taking over the world. They are simply... there. Existing, with their power, and as a threat simply for that existence. Is that a subtle take? Not at all, but sometimes the good ones go in with a machete rather than a scalpel.

We do, eventually, spend some time with the family, as they are known, and the suspense of getting there is worth it, because there's already a sense that something is wrong with the way these people all fit together, and meeting them only serves to confirm that suspicion - Heavy, the man who seems to be leading at least some of the powered individuals on a floating island home, is definitely construable as a cult leader, an idea he voices himself, letting it play out firmly in the text as well as the implications. Heavy is impulsive, emotional, very nearly destructively, genocidally violent at that first meeting with him, forestalled only by Etienne, one of those two first characters shown in a moral argument. Etienne, who stresses himself as an ethical man. But the act he does to appease Heavy - an ethical act, as he says to himself and to others - is the point upon which this first volume turns.

Heavy would likely have levelled a whole US state in his anger, killing millions. Etienne, specifically asking Heavy what he wants to prevent that violence and carrying it out, kills hundreds. Anyone order a trolley problem lads? We've got a big one here to unload. But the ethics of it aren't so much the interesting part of how this is played out in the story. Instead, what I found lingering with me was the perceptional aspects - how is Heavy coming out of this being perceived as sympathetic after that interaction, but Etienne is the threat? Why is a surgical murder of a smaller number more troubling, more evil-feeling than that threatened destructive rage? Trolley problems have been done and done and done, but how people around them respond to the decision makers... well, at least that I've seen less of. If Gillen is tackling the price of power, he's far more interested here in other costs, and willing to tread more interesting paths than great power and great responsibility.

This is only more highlighted when we meet someone who, at first, seems well set up to be the villain of the piece. Magus, with his green-blue colour palette and masked face, is instantly evocative of Wōden from The Wicked + the Divine, who was about as uncomplicatedly villainous as that series got. Like Wōden, Magus deals in tech, and appears, at least at first, to be extremely self-serving. He, too, had something of a cult (and again, that nature is labelled straight on in the text, cluing us straight away that Gillen is messing us around somehow). But his cult, in 1978, is anti-fascist, anti-police anarchists.

How he goes from this to tech-rich shithead... there are glimpses, but clearly more is to be revealed. So the allusions back to Wōden are both right and wrong - right about what we have on the page, but wrong about the depth, and the journey.

I could go on, because there are more examples, but none of the sides in this, even as a first volume are cleanly drawn, and no one is free from sin. There are sins of action and inaction, sins of morality and ethics, sins of accident and decision. This is clearly a world in which the Atomics have had long enough to muddy all the boundaries, to have seen some shit, fought some bad guys and be living in their own legacies. And I say "sin" with deliberate choice, because there are some tantalising hints of verrrrrry interesting worldbuilding that I hope to see more of in future volumes, and which shift things away from a lot of existing mutant or other pseudo-scientific superpower scenarios. As a first trade, it is to be expected that much will be hints without resolution. But there's enough substance alongside them, and the substance lies firmly in all that undermining, that outward referencing and then complicating, that's very clearly setting out a stall for some interesting thoughts on how someone can exist in a world with that kind of phenomenal power. The answer, I suspect, will be some flavour of "with deepest, unresolvable regret", amongst other things.

Gillen is at his best, in my opinion of his past work, when he's deeply in his references, pulling on multiple threads in other works and forcing the reader to confront something about them that they may not have considered before, quite possibly something with uncomfortable implications. Volume 1 of Die did precisely that with its Tolkienian allusions, and the series went on to do it for D&D with bells on. Once and Future was all over it for the Arthuriana mythos. There's a perfect line between obvious affection for sources and clarity of thought and incisive critique that I find intensely appealing, and makes me come back for more of his work again and again, and I have absolutely no doubt that The Power Fantasy will be doing that, if anything, harder than ever. This first volume has already taken a thesis of problematising the found family, and that alone is selling it to me as an interesting line to take.

But it's not all Gillen. Caspar Wijngaard's art also has a strong part to play in why this story is beginning so effectively. There's a distinct colour palette overhanging the whole story - the majority of it is slightly sepia-ed pinks, peaches, and dusty purple, giving it an aged vibe, even for the segments not told in the past with respect to the narrative. When you have a setting that is distancing superheroes from a sciencey underpinning, pulling it away from the crisp, blue-toned futurism of some of the contemporary superhero comics feels like a pointed decision. Likewise, several sections occur at different times and places, and the art plays around beautifully to reflect that - from the black and white, splotchy, made-in-someone's-garage feel of the 70s anarchists sections, to the crisply-green modern hub of Magus, to the red-toned hellscape of a past atrocity, this is art that states its case very clearly for the mood of each scene, and isn't afraid to switch it up when needed. Colour also helps tell the story panel to panel - when characters are pulled into telepathic conversations, the colours pale along with character eyes, distancing the reader from the physical body. As with some of the storytelling - it's not subtle and not trying to be, but it is effective and it is interesting.

One can never be certain with graphic novels from the first trade how things will go in the long run - too many get lost in the weeds of middle issues - but The Power Fantasy has a great deal of the promise one wants from a starting point, setting up interesting themes, worldbuilding and characters, and especially character dynamics, that I am keen to see play out into something special.

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The Math

Highlights: 

• Nuanced and unusual approach to superheroism
• Who cares about the trolley problem, how does everyone feel about the trolley problem?
• None of you is free from sin

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers, [Image, 2025].

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