Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: The History of the World Begins in Ice by Kate Elliott

A diverse set of stories and essays set in Kate Elliott’s world of Cold Magic (Spiritwalker)

The Spiritwalker/Cold Magic books by Kate Elliott are self-described as taking place in a post-Roman Afro-Celtic icepunk regency fantasy setting. That’s a lot of adjectives and nouns, but the complexity of this Earth, that never was but resonates with our own, is a rich invention that, beyond the bounds of the three novels, begs for more development, involvement and exploration.

The History of the World Begins In Ice: Stories and Essays from the World of Cold Magic is here just for that. We get a curtain pulled away to watch the author develop and create a setting from more angles and facets than the novels you “see on the screen.” A lot of worldbuilding for novels, especially in SFF, is below the waterline of the iceberg, never to be seen. Given the wide range of writing that Elliott had already done in developing this setting, bringing it all together seemed like a no-brainer. And given that the Spiritwalker series is (unusually for Elliott) a first-person point-of-view series, having stories from other perspectives is a way to get some of the wider-screen experience you get in many of her other works, in bite-sized formats. And the essays give a look underneath that waterline.

So what’s here?

The three quarters of the book are fictional pieces arranged in chronological order, starting decades before the events of the novels, up to a story about the youngest daughter of Andevai and Cat, thirteen years after the series ends. We get a variety of points of view, characters, themes, and styles, ranging from the origin story of Kemal, far to the east, to the epic poem of the Beatriceid, to a story about a little girl who is convinced what she wants to be when she grows up... but more importantly, wants to find her stuffed animal. The stories are relatively light, fresh, and delightful. I had read several of these before, and it’s good to have them in one place. Many were unavailable for years until this volume came along.

For me, the last quarter is where this book really sings and comes to light. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beatriceid, and The Secret Journal, and much else in the fictional section. But it is when Kate starts talking worldbuilding that I sit up and *listen*. We get essays on why Kate wrote this book, the thinking process behind the magic system, the geography (Doggerland represent!), the development of the Antilles creole, character development studies, maps, and more. You can guess how much detail and research goes into a thick Kate Elliott book and series; here is where she shows her work and the way it’s done. The true extent of the “iceberg” is revealed. I found the essays on the creole language particularly fascinating; it’s the deepest dive I’ve seen on the subject short of talking with a full-on linguist.

One last thing to note is that the book is well illustrated throughout. Some of these stories and works, such as The Secret Journal of Beatrice Hassi Barahal¹, already had copious artwork, but others are newly commissioned for this edition. Like the artwork for The Secret Journal, the addition of art for this work really completes the book, and it would not be nearly as compelling without it. Through the history of the Spiritwalker series, the art really has gone hand in hand with the writing, and I am pleased that tradition continues here. The galley review copy proudly lists the artists’ names on the cover. Part of the reason to get this book in print is to get the artwork (which really is wasted on a digital screen).

The last and important thing to ask about this book is: Who is it for? If you are a fan and reader of Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker series, this review just confirms known facts, and you may have purchased this already. (If not, get thee to a bookstore or library.) If you are a reader of hers but haven’t read the Spiritwalker books and have been curious about them, you might like this collection if for no other reason than its “back half.” The process of Elliott’s worldbuilding and the facets of it may well be in your interest... and this collection in general might then spur you to pick up Cold Magic.

But what if you haven’t read any Kate Elliott? Is this volume for you? This is where I feel uncomfortable and conflicted. I want to say yes, because I do want her work widely read and loved as I love it. But the stories are atypical of her longer SFF works (when she’s written things like even novellas, it felt like an ill-suited fit for her). She’s widescreen, big screen all the way. So while you get tastes of the world she has built in Cold Magic, the stories do resonate better if you have some “buy-in” to that world, so reading the origin story of Kemal, or the Beatriceid, or the funny misadventures of Rory in To Be a Man may just not land quite as much without that background.

So I’m going to have to reluctant come down on the answer of *mostly* no. If you’ve never read any of the Spiritwalker books, or any Kate Elliott, this is not the place to start with it. Unless, maybe if you are a fantasy writer, or aspire to be, and want to see how a master writes an intensely built and created world. For those people, the last portion of the book may be an invaluable guide.

For those curious, Kate has a blog post on where to start with her work, written in a unique format.

Highlights:

• Great art that compliments the writing
• Fascinating worldbuilding essays
• Welcome return overall to the Spiritwalker 'verse

Reference: Elliott, Kate. The History of the World Begins in Ice: Stories and Essays from the World of Cold Magic [Fairwood Press, 2024].

¹ A formatting criticism that really doesn’t fit elsewhere: I am glad that I had read The Secret Journal before. As it so happens, the electronic review copy I had was not formatted well, and treated this section of the book like a PDF, which made it impractical and unpleasant to read on my Kindle. I skimmed through a physical galley I had to make sure I had not forgotten details of the story. I hope the final electronic copy does not suffer the same issues.

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

What the Hell, Star Trek?

There was never going to be a good way to tell a story where Section 31 are the heroes, but it didn't need to reach this abysmal degree of atrociousness

For all the excellent ideas to come out of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it had some… less excellent ones. The Klingon episodes were tedious, the Ferengi episodes were cringeworthy, and the Trill episodes only had one topic to be about. The series had a bizarre obsession with fetishizing manual agriculture, an incongruous skepticism of the capabilities of galactic medicine, and a willful inability to trust the Federation's sincerity. Deep Space Nine turned the Federation's enlightened optimism into a veneer that concealed ruthless pragmatism, effectively dragging Earth into the same muddy playing field of Romulus or Cardassia. Although I'm typically in favor of questioning claims to exceptionalism, the version of Earth presented there was hardly one that would have founded something like the Federation. And Deep Space Nine's fundamentally cynical view of humans found concrete form in the worst creation of the series: the clandestine operations agency of the Federation government known as Section 31.

The rationale for introducing Section 31 to the Star Trek setting was that, if future Earth is able to thrive as a peaceful, prosperous utopia, it's only because it has spies and assassins scattered everywhere, discreetly doing the thankless work of keeping humans safe. In other words, series showrunner Ira Steven Behr either refused or failed to imagine a perfectly happy society that was capable of sustaining itself without doing a bit of evil under the table. It has often been said, by the most radically traditionalist fans, that Deep Space Nine contradicted the whole philosophy of Star Trek. They're only partially right. Such defiance of canonical ethos didn't happen because the series eschewed the Planet of the Week format, or because it gave a voice to protagonists outside of Federation authority, or because it refrained from giving every problem a simple, high-tech solution. Deep Space Nine broke away from the core assumptions of Star Trek because its humans aren't the focal point of view by default, and they don't provide the show's moral center. These humans play dirty. Sometimes they're downright nasty. Winning the Dominion War via biological weapon plus attempted genocide left humans in a morally unstable position that subsequent shows haven't dared to acknowledge.

A few years later, in the revived Battlestar Galactica, captain William Adama said this wonderful line: "It's not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving." That is the test of moral fortitude that the humankind of Star Trek fails by having a Section 31. The very thing that made Star Trek stand out from other works of space opera was its trust in reasoned argument and the fundamental goodwill of every sapient being. This was a gust of fresh air in a science fiction ecosystem where conflicts tended to be resolved by who had the biggest pew-pew. Giving humans a Section 31 undermines the message of any episode that tries to present as reprehensible the cruelty and treachery of the Romulan Tal Shiar or the Cardassian Obsidian Order.

And none of these are the reasons why the new Star Trek: Section 31 movie is a horrendous mistake.

Again, Section 31 was always a bad idea, but that has nothing to do with why this movie doesn't work. The movie doesn't work because the dialogues are lazy, the characterizations are one-note, the pacing is erratic, the set design is boringly generic, the fight choreography is impossible to follow, the performances (save for the always exquisite Michelle Yeoh) are either dialed down to utterly forgettable or dialed up to utterly irritating, the villain's plan contradicts his own goals, the heroes' solution is to repeat the villain's plan, and the direction is too obviously desperate to add some energy to an insipid nothingburger by inserting gratuitous camera movements that can't disguise how mediocre the whole production is. Think of any of the thousand ingredients necessary for making a movie (casting, lighting, scriptwriting, editing, color grading), and every one of them fails catastrophically.

Section 31 starts with a prologue showing us former Empress Philippa Georgiou's backstory. We learn that the evil Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe elects its ruler via survival contest. We see young Philippa return to her home village, exhausted after countless rounds of brutal fighting, tasked now with severing her personal attachments, which she succeeds at by giving her family a painful, slow death by infodump. So she wins the throne, plus her closest competitor as a slave. I'm no expert on dictatorial practices, but I suspect that keeping in your palace the person who almost got the throne is tantamount to asking to be poisoned, stabbed, and defenestrated several times before breakfast. Add to this the fact that she and her runner-up were in love, and that she effortlessly went full tyrant on him the nanosecond she was declared Empress, and you have a fertile ground for drama that the rest of the movie proceeds to casually throw in the trash.

The actual thing that has the temerity of passing for a plot in Section 31 is the quest to intercept a superweapon that someone wants to sell to someone. We're told that the eponymous secret agency is given this mission because the sale is going to happen outside Federation territory (it just so happens to be former Empress Georgiou's bar/disco/love hotel, because when an unrepentant despotic genocidal cannibal from another universe is set loose in ours, the thing she chooses to do with her life is create jobs). After extended infodumps that matter not one bit, because they're about describing a hypothetical convoluted heist plan that has just been frustrated, the aforementioned superweapon, which turns out to be a conveniently portable item designed to look and spin like the illegitimate child of a d20 and a Hellraiser puzzle box, is tossed around like a hot potato between Georgiou and a mysterious new enemy until it's time for the next infodump.

Also, time for a reveal: the superweapon was built in the Mirror Universe, by orders from Geourgiou herself. She explains that it's capable of killing an entire quadrant of the galaxy, and somehow it never occurs to the team of expertly trained defenders of the Federation that they might want to alert the galaxy about the faction that intended to buy such an item. Instead, the entire second act is derailed by what should have been minor subplots: rooting out a traitor in the team, getting clues from a body camera, repairing a damaged ship—these tasks consume too much precious runtime, detracting from the tension that the movie should want to maintain about, you know, stopping a superweapon that can kill a whole quadrant of the galaxy.

Not that the villain intends to do anything remotely comprehensible with the weapon. To end quadrillions of lives as preparation for a campaign of conquest is to inflict scorched earth on yourself. This plan makes so little sense that it's perversely fitting that the heroes fly into battle on a garbage transport ship and improvise, as their only available attack, a load of garbage timed to explode.

That's right: the resolution of this movie comes via literal dumpster fire.

The aesthetic, the tone and the metaphors of this movie seem calculated to maximize the viewers' angry revulsion. The story is a textbook MacGuffin chase like every other MacGuffin chase you've watched. The main characters don't have personalities but post-it notes: the movie stars Walking Tragic Past, Only Sensible One, Barely Repressed Chaotic Neutral, All Points Went To Armor Class, Galaxy's Most Punchable Face, and Blatant Eye Candy. In fact, let's talk for a minute about the Deltan in the room, because the very fact that they chose to have a Deltan in this movie illustrates the instrumental way its characters are treated. In Star Trek, Deltans are an alien species whose entire deal is being irresistibly hot. The franchise has never known what to do with the Deltans except point and ogle, which means they're not allowed to be people in a story, only talking decoration. So of course, this time as every time, as soon as the Deltan does her one trick, she's quickly out of the movie. And it goes likewise with the rest of the cast, who have all the inner life of a call menu.

To conclude the list of questionable choices that went into this production, Section 31 doesn't tell us anything about Section 31. This was the best opportunity to explore the ethical complications inherent to resorting to dirty tactics in the service of a nominally righteous civilization. It also could have given us a more nuanced portrait of Philippa Georgiou as an exiled tyrant with a whole galaxy's worth of skeletons in her closet. But Section 31 has no interest in the complex questions. And if anything defines the essence of a Star Trek story, it's the willingness to jump deep into the complex questions and live with the complex answers. What we get instead is a movie incapable of realizing that a secret police is by definition the opposite of cool, and that a cannibal mass murderer is a terrible choice of hero, and its too-hard attempts to make that disastrous combination work are just embarrassing to watch.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

An incomplete list of recurring motifs found in the novel Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

• A woman growing a beard. Caught on camera or seen in person, the act is impossible to believe, but its method cannot be understood, by viewers or by the reader. There is weirdness in the world, and we must simply accept it.
• Miracolo. Miracle hands. Hands that make miracles. Art is a miracle. Sport is a miracle. Science is a miracle. All the things that humans do, that touch one another, metaphorically and literally. The urge to reach out a hand to those around you, the only possible reaction to the knowledge of the inevitability of death.
• Tree of heaven—a real type of tree, which I had to look up to be certain of. So much in this book is invented, but feels real, I began to doubt myself on all manner of things. It is an invasive species in the US, fast-growing and hardy, and it outcompetes local species to take up space and resources. The book is set across a huge span of times, thousands of years, on Earth and Mars, but so much of it is in the near future as we see resources dry up and competition become fiercer, and the things that thrive within that environment are not always beneficial to those around them.
• Anne Frank. Subtly at first, and then with strangeness, and then understanding upon which the novel pivots.
• This one weird book about a droplet of water in an arid, dried-up future Earth. The droplet dies at the end, but that ending is considered happy. How people respond to the book, the art they make themselves after having read it. The life of the author, and what that drove him to, the rippling effects on his family down the years, and the people they interacted with, spreading out and out across geography and time.
• Tattoos. Medical tattoos, weird tattoos, tattoos that are art and books and crimes and innovations. The body as a canvas and a battleground. Who owns the body? No, really, who owns that one specific body they want to drop into the sea for science?
• Weird art. Sometimes on bodies, living or dead, but not always.
• An address in New York—7 Tailor Lane, the Diamond Exchange, which I don't know if it's real or not. I don't want to look it up. I want to preserve some of the mystery, knowing as I do that the author has inserted so many absolutely plausible bits of fiction, alongside the obvious truths and obvious lies. But seeing one physical location recur, even as its occupants are recorded over and over in obituaries, makes them more poignant, and even more so when the building, as a sidenote in another story, gets its own obituary of a sort. Death comes for things beyond the living.
• The tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it. Is it a tree of heaven? Any kind of tree, really. The witness of a human to its suffering is not required for that suffering and death to matter, or be real.
• Witness and martyrdom. Witnessing in all the senses. Obituary is an act of witness, speaking for those who can no longer speak for themselves. It reminded me of, in The Goblin Emperor, the witnesses vel ama, whose role is to speak for people and things, whether the dead or the inanimate, whose voices matter within a particular frame of reference, but who cannot speak for themselves. But the reader is also the witness. Obituary is a reflexive verb; the subject becomes the object eventually. Memento mori is also memento testis fieri. Testis, testis (n.), witness, but also just a third party, as we are to the story, as we must become, through the passage of time. We must all bear witness.  
• Etymologies—are these real, or very well faked? I don't know. Does it even matter? They felt real, and more critically, after we are given each thematically appropriate etymology for the moment in the story, we get examples of sentences in which the words are used. In these sentences, we find the only examples of the voice of Peregrine, searching for her daughter, and then simply for meaning. As if meaning can be found in looking back through time like that, simply cataloguing fleeting moments of existence and pinning them down to the page. Wait. Am I talking about obituaries or etymologies?
• The fictional virgin Wilgefortis. Is she real-world fictional, or fictionally fictional? Does this matter? I suppose that's becoming a theme within the themes—it is increasingly difficult, as the story progresses, to unpick which pieces the author has invented and which have been pulled from history. It would be possible to look them all up, as I did for quite a few in the beginning, but I decided the story is better if I believed in all of them, even the ones I knew were false, as long as the narrative wanted me to. Stories do not need to be gutted and pickled, each organ in its own labelled bottle of formaldehyde, and some stories yearn to live in their own mystery more than others. This feels to me like one of those stories. It does not resist explanation, but perhaps resents it. It didn't need to be explicable to have meaning that mattered to me as a reader.
• Art as meaning, or lack of meaning. The relationship it has with the artist and the witness observer. It makes sense that so many of the people discussed in the story would be artists—they seem, more than many, to be whom we expect to see memorialised. They matter. Even the small ones whose art touches only a few lives. Art weaves itself through the story, constantly, but especially art being destroyed, lost or found again. Art as a vector for ideas of memory and legacy, and being forgotten. There is something particularly poignant in the art being found of a child taken too early, whose gift was unknown to everyone around her. Her loss is in the loss of the art she did not create.
• The having, or not having, of children. Who can have children, whose womb can be used to bear children, in whose body, being a transgressive act. This feels apt right now, but has always been. It made me think of Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock, imagining changes in reproductive science and the culture around it in vignettes going on into the future. This may be a story told in death, but aren't we always concerned with whom the dead do (or do not) leave behind them. She is survived by her parents. His husband. Their many friends. Her daughter. Obituaries are, so the story says at one point, for the living after all.
• Forgetting, being forgotten, leaving nothing behind. Because in a story about the ways we remember, there is naturally the negative space in which we consider what has been lost.
• Memorial/legacy are the natural contrast, of course. And it goes without saying that a book written in obituaries is concerned with memorials. The Latin "mori" again, in there though it's not related (sometimes what looks like etymology is just a coincidence, and not all puzzles have such easy solutions). The very earliest snippet in the story is not an obituary at all, but a collection of translated Roman tombstones, just as heartbreaking as ever they are to read. People have always been people, and always grieved the dead. It is always useful to remember that some things do exist that connect us through time like this. They reminded me of Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley in that there's no commentary on those tombstones, but their position within the story feels very pointedly to say part of what she does in her story, that connections exist, reaching backwards and forwards through time. But the absence of commentary reminds us that we are, sometimes, on our own trying to understand them, and we cannot verify if our connection back to the past is truly the one we believe it to be.
• Obituaries. The previous point being said, very nearly the whole story is told through obituaries, of people connected to other people connected to other people, all through history. They are the real story; this is a book about people. But in the background as well, there's another story, a mother/a machine/a monster on the run, hunted down by law enforcement and fanatics. A mother who has lost her daughter, and is hunting for her too, even as she is hunted. At every moment in the book, the focus is only on someone no longer living. How can a story have action, if all the participants are dead? But maybe stories don't need action, and the three-act structure is so passé. We're not so gauche as to need any direct actions, and can subsist quite happily instead on remembrances, if done well. The kind that tell us not only about the deceased, nor even just about the person who writes about them, but about their world, and about the perceived reader. Worldbuilding relegated to the margins of an often marginal form of writing—in the assumptions the reader would surely already have, and the gaps we see formed by those assumptions in our own understanding. Infodumps and exposition are surely even more passé than action?
• Flowers. Poppies. Where has Poppy gone? Peregrine is searching for her daughter Poppy, who committed suicide and then ran away. The image of the poppy, a symbol of pain and war and death, often paired with the rose and all its many meanings and associations. But the poppy is also life coming out of death, when the flowers grow on the churned-up mud of the battlefield. Symbols (or motifs) can have multiple meanings.
• Femininity. Or rejection thereof. Women through history whose place was forged in pain and determination. Throwing piss out of windows and being run over by a hansom cab. Deliberately having a sex scandal with a politician and getting oneself arrested just to get the publicity to keep your business afloat after a strange stage artist does a magic trick that didn't make any sense and ruined the whole act.
• Absence of understanding, in which is contained, right in the middle of the story, a dramatic crux that passes by almost without fanfare. One of the most dramatic, obvious unrealities of the story, that makes you sit up and ask "wait, what?" is the product of that misunderstood artist, a stage magician doing real... well, not quite magic, or maybe it is. We'll never know, after she was booed off stage. But her art, magic, science, whatever it is, changes history. Except that, once it got changed, history had never changed at all, because no one remembered the difference except her.
• Escape, of all kinds. The physical, the emotional and the metaphorical. Peregrine escapes capture and danger again and again, in the margins and the background of the story, back and forward through time.
• Faked deaths are a subset of the above, as a kind of escape. But at least one of them is also a kind of performance art.
• Real deaths. Likewise.
• Escaping, or at least postponing, death. Which is only possible up to a point, as per the book's title.
• Grief, which is inevitable, after that inevitable death. It can't be avoided, only understood. Perhaps by looking at etymology after etymology, trying to sift meaning out of the building blocks of human understanding.
• Acceptance which comes after the process of grief, though probably not as a direct result of any specific activity, just through the passage of time.
• Inevitability. That passage of time, for one. But, as the cover says, of death.
• Uncertainty, which is at odds with that inevitability, but when so many people manage to fake their deaths, you can never quite trust the particulars, even if, broadly speaking, we know it comes for them eventually. Obituaries are written by people, and so are flawed as they are, whether by bias, misunderstanding or a lack of complete facts.
• AI. Maybe I should have said this one sooner, given how central it is to the plot, and that it's right there on the back cover blurb. Peregrine, who has lost her human daughter Poppy, is an AI. How does that work? Well, that takes quite a few obituaries to explain, but is well worth the explanation when you get there. And it's more satisfying to learn piecemeal, at least in my opinion, as each detail falls into place when linked to the person who made it happen. Peregrine and Poppy's lives are a tapestry of many, many threads of connection with all these (dead) people, and can —or perhaps should— only be understood by witnessing them as individuals, whose brief moment in the spotlight recognises them as the main character in their own story, not just a bit player in a wider tale.
• What does it mean to be a person? Who gets to be one? AI stories always tackle this one, but it's not just the AI we're examining that about here, and not just in the trite way of turning it on its head and asking what truly makes us human. Everything Eden Robins does, through every part of this book, turns on subtlety, and no more so than here. This is a question without a clear answer given in the text, and all the better (as most things tackling the big themes are) for not presuming to have one at all. Experience Peregrine's life, and the lives of those around her, and decide for yourself.
• The relationship between humanity and mortality. Which is critical to that above question. Is mortality necessary for the definition of humanity? It's a thesis put forward, and not a novel one, though one worth considering all the same. By telling a story in obituaries, by putting death and the finity of life front and centre, the story considers that these lives can only be told in their absence, that their completion is critical to the telling.
• And so, the ending. All endings. The story ended before it was begun. All action was viewed from a detached future point of resolution, and it was all entirely gripping nonetheless. It takes a skilled author to handle something like this, and keep each individual text worthwhile and still a meaningful piece of the whole, but Robins manages it all the way through. She plays with format, prose style and voice constantly, and is willing to let meaning take its time to develop, without the last quarter panic crescendo common to so many stories. Every single obituary is a full text, and forms into a sum greater than its many, many parts, that is well worth the time spent reading it.

Reference: Robins, Eden. Remember You Will Die [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].

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

Video Game Review: Metaphor: ReFantazio by Studio Zero

Time marches on, and the age of a new king draws nearer...

The death of the Euchronian king, with no apparent heir, brings about a power vacuum in which tensions run high and anxiety reigns supreme. A few primary choices become obvious, but how to decide who will lead? That’s when the old king’s magic comes into play, bringing to this storybook fantasy world something it has never experienced before: democracy. In this fantastical world, candidates vie for the throne with words, swords, magic, and ideals, all while dealing with the social and racial inequalities that have plagued Euchronia for far too long.

Enter the main character (whom you name), an ally of the long-thought-dead prince of Euchronia. Hidden from the world and afflicted with a curse, the prince has been removed from the board as a potential candidate. It is the main character’s responsibility to free him from his magical curse and bring about peace in a world full of inequality. Through forging bonds with others and awakening to magic long forgotten, the player is taken along for a heartfelt, thought-provoking narrative that brings Euchronia to life in what I think is Atlus’s finest game to date.

Upon booting up the game, I was greeted with a beautifully animated cutscene, introducing Metaphor’s initial conflict and the world that birthed it. From the initial cutscenes until the first moment the main character steps into Gran Trad, I could tell I was in for a treat. The art direction is splendid, immediately drawing me in and giving me a sense of authenticity that I rarely feel that early in a game (especially one this big). Sunlumeo Street and Sunshade Row represent different socioeconomic spheres of the great capital of Gran Trad, but still carry the same heart. And the further you explore, despite the extreme differences of the biomes, Euchronia feels connected and looks fantastic. And let me not forget the special pitstops the gang make throughout their journey, each one postcard-worthy, and each a little piece of the magic that drew me further into an already endearing world.

Exploring the cities and towns is a treat. Anytime a new primary event occurred, I made sure to go around the streets of all the cities to soak in all the information and gossip. This added extra depth to Eucrhonia, making it feel as though the world was moving alongside me instead of remaining static. Because of this, even small, insignificant gossiping characters on the street show a modicum of character growth. Also, the ability to look at the dialogue log is such a blessing (just in case you missed something). With spoken dialogue, you can have the line repeated, which I did multiple times for some of my favorite lines.

I always have to mention the UI design in the more recent Persona games, and Metaphor is no exception. This is undoubtedly the best I’ve seen. Metaphor’s UI is a thing of beauty that kept me staring at the screen. They went quite hard on something that is usually a passing thought in most games and I am all the more grateful for it.

Metaphor gets you into the combat early and blows open the archetype-class-based gameplay, but it continues to expand throughout the entire playthrough. It’s no small wonder that Metaphor is similar to the Persona games regarding its magic and combat systems, considering Studio Zero is made up of many of the developers from P-Studio, including its director, Katsura Hashino. Party characters are capable of embodying archetypes, old magic that is intention manifest, allowing them to summon a powerful being that fulfills a specific purpose toward one’s ideals. Whether that be the archetype of a warrior, knight, or merchant, the archetype system echoes Persona’s system of summoning beings to assist the party in combat, though instead of summoning, the archetype is an embodiment of each character’s willpower. By giving the main character the ability to transfer this focused intent to his companions, they too can achieve different archetypes. This allows Metaphor the freedom of allowing all party members to mix and match archetypes, blowing past Persona to create a more flexible and versatile party utilization system.

Like the Persona games (and most JRPGs), exploiting an enemy’s weakness in this well-crafted turn-based combat is the key to victory. Gems atop the screen show the player how many turns they have against a current enemy. Each gem constitutes one character’s turn. Upon delivering a critical hit or dealing damage with an enemy’s weakness, the player is awarded a half gem, which gives another turn. Exploiting weaknesses gives the player a huge advantage and can turn the tide against strong foes, but equally, missing enemies with an attack or using an ability with an affinity that they are impervious to removes extra gems, relinquishing precious turns. When an enemy increases their agility, it is wise to debuff them, and when they debuff you, it’s a good idea to get back to neutral. In addition, the game introduces Synthesis abilities, which incorporate a mixture of different archetype classes to create a completely different set of abilities that allow party members to work in tandem to take down an enemy. These moves mostly use only two characters, but some use three or four. Depending on the Synthesis skill and number of party members involved, this will take up a gem corresponding to each party member involved. Discovering all the class abilities and Synthesis skills is a treat throughout the entirety of the game. There are so many possibilities to mix and match that the game truly continues to give the player options until the very end (and into a second playthrough).

But Studio Zero decided to go a step further and add action combat. This action combat is how the player character interacts with enemies in the overworld. By knocking an enemy’s stamina to zero, the player character can initiate an ambush on the enemy, allowing an advantage at the beginning of the fight, inducing both stun status and inflicting damage. This works for enemies that are both within level range and that are stronger than the protagonist. For weaker enemies, they are simply killed in overworld combat without having to waste too much time. In this way, it feels like Metaphor respects the player’s time, especially when you have an eighty- to one hundred-hour adventure on your hands. Not only is killing weaker enemies a breeze, it makes grinding much easier (which is totally optional). Metaphor is one of the few games that I found that respects grinding while also retaining its balance. I thought I had saved up so much money with the Merchant class after grinding for quite some time only to find that I didn't have nearly enough to afford all the items I encountered in shops. A million reeve just doesn't go that far these days. Studio Zero built a system that takes into account players who like to grind and those who don’t, and balanced it well. Quite the achievement. While overworld combat is a time saver and mostly satisfying, it's not overly complex by any means. Some class weapons are a little less enjoyable to use than others, so I found that I would sometimes level certain archetype classes with seeds and roots instead of through combat. Turn-based combat is the bread and butter of this game, but it’s nice to have options.

While the primary dungeons are satisfying and large enough to explore and get lost in, some of the side dungeons are a bit basic. It doesn't ruin any of the immersion by any means, but it would have been nice to have a more lived-in feel to some of the side content. I know they’re supposed to be simple side missions, but when the rest of the game feels so high quality, it feels a bit sad that you can run through some of the side dungeons very quickly, though I can see how that would be a benefit for some. With the combat so enticing, I would have happily spent more time encountering enemies in side dungeons.

The combat options in the game expand as the player meets and advances their relationships with their followers. This works like a traditional Persona game, but instead of forcing a player to make the correct dialogue options to move the relationship along, the relationship advances regardless, so long as you take the time to level up your royal virtues (stats that increase through different activities like reading, listening to others, etc.). This is a huge advantage to Metaphor’s benefit. This allows the player to spend more time learning about the world instead of trying to gain someone’s favor over and over because you didn’t pick the perfect dialogue option.

Speaking of followers, this game has the best set of followers (or confidants, as you would see in a Persona game) I’ve come across in an Atlas game. And that’s saying something, considering how much I love the Persona series and its characters. This is probably my favorite group of party members in any JRPG. I loved them all. Some more than others, naturally, but I didn't actively dislike or feel indifferent to any. To watch them all grow and make their choices was an absolute treat, and there wasn't a single character that I didn’t look forward to spending time with. I don’t want to spoil any potential revelations and character growth, but just know, I loved it all. It felt satisfying to reach the end of each arc (except for one—one of my absolute favorites, unfortunately—which was still good, but not quite as good as the rest). You have the twofold benefit of enjoying a story arc while also increasing and expanding combat prowess.

This satisfaction is in huge part the writing, but the English dub voice actors are excellent. Most of them shine, delivering emotional, honest performances. I feel as though the main character, though mostly quiet, is a bit of an exception to this. He’s fine but is outshone by his cohorts. A few other actors are also dubious, but are outside of the main party and don't take up too much screentime. Heismay, Hulkenberg, Strohl, and almost every character throughout the game kept me hooked. Oddly enough, one of the best performances was none other than the primary villain Louis Guiabern (voiced by Joseph Tweedale). His calm, cool, collected, confident delivery is such an allure that he almost pulls you to his side by sheer force of charming magnetism. He steals each scene he’s in and is such a strong part of what makes Metaphor work. The contrast of such strong personalities elevates the game. He is, without a doubt, one of my favorite video game villains. Using his wits and power to remain one step ahead of all adversaries, Louis kept me on my toes all while making it look easy. It’s a thing of beauty to see two groups of people who wish to rid the world of inequality have such different ways to do it. I love each character’s consistency and passion (though I did find a moment or two that stuck out as a counter to that). This was one of the consistent drivers of the game for me. I only wish that all companion interaction were voiced. Sometimes the interactions felt like they could have had increased impact if only they'd had recorded voiceovers for the scene.

While still on the subject of sound, Metaphor’s music is an excellent amplifier to the rest of the game’s quality. The chanting music in combat hyped me up, while the music in the gauntlet runner brought a sense of calm, and oddly enough at the same time, a sense of adventure. When a follower found their purpose, the music filled me with a sense of pride in my companions. As Gallica says, “Music was the first magic this world ever knew, after all. Makes the road a little easier.” And it truly does. The soundtrack is just another piece that fits into this wonderfully large, intricate game.

With the primary story full of twists and turns, like the primary villain himself, it keeps you guessing. Some of the events are lied about early on to create false enmity, which works in the grand scheme of things, but seemed to be a bit of a cheat. Some things are simply unknown. But each revelation seems to fit, odd as some might be, which closes up almost all plot holes that had me wondering how things fit together. In the end, I felt extremely satisfied, even if the final conflict left a bit to be desired plotwise.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a game that came along at a perfect time. It reflects our world in many ways and is a reminder that belief in an ideal that betters the greater good—however imperfect—is worth pursuing, despite the pain and difficulty endured on the road to its achievement. For all of the inequality that runs deep within the world of Metaphor, it is balanced by the beauty of the world itself and the traditions of its eight contrasting tribes. While the overarching narrative may sometimes seem to drive the point home very strongly, the characters alongside the protagonist consistently bring the nuance and the acknowledgment that the ideals they strive for are not only going to be difficult to achieve but nearly impossible. Nothing is truly sugar-coated when the layers are peeled back, and it’s one of my favorite aspects of the game.

Metaphor is a phenomenal first entry from Studio Zero that enchants, enlightens, excites, and ignites. There is even more that I could say about this game, but I feel like experiencing the game, its world, and its characters is a bit of magic in itself, and I wouldn't want to take that away from anyone. Metaphor is a game that made me want more. Knowing that the clock was ticking and that I was getting close to the end of the game made me genuinely sad, as I didn't want to leave the world or the characters behind, even after a hundred hours.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +0.5 for party and characters, +0.5 for beautiful art direction, +0.5 for experimental combat classes, +0.5 for worldbuilding and lore, +0.5 for strong voice-overs and music.

Penalties: −1 for weak protagonist VO, −1 for a few cheap plot gimmicks.

Nerd Coefficient: 9.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

Breaking out the D20s and introducing a Dungeon Master into the Laundry Files.

The ‘Satanic Panic’ that erupted in the early 1980s possibly has to have been lived through in order to be actually believed. Thousands of unsubstantiated accusations of ritual abuse and worse, best selling books, and much more. It was a moral panic of the first order and had no basis in reality. Swept up in this crusade (and I use that term carefully) was Dungeons and Dragons, which was identified by some of the proponents of the panic as leading to witchcraft, Satan worship, and more. Tom Hanks’ first starring role was in a movie that encouraged this point of view, Mazes and Monsters. In some ways the Satanic Panic’s echoes still exist to this day (hello, Pizzagate). The Satanic Panic shows the power of belief turned to poisonous and wrong ends.

This has everything to do with A Conventional Boy, the latest Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross.

With the Laundry Files universe and its titular focus and worry about magic, Elder Beings, and the like, you can see how the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s might wind up intersecting with their remit. Derek Reilly, an enthusiastic autistic D&D player (nay, a DM) gets swept up in the Panic and winds up at Camp Sunshine, the locale where the Laundry Files deprograms cultists. Thanks to a series of bureaucratic events, Derek never gets released. Decades pass. He becomes a “trusty”, even allowed to edit the camp newsletter, and to run his play by physical mail game. (But even so, paper and pencils and the like are highly restricted at Camp Sunshine and you can forget about computers or the Internet.) But when Derek finds out that a D&D convention is happening nearby, and that the Camp is being temporarily rehoused, he does the unthinkable, and decides to escape to attend it. Derek has been paying attention, and despite the enormous dangers in trying to leave Camp Sunshine, he manages it. But the convention he goes to has a dread danger all of its own, one that Derek is equipped to recognize, and possibly deal with. Roll for initiative, Derek...

And so lies a story.

The titular story is a love letter to Dungeons and Dragons, specifically its early AD&D incarnation. (Derek hasn’t been able to get later editions at Camp Sunshine, after all). So the book is replete with lots of nerdy references, in-jokes and the like about Dungeons and Dragons, the nature of the game, some shade thrown on various modules, and the like. For someone who grew up on the stuff, it's catnip and a lot of fun¹

Like me, for instance.

Having grown up playing Dungeons and Dragons under the Satanic Panic, and being a GM for play by email games for a long time, Derek and his plight also hit me in the feels rather hard. Mind you, there is an irony in the theme and how things play out that while Derek was scooped up accidentally and wrongly and kept in Camp Sunshine basically by accident (and Derek not knowing enough to challenge it), the theme and logline of the book is one that Derek doesn’t quite realize himself--that he does, in fact have magical power, in those dice that he carries along. Derek doesn’t admit to himself that he is doing magic, but we, the reader, can totally see how and what his dice do, magic wise. But it is not just his dice, because when he gets to his convention and we see just his D&D campaign and one-shot are like, it is a :blink blink: moment for those who have been following the entire series. It made me stop and think and then read carefully to the end to see if I really got what was going on here.

A scene at the end, however, made it clear what has happened and what is happening, but it does reinforce for me that this is a book that, conceptually, a reader new to the series could possibly start it here. There is enough here, and given Derek’s isolation, Stross clearly seems to be reaching for that sweet spot where someone could parachute into his massive 13 book series right here. I think the above :blink blink: moment might then be an invitation to read the rest of the series having started with this book. It’s a very tricky balancing act and I think he manages it partly, and it is somewhat of a disappointment to me (but an understandable one) is that A Conventional Boy is short. It’s not a meaty thick Laundry Files novel, but rather a novella. It thrives on that length, and really, for it to be longer would make it wear out its welcome. If you are trying to get people to try a big 13 book series, a shorter entry has its advantages, though, and that seems to be what Stross is going for, here. He’s tried this before, but A Conventional Boy feels like his latest, most forceful attempt to bring new readers to the series.

The format of the book, though, is not just the titular story. There are also two additional stories after A Conventional Boy, and they are “early” stories of the original series protagonist, Bob Howard. These stories don’t just pad out the book to a publishable length (or else this would just fall under the rubric of a novella) but also tie in thematically and parallel A Conventional Boy, even if Derek doesn’t show up in either of them.

In “Overtime”, we get to see Bob Howard on a night watch duty on Christmas Eve, where he winds up having to tangle with an extra dimensional entity taking advantage of the power of belief. This story also has the value of clarifying a bit the end of A Conventional Boy, and closes the loop on it (although to be clear, Derek does not appear in any way). And again, thematically, ties into the narrative of belief fueling magical power.

The final story in the volume, “Down on the Farm”, again finds Bob Howard (again, in a relatively early part of his timeline) going to a psychiatric institution for people with magical abilities. A message has been smuggled out and Bob, precisely because he is not magically strong (again, this is way before Bob becomes a badass), he is a safe person to go investigate doing there. This story, too, has counterpoint to A Conventional Boy in that they are dealing with magical or potentially magically dangerous people, in an enclosed bottled institution. What Bob faces there is really like a magical-amped Laundry Files version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, with some nasty secrets and some clever magical workings going on inside.

Taken all together, then, A Conventional Boy doesn’t hit the heights of some of the Laundry Files novels, but its character and his plight and nature definitely hit me on an emotional level. I had to ration out reading the book a bit as a result. I was not expecting such emotional resonance in a Laundry Files book, but it does go to show that the dice, once again, are in my favor when reading a Charles Stross novel.

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Highlights: 

• Book is actually the titular novella and two short stories. 

• Possibly an entry point for those new to the series. 

• If you lived through the Satanic Panic and know your Thac0, pick this one up.

Reference: Stross, Charles, A Conventional Boy, [Tordotcom, 2025].

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

1. Fun fact that you may not have known. Charles Stross is (via the Fiend Folio) the creator of several D&D monsters and races. Most famously these days, thanks to Baldur’s Gate III, Stross created the Githyanki. Stross does involve an incestuous cross reference, there are no Githyanki or any of his other monsters in this book. That might have been too much.

On Building LEGO Star Wars after fifteen years

Putting the pieces together on an old beloved hobby

As fortune would have it, I was born on the 27th of December so that my parents could factor my birth into their 1996 tax returns, since the doctor overseeing the procedure didn’t want to induce me on Christmas, my mother’s birthday (“but you’re Jewish!” she said. “Doesn’t mean I want to work on Christmas,” he responded). Because of that, every year my birthday falls into what could be considered an extended Christmas season, falling in that surreal week between Christmas and New Year’s where nothing is real. Because people are traveling during this period, my birthday party is always sometime in the middle of January so that people can get back from their celebrations of profound things so they can celebrate far more worldly, insignificant things (me). More pleasantly, it means I get all the year’s presents crammed together, and it was this year I got something I hadn’t played with in fifteen years: LEGO Star Wars sets.

One is a bust of the head of Captain Rex from the Clone Wars, and the other is a rather large set - over a thousand pieces if memory serves - of R2-D2. During the two nights I built these sets, there was a lot of blue and white. I found myself enjoying the experience just as much as I did when I was a kid. It was an unfamiliar experience, doing so much work with my hands, having graduated to being a faceless bureaucrat among an army of faceless bureaucrats in the Washington DC blob who sits at a desk and presses buttons to earn his pay.

But there is something doubtlessly mesmerising about putting all these little pieces together. On one occasion, I got up to use the restroom and found myself feeling almost dizzy, a feeling I’ve only ever felt after gaming for a long time and then standing up. It also reminded me of my grueling job-hunting stretches after I graduated in 2019, and then had to ram into the pandemic and omnipresent discrimination against the autistic (as I am); I found myself investing more time in various writing projects or other things, because they gave me results. If I wrote a short story or an article, it was there, in front of me, an indication that I had worked. For job applications, it was flushing effort down the drain with nothing more than a confirmation email to prove that I did it. Here, again, was labor in physical form - evidence for Marx’s labor theory of value, perhaps.

One of the things that struck me when putting these little pieces together was how colorful the insides of these sets were, and how all of that color was to be covered up by the blue and the white and the gray. There was something fascinating about all that color, reds and browns and greens, being hidden by a shell for which the real aesthetic value comes in. It was, as I soon figured out, a multilingual way of keeping everything straight. LEGO famously does not use words in its instructions, but does everything with pictures. The colors on the inside of the set is a natural extension; red parts connect with red parts, yellow with yellow, et cetera (this is how the designers had me build R2-D2’s head, making sure each portion is connected to the right side of the set). There’s something sad about all that color being hidden; exposing it may make some sort of interesting abstract art piece, akin to those lavishly drawn books that show you the inside of any number of vehicles (including licensed Star Wars ships, at least one book of which I read as a child).

On another level, it was strange to see a LEGO set be a sculpture and not a toy. I grew up with LEGO Star Wars, Bionicle, and other themes that were designed to be played with. I have a LEGO Star Destroyer on top of one of my bookshelves, serving a purpose as a sculpture, but if I look at it from the right angle I can still see the minifigures inside. The massive R2-D2 set I built have smooth parts on its feet so that you can glide it around, but it still feels larger and so fragile that you just want to leave it there. The head of Captain Rex is even more a sculpture, as I cannot see any way to play with it. I took to calling it the ‘severed head,’ and proudly called it such alongside a picture of the set in a group chat for my extended family. Both sets are now in a TV room, on top of a shelf, looking down at you as if you are a threat.

I have seen those big master builder sets in bookstores and in other public places, where LEGO is clearly angling for the adult market. Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs, as they are called in the fandom) have a saying: you get into LEGO as a kid, then abandon it in an attempt to be more adult as a teenager, and then get back into it as an adult. I lost interest in my freshman year of high school (fourteen years old, for non-Americans). As C. S. Lewis said:

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

But it does feel like LEGO has exploited that; the adult fans are not just going back to something they enjoyed as a child, but rather that LEGO has successfully found a new market for its products, and is happily making money hand over fist because of it. It’s like how a lot of licensed toys for small children (like a buggy shaped like the Millennium Falcon, for example), are really marketed toward their parents, as the parents are the ones who are spending money, and children of that age can only object so much. On some level, it’s another manifestation of how late capitalism has made it even harder to imagine things that are truly new, rather than repackaged nostalgia (writes he who spent eight days catching up on The Bad Batch on Disney Plus, hypocrite that I am - the positive is that I got to see Captain Rex on screen while Captain Rex’s severed head was looking down upon me). We have been given our fantasies for money, and we are all too happy to fork it over.

I can accept that my joy in building these sets is in some sense an act of deliberate regression. But as Lewis says in the above quote, that is not necessarily a bad thing. All too often we allow what is new and ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ and whatnot glom onto our basic humanity, the humanity that we had as children. Likewise, it was good to get back to basics in a sort of metaphysical sense, to do things with my hands rather than via a mouse and keyboard. But if moving away from these things is progress, what does our notion of progress really mean? And, above that particular discussion, what does it mean when that refreshing inversion of oppressive norms comes when a corporation profits from it? There has got to be some French philosopher from the 1960s who has a pithy quote about that which would illuminate the conundrum, or barring that a quote from the works of Mark Fisher. In any case, I enjoyed the experience, as I have enjoyed so much of Star Wars and so much of LEGO. But it made me think of all the things wrapped up in this, all the pieces that make it up, and how they all click together.

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

2025 Nerds of a Feather Awards Recommended Reading, Part 4: Institutional Categories and New Hugo for Best Poem

Welcome to our final presentation of the Nerds of a Feather 2025 Award Recommendation List. Today will look at the Institutional Categories of Semiprozine, Fanzine and Fancast, Best Related Work and the new Hugo for Best Poem. This last one is a temporary addition just for the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, but poetry awards exist outside of the Hugos, so do look out for The Rhysling Award, the Ignyte Awards shortlist, and, from next year, a new category for it in the Nebulas.

As before, we here at nerds are presenting a collective longlist of potential Hugo nominees that we think are worthy of your consideration. These selections represent the spectrum of tastes, tendencies, and predilections found among our group of writers. Today's section contains Best Fanzine, the category we won (*gasp*, still exciting) the award in last year, and in which we have recused for 2025, to ensure that the category can continue to have space for new voices year on year.

As ever, this list should not at all be considered comprehensive, even in the remaining categories. Some outstanding works and institutions will not make our longlist for the simple reason that we have not managed to keep abreast of all the amazing things within the SFF space. We encourage you to think of this as a list of candidates to consider alongside people with which you are already familiar, nothing more and nothing less.

We hope these posts have been useful to you in curating your potential award nominees, and we're excited to see where this year's awards seasons take us.

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Nerds of a Feather 2025 Recommendation List Series:

Part 1: Fiction Categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Series, Lodestar Award)

Part 2: Visual Work Categories (Graphic Story, Dramatic Presentation)

Part 3: Individual Categories (Editor, Fan Writer, Professional Artist, Fan Artist, Astounding Award for Best New Writer)

Part 4: Institutional Categories (Related Work, Semiprozine, Fanzine, Fancast)

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Semiprozine

Augur
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Escape Pod
FIYAH
Giganotosaurus
Heartlines
Interzone
Kaleidotrope
khōréō
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Lightspeed
Omenana
Podcastle
Pseudopod
Shoreline of Infinity
Small Wonders
Strange Horizons
Sunday Morning Transport

Fanzine

The Ancillary Review of Books
Asking the Wrong Questions
Astrolabe
Black Nerd Problems
The Full Lid
Journey Planet
Lady Business
Reading the End 
Runalong the Shelves
Stone Soup
There’s Always Room for One More 
Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog
Women Write About Comics 
Words for Worlds

Fancast

The 250
Barcart Bookshelf
Breaking the Glass Slipper
Critical Friends
Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones 
Hugo, Girl
Hugos There
A Meal of Thorns
Mostly Nitpicking
Mythcreants
SFF Addicts
The Skiffy and Fanty Show
Sword and Laser
Three Black Halflings
Wizards vs. Lesbians

Best Related Work

Michael Bérubé; The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species, [Columbia University Press, 2024]
Boyle, Rebecca; Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution and Made Us Who We Are, [Random House, 2024]
Brentjes, Rana; Brentjes, Sonja; Mastorakou, Stamantina; Schäfer, Dagmar; Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity, [Mimesis International, 2024]
Carroll, Jordan S.; Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, [Univ of Minnesota Press, 2024]
Cliff, Harry; Space Oddities: the Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe, [Doubleday, 2024]
Halpern, Paul; The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other World and Parallel Universes, [Basic Books, 2024]
Hanchey, Jenna; Africanfuturism Beyond the Future
Hartland, Dan; Snap! Criticism column  at the Ancillary Review of Books
Jacobsen, Annie; Nuclear War: A Scenario, [Dutton, 2024]
Nussbaum, Abigail; Track Changes: Selected Reviews, [Briardene Books, 2024]
O'Connor, John; The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, [Sourcebooks, 2024]
Speculative Insight 2024
Rees, Gareth E.; Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds, [Elliott & Thompson]
The wikis at fandom.com

Best Poem

Atreya, Alexnader; "Earth as Eidolon", [Deadlands Issue #33]
Barlow, Devan; "Your Visiting Dragon", [Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024]
Cohen, Jie Venus; "Gaia Sings the Body Electric", [Radon Journal Issue 8]
Cooney, CSE; "fowlskin", [Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Six]
Day, Kelsey; "Sunday in Atlanta", [Reckoning]
Gospel, Chinedu; "Black Bile", [Haven Speculative Issue Seventeen]
Israel, Ayòdéjì; "Shattered Souls at Heaven's Gate", [Deadlands Issue #36]
Lee, Mary Soon; "What Giants Read", [Strange Horizons 29 January 2024]
Liu, Angela; "The Final Trick", [Strange Horizons 26 August 2024]
Liu, Angela; "there are no taxis for the dead", [Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Eight]
Margariti, Avra; "In a Cradle of Antlers", [Small Wonders Magazine, Issue 13]
Ness, Mari; "Ever Noir", [Haven Speculative, Issue Sixteen]
Ogden, Aimee; "Entropy Brooks No Countercurrent", [Kaleidotrope Summer 2024]
Oluyemi, Elisha; "Another Beauty of Darkness", [Strange Horizons 25 March 2024]
Pittman, Rachel; "The Quickening", [Strange Horizons 29 July 2024]
Rabuzzi, Daniel A.; "Along the River's Edge", [Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #48]
River; "Hiatus", [Deadlands Issue #36]
Sabin, Dyani; "Abstain from Spinning, beauty", [Small Wonders Magazine, Issue 14]
Saha, R.S.; "Kin", [Strange Horizons 12 August 2024]
Skreslet, Tabor; "Lonely Rocks", [Heartlines Issue 6 (Fall 2024)]
Tiji, Bindu; "Journey", [Samovar 28 October 2024] (translated by Lakshmy Nair)
Umana, Joemario; "Society's Learners Dictionary on Defining a Boy", [Strange Horizons 26 February 2024]
Wheat, Steve; "The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program", [Radon Journal Issue 8]