Review: Future's Edge by Gareth Powell

At its heart, this standalone space opera epic is the story of three people coming to terms with each other

Of all the Gin joints for him to walk into, he had to walk into *hers*.¹ Ursula Marrow, running a bar in a refugee camp on the planet of Void’s Edge, has her ex-husband Jake walk into it, seeking her help. Ursula has a strange link to a weapon that might slow down the implacable Cutters, who are steadily destroying civilizations and wiping out intelligent life as they go (that was the fate of Earth, if you must know). Ursula could have gotten on the STL ships to get even further away from the enemy, but she’s still running her bar by the camp at the edge of the galaxy arm, before the doorstep of the void that the STL ships are fleeing into to escape the Cutters. And now her ex needs her help again, in her capacity as a former xenoarchaeologist with a unique link to that aforementioned weapon (everyone else who has tried to link to it has, in fact, died). But in the two years since she last saw him, during the chaotic and desperate evacuation of Earth, he has gotten a new wife... his sentient spaceship, The Crisis Actor.

Ursula, The Crisis Actor, and Jack are at the center of Gareth Powell’s Future’s Edge, a standalone space opera epic novel. It first and foremost runs on how these three characters get along, even as interstellar civilization (humans and others) is quite literally falling apart due to the Cutters. The novel’s point of view is almost exclusively Ursula’s; aside from the brief and revealing shifts to The Crisis Actor, we mostly stay in Ursula’s head. We don’t get a narrative from Jack, so we have these two most important characters in his life; and the way they regard and react to him, the ex-wife (human) and the current wife (AI/spaceship), makes for a fascinating engine for character development, growth and drama. Add in a constellation of secondary characters, some from Jack’s life, some from Ursula’s, mix well, and you have an engaging cast for the end of the world.

I want to explore a little more and engage with Ursula as a character. Even with everyone dealing with the mental fallout of a world that is on the edge, Powell explores substance abuse in having Ursula be an alcoholic. That word is never used, the subject is not brought up, but the reader can see that her alcoholism is a symptom and a consequence of what she has been through. Jake, by comparison, clearly is suffering some PTSD from having been in a constant state of war for the last couple of years. This gives an interesting and sometimes disquieting angle to his relationship with The Crisis Actor.

Non-humans, especially AIs, are a feature of Powell’s work all the way back to Silversands and Ack-Ack Macaque. Powell seems very interested in including characters in his works who think close to humans, but are not quite humans, and have to engage with humans who have varying if not wrong expectations of what a non-human intelligence is or should be like. There’s a fascinating conversation in a desperate moment where Ursula orders The Crisis Actor to turn on her emotional circuits, because she’s frustrated with her overly logical intelligence. While I have enjoyed AIs of various kinds in previous works by Powell, having The Crisis Actor in this three-way relationship mess comes off as one of the most interesting instances in his oeuvre.

And the novel is populated with more non-human characters, a diverse cast across a variety of spectra. Powell effortlessly makes his books inclusive and with characters with whom a wide variety of readers can identify. While our power trio is the main focal point, I enjoyed a variety of the characters in secondary roles as well. Like our protagonists, they, too, bear the scars and costs of this grinding, implacable, genocidal war.

We are presented with a rich, interesting world. I’ve read enough of Powell to see the lines of what he likes to do, tying one or more characters very directly into his worldbuilding in a fundamental way. Having Ursula’s link to the weapon, that starts as a MacGuffin and turns out to be so much more, is our hook to really engage a character, and by extension the reader, into the fabric of the world. Revealing just what the weapon is, what it does, and how Ursula ultimately uses it is the capstone of this novel, along with some final revelations of what the actual nature of this universe, its Precursors and the antagonist Cutters really are. What Powell sets up he ultimately pays off for the reader in the denouement. I was quite satisfied with the resolutions, both of characters and overarching plots.

We get an interesting method of FTL (and not-so-FTL travel), we get lots of neat technology and weaponry from the small to the ship-sized, and we get Precursor and other alien technologies. This is a cobbled-together set of people with sometimes very ramshackle (or not very well understood) technology living on the ragged edge, trying desperately to hold off the Cutters and find the means to evacuate more people to a place hopefully out of their reach. This is a novel after the destruction of the Earth, after all. Humans (as well as other species) are raging against the dying of the light. That’s why Jake and Ursula’s efforts to try and find the weapon are at the same time a use of resources that cannot be countenanced, yet maybe the only thing that might help a few thousand more people escape. Desperate stakes, desperate hope, desperate odds. That hangs over the heads of everyone in the novel.

Precursors and their remnants are not exactly a new thing in science fiction, of course. Given the age of the universe, the idea that there have been civilizations that have risen and fallen in the big wide universe goes back to the cosmic horror of the 1920s, if not even further back. And xenoarchaeologists go hand in hand with the existence of fallen, lost civilizations. Powell’s take on xenoarchaeology, his Precursors, and the monstrous reminds me of a variety of potential inspirations and parallels, ranging from video games (the Star Control and Mass Effect series) to authors like Frederik Pohl with his Gateway series. The novel, like many that feature xenoarchaeology, does tackle and provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Future’s Edge is lean and mean, folding in high-octane action sequences with tender, intimate moments that give the characters space to grow, breathe and come to terms with each other, all with a killer high concept. The novel never flags, and just when you think that the social elements are getting long, Powell drops in an action sequence... but on the flip side, he makes sure those action sequences are not just a single straight line without healthy pauses. This is a real feature of Powell’s writing, and this novel shows him skillfully wielding his craft in a page-turning way.

This is an excellent story that gets resolved in one volume. One can imagine more adventures in this ’verse, but the story of this trio of characters and their coming together is complete. Despite the MacGuffin, the story really ends when their character arcs are resolved. I have a lot of questions about this world and its future, and I wouldn’t mind reading more from this rather ravaged setting. Future’s Edge may tell of a time after the end of the world, but it shines with hope.

Highlights:

• Strong trio of primary characters, flawed, entangled in complicated relationships, and interesting
• Engaging, deep and interesting worldbuilding
• It’s after the end of the world as we know it, no one’s fine, but we’re still raging against the dying of the light

Reference: Powell, Gareth. Future’s Edge [Titan Books, 2025].

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

¹ The book is set after the end of the world, and with the remnants of humanity trying to hold onto what cultural icons they have left, there’s a discussion in the book at one point about movies. And yes, Casablanca is one of them. Trust Powell as a writer; he knows what he’s doing.

Film Review: Flow

A breathtakingly beautiful tale about a determined cat, his idiosyncratic animal companions, and the devastating effects of a catastrophic flood on an alien world

For a short-ish animated feature that has zero dialogue, Flow is wildly entertaining. It follows a young black cat as his quiet world gets subsumed by a flood of biblical proportions. He manages to escape on a rickety sailboat that manages to pick up other animal straggler survivors, including a stiff and rigid secretary bird, a can't-be-arsed capybara, and a greedy lemur—all while avoiding the barking and chaotic pack of dogs on a rival boat.

I know, I know. This sounds silly and saccharine. I'm not one for animated movies generally or animal adventure tales specifically, but Flow is different. Granted, I'm a nautical obsessed cat-lover, so that may explain a lot. But this movie is adorable, visually stunning, and makes you think without really any exposition at all. It's quite a feat, and I'm honestly in love with it a little bit.

Who is this cat?

Our protagonist is a scruffy little black cat who spends his days romping around the forest near his home, which contains dozens of hand-carved cat statues. It's unclear if his owner is alive, dead, or missing—but something seems off, especially when the flood comes. Our cat is all cat, from his constant low meows to his slicked-back ear planes when he's scared. He's vulnerable in so many ways, not the least of which being his world invaded by ever-rising water—every cat's nightmare. But animals, even cats, are much more resourceful than we give them credit for. So yes, he learns to swim, to interact with a lemur, even steer a boat. Seriously. But more on that later.

The achingly beautiful world they inhabit

Even though it's not billed as such, this movie is essentially a mystery. What caused this flood of epic proportions? Where's the cat's owner? Why are there no humans escaping the flood? What's that dragon thing?

On the animals' voyage sailing through the diluvian world, one wonder if it's even Earth—it could be a million years in the past, or a million in the future. It could be an entirely alien world! As they sail through the remains of (presumably) human civilization, you can get really lost in your reverie.

The colorful, meditative animation makes every scene absolutely serene and gorgeous. It's like playing a cozy Nintendo Switch game for 90 minutes. It reminded me, even, of playing Stray, a recent puzzle video game where you play as an orange cat that's trying to escape a cyberpunk city inhabited by robots.

Animal fantasy that's refreshing and not cloying

Here's the thing: If this was a Disney movie, I probably wouldn't watch it. No shade to Disney movies, they're just not my thing at this point in my life (though I did love Coco). But having the animal characters be wordless makes them somehow more real, if that makes sense. They're still fantastical, in that they know how to get on boats and then take turns at the rudder, but not ridiculously so. There's no crab with a Jamaican accent singing "Kiss the Girl." And yet you're never left wondering what's happening and you're never bored.

Part of the film's success stems from how expressive the animals are—Flow excels at depicting wide-eyed terror to bemused stubbornness. It's a bit hard to explain exactly how compulsively watchable this movie is, but I assure you that it's true. There are parts where you're so worried about this little black cat that's it like if Homeward Bound was directed by the Safdie brothers.

But it's worth it.

Also, there's an amazingly wholesome trend of pets watching along with their owners right now. This is also true, I can confirm. Here's my cat, Goose, intently watching:

Baseline Score: 9/10.

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.

Book Review: Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions

Imaginative fiction, Jamaican vibes, and random musings on life create a quirky anthology of speculative fiction

In her latest science fiction anthology, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson delivers a collection of short stories from various parts of her prolific writing career. One of the stories - Jamaica Ginger - is also co-written by Nisi Shawl. The narratives range from lengthy and thoughtful social commentary to short, quirky, fever-dream musings. Each tale includes a brief opening comment from the author, giving readers a bit of context for her writing process at the time of the story’s creation. Without a clear central theme to connect the tales, we have an assemblage that is chaotic, in a good way. The collection has a range of everything from steampunk robots and cybernetics gone wrong to monster babies and world-ending plagues. The result is an eclectic rambling of Caribbean-futuristic speculative fiction served in bite-sized pieces to fit a range of moods.

Many of the stories share themes of environmental abuse, particularly as it relates to water, which becomes a recurring symbolic element across the collection. In the tales, water manifests as lethal, nurturing, mysterious, familiar, victimized, powerful, comforting, and punitive. Many of the tales are specifically or impliedly set in Jamaica. Jamaica (Xaymaca) is known as “the land of wood and water” or “the land of rivers and springs,” so the essential presence of water is a natural element of the culture and the stories. The other recurring element is the language of Jamaica. Bits of Jamaican-inspired dialect, vernacular, and slang are woven into stories of dystopian futures or mystical creatures. Despite the Jamaica focus, several of the tales are distinctly not Jamaican, including “Child Moon” and, ironically, “Jamaica Ginger.” As is the case with most anthologies, some stories stand out as particularly engaging and thought-provoking.

“Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” is set in a dystopian era where humanity is scattered across dense, stressful cities or complex floating water communities. In this future Earth, the ocean is no longer grand and beautiful but is an obstacle of dirty water caused by decades of misuse, climate change, and pollution; hence the story’s title. Jacquee is a member of a close-knit water community, but she is piloting her water vessel alone and is soon faced with unexpected danger. It’s a classic journey story with a few twists. She’s just recently undergone surgery for cybernetic implants to help her better pilot her watercraft. But her impulsive decision to leave the medical facility before fully healing leads to problems for her psyche once she’s back on the water. Jacquee’s own tragic backstory of the loss of her family parallels the Earth’s own environmental losses. Like many of the other tales, the story is threaded with references to Jamaican and Caribbean culture, particularly in the use of language. Despite its tragic elements and dystopian setting, the story is surprisingly positive and ultimately empowering, with found family and community themes that resonate.

“Inselberg” is a creepy, dark humor tale also set in a decimated future version of Jamaica. The use of a second-person narrative immediately pulls the reader in for an immersive adventure with a naïve group of tourists and their cynical local tour guide. The story migrates from humorous to disturbing as terrible occurrences befall the travelers in their degenerating journey to a destination that is not what it seems. The story ends a bit abruptly but the set-up is intriguing and the writing style is addictive.

“Child Moon” give us an eerie narrative of Amy, a mother struggling to care for her beast-like changeling infant who would rather drink blood than milk. Despite the strangeness of the creature, she and her husband are bonded to the child. However, the community avoids the family and the child in particular, fearing that the child is unnatural. Amy soon decides to take a dangerous trek into the forest to find a solution. In the preface to the story, Hopkinson describes a vision she had while flying and watching the moon hovering in a deep forested valley. The result is a gorgeously descriptive narrative in a lush, dark setting. The journey is both immersive and symbolic and the solution is unexpected.

“Jamaica Ginger” is set in a steampunk-style New Orleans where Plaquette, a Black female engineer, works for a strict employer creating robots designed to replace the Black porters who serve on the train cars. Plaquette’s own father was a porter until an ailment left him unable to work. As a result, she and her mother must come up with creative ways to keep the family going.

My favorite story in the collection is “Clap Back.” In this tale, a wealthy, popular designer creates a fabric designed to erase guilt over racism and exploitation by building in audible forgiveness messages from the low-income workers who assembled the wildly expensive clothing. The words sink into the wearer’s skin like nanites and cause the person to audibly share the implanted phrases of coerced forgiveness from the oppressed workers. Meanwhile, artist Wenda does her own manipulation of inanimate objects and uses a horrifying figurine collection of old and offensive depictions of Black people to enact her own countermessage.

In addition to the strong central stories, the anthology has several shorter pieces, many of which end in unexpected ways and don’t necessarily have a moral point or character arc. Instead, they are small explorations of imagination and emotion that feel a bit open-ended. With a range of tales from a range of time periods, Jamaica Ginger acknowledges society’s challenges and ailments and provides a provocative remedy.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Twisty, eclectic, dystopian tales
• A range of narrative intensities
• Jamaican cultural references

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

Film Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Neither brave enough nor new enough

There has always been a tension in how a particular sort of liberal-leaning-leftist viewer has perceived the character of Captain America (and I absolutely include myself in that qualification). As an American, particularly a Filipino-American, there is a part of me that has been seduced by America’s self-flattering myths, and perhaps worse, wants to be seduced. As stirring old Red Army marching songs make you want to believe in the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union and forget about the Holodomor and the Rape of Berlin (I’m reminded of what Joseph Goebbels said about Battleship Potemkin: “anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”), the best Captain America media makes you want to believe in the old pablum about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forget about the carnage in Gaza. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers certainly made you want to salute Old Glory, to believe in white America’s view of itself. He (Evans and Rogers both) is what the twentieth century would have called “All-American”—white, blonde, and wholesome. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney made Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, which attracted aplomb and controversy as he is Black. Mackie and Wilson get their first spin at the role on the big screen in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World.

This is a movie that, for better or worse, has a very defined place within the broader mythos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen people frustrated that it is in some ways a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the only time Edward Norton ever played that role. It is a film I confess to have enjoyed. The ties to that film are made very clear by virtue of the very important role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, now played by Harrison Ford in his gruff twenty-first-century demeanor. The thematic thread that connects this film and the Hulk film is that they are focused more than other MCU entries on the interaction between superheroes and the United States government. The film uses some of these connections in smart ways, but those who wanted a broader political statement will see any such statement hampered by the politics of the plot, and the politics of The Walt Disney Company.

It is Ford’s President Ross around which so much of the film’s themes rotate. He has served in a number of incidents involving superheroes and their adversaries, and he has parlayed that into a successful presidential run. As you would expect, he has skeletons in his closet that come into play over the course of the story, all running through high-level politics. He is a geopolitical hawk and a loud personality, reminiscent of a certain current occupant of the Oval Office, but compared to that one, Ross is so lucid I would pick him in a heartbeat. The film portrays him as a deeply flawed, ambitious man, obviously a climber. But it also gives him a moral core, a certain sense of decency, that he can act on when prompted enough, especially by Sam Wilson. It is there that the film becomes divisive.

Walking out of the theater and later discussing it with a friend as I drove him to a board game night, I concluded that Captain America: Brave New World is an enjoyable enough supervillain film whose politics I disagree with; my friend said that is what he expects of MCU movies, and I can’t really disagree with him. I like Sam Wilson in this role as a patriotic hero, and Ford is good as Ross. The action is well done, with appropriate weight given to punches, and there is a very good scene involving fighter jets. None of those are really the issues I have with this film. The issues come from the fact that I studied international relations in college with plans to join the US Foreign Service, until I read about the Nixon Administration’s support of the Bangladeshi Genocide so that it could keep Pakistan as an intermediary during the leadup to Nixon’s visit to China, was terrified at the prospect of becoming another Archer Blood, and then decided I couldn’t morally accept such employment.

I think this is a good time to note the presence of Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas, who has been the subject of some internet controversy. The character Ruth Bat-Seraph is a form of the comic character Sabra, who in-universe is Israeli, as is her actress. The name ‘Sabra’ refers to a prickly pear native to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, often used as an affectionately jocular autonym referring to how Israelis are said to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Certain groups on the internet find her name deeply offensive, as Sabra is also the name of one of the refugee camps (along with Shatila, which is commonly mentioned in tandem) in Lebanon, where Israeli-backed Maronite militias slaughtered innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shias (a fact that directly preceded the founding of Hezbollah) during the Israeli invasion of that country in the ’80s. The character was created two years before the massacre, so I am confident that the name is a coincidence. Its actual portrayal in the film is rather bland, frankly; anything of real interest, including the name ‘Sabra,’ is hacked off in an attempt to dodge controversy in light of the Palestinian Genocide; she is mentioned to have been born in Israel in a way that perhaps vaguely refers to the Mossad’s reputation, but I can’t really detect any commentary beyond that. I don’t view the presence of an Israeli character in itself to be offensive (much as I don’t find the presence of a Russian character, vis-à-vis the invasion of Ukraine, to be offensive in itself), but I have seen her presence brought up in broader (legitimate) critiques of how Disney relates to the Israeli government. All told, the whole thing has amounted to a tempest in a teapot.

The case of Ruth Bat-Seraph is emblematic of a broader problem with the film, going right down to its foundations. The whole plot is framed as a single bad actor within the US government exploiting the weakness of a flawed politician who nevertheless has some decency. There is never, at any point, an attempt to interrogate the structures of the American government that could make any of this story, any of these deceptions and deaths, possible. The film comes closest through the abandoned super soldier Isaiah Bradley, played by Carl Lumby and imported from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it never goes as far as it really ought to have. Such a critique would have been extremely relevant given the American-backed razing of Gaza, but there is absolutely no engagement as to why this country, founded on slavery and genocide, feels entitled to bestride the world as a colossus, murdering tens of millions without accountability. There is no attempt to see how this corrodes a nation’s morality. The first sequence of the movie is set in Mexico, and another is set in the Indian Ocean. The film is just close enough to realizing that corrosion, as Aimé Césaire so boldly put it in 1950’s Discourse on Colonialism, but the film is simply not brave enough.

That is really the core issue with the film: it is not brave enough (ironic, given its literal title), and it really doesn’t bother being new enough either. By the end of watching it, you will have spent roughly a hundred minutes with a reasonably entertaining superhero movie, which is about what I expected. The problem, ultimately, is that this movie was exactly what we expected it to be, and nothing more.

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Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Review: The Monkey

A darkly funny adaptation of the classic Stephen King short story about a demonic toy—from the director who you brought you Longlegs

One of the all-time classic horror tropes is haunted or cursed objects—from the classic 1902 short story The Monkey's Paw to my personal favorite as a child, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps classic Say Cheese and Die.

Osgood Perkins, fresh off of last year's delightfully disturbing Longlegs, is trying his hand at the cursed object trope, and has adapted The Monkey, a classic Stephen King short story about a cymbal-clanging, demonic toy monkey that brings death wherever it goes.

His take on it, however, is less foreboding and more darkly absurd—and at times rip-roaringly funny. I say this, of course, as a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, so I realize my gallows-humor take may not be representative of the average person. I laughed A LOT throughout its tight hour-and-a-half runtime, as did most of the audience on the sneak-preview Thursday night pre-premiere showing in Atlanta.

The Monkey is not like Annabelle, which offers a different take on an evil toy, and instead is more akin to the entries in the Final Destination franchise with its shockingly horrific deaths. The story centers on two twin brothers who experience a lifetime of tragically random deaths because of the monkey's presence. Whenever its key gets wound up, within a matter of hours someone close to it will die—horribly, grotesquely, and painfully. There's not too much plot to speak of, mostly just our hero trying to stop people from turning said key.

The pleasure in watching comes from the shocking kill scenes, which are extremely creative and a master class in depicting truly messed-up ways to perish. It's gory, but in an over-the-top sort of way, like the final fight scene in Kill Bill Volume One. I never squirmed or got grossed out, and if you need recent comparison, it's got maybe 5% of the gore of The Substance, which is nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Do with this information what you will.

Overall, it's a fun ride that scratches the itch of missing spooky season. I always love a good trip up to Maine in a Stephen King adaptation, and the set and production design is fantastic. There's also some great cameos—we get brief comedic performances from Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, and Tatiana Maslany. The tone may not work for a lot of people, but folks who like their horror with their tongue planted firmly in cheek will enjoy it.

Baseline Score: 7/10.

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

Book Review: One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed

A short collection of stories in a grim and engaging world mired in perpetual war. 

Major Tzajos of Treotan is doing his grim duty in the aftermath of the war. It’s an honor, really, to find and properly dispose of dead bodies now that the war is over and conduct that harvest. Efficiency, effectiveness, and all of the marks of a well oiled machine running after the well oiled machine of war. But as Tzajos collects teleplasm (souls, if you will) from battle sites and deals with the dead, it soon becomes clear, to the reader even more than Tzajos, that this reclamation is having a rather chilling and transformative effect on the Major.

His story, and several others in his world, make up the collection One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed.

The bulk of this collection is its striking titular novella that leads off the book, so we might as well begin there. We get a deep dive and interior look at Major Tzajos, even more than he himself can comprehend, as he goes about his duty in the aftermath of the war. There is a definite creepiness as other lives, other voices, start leaking into Tzajos’ pages of his journal, and then into his actions. One could take this as a metaphor of the madness of war, and what it does to a person, even without them quite realizing it until it is too late. There is a real tragedy to Tzajos who in his lucid, normal moments, really does think that he is doing well by the army, by the people around him, and himself, even as that world inevitably crumbles around him. 

Using those intrusions really allows Mohamed to show us the horrors of war, far away from an active battlefield. Tzajos doesn’t realize and even denies what is clear to us, he is channeling the experiences of people fallen in this terrible conflict, to horror and ghastly effect. What starts off as unintended entries in his journal does not remain confined to the page. 

And there is a real set of questions of duty, privilege, honor and right action that is being explored in this novella. Tzajos thinks he is a good man, that he is doing a good thing by the exhumation and repatriation of remains and capturing the teleplasm that would otherwise go to waste. He’s a cog in a machine in eternal war, and he thinks, ultimately, that he is one of the “good ones”. Tzajos is totally a villain but not the moustache twirling kind, instead one that helps keep systems of oppression and harm running, even if they can’t see that those systems are doing that. There are far more Tzajos than moustache twirling villains in this world, and in this story, Mohamed gives us one who ultimately comes face to face with what he's doing. 

Next up is The Weight of What’s Hollow. Taya comes from a family who build gallows for executions. It’s a fascinating if ghastly business mainly because her family builds these gallows, on spec to the government, out of bones. Taya is asked to build a set for the latest victim, but the commanding Colonel wants the victim to explicitly suffer, something that goes against all of her family’s principles. But to defy the Colonel could lead to disaster. The story also has a story skeleton of the family writing down at last the details in a manual on how to build such gallows, giving the whole story a very macabre feel to an ultimately quotidian problem: To resist, or not resist, an order that will lead to cruelty?

The third story is Forsaking all Others. There is a neat thematic link here even beyond it being set in the same world. The prisoner that the Colonel wanted killed with cruelty was a deserter from the Treotan army. This story features a different deserter. Rostyn has left the army and is on the run, trying to dodge wanted posters, curious people, and much more. He gets help from Nana, who is not the innocent grandmother that she appears, as we get from her point of view her own perspective on the war and what she has done to oppose the enemy. And when the military authorities come knocking, Nana is ready. And then there is Kalek, the third person in this little drama... but to talk about Kalek, that would be telling.

The volume ends with the even more phantasmagoric The General’s Turn. We started off with strange doings with One Message Remains, the dark quotidian horror of The Weight of What's Hollow, the thematically linked and unusual Forsaking All Others. The General’s Turn brings us the story of a captive, Private Stremwynn. His choice of being caught as a war criminal and brought to this play of gears and machine is arbitrary. What is not arbitrary is that if he does not survive the night that his captors have planned (lead by the titular General), he will either hang (there’s the gallows again) or be ground by the gears. It’s a story about deaths and its aftermaths and trying to avoid a seemingly inescapable, rigged game. It’s the most surreal of the set, even more so than One Message Remains.

Overall, the stories evoke for me a feel for a world that feels not terribly far away from the world of the Palleseen in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers novels. And I want to explore for a bit what that means, because both that series and this collection are examining the same themes. What those works (particularly the second book, House of Open Wounds) and these stories really convey is the horrors of industrialized, wholesale war, but on the personal level.

War does terrible things to people in any day and age, but the mechanization of war is a new and vicious brutality. Mohamed goes for a different approach than Tchaikovsky here, though adding in the aforementioned generous elements of horror and dark fantasy that is not Tchaikovsky’s usual métier. And Mohamed’s stories don’t take place in the war itself, but the war looms over her stories like a death shroud. The war is not physically present, but it is not past, either. It's an eternal war, even if the bombs aren't being dropped on your head.

And Mohamed likes to, from all of my experience, and shown here, write at shorter lengths, to distill down her story, worldbuilding and elements into a concentrated form. While I really have a good sense of the world on a larger scale in Tchaikovsky's books, what One Message Remains offers is a darker, narrower, focused experience. We feel for the unraveling of Major Tzajos, all the way to his dark end (even if he is the villain!). We feel for Taya, asked to make a gallows that goes against all of her principles of capital punishment. We feel for Rostyn, deserting from an army, only to find out that while he can run from the war, the war will run toward him all the same. We feel for Private Stremwynn, caught in the General's ghastly auto-da-fé-like trial and display. 

Even more so than making us feel for the characters, the evocative writing of the author, the dark fantasy sliding into moments of horror, really is put on display here. From the horror of past lives intruding on the present, or the details of how to build a gallows, word choice and line by line dialogue and description shows Mohamed’s strength and skill as a writer. Her work engages even as it unnerves. 

So if one wants to go for a food metaphor, while Tchaikovsky’s Palleseen novels tackle these subjects like a large rich delicious chocolate cake... Mohamed instead goes for several high cacao percentage squares of that same chocolate. So, her work may not necessarily be for everyone, and it is intense and difficult for me to read loads of at one go. But such intensity of writing, of feeling, of evocation truly makes her work special and lasting.

In a time and world where we are dealing with grinding war and brutality in several places in the real world, One Message Remains shas us confront the costs, without ever stepping onto the pages of a literary battlefield. Thus, in the end, the stories of One Message Remains together provide an engaging and immersive set of experiences of a world where the war is always in the background, and always at your front door.

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Highlights:

• Interesting set of stories led by the titular novella
• Engages with the reader on a visceral level 
• Classic and patented Premee Mohamed touches of horror 

ReferenceL Mohamed, Premee, One Message Remains, [Psychopomp, 2025]

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

Book Review: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s ambitious new novel tackles major global issues from AI to the power of storytelling

The title alone, Death of the Author, sets up this novel to engage with how we think about authorship, readers, and the life of a story. The novel follows Zelu, a failed adjunct professor, who at her lowest moment, writes a science fiction novel. Her previous literary novel, which she had worked on for a decade, had failed to sell, but after she sends in this new novel about robots in Nigeria thriving after humanity has destroyed itself, her agent declares it will be a hit. And it is. Zelu’s life entirely changes as she is swept up in the fantastical life of a celebrity author.

Zelu’s rise to literary stardom is marked by her struggles with her family. As a girl, she fell from a tree and became paralyzed from the waist down, which impacted how her family treated her and continue to treat her as an adult. Zelu comes from a large diasporic family, with many of her siblings living successful lives in Chicago, while Zelu is, at first, the failed writer with only an MFA. As her uncle says later in the book, “You’ve been shrugging off the house they built around you since you wrote that book. […] You rewrote your narrative” (312). The more compelling part of this novel is following Zelu as she rewrites this narrative that her family and Nigerian culture has constructed around her. Even before her success as an author, she displayed a level of independence from her family by smoking weed, using autonomous driving vehicles instead of relying on the family for rides, and having an active dating life.

Braided within the story of Zelu’s family life and literary career is the novel that rockets her to stardom, Rusted Robots. This novel follows Ankara, a Hume robot who collects stories. While walking the human-less earth, Ankara learns a terrible piece of information that will lead to the destruction of the planet and must find more Humes who can help avert this destruction. During the search, Ankara becomes entangled with a NoBody, a type of AI which lives in a hive with other NoBodies. They believe they are superior to Humes and other robots who continue in a physical existence. Even so, Ankara and the NoBody named Ijele learn to work together for survival. 

Meta books like Okorafor’s novel are particularly tricky to pull off. Usually, when describing a novel within a novel where the story is a global sensation, there are two common routes: either the sensational novel is included, emphasizing the story-within-story, or it is only referenced and summarized by various characters, never giving the reader any, or very little, insight into the text. The problem with including the sensationalized story in the novel is that it has to live up to being a global sensation, which is a task for any novelist. Okorafor braids the story within a story of Rusted Robots throughout the novel, but it never caught me up as an inspiring hit. Moments of Rusted Robots were moving, funny, beautifully described, but it didn’t quite deliver the promise of the frame: that it would capture readers globally to the level of reading it over and over, obsessed with these characters, obsessed with the author. Rather, Zelu's story is more compelling and personal. Even so, Rusted Robots has a lovely meditation on the importance of story as the character Ankara collects tales and ultimately, uses fiction to help save the planet. As Ankara says: “Stories are what holds all things together” (412). 

The reference of the novel’s title promises the reader an investigation of storytelling, and the novel does deliver on some of those ideas. The title, Death of the Author, comes into play as Zelu must release her novel Rusted Robots into the hands of her readers, thus completing Roland Barthes’ maxim at the end of his essay by the same name: “We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” This release becomes particularly troublesome for Zelu when the movie adaptation is far afield of the Nigerian-based book that she produced, becoming a much more “American” version, which Zelu hates. Yet, the movie becomes incredibly popular and praised, leading to more interest in her novel via this interpretation of her work that she deems incorrect and insulting. This meditation on the struggle of being a successful SFF author captured the meta-ness the novel promises as Zelu struggles with being “canceled” and the demand for a sequel alongside the threats that come from becoming so rich so quickly. In something of an American fairytale, Zelu manages to pull herself up by her bootstraps and is richly rewarded for her hard work as a writer, with even her snotty students apologizing to her after her stardom. Of course, there are also struggles as she has negative interactions with interviewers who want to focus on her race, her disability, or her class, but these interactions and right criticisms of the media industry do not detract from Zelu’s ultimate success and wealth. 

It was refreshing to see this type of meta narrative in science fiction as opposed to the postmodern literary novel. Throughout the novel, the commentary on science fiction as a powerful tool is clear, as one character says: “[Science fiction is] about being different, seeing more, examining human nature, and imagining tomorrow” (383). To that end, parts of Zelu’s stardom story are troubling if we are to believe in the power of science fiction to imagine tomorrow. Plot points hinge on the interest and action of two rich, white men—one working in medical science and another investing in citizen space travel. The timing of this book does not lend to the positive associations these character garner from Zelu—published a few days before a “rich” white man was inaugurated for a second term as President of the U.S. and a few weeks before the richest man in the world would speak in the oval office while disassembling parts of the U.S. government. There are gestures of criticism in the novel to the fact that Zelu is accepting opportunities from these rich, white men, but I struggle to find a thoughtful examination of these moments. 

In the spirit of Barthes, the title asks the reader to separate the author’s biography from the text and reader’s interpretation (or not, if we are to interpret this novel as refuting Barthes, which there is evidence for in how closely Zelu’s life mirrors the Hume Ankara). It is important to note that Okorafor does not agree with Barthes’ theorizing and told The Bookseller: “You can’t separate the author from the work. You can’t separate it and that’s okay.” To not separate this book from the author creates a strange dissonance around the economic politics of the book, upon which much of the plot hinges. Zelu’s economic success changes her life, and she has fantastical experience after fantastical experience because she is rich. While the book gestures at the occasional critical comment of the wealthy characters, ultimately the rich white guys are good. Only in science fiction is such a world possible.

The cover of Death of the Author promises “the future of storytelling is here.” While the novel does not quite live up to the idea, this book demonstrates Okorafor’s range as an artist. The economic plotline of the novel leaves something to be desired in our current moment, but this layered text will leave interested readers with much to discuss.

Reference: Okorafor, Nnedi. Death of the Author [William Morrow, 2025].

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

Book Review: The Scourge Between Stars

You'll wish that space were a little more empty

We like to refer to the vastness of space, of space as a gulf, a maw, an expanse. All of these bring into stark relief the scale of the universe, so much bigger than anything that we can realistically comprehend on an individual level. With training, we can grok it with high level mathematics. With space so big, and with so many things unknown in it (cosmologists believe that much of the matter in the universe is not composed of atoms at all), it is logical that humanity would put scary things in it in our myths; after all that is what we have done with caves, with oceans, with jungles, with mountains. It is that urge, to fill in the scary unknown with something scary yet comprehensible is what Ness Brown’s 2023 novella The Scourge Between Stars runs on.

The plot is aboard the generation ship Calypso, one of several arks carrying what’s left of a failed extrasolar colony on its long, cold journey back to Earth; there, one can see a philosophical parallel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, a book which takes the twelve-year-old you once were who fell in love with the grandeur and majesty of science fiction and strangles them with a bedsheet. But Brown adds another element to the mix: something is aboard the Calypso, and it apparently had been on the other ships before all contact with them was lost. Your protagonist, Jacklyn Albright, is acting captain of the Calypso, is leading the effort aboard the ship to figure out what the hell is going on, and what is killing so many of her shipmates.

There is a particular cramped atmosphere to this whole story that really works. Not too long ago I read Alexei Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage, much of which is set on a similar ship. The ship in Panshin’s novel feels spartan if pleasant, at times. Not so here - the Calypso is a ship in dire straits. There are rebellions in different parts of the ship, going on to downright mutinies in parts. Things are so bad to the point that there is significant dissent as to where even this ship should go: onward to Earth, or back to their ruined colony to give that planet another go. This is not a harmonious voyage, and this is not a harmonious ship. Brown does a good job of creating a ship that feels not only lived in, but overcrowded, even with plenty of physical space. When I imagined the innards of this ship, much of which involves the passages within the walls, I visualized it as very, very dark, a sort of horror movie lighting if you will.

Jacklyn Albright is a character who will be instantly relatable to anyone who has had to juggle too much on their plate. She is in charge after her father, the previous captain, has locked himself away in his quarters and refuses to leave for any reason. She has become the apocryphal turtle on a post, and the post is the captain’s post, and she herself is wondering why she was put there. She is determined, but Brown is more than willing to show just how taxing this is on her, how much everything crashing down around her is destroying her sanity. In this regard, she is a traditional sort of horror protagonist given substantially more responsibility; one could describe her as the ‘owner’ of the house that is being haunted.

There is a major side character, by the name of Watson, who is a robot. She was created by one of the chief scientists aboard the Calypso, a cantankerous sort with many highly visible flaws and a willingness to cause mischief. What is particularly interesting about Watson is that she only recently received the programming to be able to experience human-like emotions. As anything resembling normalcy disintegrates around the human protagonists, Watson is experiencing a rapid crash-familiarization with the very concept of feeling anything. This means that she is both incredibly empathetic and surprisingly levelheaded, if a bit bewildered now and then. Watson as a character is an interesting addition to this sort of story, with a particular point of view that inflects everything towards the reader in a way that illuminates the stakes.

The only particular issue that stood out to me in the novella taken as a whole is that the ending can feel a bit too convenient, bordering on a deus ex machina. The entire plot, messy and gory as appropriate for what could be considered Alien on a generation ship is eventually wrapped up with a bow. It’s too clean, ultimately, and the major conflicts are ultimately resolved by certain things being possible that were not given nearly enough foreshadowing or at least a sense that they were possible in this particular universe. As a result the end of the book feels unearned on some level, that this ending wasn’t justified. It’s disappointing, as the rest of this book is properly harrowing as a horror story set in the gulfs of space should be.

I ultimately enjoyed The Scourge Between Stars, too clean an ending notwithstanding. One of the cover blurbs says that it could be read in a single sitting, and it would be great for someone looking for something matching that description (I confess that I intended to do so but I felt myself nodding off for non-book related reasons so I ultimately finished it at a Japanese restaurant on lunch break from work the next day). More than anything else, Ness Brown succeeds in creating a compelling unsettled feeling that never lets up until the end, which will keep the seasoned horror reader turning the pages. I think that Brown has a good career ahead of them, and I’d like to see what they can come up with. They just need to find a way to wrap up their stories better, make those endings feel a bit more earned.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Brown, Ness. The Scourge Between Stars (Tor Nightfire, 2023)

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

Nanoreviews: The Martian Contingency, Tidal Creatures

The Martian Contingency, by Mary Robinette Kowal
While getting ready to write about The Martian Contingency I listened to the Hugo, Girl pod on Red Mars, obviously, that’s a very different novel published some thirty plus years ago, and the only real point of comparison between the two novels is that they are generally about the colonization of Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel is intensely detailed (painfully so, at many times) and Mary Robinette Kowal is focused on the space science, some politics and conspiracy, and handles it all with a light and gentle touch. I bring it up because the pod made me think about the differences in how stories are told about settling Mars and what different writers choose to focus on.

The Martian Contingency is a VERY Lady Astronaut novel, which is probably a dumb thing to say given that this is the fourth Lady Astronaut novel and the third one focusing on Elma York but this is a *very* Lady Astronaut novel.

What that means is that if you’re all the way in on this series like I am, you’ll find a lot to love here. It’s familiar and comforting. If The Calculating Stars or The Fated Sky did not land for you, though, The Martian Contingency won’t change your mind. It’s more of the same as far as how Kowal tells her story and does her characterization. If you liked the first two books but struggled a bit more with The Relentless Moon because of the protagonist shift to Nicole Wargin, The Martian Contingency is right back to Elma York for everything that entails.

The plotting aspect of The Martian Contingency’s narrative is the second mission of Martian settlement and the challenges that it faces to accomplish that mission, from technical challenges to identifying and addressing an unspoken issue from the First Mars Expedition to dealing with political obstacles back on Earth despite being millions of miles away. I dig how Mary Robinette Kowal tells her stories with easy, breezy prose so this book like so many of her previous books is borderline comfort food. She’s dealing with big ideas, but because the lens she uses is with characters who could be our friends, the big ideas don’t overwhelm the book.

The Martian Contingency is aspirational science fiction and despite being set in the early 1970’s as alternate history (and even more so the farther away they get from The Meteor in The Calculating Stars) the novel very much feels like a response to America and the world today. Some aspects are handled very quietly, like Nicole Wargin being the first woman President of the United States (after her Presidential Candidate husband was killed in The Relentless Moon, which makes me wonder about the rest of *that* story), the perpetual issues with “lady” astronauts and the inherent sexism the women face, and abortion issues much more overtly in this novel. This is along with Elma York’s working her way through understanding and misunderstanding of cultural differences.

This is a generally standalone novel and I think it works as such. The only Lady Astronaut novel that isn’t is The Fated Sky and that’s because it follows immediately after The Calculating Stars and reads more of a duology as a distinct work on its own. To that point, I’d recommend starting with the Hugo Award winning The Calculating Stars. I adored that novel and it really sets everything up for this alternate history, but The Margian Contingency works without that base. This is fairly accessible science fiction for non science fiction readers and there’s a lot to like here for everyone.

Tidal Creatures, by Seanan McGuire
The third volume of Seanan McGuire’s Alchemical Journeys and quite possibly her most ambitious. Middlegame was a true showcase for what McGuire can do as a storyteller and blended more ideas together than one could reasonably expect to form into a successful and satisfying melange of awesomeness. Middlegame also set a standard for what we can expect from this series, and if Seasonal Fears didn’t quite level up to those incredible heights it was still a very good novel.

Tidal Creatures is doing something more, if potentially less successfully. It is taking those major elements from the first two books, bringing in the ideas of A. Deborah Baker’s Up and Under series a little bit more concretely, and *then* working with the idea of a murder mystery where aspects of moon gods are being killed and how that impacts the larger conflict of alchemists vs everyone and the culmination of the plans of Asphodel Baker.

I should digress for a moment. Asphodel Baker was a background character in Middlegame who wrote four Up and Under children’s books that was able to form the core magical / alchemical system that underpinned the events of Middlegame. Seanan McGuire then took that idea and *wrote* the four Up and Under novels under the pen name of A. Deborah Baker, which then referenced later events and ideas in the Alchemical Journeys series - but now McGuire is making those connections yet more explicit. Confused? It’s a lot. I don’t think you *need* all of those books and connections to appreciate Tidal Creatures, but it helps to build resonance.

The problem is that this is where it does all begin to feel like too much and it’s takes at least a third of the novel to even begin to bring it all together because that first section of Tidal Creatures is a wholly new introduction to characters and a setting that is generally unfamiliar. Hey, this is fantasy, that’s what we do but it’s a little jarring in the third book in a series where readers are once again figuring it all out AND trying to make those connections to how this relates to what has come before.

McGuire does eventually bring all of those elements together and Tidal Creatures becomes more familiar and more satisfying than readers might have expected earlier in the novel. Tidal Creatures is still a lot, but it’s a lot in a way that Seanan McGuire’s readers will appreciate. I like that I have no idea where any of this is going in the next book or two of the series (which may conclude it), not even the bare shape of it beyond the conflict with the alchemists.

Strong recommendation to NOT start here. Read Middlegame, love it, and then continue in order.

Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather, Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner. Minnesotan.

Film Review: The Gorge

What can be more romantic than jumping over the pit of hell to meet the right one?

As the old song goes:

he was a mercenary manhunter with PTSD-induced nightmares and nothing to live for
she was a trained sniper with a world distance record for the perfect shot
can I make it any more obvious?

Speed's Sandra Bullock warned us that relationships born from dangerous situations don't have the best odds, but life in this century has become a 24/7 dangerous situation, so we may as well fall in love and hope for the best. If you've been assigned by a super-secret agency to stand guard by the edge of a cursed pit full of unknown horrors, all on your own, for an entire year, and the only human being available to talk to is the other expert sharpshooter stationed in the tower at the other edge of the pit, what are you going to do? Have romantic dinner by candlelight in the evening and fire bazookas at the hungry hordes from the abyss in the morning, that's what you do.

It's nothing terribly innovative to juxtapose the blossoming of love and the ever-present specter of death, but it hits differently after a worldwide pandemic. Whether intentionally or not, The Gorge captures the feeling of isolation during quarantine, the encroaching boredom of having the same books and the same walls to look at day after day after tedious day, and the hunger for human connection that can't be fulfilled because what awaits outside is death. In those months of mandated seclusion, it truly felt like there was an all-devouring gap between us and our neighbors, and crossing that forbidden distance was always followed by a period of heightened dread: Did I get infected? In how many days will I know? Have I become a danger to others? It's a miracle to find the love of your life in such circumstances.

But there's another way of reading the themes of The Gorge, if you'll allow me a small spoiler. As our two lethal lovebirds investigate what created that rotten hellscape, they run into some wartime secrets that their respective governments have been remiss about handling. The winning parties of World War 2 have spent decades trying to keep the titular gorge from spreading its filth to the rest of the planet. It won't do to just contain this relic from Nazi times; it needs to be eliminated. As long as that threat remains, there's a sense in which World War 2 is still being fought today.

Which seems fitting for our times, when somehow, after all these years, we still have to deal with leftover Nazi garbage sprouting around us like mutant weeds. In The Gorge, the whole problem began because the winning parties (Americans, Brits and Russians) tried adopting the enemy's methods. Well, look at us now. The curse has touched us, and we were the ones who invited it in.

As combat thrillers go, some of the tension in The Gorge is lost by the audience's knowledge that both leads are professional assassins who can survive a fight with tree-themed zombies with only a few scrapes to show for it. But as a welcome tradeoff, there's an element of competence porn in the way these two quickly synergize their skills into an efficient killing team. There's no "come with me if you want to live," no unforced errors caused by panic, no one assigned to the role of damsel in distress. When they save each other's lives, it's presented as partners in battle doing their business, not as the Designated Awesome coming to the rescue of the Designated Clumsy. I was surprised by how much more I could enjoy a scene of continuous machine gunfire versus the doubleplusundead when I didn't have to worry about anyone making a rookie mistake.

While watching, I needed to remind myself that there's a level at which this type of overanalysis can kill a story, and it's evident that this movie has been a victim of that. Of course world governments would be more deeply involved in keeping the gate to hell in check. Of course such a location would be patrolled with more than just two guards. Such criticism misses the point of the story. Despite the intense barrage of popcorny action (and there's more than enough of that, with lots of chases and headshots and explosions, and a particularly nail-biting scene with a slowly ascending jeep), I find it moving that The Gorge is essentially about the life-saving choice that our historical moment needs: finding the courage to reach across the open maw of chaos to hold the hand of a loved one.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Game Review: Squirrel Stapler

I am never going to be able to look at a squirrel in the same way ever again - and there are a lot of squirrels near me

There are many squirrels in the neighborhood I grew up in and still live in. They are out and about, darting back and forth across streets, across yards, across trees. Even as a child, it would not be uncommon to see the corpse of a squirrel, its life cut short by a car, splattered across the road. As such, to teach my sister and me to be careful when crossing the street, my parents told us to “look both ways, or you’ll be squashed like a squirrel.” (every time I told my friends in college that, they looked at me like I was weird - they were correct). As such, I suspect I have a subconscious linkage between squirrels and death, which is probably why Squirrel Stapler was such an unnerving experience for me.

You start out in a cabin in the woods. You have a gun. There is a corpse near your bed, which appears to be your wife. There is a room with a refrigerator in it, as well as a dining room. On a wall, right next to the exit, is a countdown of the days until God arrives. The nature of God is never explained. You use the aforementioned gun to shoot squirrels, which you bring back to your wife. Some of the squirrels are not happy you are here and will try to kill you. There are signs that other people were in this forest at one point, but you never meet them.

So much of this game is the mood. The game explains to you how the game works - which is, by itself, a first person shooter which is not terribly complex - but not why literally anything is the way it is. You have been dropped on what may have been a desert island, if not for all the living things here, some of which want to kill you and some of which you kill with the aforementioned gun (not terribly detailed, but it could easily be a .22 like the one my father taught me to shoot with when I was about ten years old). The entire sensation is that of a deeply unpleasant isolation.

Squirrel Stapler does not merely cut you off from people, leaving you alone with animals and with what may be the divine. This game cuts you off from reality, from sense, from logic. Being a game that explains to you almost nothing, you are left to fill in the gaps with a litany of unpleasantries. The few things that are explained are done in such a way that leaves ever more questions open, gaping like a door into a haunted house. To borrow a concept from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this forest is Fisher’s ‘eerie-’ you get a feeling that something is missing among this familiar woodland, but you can’t quite say what that is. Eventually, by the end of the game, you are confronted with the fact that it is the basic condition of everyday life, or even most abnormal times in life, that is gone. In basically every second of living, you have some idea of what is going on. This game denies you that, and it gets under your skin.

Those looking for deep, complex gameplay here will be disappointed. The actual gameplay is to walk into the forest with your gun, shoot squirrels, bag the squirrels, collect items as needed, and occasionally run away from things. This is done with no music. The only sounds that accompany the proceedings are your footsteps, the skittering of squirrels, a rather quiet gun, and the occasional unexplained voice. The end result of all of this is a gaming experience that is stripped-down, minimalist, quiet, too quiet. That’s what makes this game so eerie, I think. It’s like meditating, but instead of focusing on what your mind is doing, you are focusing on all the ways your mind projects its fears, and on the whole rationality and irrationality of how you process the game, versus the sparing manner of the game’s exposition.

A similar affordance, I think, is there in the game’s graphics. They are graphics that could easily have been on the PlayStation 2, among the many games I played as a child in the 2000s on that console. I know there is a trend in indie gaming towards sparse graphics, but in this case they also emphasize the horrors. The squirrels are obviously fake, which increases the uncanny valley effect; ditto for the trees and the rest of this isolated forest. Your wife is fake. Your house is fake. God is fake. For all you know, you are fake (I am certainly fake). What remains is the fact that your fear, the meanings you concoct to rationalize what appears to be on some level noise, is very real, all too real. Your reaction is unnervingly, sometimes frustratingly real. I can vouch, as I felt almost dizzy by the end of this game.

The game is short, mercifully so, because I think a game this disturbing being longer than the ninety or so minutes I played it would border on the sadistic. It is a very good game for a single session, something short when you are in that mood. The end result is efficiency, conciseness, and an overall sensation of leanness.

Once I was talking with my sister and one of her friends about this very game, and we came to the conclusion that the horror genre of media, broadly construed, can be defined as ‘recreational bad vibes.’ That is a very good description of this game. I sometimes wonder why I let my sister talk me into playing this game, but I can’t say I regret the experience. There is something very expressionist about this game - it is about the vibe of fear, more than anything else, and it soaks you in that fear, and never lets you go until the very end, when you are called to answer for your crimes. There’s a sadism in the design that is quite compelling, in that it raises a bunch of questions and never at any point gives the player an answer for any of them, at least without raising several more questions of a similar nature. It is hands down one of the most unnerving experiences in my life. I don’t know if I can recommend it to anyone who isn’t into this sort of horror, but if you can handle it, go right ahead.

I’m still not convinced I’ll ever be able to look at a squirrel in the same way ever again.

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

Nanoreviews: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End; Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty; Stray

The G catches you up on some quality titles 

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Remaster (PS5, PC) 

I went straight into this remastered PS4 classic after finishing the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I was not disappointed. A Thief's End is considered by many to be the best entry in the series, and a fitting end to the story of Nathan Drake, treasure hunter. The remaster is superbly done, with crisp high-res graphics and subtly optimized gameplay. This one features a lot more action and a lot less stealth than Indiana Jones, and on balance I prefer stealth - but the 3rd person shooting and platforming are all well done. The story is surprisingly compelling, focusing as much on interpersonal relationships as the quest for Henry Avery's treasure. I have two complaints, though. First, whereas Indiana Jones captures the sense that you are a human being with physical limitations (which heightens tension in key moments), the action here is more like what you find in a superhero film drunk on CGI and VFX. I found that annoying and distracting. Second, there's no map! Sure the game is pretty linear, but there are more open stages - making the decision to forego a map super annoying. Rating: 8/10.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (Series X, PS5, PC)

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games of the past decade - I've played through it twice and will probably do so one more time. It's that good. Phantom Liberty is a meaty addition to the story, designed to be played about 2/3 of the way through the main story. It opens up a new section of the map, Dogtown, which is the autonomous fiefdom of a warlord and his private army. The story begins with a downed plane, carrying the President of the USA. You are contacted by a member of her inner circle to go into Dogtown to save her. But nothing - as you can imagine - is what it seems. As you progress through the storyline and its many double-crosses, Phantom Liberty poses interesting questions on the nature of consciousness in a transhuman, AI-powered social landscape. As far as expansion packs go, this one is about as good as they come - and definitely a worthwhile purchase for fans of the game. Unfortunately, it's not quite as compelling as the main questline. Rating: 8/10. 

Stray (Series X, PS5, PC)

In this one, you - a cat - become lost in an underground world populated by robots. Your journey to the surface uncovers a dark secret - as well as a message of hope. Sound enticing? That barely does the game justice. Stray is beautifully rendered, melancholic and completely absorbing. In fact, it's one of the most remarkable games I've ever played. My only complaint is that it isn't long enough. Rating: 10/10. 

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

Book Review: The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

A secondary science fictional world whose protagonist, and her world, turns on matters of justice and law

Nila is an ambitious student of law in the city of Peruma. And it is an exciting time to be a student on a track to be a full-fledged Guardian, which you might usefully think of as a neutral lawyer and advocate. Nila’s hope, given her high standing in the community of students, is to be selected for the case of the century, to be one of the twelve students chosen to argue one of the two sides of a question that could decide the future of the city. Nila is not selected for that case, but is instead asked to argue to overturn the sentence of a murder... a murder which changed the course of history a century ago.

This is the story of Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence.

The novel takes place in a rather unique setting. It is a completely mundane alternate world that nonetheless appears to be the only world. It’s not a colonized planet. It’s not the far past or far future of Earth. And yet it is a world that has no magic or even the hint or trappings of a fantasy setting, either. It’s just an alternate cradle of humanity, from all the textual evidence.

That said, the history of this world reflects, refracts and rhymes with our own. It takes place on a subcontinent with a number of city states besides Peruma, where all the action takes place. Peruma, once upon a time, was an imperial power and dominated the entire subcontinent before a world with technology slightly ahead of ours. A revolution in the imperial capital, freedom for the other cities, and war left them with a subcontinent of competing and jockeying city states, high in technology. Given the names of the other cities (Chemur, Monara, Lubini, Jharna and Sampi), and other worldbuilding we get, this all gives the subcontinent that Peruma sits on a very Indian flavor. However, this appears to have been a homegrown empire rather than one imposed from without—much more like the Chola empire, rather than the Mughals or the British.

The empire, however, is four centuries in the past (this is the kind of novel that has a timeline up front). After the fall of the empire, the city of Peruma turned into a mercantile republic (republic in theory, anyway) wracked by revolts from the lower classes. Finally, a hundred years ago, Purul, the head of the republic, the Director, had a lethal confrontation with a worker, Jagat R., leading to a revolution within the city and its division into two halves. Jagat R. was found guilty, but in a world where the death penalty had been abandoned, he was instead put into cryosleep.

A hundred years later, it is Jagat R.’s sentence of murder that our protagonist, Nila, is asked to reopen and overturn, rather than what she really wanted: joining the “case of the century”, which is an examination of the treaty signed at the end of that same revolution.

And thus our plot is up and running.

So, while the ostensible plot is Nila trying to work on what is seemingly an open and shut murder case from a century ago, and one that literally is seen to have changed history, the novel is really about the sociological and legal questions that the author poses in the narrative. The Sentence itself, the cryosleep that in a real sense is almost always just a slow-motion death penalty (after about 100 years, someone put into cryosleep cannot be revived) is just one of the base questions. Questions of justice, due process, and equity in sentencing and representation (the Guardians are a fascinating legal idea) are part of the pie.

Even bigger are the sociological and political questions that the novel raises. I didn’t mention that when half of the city broke away from the other after the assassination, that lower city’s revolution took its form of government in a radical direction that went all the way to an anarchic commune. A century later, it is mostly following the precepts of its own revolution, but the upper city still holds a strong hand, and would definitely want to reintegrate it back into its political control. What is more, the commune’s future is already at stake. Someone upsetting the applecart of the fact of a lower city martyr, Jagat R., assassinating the Director could be at best a destabilizing force on its very existence.

And did I mention that Nila’s mother is an important member of the commune?

So The Sentence is The Paper Chase by way of the Paris Commune, set in a secondary science fiction world loosely based on the Indian subcontinent, with aircars, cryosleep, and a few other twenty-minutes-into-the-future-level technologies. It’s a legal thriller, certainly, but even more it is a sociological and societal thriller that poses some not-easily-answered questions about justice, society, government, and the role of personal responsibility to all three.

It makes the book hard to judge with its peers in the SFF community because it takes several uncommon subgenres (a legal thriller, a sociological piece, and a de novo secondary world unconnected even by hint to our own) and alloys them all together. There is definitely DNA of LeGuin here, but the deep study and appreciation and concern over the ideas and use of anarchism are far rarer in science fiction outside of LeGuin, and perhaps Doctorow and to an extent MacLeod, and given the author’s setup here, The Sentence is much more in dialogue with things like The Dispossessed than anything else in terms of the anarchism (which does really feel like the beating heart of the book) but combined with the legal aspects and the sociology of the entire world), and it really is boldly striding into uncharted territory.

How it gets into that territory is, of course, the proof in the pudding. The book is written cleanly, strongly and crisply, but with a lot of overt worldbuilding, necessary because of the nature of the setting (I mentioned the timeline before as just one example). The writing is thus rich with details of all kinds. One particular highlight is Unclean Hands, which is a fictional play that turns into a touchstone for Nila and other characters. It might be inspired by the real Dirty Hands by Sartre, but the two are clearly different.

Another interesting highlight is the historical attitude and viewpoint of this society and it frames itself within it. The society has a theory of history that works on points of potential divergence, where the course of history was shaped, called Inflection Points. The entire society agrees that this is the standard model of how history is currently interpreted, looked at, discussed and debated. The assassination of the Director a century ago is seen as the Fourth Inflection Point in the post-imperial era, and everyone seems convinced that the 100th anniversary of that assassination and the debate between the halves of the city is destined to naturally be the Fifth Inflection Point. And that is even before it is revealed that Nila is going to try and reopen the case of the murder of the Director by Jagat R.

Although the politics are extremely different, the only other recent work that really compares to The Sentence is The Broken Trust (Mazes of Power) series by Juliette Wade. That too takes place in a society that is not our own, and explores some thorny questions about sociology and anthropology as well.

While there is intrigue, and some action sequences intended to dissuade Nila from handling the case get more and more overt and dangerous, the real heart of the book is, in fact, Nila’s heart. She is faced with some very difficult decisions, morally, ethically and personally in the course of her legal investigation, with implications for the city, for society, and most importantly, the author points out, her own soul. It makes The Sentence fascinating reading, and as of the writing of this review, frustratingly only published in India. This seems to be a wasted opportunity by UK and US publishers. The Sentence is the type of science fiction that demands a much wider audience.

Highlights:

• A world not our own, with thorny and interesting sociological questions
• Strong legal framework and centrality to society and main character
• A book that will remain with you long after you read it

Reference: Bhatia, Gautam. The Sentence [Westland IF, 2025].

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