Anime Review: Solo Leveling

Video game vibes, simplistic plot, addictive action.

With all of the hype and publicity surrounding Solo Leveling, you might expect a show with deep, meaningful character exploration, complex drama, and a thoughtfully created cast of fascinating allies and enemies. But that is not the case. Solo Leveling is a story of a person who undergoes a transformation from being weak to reawakening a powerful new version of himself, one that continues to grow stronger as the story progresses. However, both the protagonist and the side characters have very limited backstories—in most cases just enough to identify them. Compared to highly popular cerebral dramas like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and The Apothecary Diaries, it’s interesting to see a series like Solo Leveling with very linear plotting and minimal introspection being nominated for Anime of the Year. But Solo Leveling succeeds by unapologetically leaning into what it does best: action. 

Solo Leveling is an anime based on the Korean manhwa of the same name. It’s set in a near future version of Korea where trans-dimensional portals appear randomly in urban places. Hunters are magic-equipped people who are trained to enter the portals (referred to as dungeons), kill the creatures inside, and take as much of the treasure/gems piled inside as they can. Once the key creature/demon is killed, the portal will close and life in the neighborhood can return to normal. The dungeons are ranked based on the danger inside and the hunters are ranked based on their strength. Sung Jinwoo is a comparatively weak, kind-hearted but naïve, bottom-ranked hunter who does dangerous dungeon hunting work to earn money to take care of his teenaged younger sister. Their father is absent and their mother has been in a coma for the last few years. In the opening episode, Jinwoo joins an ill-fated hunter team for a low-ranked dungeon. However, the dungeon turns out to be far more dangerous than expected and, after a lethal injury, Jinwoo is reborn with new and growing magical powers. The series is about him secretly getting stronger under the guidance of a videogame-style message screen that only he can see. He later connects with a rich corporate playboy, Yoo Jin Ho, who want to prove himself as a hunter. Jin Ho pays the expenses of the dungeon raiding so that he can work with Jinwoo as he continues to get stronger. Jinwoo is motivated to progress in the game system to earn an elixir that will revive his mother. He eventually becomes a necromancer who can revive and control creatures and warriors he has killed in battle. 

Over time, his appearance changes. His height increases, he is more well-built, his voice gets deeper, and even his face changes, becoming more angular. Despite the initial uneven pacing of the early episodes, the show gains momentum as Jinwoo gets stronger and less fearful. As he changes physically, he also becomes more stoic, cynical, and cold. He has no deep friendships or bitter rivalries. There is no romance (in the first two seasons) and, unlike many anime, there is no significant social commentary, cleverness, or even much emotional depth. With a few exceptions, the appeal of the show lies primarily in the addictiveness of the escalating adventures. In the second season, an elite team of hunters is introduced. They provide some much needed character interest for the series. The second season drops hints about Jinwoo’s long lost father and about the mystery of why Jinwoo is able to become as strong as he is. 

The process of dungeon raiding is an interesting concept with the hunters basically walking in, killing the residents and stealing their property. No one really attempts to engage with those living in the portal spaces and no one has any moral hesitation about colonizing their property. There is no attempt at diplomacy or compromise since the creatures are alien and different. Even when the residents are humanoid and conversant, they are still mostly dismissed and disrespected. The show is designed with a video game aesthetic allowing it to ignore those kinds of real-world moral scruples. Later in the story the plot shifts to an island overrun with giant flying ants. We also get a culture clash between the Japanese hunters and the Korean hunters with the Japanese characters portrayed as arrogant, angry, and egotistical. It’s an interesting cultural shift from the usual anime paradigm. 

For Jinwoo, every new obstacle becomes a stepping stone to bring him to a higher level and, since he knows this, he remains calm and motivated by challenges rather than fearful. His ability to align everyone he has beaten to his service makes him seem almost invincible. As a result, this is a series which is better enjoyed stacked up and binged. The appeal of the narrative lies in the bingeworthy fun of watching him calmly become wildly stronger in each episode. However, the single minded pragmatism and nonstop action make the occasional thoughtful and affecting moments stand out. In the second season we get one episode of him becoming truly emotional in a tear-jerker scene. In a later episode, we see him help one hunter team deal with the loss of a beloved colleague. Those moments stand out as deep connections in journey of otherwise stoic power. 

While recent seasons of other popular anime have been filled with thoughtful, cerebral, or emotional storylines, Solo Leveling gives us a straightforward, reliable, and ultimately kind, action hero experiencing an increasingly exciting adventure. An outrageously strong character doing outrageously strong feats in the face of outrageously devastating odds feels strangely cathartic. And, that makes the show enjoyable, even for those of us who prefer deeper character explorations.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Escalating, addicting action
• Linear, video game storytelling
• Outstanding animation balances limited character explorations

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

Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

 A very British, very brutal take on dark academia that takes it back to its more critical roots.

Caveat: this review was written in October 2024, and I believe before the final editing pass. I doubt it will make an actual difference to anything, but just in case.

So… dark academia. Where to start with it? At the beginning, I suppose.

I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in a good number of years now, but I remember loving it. It’s dark in the truest sense, complex, vicious and incredibly cutting about institutions, class, power and hierarchy. This is dark academia as a tool for critiquing the setting, although, as with all satire, there were inevitably people who missed the point, even when it came out.

Cards on the table – I went to the University of Cambridge, where I studied classics. My background was not wealthy, though I had some advantages that helped me on the route to university, but there was enough in the perspective of The Secret History’s protagonist that felt real and personal to me, that I was always either going to love or loathe it. For all that my university experience was pretty positive, there was enough in what I saw that connected to what Tartt discusses, what she critiques, that the book made a special little place in my heart right from the off. If this is where dark academia had stayed, this thoughtful place that understood and heavily satirised the trappings of power, privilege and education, and what they mean for the lives of the people in the system, what they mean for aspirations, and how class is so deeply interwoven through all of it, it would have been a damn good subgenre.

Alas, much of modern dark academia feels more about style than substance – it’s the allure of the tweed jacket and the terrible teens swapping Shakespeare quotes because they’re just better than everyone else, and the feeling of being part of that crowd because you, the reader, by dint of reading this sort of book, are also better than everyone else, and part of this special intellectual club. The extent to which the point is being missed is frankly astounding.

The new novel from Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, is also billed as dark academia in much of the marketing, but where many of the more recent entries have strayed from its origins, here, Tesh has dug both hands deep into the thorniest parts of what Tartt was getting at and yanked. The Secret History is a fundamentally American story, and this… this is a deeply, deeply English one. It is so utterly suffused with English notions of class, education, history and legacy, I almost wonder how some of it made it through the US editors. This is a story that includes a specific song sung at the University of Cambridge about how we’d rather go to Oxford, our longstanding historical nemesis, than one of the colleges of Cambridge, St. John’s*. Why John’s is loathed is a matter long lost in the annals of history, but knowing the song is one of the many shibboleths of Oxbridge culture, another way of saying “here I am, I know the secret knowledge, I am one of us”. Wait… I swear we were just talking about exactly that…

Set in a posh English boarding school that offers, among the usual curriculum, lessons in the three modern branches of magic, The Incandescent follows the long-suffering Dr. Walden, director of magic, deputy head, and person responsible for much of the smooth running of the school. Walden, alumna of the school, Oxford graduate, PhD and one of the best magicians of her age, is a complex figure with her roots deep into the various education systems of England and beyond. She’s well placed to charm and soothe the wealthy parents of her privileged pupils, as well as to advocate for those few whose places at the school are charity rather than spending, those whose magic is so strong they have to be somewhere where they can be trained into safety.

Already, we have a point of difference – where many of the novels in dark academia follow the young, teenagers, university students, Walden is 37, jaded and somewhat tired. She looks on her young charges with a great deal of fondness, but also a healthy dose of exasperation – she does not take teenagehood and its tribulations as seriously as teens do, because she’s been there, done that, and seen a number of years of them come up under her tuition. This is academia with an already weathered eye, an awareness that none of it is truly that special, all things come around again and again.

Particularly, what comes around again here is a longstanding threat to the school from a demon that lives just on the other side of the borderline of reality, known affectionately as Old Faithful. Incursions have happened throughout the years, with disastrous consequences, and things seem poised for another one under Walden’s watchful gazy. That alone might be the story of some novels – a looming threat, a skilled guardian with the right companions, putting down the big bad once and for all. But Tesh takes it in a rather different direction – the enemy here is a subtler one, and the true problems the characters face do not fully realise until much later on.

If you’ve read Some Desperate Glory, her Hugo winning novel, you’ll know Tesh isn’t averse to changing the rules of the game late on. The effect here is rather subtler, but has some markings of the same hand at work in it – we learn enough about the system, the parameters of the story to start to feel comfortable, and then we learn that actually, we’ve been focussing on the wrong things entirely. Time to pivot and reassess our view, and re-examine the knowledge the book has given us.

That moment, that pivot, is key to the success of both books. Though they focus on rather different issues at play, both are stories that want the reader to really interrogate the systems at work in their worlds, and do so by forcing them out of complacency. They let you think you know what this is, that you know the rules, and then boom, no you don’t. In that moment of uncertainty, you have to think about what the story’s doing. You are forced to do the work, and to look under the rug at what might be lurking, unexamined.

The answer, in The Incadescent, is a complex cocktail of privilege and class, a dash of very British racism, and the long, rotten tail of tradition and legacy that seems like an unavoidable mould upon educational institutions. It’s there right from the start, but it’s only once the story lurches that you truly confront it in all its nastiness.

And, following on from that, I felt likewise drawn into an interrogation of both the dark academia novel and its longstanding cousin, the school story. Before Harry Potter seized the cultural attention, there were plenty of others, including plenty of magical ones – I have fond memories of watching The Worst Witch, and though I never read the books, there were many who did. They too are full of children who are in some way Special. Sometimes they are special because of their magic, but many of them are also from longstanding families, wealthy, with societal cache and legacies running deep into the past, alumnae of the institutions that the current crop of children attend. Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley were not innovations, and owe their debts to many a character before them.

It is easy, especially as a child, not to look too closely at this idea of specialness, of this small, select, often secret group of people, being taught things normal people aren’t allowed to or cannot know. The idea that they’re better always floats just below the surface.

Tesh confronts that. The story examines the rot in the system, while acknowledging the good – there’s always something good or wanted in there, at least for someone, else the system never would have ended up perpetuated – and forcing the reader to confront all the nasty foundations upon which these stories are built. Here, the privilege is obvious – that this is a posh boarding school, with all the attendant issues, is front and centre, returned to again and again. You cannot forget it, nor can you forget the position that puts some of the students in.

On the one hand, you have a ward of the school, a magical prodigy, whose talents likely caused the death of her parents at a young age. Black, not well-off and alone in the world. The school, the lessons to help her control the magic that brought her to the attention of the authorities, are her world, but she is a step apart from so many of her fellows. She knows this – it’s acknowledged in conversations with Walden, her hesitance about her place in the world going forwards.

And then in contrast, a legacy boy. He has talent, yes, but also charm, and both make him lazy. He is someone for whom the world lines itself up nicely, smooths the path, whether because of money, connections, or simply the confidence of coming from that sort of background. Critically, his charm is palpable to the reader. Walden doesn’t hate him – though she acknowledges as an adult she might find him insufferable (we’ll come back to this in a moment) – and I found I never could. He genuinely is charming, as many people in his sort of situation are. The contrast between these two, as well as their interplay with their teachers, the school,  and their classmates is a well balanced look at how education systems perpetuate the existing inequalities of English society, locking into place the old class and money hierarchies that stretch back deep into history.

I say English, not British, because I think a lot of what this book does is rooted in a particularly English sort of superiority complex. Which isn’t to say equivalents or similar versions aren’t available across the UK, but just that the one this particularly focuses on is a particularly subset of the type.

But it’s not all about the kids. Because we have Walden as our main viewpoint character, we have access to a world within the school outside of the sphere of interest and influence of the children. This is a book about teaching, about the various structures around keeping a school of this sort going, as much as it is about all the rest. But it also means we have access to adult relationships. While not dispassionate ones, there’s something so much more alluring about the interpersonal stuff – romantic and otherwise – of a 37 year old than the high drama ones more likely in books with teenage protagonists. 37 year olds just do relationships differently to teens. The priorities, the focus, the modes of interaction are just a whole other thing.

This, too, is something the book does fantastically. We see Walden interacting with various members of staff – we get her friendships, her rivalries, her flirtations, and indeed her romances. We see her as a whole, rounded person, someone who had a life before the story began, with people in it. Where teens can feel a fresh slate, ready to make the relationships that will kickstart them into the world, Walden is someone with failures behind her, someone who has loved, lost and learned. It makes her jaded, but it also makes her so, so interesting to read, and so very human.

She also has relatably tragic taste in men (and very acceptable taste in women).

Good bi rep in a non-romance book is a rare and wondrous thing. Good bi rep that acknowledges compulsory heterosexuality and that bi women can be totally ok with being attracted to men, and not just diet lesbians with bad habits? Chef’s kiss.

Because, coming back to the charming boy – there is an adult version of him in the story. He is bad news. Walden knows he’s terrible. But he is, also… well, he’s charming. He’s charming in a way that is so palpable on the page. I got it. I didn’t blame her. And while this is great for bi rep in general, it swings us right back to those points about privilege and power and charm. This is what the adult product of that upbringing looks like. He moves so easily through the world, and some of us even like him, while knowing what he is, where he’s come from.

Dark academia works because there is an undeniable allure to some of what those broken systems create. Not for everyone, of course. Some people will inevitably see right through the charming man and send him on his way. But some people will… I don’t want to say “fall for it”, because you can do it with eyes open too. You can see the smiling face of all that corruption and kiss it anyway, knowing what’s underneath, because it is a good smile, and it is a remarkably good kisser and well… it’s just a kiss, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s only… it’s just…

And so the system has you too.

Tesh’s characters here are never just characters. They are so totally embedded in their places in the world, that every interaction is laden down with meaning. The hot man is never just a cigar.

When I stop to think about this book, I inevitably circle back, again and again, to class. People joke that British people see the whole world through its lens, and at least speaking for myself, I cannot deny it. And as an SFF reader in the current environment, where so much is dominated by US-authored stories, it’s not something I see in fiction as much or in the same way as I experience it in the world around me. It makes me hungry for stories that acknowledge this scaffolding that sits around a large part of my worldview. It sometimes exasperates me when stories don’t recognise it, especially stories set in the UK, or places that feel like the UK, or when they fail to convey its nuances. It isn’t the only lens – gender, race and sexuality too have their parts to play – but to cut it out of the story fails to capture the world. So when we come to a genre like dark academia, one so steeped in all the trappings that for me, an English person, are laced with class markers… to have it missing? That’s half the story untold.

Tesh does not leave that half untold. It is there, written large, in every word on every page. This is a story that understands how class is the underpinning, the bedrock, upon which these sorts of institutions thrive and survive. Money is important, but class is everything. Even the people who think they know better cannot escape it.

And it is precisely that awareness, and the very evident flawed immersion in exactly that environment, that makes the protagonist and the story work so, so well. If The Incandescent is dark academia, it is an entry into the genre that knows its roots, and chooses to take that original sense of knowing critique, of the view of the rot that you can only get from right in the very innards of the beast. It acknowledges the allure, the good, the draws – Walden, whatever else she is, is a dedicated, passionate educator committed to her students and the subject she teaches them, and one who loves the place she first came to her passion – it understands why we would kiss the charming man. But it tells us, in the end, that the rot is there under the smile, and that it cannot be ignored.

* Sung to the tune of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain”, it runs thus:

“Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford than St. John’s”.
Truly, an artwork for the ages.

--

The Math

Highlights: a very British criticism of class, dark academia with teeth and claws intact, top tier bi rep

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, [Tordotcom, 2025].

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

Rebellions are Built on Hope: Andor S2E1

As some of you know, I’m a big Andor fan, have reviewed season one, written about the show, and have a Cassian quote tattooed on my arm. With season two premiering, I wanted to take a closer look at each episode and some of the politics and modes of resistance—and just plain great storytelling. 

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reviewing each episode. Disney has chosen to release the twelve episodes in four chunks, but I’ve decided to slow down and give each episode it’s due. As I’ve rewatched season one, I continue to be surprised by the nuance of the show, and I’m hoping the same for season two (and so far, it hasn’t disappointed!). I’ll be writing these reviews with the assumption readers have watched season one and watched the episode, so I won’t be tagging spoilers. As readers of my previous Andor content will know, one of my major fascinations with the series is the anti-fascist aspect of the storytelling, so these pieces will lean in that direction. On to season two!

The first episode is titled “One Year Later,” and much like the description, the episode sets up a lot of plot lines: “An undercover mission. A sanctuary threatened. A Chandrilan wedding. A chilling imperial plan.” The hour-long episode sets up these four plotlines, which seem to have a rotating centrality to the season as a whole. 

The episode opens with Niya (Rachelle Diedericks), helping Cassian Andor (with continued excellent acting by Diego Luna) steal an experimental TIE fighter model. She’s new to helping the rebellion, and she’s nervous. Part of this scene shows how Cassian has changed over the past year since he fled the planet Ferrix with his friends Brasso (Joplin Sibtain), Bix (Adria Arjona), and Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier). Cassian has come into his own and presents a level of leadership more reminiscent of the Cassian Andor from Rogue One. When comforting Niya, we get one of those great, inspiring Andor moments: “The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself.” 

This moment builds to Cassian confidently entering the TIE fighter, starting it, and—absolutely messing up. Even though his prominence as a pilot was a major point of season one, he cannot figure out how to fly the fighter, and his quiet exit becomes a serious action sequence before he finally escape. But this escape is only the beginning of his problems. 

Enter the Maya Pei. When Cassian lands to meet his Rebellion contact, a group of guerrilla fighters capture him instead. He realizes they are the Maya Pei, a group that the Rebellion has even supported in the past, but they refuse to believe he isn’t what he looks like—an Imperial pilot. The Maya Pei are clearly part of the rebellion in terms of their hatred of the Empire, but they seem totally inept and infighting quickly divides the group.

In episode one, Cassian’s storyline is the least political, but also the most fascinating as it seems off kilter to the seriousness of the other plotlines. The Maya Pei are hilariously bad at being guerrilla fighters. Right now, their depiction lacks some nuance since guerrilla warfare has been very successful against many authoritarian regimes, so this clownish depiction seems at odds with the serious and thoughtful analysis of empire and revolt of the previous season. I currently have two ideas. First, I think the Maya Pei will return in the season to bring some of that nuance. Second, this season seems to be speaking to the problems of leftist responses to empire, especially the early stages of rebellion (which may feel familiar to U.S. viewers). I’m curious how this thread will continue or not. 

Turning to the other three storylines, the Empire’s plotline held the most fascination for me. I loved how Andor season one made the Empire feel like an empire down to making it clear the people who support it are just weird, dangerous, isolated people (like all Fascists are). The Empire in Andor is rarely, if ever, cool but rather banal and bureaucratic, which doesn't mean they aren't dangerous. Dedra Meero (with an amazing performance by Denise Gough) is invited to join a top secret project led by Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). I assumed Krennic would be a much later reveal as a major returning character from Rogue One, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him revealed in episode one. 

The imperial project is a mining operation on the planet Ghorman. The Ghorman people are set up as a somewhat powerful entity—at least one that won’t go quietly—and in order to be able to mine the planet, they will have to be subdued. The Empire has already worked to undermine the Ghorman reputation through propaganda. In a move that feels so relevant to the social media misinformation of today, two hired propagandists explain how certain stereotypes of the Ghorman people were started by their propaganda.

This chilling boardroom sequence discussing how the Empire intends to destroy a people, culture, and planet for a mining operation felt particularly poignant when paralleled with the third storyline—visas. While Cassian is running missions for the Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), his Rebellion contact from season one, his friends Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon are living as undocumented agricultural workers on Mina-Rau. Over the past year, they’ve settled in, with Brasso in a long-term relationship with a citizen and Wilmon dating a citizen, which is causing problems with her parents because he doesn’t have a visa. 

In the U.S., it’s impossible not to feel the poignancy of one of our most popular franchises showing the struggles of undocumented people. This moment is paralleled with the boardroom scene as Krennic and other members of the fascist Empire work to dispossess another people of their planet, thus turning them into refugees—if they survive. 

Much like season one, the first episode of season two is a slow burn (though the next two episodes build quickly). Yet, these four storylines (I’ll talk about Mon Mothma and Chandril in the next episode review), set up the gritty realism of a fascist Empire—and the real fight against it—that I have come to expect in Andor. 

As such a big fan of the first season, I was deeply worried about season two. Writer Tony Gilroy could still disappoint, but I, once again, feel like I’m in careful hands. 

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

Review: The Book of Gold by Ruth Frances Long

 The Book of Gold by Ruth Frances Long starts off as seemingly a simple heist novel that evolves into something more complex, especially theologically.

Lyta Cornellis is a thief, and a good one. She loves a good score as much as she loves her younger brother Kit. Kit is a printer and publisher, a new and expanding business in the city of Ambres, hub of commerce in an alternate 16th century Europe.Various powers are always lurking, from the King of Castile, Aragon and Leon to the dread Duchess of Montenbleau. So when Kit is arrested for printing a pamphlet that is declared treasonous, Lyta has to save him. To do so, she makes a deal with the king to steal a magical book from an impregnable fortress. But even with a small god on her side, she is going to need help with her biggest heist yet.

This is the beginning of the story of The Book of Gold, by Ruth Frances Long.

The novel features an interesting set of characters whose alignments, relationships, agreements and more feel three-dimensional.  Lyta is our primary point of view. She runs by her skills, her devotion to the small god Eninn, and her love for her brother.  Also, the knowledge that her husband has been long lost to the very fortress she agreed to break into. We slowly peel back and learn more about her backstory as the novel progresses, further deepening our understanding of how she, and Kit, got to where they are.  Kit, who is also a major point of view, is idealistic and somewhat oblivious to what the power of his printing profession really is.  Add in Sylvian, now the King’s loyal guard, but was Lyta’s first love. Finally, there is Ben, a very noted scholar,  who is needed for the book heist, and has secrets and power of his own.  

The worldbuilding for the most part is fascinating, although a couple of things irked me that I will leave for a footnote because I don’t want to totally detail the review with them.¹.  Ambres is a cognate of 16th century Antwerp, an entrepot if there ever was an entrepot. This is the high age of the low countries mercantile influence, while still being under the control of Spain (here Castile and Leon and Aragon). Power, money and influence pour through the city. Oh, and did I mention the Church Imperial is also potent and has interests and influence here? Add in the paradigm-shattering effects of the early days of the printing press and you can see why Long chose this location to build her not-quite-our Europe and her city of Ambres for the action to take place. This is a book for those who like this sort of historical fantasy, with a lot of period detail particularly on printing and publishing along with the thievery and other hijinks.

The novel is very well paced, with good mixtures of action beats as well as character moments. As a result, Long’s book is extremely readable and goes down easy. The set-piece of the break into the Fortress, with its successes and reversals, is the highlight of the book, but the novel begins with a bang with a heist at a party. The novel as a result is lean and well paced.

So, instead, I want to talk at length now about what I really want to get into in this piece. Not just about The Book of Gold, but its place in terms of its theological fantastical context. The theological setup in Long’s world is of a cognate of the Catholic Church, the Church Imperial. Their stamping out of heresy is not of Calvinists and Lutherans, but rather the older Gods who have been stamped out and suppressed with the rise of the God-Emperor. Long here has merged the idea of the divine Emperor of Rome with the Holy Roman Emperor and made him an off-screen living God. His goal is to be the *one* God and to wipe out the rest, and the efforts of his minions and servants plays a large part of the book.

Thus, as I was reading this, a sheaf of connections came to mind. There seems to be a small cluster of books interested in a spectrum of Gods, some or all of which are under siege or threat.  Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller comes to mind, where small Gods are being hunted by characters such as our titular main character Kissen. Ari Marmell’s Widdershins novels, where she is the sole devotee of a small God. The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson has a set of eight Gods, the Raven being the most seen and active among them, but again, their power and controlling them comes into play. And of course, the Tyrant Philosophers series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.²

All of these works, from Long’s to Tchaikovsky's are interested in the use of theological power of the Gods and how it might be captured, transformed, diffused by man. Gods are not dead in these works, but they certainly are being harnessed, diminished, destroyed or transmogrified at the hands of power-hungry humans. The tyranny of this is consistent, throughout. It is often portrayed as being for the good of everyone, or the good of society, but in the end, it is a road to power, by either removing a rival source, or absorbing that power directly. 

Whatever the portrayal, in the end it is definitely a loss of theological diversity, something that Long’s book and the Tyrant Philosophers novels by Tchaikovsky make absolutely clear. One belief system, one mode of thought, one correct way to mold society. Like any monocultures, though, they are almost always inherently bad and the drive for one distorts and hurts people and society. 

But why is this suddenly a popular topic? Why in this secular age is there a series of novels and stories like this. This crop of limited theologically oriented beings, whose power is sought to be extinguished, or bound or even just drained by larger entities?  Is this all a subconscious metaphor for small companies being eaten up by billionaires and entities like Meta and Amazon? Is it a metaphor or allusion to the rise of fascist-curious or fascist regimes, who reach for power and extinguish dissent, different thinking and rival power centers? Is this some Nietscheian reaction to lots of fantasy novels with Gods and Goddesses running around doing things with and to mortals and against each other? Or is this an echo of superhero novels and stories and movies, which have made up so much of our zeitgeist, which are of course all about ordinary people gaining powers formerly attributable to Gods? 

In The Book of Gold, we get to see a number of these entities, revealed slowly as the perspective and tone of the book goes from simple heist to theological conflict. Eninn, a god of tricksters and thieves, is the first and primary one we meet. He’s small, doesn’t apparently do much, but can escape the grasp of those who might bind him, and he has Lyta as a loyal follower. He corresponds very well with the Fox in The Raven Scholar.  More of these are revealed as the novel progresses. Kyron,a god of soldiers. Ystara, a goddess of love. The aforementioned living God-Emperor himself, too, with his dread plans.  And it makes sense that Ambres, trading and mercantile hub, would have these powers arranged and interested in it. The author’s love of the space and place of 16th century Antwerp really comes through, and it makes sense that this is where Godly powers might come...and might be caught and captured thereby. Or, when the Gods have power, anoint or expouse champions of their interests, either unofficially or officially. There are some nice reveals and power plays that occur in the denouement of the book.

There are also hints of darker, older deities as well afoot. For all of its power, the Church Imperial has made great strides over a millennium but has not extinguished, cowed or bound all of the deities out there. It gives the theocratic landscape of Amberes much more of an late antiquity/early medieval Catholic Church feel.³ 

There are a lot of potential rabbit holes one might go down in this book besides the theological one I just did. The role of the early printing press and the focus on books as treasured items, for example. Or you might focus on the romance dynamics in the interplay of characters (there are past and present romances, heterosexual and queer, and Long makes good use of all of them for character and plot development). And other angles to explore as well. It’s a rich quasi-historical fantasy with a lot to offer a reader interested in these sorts of worlds just next door. 

Highlights:

• Engaging and dynamic inspiration (16th c. Antwerp) used for her fantasy setting

• Strong use of romance and characterization among the protagonists

• Intriguing theological models and Gods. 

Reference: Long, Ruth Frances,  The Book of Gold [Hodderscape, 2024].

¹ Okay, so here we go. So the inconsistency of names of polities and locations irks me. There is a Castile, a Leon, an Aragon, That’s the parts and titles for the rulers of Spain, that’s easy. That’s right from our world. But then why rename England as Albion? And someplace in Scandinavia gets renamed as the Kingdom of Geatland? The use of Brabatine to identify the Spanish Netherlands, where the story takes place, is also a piece of this. It’s not quite wrong, but its not quite our history’s name, either. And there are references to Caput Mundi, which given that is the city of the Church, must be Rome. But then why keep the pieces of Spain with the same names as our history? I get that it would be hard to convey “Spain” without using the real life parts of it, but it still feels a little discordant. 

² Of course this is nothing new. Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, of course. But it seems like there is a boomlet lately in such works, exploring limited divinities and often putting them under strife and danger. 

³ The worldbuilder in me has lots of questions--like, what is happening in North Africa, the Middle East? Is there a cognate of Islam? There is one reference to a “Byzantine coffee shop” --does the Eastern Roman Empire still survive in this version of the universe? What’s going on there, politically and theologically if it is? And given the date in history...what about the Americas?

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

Whose Science Fiction: Recognition and its Absence in a Reading of Colourfields by Paul Kincaid

A deeply thoughtful collection that muses on the nature of SF and its sub-categories, though not one without blind spots

Cover art by Tom Joyes

I am not, by nature, someone uninterested in history; my degree was, after all, somewhat directed into the ancient world, and the study of the past has long captured my attention. And so it is very strange to find myself reading a book that contains reviews (a thing I love) many of which focus on histories (also a thing I like) of science fiction (a genre I greatly enjoy), and feel... disconnected from it, as was my experience with Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, the new Briardene Books volume from long-time critic of the genre, Paul Kincaid.

Split into three sections, the volume collects his reviews of Histories, Topics and Authors, covering a broad span of work on a wide-ranging set of texts, all in Kincaid's enjoyably acerbic tone. It's not a collection to pull punches either; when Kincaid dislikes a text he is reviewing, or finds it wanting at the fundamental or surface level, he doesn't hold back in offering up his critique (and as someone with a strong ideological support for the negative review, this was extremely welcome reading). Each review digs deep into the substance of the book in question, offering a clear view both of what that text is setting out to achieve and how well it does it, and any blind spots, omissions or unusual choices made in the process, alongside interesting bits of contextual information drawn from a frankly alarmingly broad knowledge of the field.

Before I get into the musing about why I felt that disconnection, I want to emphasise—I did enjoy reading this book, at times, immensely. It came with me on a flight, and I found myself giggling despite my deep discomfort with flying, so it must have been doing some things right. But I found, as I read, increasingly there was one lens through which I was viewing the whole of the book, and so the thing that affected most deeply my reading of it both as a text entire, and in its individual components: namely, that I very often looked at the science fiction(s) being presented to me on the page, and simply did not recognise them.

I don't have a clear answer for why that is, though I have some theories. The first of which is simply one of the passage of time: the SF I grew up into and the one often portrayed on these pages have between them a gulf of years that encompassed a great deal of change. But I don't think it's just that.

Kincaid alludes in various of his essays and reviews herein to the multiplicity of science fiction—the idea that it is not a single, coherent genre (indeed, he talks about disliking that word as well) with a single, coherent history. And so my discomfort in many ways proves him precisely right—whatever my conception of science fiction was, and is, it occupies a different strand of the weft (or a different shade of the colourfield, I suppose) than the ones under discussion here. But even with that acknowledgment that these reviews and essays look only at part of the story, it is still peculiar to see so little of the parts I do recognise—chiefly, the references to the Puppies and their Hugo activities. It's not even necessarily in the specifics of what's on the page, rather sometimes in tone, or in feel. This isn't a place I find myself or my experience within, and that's just downright odd, especially as I generally think of myself as at least reasonably curious and relatively informed, up to a point. Perhaps that self-image needs some adjustment.

However, my suspicion is that alongside the time gap there's a confluence of factors that lead to the genre I grew up into bearing little resemblance to the one Kincaid references, and I rather suspect gender plays a big part in it. The fiction I grew up reading, the fiction that coloured my childhood and my perceptions well into my time at university is what I might call, for want of a better term, girl-coded. It was aimed at children, and it was particularly geared at a market of female children. It was only at university (and sometimes rather later) that I encountered things I now see taken as universals. The SFF magazines of short fiction are a particular example, because I don't think I was more than passingly familiar with the barest concept of them until the mid-2010s. So maybe I wasn't connected to fandom, or only to a more forward-looking (or possibly just gender-segregated) subsection? Except... I don't think I was. Until fairly recently, I'd have called the university SF society I was a member of extremely backwards-looking, at least when I initially joined—they didn't read or discuss, for the most part, contemporary releases in my first couple of years, and if I think back to our society library, the overwhelming sensory memories are the feel and smell of slightly mouldering, very yellowed paperbacks. I was also, when I joined, one of three women in the whole society. Bastions of the futuristic we were not.

I am also, to be blunt, not the fresh face of the youth anymore, being a whole thirty-five. But that is exactly what reading this collection makes me feel—young, and terribly, terribly ignorant. Because, despite his clear awareness of that multiplicity of SF, there feels to be a coherent subsection of it on show here that does lean heavily backwards, not just in the sense of looking at histories (which would entirely make sense, given the topic of a whole third of the book), but in the sense of approaches and conceptions of what the genre is, where it is, and even more nebulously, but perhaps most crucially, how it is discussed. This is not a way of talking about the genre that maps to the vast majority of the conversations I have, many of which with people much smarter and more knowledgeable about both genre and fandom than myself.

If you're unsure from the way I'm talking about the book whether I think this is a good or a bad thing, well... join the club. I vacillate between poles as I consider it. Because on the one hand, I feel like I'm benefiting from this thoughtful, considered and extremely thorough look back at a part of the genre that is alien to me, and that kind of thing is surely always a benefit? But then on the other, the incompleteness rankles, on a more emotional level. The inner voice that goes, "Well, where's the bit I'm in? Why doesn't that get a look in?". I think, if I try to boil it down, my opinion is that what it does is done extremely well—if you like an acerbic turn of wit, an inclination towards sass and a very analytical eye on the specifics of what a particular work is doing, this will absolutely be provided. But, like all these kinds of projects, it has a limitation, and it may come to the fore if, like me, your experience of SF doesn't match up to what is being put under the microscope. And of course, that limitation may come from a number of places; as this is a selection of pre-existing work, it is predicated on what Kincaid has previously reviewed. The selection bias can come from any point on the journey: what was offered, what was accepted, what was actually written about, what was chosen for this project particularly. I don't know, and in many ways it doesn't matter, as all I have and can assess is the text in front of me.

However, to move away from the navel-gazing before it consumes all possibility of interesting thought, we should talk a little more in depth about the content of the book:

The three sections do pretty much as they say on the tin. Histories provides Kincaid's reviews of a selection of histories of the genre, and in general he seems somewhat dubious of them at a project conception level. When talking about Adam Roberts's The History of Science Fiction, he is fairly clear in his rejection of the idea that there can be a single, canonical history of the genre, not least due to the fact that SF as a single entity cannot first be defined. To quote:

"But when your subject is science fiction, famously undefinable, a protean literature that takes on the characteristics of its observer, no history can be anything but partial."

This argument crops up again and again, with variable strengths of expression, throughout the chapter, as he grapples with various attempts by a range of authors to both pin down and explain SF and its past. He takes pains to spell out his position well too, that many of these characterisations of the genre limit themselves in their inclusions and exclusions, often on gender, race or linguistic lines. It's an argument I think is made well, and one I mostly find myself in agreement with (I too have done a big sigh and rolled my eyes at the idea that there was a single progenitor of the genre and that it was Mary Shelley). The one downside, outside of my previous discussion, with this section is something that becomes apparent as you keep reading: he is dissatisfied with approximately every single text he discusses, possibly even exasperated, and it becomes quite wearing to get to another history and... oh yep, this one's bad too. He's right and he should say it, but structuring the book with these collected together and as the first section is a little of a trial by fire; if you can weather the grumbling, you can get to the good stuff.

Which brings us around to Topics, by far my favourite of the sections. Because, by nature, the works under discussion in this section are narrower in their scopes, the tone is much lighter—the fundamental objection to the project of them is much reduced. The reviews here feel much more wide-ranging, and include possibly the most positive section in the volume, a chapter that I had to put down and stare off into space for a little while after reading because it was such a glowing paean to its subject that it felt wildly out of place. It was, of course, the Clute chapter. I should not be surprised.*

As someone without a huge depth of knowledge on what was being discussed, I also found this section the most informative about the genre that I wasn't recognising—the different texts being reviewed start to paint a picture of some key areas of import, from Marxism to utopias to Gnosticism to grammar to the prehistoric and its role in genre works that may (or may not, depending on the light) be counted as SF. Names crop up over and again, and a web starts to form of connected thoughts, schools and ideas. This is the section where I found myself wanting to pick up the books under discussion, although Kincaid is more easily inclined to declare something universally necessary for those interested in SF than I would be, an assertion I am often moved to distrust. There are no universals, not even in criticism, and certainly not in worth or value. But the works held up as vital in this way are not ones I'm familiar with, and so I cannot say for a certainty that I don't agree, only that I distrust the instinct to make such bold declarations.

That being said, the confident tone in which Kincaid feels comfortable making quite broad statements felt more apt here than in Histories, or perhaps I had just acclimatised. Likewise, I felt less sandblasted by my ignorance, more just informed, and I think that is also down to the reduction of scope. It's easy to look at a specific topic and be ignorant, and then to learn about it, whereas trying to behold the genre at large and finding it unrecognisable has something of a humbling effect. If there's a downside to it here, it is that occasionally Kincaid will confidently assert something—that X is author Y's best work, or similar—and it is unclear whether this is relaying the information presented in the book under discussion, or his own opinion thrown in. I don't particularly mind which; I am generally in favour of reviewers not feeling they have to hedge every single opinion as being just an opinion (it's a review; surely that's a given?), but it would be nice, in general, to know.

The final section brings us onto Authors, and this section is... tricky. I'll come onto the content/tone in a moment, but I want to first look at who the authors chosen are, especially in conjunction with Kincaid's assertions back in the Histories section about people looking at the genre with a closed-off scope of who fits (and who isn't included).

Of the 12 authors covered in 11 chapters, only three are female. As far as I can tell from cursory research, every single one of them is white (with a complication in that the Disch chapter talks just as much, if not more, about Delany, who is a queer black man). They hail from three countries in total: the UK (7, of which 2 from Northern Ireland), the USA (4) and Canada (1). Only three of them are living, and I'm unsure if one of those is still actively publishing. Their careers fill a gap between 1895 and the present day, though I would personally suggest most of them had their zenith... I'll say before I was born rather than pinning it to something more specific. If we're going to talk about limited scope, and especially if we're going to talk about genre being a spectrum whose constituent parts stretch back before Aldiss's claim about Mary Shelley and forward up to the present day... well, the selection here somewhat undermines that assertion. And again, I don't know the factors that led to these specific authors being selected. I don't know what biases operate on the books Kincaid has been offered over the years to review. But I have this work in front of me as itself, and as that text, at this time... I have some questions to ask about this selection, when placed alongside those earlier critiques.

So let's see how Kincaid talks about it in his own words:

Preface to the third section of the book, entitled Authors

So yes, he alludes to the editorial selection issue, but then assures us that this selection is a designed one. And to take up the metaphor, if there is a figure emerging from the rock... well, it's a white, British man. That mirror being held up is indeed perhaps to the reader and to the reviewer himself.

But it's not just the demographics. When I said earlier that the way this feels is backwards-looking, this selection of authors only highlights that feeling. If this is the fascinating ecosystem we call science fiction, did it end in 2005 or so but for Margaret Atwood? And where, in Histories and Topics, that backwards glance feels more apt for the subject matter, here... here I struggle. For all the interest in each chapter of this section (plenty, let me stress), when I step back a ways and think of it holistically, I cannot stop myself from thinking about what this, as an indicative selection, says about SF. Because ultimately this book is about SF, what it is, what it isn't, and the blurred boundaries of its edges into other work. If I weren't thinking about the shape of the thing under the blanket, I wouldn't be engaging properly with the work.

To be blunt, the shape of the thing under the blanket looks exactly like the thing Kincaid has critiqued. That he has seen the problem and nonetheless himself gone on to replicate it is frustrating. Hopes dashed and all that.

Tonally, this section lies closer to Topics than Histories, and for me is the better for it. Particularly, not all the chapters are reviews—Peter Ackroyd, for instance, is covered in a short essay for an anthology about supernatural fiction writers, and this gives more leeway for the personal opinions and assertions of objectivity that are the mode in which I find myself enjoying Kincaid the most. Call it an opinionated potted biography, perhaps. Likewise the "impressionistic response" to M. John Harrison's anti-memoir.

It also made the better for many of the authors in question being people Kincaid has met—I enjoyed the brief digressions into personal anecdote a great deal, and again fit into the tone I seem to enjoy most in Kincaid's work, with added connectivity out to these figures who for me are distant and august, if I've heard of them at all.

Of the book's three, this section also generated by far the most online research and interest in discovering more. With each new author under the glass, I found myself tabs deep in discovery, and trying my best to withhold the onslaught of tbr additions. These are often authors familiar to me but now fundamentally more interesting by his discussion of them. Previously my interest in H. G. Wells was... well, not zero but hardly significant. Now? We're trending upwards, for sure. And the previous interest I had definitely had in M. John Harrison's Viriconium works has likewise been given a fair boost. When he's convinced of a work (or an author)'s worth, the value it has, whether aesthically, ideologically or contextually, is very well spelled out, and even when he's not trying, what he loves, he sells. When it's there, the enjoyment in a work is palpable, and because it exists in contrast to pretty honest and blunt critique, it is clearly authentic, making it all the more valuable.

It ended very much on a high—the section on H. G. Wells covers several works, but reiterates a point made earlier in the volume about the depth, range and contradictory nature of his character and body of work. It feels like the best of what the volume does (Clute lauds aside), capturing a person and their relevance to the body of SF, such as it is, in all their variety. This? This was the stuff I loved.

But it cannot erase what came before, nor the context in which it sits in that final section.

And so, somewhat contradictorily, my conclusion is this: In presenting only a subsection of SF, only a few colours of the field, Kincaid proves his own assertions about the nature of the genre entirely correct, and my inability to recognise them shows only how wide and deep the field ranges. But, on an aesthetic and personal level, I found it strange to read, and sometimes alienating, because, even as he acknowledges that there are many science fictions—acknowledges the absence of women, people of colour and non-Anglophone voices in frequent attempts at categorising them—the one presented in the book slowly feels as though it coheres into a single beast, one overwhelmingly white, male and British, and whose focus ranges backwards, a preoccupation I sometimes feel undermines SFF's ability to accurately assess itself, and the issues it faces in the present, except as viewed through the lens of that past. I know there is a value in history, and on the merits of that it delivers a thorough, thoughtful and fascinating insight. I learned much, developed my existing understanding more, and had a great time with the thoughts of someone with a deep feel of his part of the field and a knack of sharing it clearly. But in my inner self, I wished the mirror held up had shown at least a little of a face I recognised. Demographically, but also environmentally and contextually.

Ultimately, I may need to look backwards to understand where SF has come from to reach the point it's at now. But equally, when attempting sweeping discussions of "what it is we write about when we are writing about science fiction," that "fascinating ecosystem" cannot be understood fully if we excise the last ten years either. The present owes its debts to the past, but must also be understood on its own terms—partly shaped by the ideas and people covered in this exploration of the genre, but not wholly defined by them. This is a snapshot of what SF was rather than is, a work I find in some ways limited, but within those limitations—fascinating, thought-provoking, discussion-provoking, occasionally laugh-provoking and more.

*I have yet to grapple with Clute myself but I am beginning to understand that he operates as a sort of saintly figure, or perhaps the icon of a mystery cult, for a lot of British SFF criticism. If I start babbling about him as Dionysus reborn, you must assume that I too have been initiated.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Acerbic tone of voice, leading to occasional snicker-out-loud moments
• Huge depth and detail of information about SFF history, criticism and its discussion
• Thoughtful discussion about the nature of the genre

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Kincaid, Paul. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction [Briardene Books, 2025].

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

Book Review: The Estate by Sarah Jost

A version of the story of a famous sculptor’s relationship with an even more famous one, using an art buyer’s ability to enter the worlds of art as her genre hook

Camille Leray has a special ability, one invaluable to her work as an art historian and seller. Not that many would believe her, even if she told her secret, but she can go into a demiplane of the artwork she studies. She can get a real psychological and social sense of what the artist was thinking and doing and trying to convey, by means of the interiority of their worlds. But when her gift goes badly wrong, and she is forced to take a job at an estate in Brittany, her gift unlocks the secret and mystery of her favorite, underappreciated artist... but at a heavy personal cost.

This is the story of Sarah Jost’s The Estate.

The novel revolves around several interesting, interlocking axes. We have Camille, whose personal history, and her gift and her need for money after a disaster at the auction, leads her to the titular Estate where she spent some time during her childhood. Camille’s time there, as well as her relationship, in various meters with Maxime Foucault, the head of the estate, past and present, drive a lot of the social and psychological heft of the novel. Camille is more than a little in love with Max, and the working out of that relationship, and how it relates to her gift and her interests, is a lot of what you are going to find here. This does move the novel somewhat out of pure genre fiction (although the elements to be discussed below certainly are). A comp mentioned in the publicity materials, and what occurred to me as being a good one as I read this book, is Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. This novel does try to do with art history and art appreciation what that novel did with maps.

In keeping with the weight of the novel, and following that parallel, the mimetic elements really are strong here. We get a good third-person close POV look at Camille’s life, as her trip to the titular Estate brings up some good and some very bad memories in the process. There is an uncovering and unearthing process in the novel as we learn more about Camille even as we learn more about Maxime, his family in general, and more importantly their relationship with Constance Sorel, the focus of Camille’s artistic interest. Camille is a conflicted, interesting and engaging protagonist for most of the book (there is a later reversal that doesn’t seem well set up or paid for in advance that annoyed me). Besides Camille, a lot of the effort is put on Max, as well as his girlfriend Lila. The Camille-Lila relationship, as the novel goes on, becomes more and more central and important¹ to the culmination and denouement of the book.

So I should discuss the genre elements here. Camille’s ability to enter demiplanes that represent the interiority of an artwork and the mind of the artist is something that she herself does not quite understand and does not (as Maxime sees it) use to its fullest potential. The book begins with Camille thinking that it is idiosyncratic and singular; the inciting incident above that goes badly wrong is that she brings someone else into the demiplane with her by accident. As the novel proceeds, she finds out inch by inch that her ability is greater than she realizes. The exploration of this power is a secondary concern, and always takes a back seat to the mimetic elements and storyline.

There is a technique to determine whether a novel or story is fantasy or science fiction, and that is simply: if you remove the genre elements completely, does it still work as a story? By that test, The Estate very nearly succeeds. You’d have to make some alterations to make the plot work, get Camille to the Estate, and propel the rest of the narrative and why Maxime is so interested in her. So, without alteration, no, the work doesn’t quite succeed, but with some adaptation, it probably could. So The Estate sits inside the porous barrier between genre and non-genre work² but it is within the line. It’s just not a very *strong* genre-focused work. It was a bit frustrating to me in that regard, in that Camille is not only afraid to extend her ability, but she seems absolutely terrified, without any backing information, to actually explore it deeply.³

There is a lesser and somewhat underutilized genre element here, and that is Arthuriana. What some casual fans of the Arthurian romances may not know is that much of the work of the early versions of the Romances were composed and set in Brittany and not England at all. The forest of Broceliande was inspired if not taken to be Paimont Forest in Brittany, and to this day there are things like monuments and sculptures devoted to the French romance tradition of the Arthurian legends throughout the forest.

This gives a good grounding for Jost to use Arthuriana both in the demiplanes of Constance Sorel and in the works themselves. There is a definite theme of things such as the relationship between Vivaine and Merlin that come up time and again in the novel. A real appreciation for those early French versions of the stories infuses the work that Sorel does, and throughout the novel as Leray engages with that work at the Estate. There are intimations and not-quite-fully-formed ideas about mapping some of that Arthuriana onto Leray’s own life, but I don’t think the novel *quite* gets to where it is pushing for in that regard.

I’ve waited to this point to discuss the focus of Camille’s interest, Constance Sorel, in more detail. Aside from the original focus for her for Arthuriana, Constance’s is not imaginary at all, but is rather an alternate version of a real artist, Camille Claudel (the fact that Camille Leray has the same first name as her is, I think, absolutely no accident). Camille Claudel had an intense and tragic relationship with an artist you most definitely have heard of: Auguste Rodin (yes, the Thinker guy). Claudel was an artist in her own right, but her relationship with Rodin and her eventual confinement in a mental institution consumed the last decades of her life. Much of her work has been destroyed, part of it by herself. Hers is a tragic, heartbreaking story that recontexualized, when I first found out about it, my love of Rodin’s work.

In the world of The Estate, Constance Sorel had a relationship with an artist named “Boisseau” and the lines of that relationship are very clear: Boisseau is the better-known artist, a rockstar of sculpture. This relationship ended badly, and Sorel, like her model, wound up first in exile in Brittany, in the very estate that is the center of the novel, and then finally in an asylum.

The novel missteps with this, I think. We mostly get stories of the Boisseau-Sorel relationship and the power of their art. But the novel doesn’t seem to know whether or not these are an alternate Rodin and Claudel or not, and that hurts the story. We get a mention of Rodin once by name (Leray says she sold a Rodin not long before the start of the book), as well as a mention of The Thinker and jokingly “The Gates of Whatnot” (clearly The Gates of Hell). But I am still not convinced that the Rodin sale line isn’t a typo and that it's supposed to be Boisseau and that Boisseau in this world is Rodin and therefore, Sorel is Claudel.

The reason why this matters is that Rodin and Claudel’s relationship is never mentioned, even if Boisseau and Sorel’s relationship rhymes with it. If Rodin and Claudel existed in this world, for real, they would be a touchstone, a reference point, something for Camille Leray to hang her hat on and use. “Constance Sorel, as denied in her time just as Camille Claudel was, another woman deemed the mistress of a Great Man and whose art was denigrated and denied.” It’d be an obvious thing to mention and to think about. But this never happens, and with just one named reference to Rodin... it remains frustratingly unclear. And I think that is a real misstep.

My theory is that the Rodin line is a typo, and Rodin and Claudel don’t exist in the world of this book, but Sorel and Boisseau do.

The novel does additionally suffer, I think, for trying to fit Camille Claudel a.k.a. Constance Sorel onto the life and final fate of our heroine Camille herself. For all that we go through this journey of discovery of an artist’s true power, on top of all this, the novel seems to want to cast Camille Leray as a latter-day Constance Sorel, and Camille Claudel in the same breath, to the point of echoing Constance’s life and trying to give herself a better ending. Constance has a lifelong friendship that falls apart due to Constance being institutionalized (just as Camille Claudel was), but Camille Leray seems to be reaching for the same sort of friendship with Lila and succeeds. Instead of being pleased by the echoes and resonances, they instead seem to be an ill-suited frame fo Camille Leray’s life and fate that did not, for me, satisfy.⁴

I can hope that the book will bring more attention to Camille Claudel through her fictionalized version as Constance Sorel in the book, since her story is a tragedy (and sadly she destroyed much of her work). The thesis of the book, that Constance Sorel was an unsung genius of sculpture, appears to be the author talking about Camille Claudel’s work and place in history, and one that I can agree with. In the end, this book attempts to recapture and bring Claudel back to prominence through her fictionalized version and Camille Leray’s story.

So, if you are interested especially in art, particularly Rodin and Claudel, and don’t mind some not-always-well-used genre elements in a work that’s really about rehabilitating Claudel more than anything else, this is the book for you.

Side note: The Getty Museum and Art Institute of Chicago did a retrospective of Claudel’s work at the end of 2023. I wish I had known about it; it would have been worth a trip to Chicago to see.

Also side note: I did a Six Books with Sarah Jost in 2023, in connection with her book Five First Chances.

Highlights:

• Strong story about a fictionalized version of an underappreciated artist.

• Passionate and deep mimetic story about an art historian and her gift.

• Not as genre as it might be, and not as effectively as it might be.

Reference: Jost, Sarah. The Estate [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].

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

1. I should emphatically note that it is not a queer relationship in any way, although, given my reading habits and expectations lately in reading a lot of queer-friendly genre work, I was *expecting* the slow-build intensification of Lila and Camille to go that way... but it does not. 

2. People like the esteemed Gary K. Wolfe would say that there is no such barrier, having written articles and even a book on the subject. I’d love to know his take on this book in that spirit. 

3. To take an idea from this. Suppose you had a door in your wardrobe to another world, be it C. S. Lewis, Seanan McGuire, or multiverse style. Would you poke your head through it, look at the world of the other side but never go further than a few feet from the portal, and yet still keep coming back and just repeating that same process? That’s how Camille feels like she has a relationship with her power. She doesn’t reject it outright, but seems to really limit any idea of trying other things for a lot of her life and a lot of the book.

4. So the Camille-Lila relationship is clearly meant to be an echo of Constance-Anne. The latter one is clearly platonic, and thus, as per footnote 1, the Camille-Lila remains strictly platonic, even if I read it coding as being potentially queer.