Book Review: The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear adds pirates, a chewy social drama, and a big alien puzzle to her White Space space opera universe. 

Sunya is a researcher traveling to the edge of the galaxy. She studies information and the collection and interpretation of information, and a cache of ancient alien information is the biggest known. But her arrival there is not easy. Pirates are blockading the system. The star that the cache is orbiting, as well as the space station for the researchers, is probably going to go supernova any time now. And then there are the attempted murders. And just what are those mysterious things Sunya is seeing in the corner of her vision?

This is the story of The Folded Sky, the third and latest in her White Space space opera, following Ancestral Night and Machine. It takes place roughly in the same time period as Machine, thus some time after Ancestral Night (the actual Ancestral Night ship makes a brief cameo in the novel). If you will recall, these novels revolve around a spacefaring community of aliens, humans among them. Ancestral Night involved salvaging lost ships, and weird alien technology, as well as doing a lot of the heavy lifting in setting up this verse for the reader. Machine was very much Bear’s love letter to the James White’s Sector General novels, focusing on alien medicine an the ethics of healing and medical care.

So what is The Folded Sky, then? Well just like I was rather reductivist in my descriptions of Ancestral Night and Machine, I could be reductivist with The Folded Sky and say that it was a pirate novel (yes there are pirates in Ancestral Night, but this is a pirate novel). The pirates are a big threat in the novel, but of course, as with any Bear novel, a lot more is going on here. Just in terms of plot, we have the Baomind, an artifact/information reserve of the lost civilization of the Koregoi (who built the Ancestral Night by the way). We have attempted murders. Oh, and did I mention that the star that the Baomind is around that is being studied is on the verge of going supernova?

But, of course, a Bear novel is hardly just about the plot these days, if they were ever. Let’s take our POV and primary character, Dr. Sunya Song. She’s an archinformist, a data historian, someone perfect for taking on the task of organizing the vast library of information sitting in the Koregoi datamind. It’s a work trip of months and years away from her wife and children, or so she thinks. Turns out they are coming to stay at the ramshackle orbital station (really just a collection of ships and parts) after all. Unfortunately for Sunya, they also came on the same ship as Dr. Vickee DeVine, who has also come out to the site. To say that Sunya and Vickee have a personal history would be to say that the Battle of Kursk was a tank battle. Vickee is Sunya’s former mentor, former girlfriend, and is always sets herself as the center of any group of people, and quite successfully at that. She is quite literally the last person Sunya wants to work with on this space station.

Thus, in addition to the overall ticking time bomb of the plots (in additional to the stellar problems, the pirates get a pretty effective blockade going, and supplies are running out, and there is no ansible to easily contact civilization for help), we get a lot of chewy social and philosophical drama, debate and discussion. Rightminding comes in for discussion and debate here, as it did in both Ancestral Night and Machine, but here since we have attempted murders, the debate is how someone who was rightminded (whoever it was) make the attempts. We also get debates on interspecies relations and tolerance (the pirates are intolerant of AIs, transhuman technologies, and aliens), first contact protocols, and the challenges of a work life balance with your spouse and your teenaged kids.

And did I mention the cats?

The central image that I keep going back to in this novel, however, a throughline and a symbol of Sunya, of humanity, of the entire interspecies culture she belongs to, is a bonsai. Sunya’s family has had the bonsai for over a hundred years, from planet to space station, to starships, and all the way here to the Baomind. The bonsai is resilient, but needs care. It’s shrunken and under stress, but it has survived a lot. It is not the biggest, or the baddest, but for some, such as Sunya, it is the epitome of beauty. Humanity is a bonsai. The interstellar polity is a bonsai. And most importantly and most directly, Sunya is a bonsai.

This is never so clear, and never so unmistakable, in comparing her to Vickee DeVine. Their clashes and comparisons are throughout the book. Vickee is seemingly everything Sunya wants to be. Successful, the center of attention and power, supremely confident in her abilities. She is the Queen Bee of the high school of the group of scholars and researchers in Town, and she knows it. Their interactions and conflicts are a major portion of the book. Sunya is constantly seeing herself in the shade of Vickee, and part of the journey of the book is Sunya coming to terms with Vickee. There are some extremely messed up dynamics here, even in a society of Rightminding, People are, in the end, going to be people, and those social dynamics and personal dynamics are central to the book and what it does.

And then there are the social dynamics with the AIs (can AIs be assholes? Bear explores that!), the aliens, all in a confined and restricted space (see above, blockade). Bear has a lot of fun of seeing how these people react to each other under pressure. There is a lot of thought about pirates, and why they fight and strive for what they do, social dynamics laid bare at the barrel of a gun in a blockade.

In addition to those social dynamics, Bear is interested in history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, first contact (which I mentioned before and mention here again, but am being deliberately vague about any further, save to say that Bear treads into, and exceeds, some of the ideas of Stephen Baxter in his Xeelee novels.). There are also echoes and reflections of writers such as L.E. Modesitt's space operas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (the Diving novels) and Jack McDevitt, just to name a few. 

So, thinking about Baxter for a moment, in addition to the social science fiction there are also relativistic space battles, interesting technology, quirky and unusual physics, codebreaking (of a sort), and much more. Bear has put a variety of scientific disciplines and speculations into the novel, and seemingly no matter what kind of science fiction speculation you are into, you are going to find something to love here.

And then there is Town itself. It’s a fascinating place to set most of the narrative, even without adding that blockade into the mix . It’s more than a bit of a cobble, something that is commented on multiple times. It’s been slapped together because, as Bear notes, high manufacturing of a habitat in a solar system far away from the Core is just not practical. It’s rather skin-of-your-teeth engineering and general feel puts me in the mind of the Finder universe of Suzanne Palmer.

So with all of this going on, you might be asking one important question at this stage, and indeed, it is a concern going into this book? Does it hold together? Yes. Bear manages this by a strict and tight point of view on Dr. Song. There is a creed, for lack of a better word, said at the 4th Street Fantasy Convention (which the author does help run), that “point of view solves everything”. This is the idea that a lot of problems that come up with a narrative can be tackled by how and from whose perspective, or perspectives, you tell your story. Or as the musical Hamilton put it “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”. But the problem and challenge for the author here is a big book with lots of plots, narratives, big damn ideas, a big damn object, pirates, attempted murders and family drama. And that doesn’t even cover some of the other subplots and the setting and other things to find. How can a reader make sense of this as a narrative? So Bear’s solution is a tight and intimate third person point of view that gives us a deep and penetrating dive into her story, her mindset, her concerns, and her perspective. We get to intimately know Dr. Song, enough that when the murders occur, Vickee is immediately a suspect (and immediately questionable as one) because of how Song feels about her and their shared history and how it comes though that first person perspective and narrative.

As far as the question of whether this book stands alone, I think it does, although you will need to do a tad more work than if you had read Ancestral Night or Machine. There is no overlap of characters (sadly, there is no “Mantis Cop” in this one, although Xhelsea makes a damn good Goodlaw in his stead). This book relies a bit, but only a bit, on you having been in this universe before, but it is not a complete plunge into the unknown. You could start here, if the prospect of this narrative intrigues you the most. Like the previous two books, The Folded Sky is queer, full of interesting characters, and immensely readable.

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Highlights

• Queer, inclusive space opera, with aliens, AIs and more
• Pressure cooker environment turns up the drama 
• A bonsai tree of a space opera novel.

Reference: Bear, Elizabeth, The Folded Sky [Saga Press, 2025]

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

Film Review: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Your mission — if you choose to accept it — is to enjoy the spectacular stunt pieces while ignoring the uncharacteristically bad dialogue in this final film of the series. 

30 years after the very first installment, Tom Cruise has put the finishing touches on his Mission Impossible franchise with The Final Reckoning. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, it's stuffed to the brim with the usual spy-versus-spy hallmarks — double agents, military air, land and seacraft, death defying stunts, and, of course, Tom Cruise running at full speed across bridges and highways. But first, let's recap how we got here.

The plot

I asked a friend if I needed to go back and rewatch Dead Reckoning so I could be fresh with my plot lines, and she laughed and said no. It's true — these types of blockbuster films are popcorn movies in the same vein as Fast and Furious. I did anyway, of course, and honestly had forgotten where we last left Ethan and company back in 2023. So, real quick: Ethan and his team are once again (and as usual) at odds with the U.S. government, working solo to prevent a worldwide nuclear war. The primary antagonist is a malevolent AI called The Entity, who has a once-and-future-type relationship with the secondary bad guy, Gabriel, who is as bland as they come and honestly unrepresentative of the kind of evil-doers this franchise is known for (RIP Phillip Seymour Hoffman).

The Final Reckoning picks up with Ethan and his crew chasing after a series of robotic MacGuffins in absolutely wild locales, from the depths of the Bering Sea to the skies above the jungles of South Africa. Recapping the plot is ridiculously complicated, however, and the first hour of the film is mainly just exposition in various board rooms with U.S. government higher-ups, including a criminally underused Janet McTeer. The tasks are, as you'd expect, the most impossible of any task Ethan has been given, and the stakes, as per usual, are the end of the world. 

What works

Tom Cruise saved cinema back in 2022 with Top Gun: Maverick, and I firmly believe that there's no living actor more committed to the craft of moving making than he is. His love for this franchise in particular is clearly evident. Even though I have some gripes with this movie (which I get into below), it's a hell of a ride, and completely entertaining.

Seeing the crew all together — Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg — after 30 years is impressive and adorable, and it doesn't feel like they're acting when they're talking and reminiscing, there's that much chemistry. 

There are also some incredible casting choices that keep surprising you every few minutes. Hannah Waddingham plays an admiral in charge of an aircraft carrier, and that was definitely not on my 2025 bingo card. It was awesome. 

Tramell Tillman, better known as Mr. Millchick from Severence, shows up as a sub commander and absolutely steals every scene he's in, providing some much-needed comic relief.

A mustache-less Nick Offerman plays an army general who's all bluster and bluff, but ends up saving the day.

The best set piece in years

Under a constantly ticking clock  — of which there are literally many in the film — Ethan is given carte blanche with the U.S. Navy to head to the frozen wastes of the Bering Sea to retrieve the source code of the evil AI. The only catch? It's locked deep inside a sunken Russian sub called the Sevastopol, sitting 500 feet under the surface in frigid waters. 

As a scuba diver, I realized instantly how insane this mission is. 500 feet is at the limits of human diving ability — the average vacation diver gently coasts along beautiful reefs at 30 feet — and it appears Ethan has no experience or training in underwater technical diving. 

But have no fear! The badass divers of the friendly American sub give him a crash course, a dry suit (warmer than a wetsuit), and a final reminder to constantly breathe out during his ascent to the surface or else his lungs will explode. (This scene also had a fantastic appearance by Katy O'Brian, who you might remember from Love Lies Bleeding and The Mandalorian.)

After Ethan suits up, he's shot into the freezing cold, inky black water to take on the submarine. For the next 15 minutes, there's no dialogue, the tension is ratcheted up to 11, and you could hear a pin drop in my IMAX theater in between the shrieks of expanding metal and watery deluges.

It's hard to explain just how incredible this scene is — even looking on Google for images, you can't capture the claustrophobia or fear that permeates every shot. Even if you hate the rest of the movie (which some people might!), this set piece alone is worth the price of admission. 

After Ethan finally retrieves the source code, he attempts to escape out of a torpedo tube, but his life support equipment doesn't fit. In typical Ethan fashion — or maybe Tom Cruise fashion? It's getting harder and harder to tell them apart – he sheds his dry suit, his oxygen, and his mask, then on a single breath ascends to the surface. 

I think my jaw literally was open for 5 solid minutes.

Yes, this action should have killed him. Yes, he has hypothermia. Yes, he literally drowned. Yes, he has the bends. But fortunately the team is at the surface with a portable decompression chamber and a knowledge of CPR. Some folks will absolutely lose it at this point, calling it unrealistic. But that's the movie for you. Of course he wasn't going to die. 

Some fans will argue that the plane stunt in the final act overshadows the sub stunt, but I disagree. But the plane sequence is objectively incredible, as well — Ethan basically wing walks for 20 minutes on two different biplanes, managing to unseat both bad guys and take control of the aircraft by himself. 

What doesn't work

I think my primary gripe with The Final Reckoning is the bad guy(s). First, having a malevolent AI not only has been done, but The Entity in this film is incredibly impersonal. Skynet and the various terminators in the Terminator franchise had a constant boot-on-your-neck threatening feeling that actually was kind of scary. The Entity is mysterious, all-knowing, and playing fast and loose with the world's nuclear powers. I guess that objectively is scary, but it never hooked me in. Much like how creative works produced with AI lack no heart, a villain that's just AI similarly has no heart. Not even an evil one.

Speaking of nuclear threats, it's wild that it's the primary doomsday weapon in the film. It just seems out of place and very Cold War, and today's generation will never fully know just how scary that threat has been. 

Gabriel, the supposed link to Ethan's past life before the IMF, is somehow connected to The Entity, but it's never really explained, and he just doesn't give off evil vibes. He's probably my least favorite villain in years. Give me somebody to really hate!

Finally, the dialogue just really threw me off. It's over-the-top bad — and I have a very high cheese level when it comes to action movies. It's so bad it keeps you from emotionally investing in the outcome, and my viewing partner was scoffing or laughing at every other line.

The Final Reckoning somehow has the militaristic scope and shock-and-awe factor of a '90s Michael Bay movie, but without the actual emotion of a Michael Bay movie — and this is coming from someone who usually cries at Armageddon on every rewatch, so I mean this without irony or sarcasm. Yes, I realize how silly this sounds, too.

All of this to say, of course, that if you can get over the fact that there's not a compelling emotional heft to the film, you'll have a grand time with a bucket of popcorn and an icy beverage. I comforted myself by telling a friend, "If I want good dialogue, I'll go watch a Jim Jarmusch movie!" and then proceeded to fan girl about the stunts and action sequences. That's what makes a Mission Impossible movie, anyway — the scenes where Tom Cruise defies death and manages to blow our minds with what's possible to film.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

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: Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi

Playing with language, tone and contrast to make something that feels familiar and new at the same time.

This is a story of juxtapositions. Tone and content and setting and expectations and language, many unexpected bedfellows rub up against one another. It's interest and success comes from how well managed those contrasts are, and how the unexpected intertwine to emphasise the meaning coming from both sides.

Harmattan Season is set in West Africa under recent French colonial rule. The main character, Boubacar, has mixed ancestry, with one foot in each of the cultures in his home city. In the past, he has fought for the French, but in the present is a down on his luck, struggling for work chercher - someone who finds people for money. When a grievously injured woman stumbles into his room one night, the police hot on her tale, he's set on a journey to discover who she is, where she came from, what happened to her, and what it could mean not just for him, but for the whole city.

That sounds familiar, right? Maybe not the specifics, but the tone, the setup. A detective, a woman with a problem, a mystery that might be more than it first seems... if your genre senses are telling you "noir", you would absolutely be right. Within even the first few sentences, the vibe is settling itself in for the long haul:

Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don't leave my place much these days. It works pretty well; I keep my office close (downstairs, actually) for others' sake. Means that the bad-luck radius stays small. But, of course, the work suffers.

This could be any hard-boiled detective in any black-and-white office in any number of stories. Onyebuchi sets out his stall on this right from the off, and that tone never dips, not even for a second. There are familiar phrases, quirks of grammar - a lot of sentences clipped at their beginning - that put you right into exactly that framework and keep you there. Obvious, but not so over the top as to be egregious. And part of why that is is because so much of the rest of the story runs counter to that clear tone.

To start with, the setting. It's about a generation into French colonisation (given that mixed heritage adult characters exist), which puts us a bit early for the typical time period of the hardboiled detective, never mind that none of the characters are speaking English. Obviously the book is in English, but there's a frisson that comes from these very familiar US-specific linguistic flourishes in a story that takes pains to specify when different languages are spoken. Onyebuchi wants you to remember what this is - and isn't. But even if not for the time, the noir detective is typically at home in his US city, so taking him out into the world beyond is already a little unexpected. Add into that the mentions of fashion - the gendarme uniform and the djellaba - and the picture we hold in our heads is never the pinstripe suit and the brimmed hat. Again, these details of dress are constantly noted, this is another contrast being made clear.

And then of course just... the story. The typical noir detective isn't dealing with bodies who float up into the air, their blood hanging in mesmerising droplets over the city square. Nor are they reckoning with the ongoing legacy of colonialism or the difficulties of being tied to two different and opposing sides in a conflict that keeps on going.

There's a lot going on here.

And somehow... it all works. It's not just that the disparate elements are kept tightly under control, but that they are used to intersect productively. The contrast and the frisson turns into something new and better, something that reinforces the points being made on all sides, rather than just adding an unexpected twist.

Take, for example, the standard fantasy trope of the woman in danger who needs the comfort of the hard-boiled detective. The dame. Or, in a French-speaking context, the dame. It's not just a pun. Several moments like this, where the language or tropes of one side of the equations cuts through into one of the other pieces in play and you realise there's a connection going on, that there's a through-current you hadn't thought about at all. The pun, the visual cue, the little moment of knowing is just the nudge you need to get you across into the deeper well of connection that Onyebuchi is drawing from.

And there are likewise moments of disconnection, of language choices that feel deliberately set to break you out of immersion, and make you step back from the story - anachronisms like the protagonist talking about "batting average" as a metaphor for success rating (and his conversation partner not knowing what he meant), meme references like "I don't think that word means what you think it means", sitting in an alley with a little kid planning a heist - an "impossible mission" - in a scene achingly reminiscent of the movie staple. It's full of knowing winks telling you that what's being done here is, always, deliberate.

And it works. It shouldn't, but it does, because it feeds back into this being a story about contrasting culture, and a character unsure of himself and his place in his city, his role in the events unfolding.

Aside from all this linguistic playfulness, there's a depth to the thematic core of the book that is surprisingly hefty for the relatively short page count. Because so much of the heart of the story turns back to the recently ended war and the very present current legacy of the violence enacted as part of it. Whether that's the injured ex-soldier we meet in a care-home, his one glass eye unnerving the protagonist, or the upcoming election whose result may bring about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, uncovering ghosts and literal bones many wish left undisturbed, the spectre of the past hangs close overhead. Bouba himself fought, and he too must face up, by the end of the story, to his role in what came before, and what that might mean for his future.

And the story is unflinching about facing up to that reality. By the time it becomes a pressing concern, we've spent a lot of time along the road with Boubacar, seen him being kind to street kids, bantering with beautiful women, trying to do his best for a dead woman and to remember her as a person, not just a clue. There are things to be sympathetic with in his character and his actions. But there must also be a reckoning. Can doing good in the present outweigh the sins of the past? Can there ever be closure, or forgiveness? Those are all questions asked of the story, and the character. Onyebuchi doesn't necessarily have answers tied up in a bow, but he doesn't shy away from having his protagonist face up to them. There isn't an easy answer to many of these questions. But asking them on the page makes for deeply engaging, thoughtful reading, and a story that lingers after you close the final page.

There is one aspect of the whole that doesn't quite sing as loudly as the rest of the choir, and that's the logistical nuts and bolts of the mystery plot itself. If this were just a detective story, where the only focus was on solving the crime, that might be a problem. As it stands, there were a few moments where it was a little unclear how A led to B, but I found myself willing to gloss over them because it was far from the most important or most interesting thing going on. The mystery is there to serve some of the thematic interweaving, and so I found it less critical that it be executed absolutely perfectly. It never detracted from the atmosphere, the sense of a city poised on the edge of something big, and of a character trying to find how he fits into his own life. So it was more a niggle than anything else.

All in all, it's a beautifully written story, and I love how knowingly it messes around with how its different pieces all fit together. Tonal incongruity well managed is one of my absolute favourite things in books, and Onyebuchi does it with panache, leaving a novel worth lingering over, to make sure you enjoy how every word fits into the pattern of the whole. 

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The Math

Highlights: 

• Willing to look the hard themes square in the face
• Thoughtful and unexpected use of language and genre cues to play with reader expectations
• Plot that brings great surprises without being deceitful or sneaky

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, [Tor Books, 2025].

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

Book Review: Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era

An unexpectedly enjoyable deep dive into the storytelling of Star Trek in the twenty-first century

Adam Kotsko’s Late Star Trek is an unexpectedly enjoyable deep dive into the storytelling of Star Trek in the twenty-first century. I’ve watched Star Trek for decades and my significant attachment to the earlier television shows influenced my world view. Later in life, I discovered that my love for the show—the characters and the stories—paled in comparison to hard core fans. Late Star Trek does a good job of meeting the needs of superfans while still discussing the storytelling intentions of the various series through a more general literary and social lens. Even if you don’t agree with the ultimate conclusion regarding a particular show, film, or novel, the analyses provide useful context and theories for why some shows resonate with viewers and why some leave them feeling disappointed. In our current era of franchise saturation from brands like Marvel, Star Wars, and D.C., Star Trek stands out as a forerunner of the trend to launch multiple television shows, films, and novels to feed the desires of both old and new fans. Star Trek also stands out in terms of its core values and high fan expectations. Late Star Trek reminds viewers of what we loved about the earlier shows—particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation (optimism, diversity, curiosity, adventure, moral questions) and how those ingrained expectations shape our appreciation of newer iterations of the story, even as the real world changes around us.

Late Star Trek is a focused analysis of what went wrong and what went right with Star Trek in the post Voyager Era. After providing brief background comments on the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, the primary analysis shifts to Enterprise and the content thereafter, including the novels, the Chris Pine/Kelvin timeline reboot films, Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and brief discussions of Lower Decks and Prodigy. The most thorough discussion is the chapter on Enterprise which provides an interesting analysis of that show’s struggles to create a prequel backstory for the Star Trek universe we know so well. Kosko discusses Enterprise in the context of a post 9-11 world, particularly in terms of the perceived need to shift from the relative optimism of The Next Generation era shows, to instead adopt a tone that felt more gritty, more negative, and closer to the stress of our (then) real-life world. The chapter posits that the societal shifts influenced the plotting of the series but that the attempts to align to societal changes was ultimately alienating for fans who wanted the Star Trek they knew and loved. The analysis is fascinating and intensely readable with plenty of specific citations to episodes. Surprisingly, the analysis does not discuss other science fiction shows at the time for a comparison of how other series, such as Battlestar Galactica, utilized grittier storytelling in their reboot, and how the comparative fan expectations may have affected the success or failure of such tonal shifts.

In discussing the Star Trek reboot films starring Chris Pine, the book takes a more superfan and mostly negative analysis of the plots and execution of the films Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness. This analysis is apparently not meant to be a general one but a specific voicing of superfan opinions that generally ignore the substantial commercial success of the two films. This is both the advantage and the potential shortcoming of the text: the way it discusses Star Trek from a general artistic or academic point of view but also from the point of view of superfans specifically.

Just as the shows and novels vary greatly in terms of tone, theme, and appeal, the analysis presented in Late Star Trek adjusts depending on the topic. The discussion of Discovery does a nice job of providing an overall analysis of the initial strengths of the series and the ways it diverged from fan expectations in ways that were both positive and negative. The discussion of Strange New Worlds is shorter but still captures the essence of why that series has met with particular success by embracing the traditional Star Trek ethos and staying true to the existing cannon while still allowing the characters to develop in much more intriguing ways than their original versions.

Late Star Trek is enjoyable for Star Trek fans but also provides a solid overall analysis for storytellers in an established universe who must balance fan expectations and creative freedom. The framing of Star Trek in stages or eras rather than an unending continuum is helpful. Although the through-line of connection remains, the ability to discuss the series, films, and novels in terms of eras allows for a more helpful analysis of what resonates and what disappoints in a universe in which many of us are, for better or for worse, deeply invested. And most of all, it’s a reminder of why, after so many decades and variations, we still love Star Trek.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• A broad range of Star Trek content with helpful citations
• Superfan focus sometimes outweighs larger storytelling analysis
• Engaging exploration of strengths and weaknesses in Star Trek

Reference: Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, [University of Minnesota Press 2025]

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

Film Review: The King Tide

What if we were really nice to the kid in Omelas?

Life has proceeded uneventfully on a secluded island of fishermen, somewhere in Canada, for many generations. But one day, during a storm, a boat crashes ashore, carrying only a baby. The villagers are amazed to discover that this baby has magical healing powers, and decide to keep her a secret from the rest of the world. In just a few years, she becomes the center of their faith and the guarantor of their prosperity. As long as she's around, no one gets sick, the boats catch abundant fish, and all goes well. She's a happy child with loving parents and an entire community devoted to her. Sounds like utopia.

Except that the meaning of an "uneventful" life has been warped. In this version of utopia, to keep the miracle to themselves, the islanders have cut off all contact with the mainland. The village doctor is now a jobless drunkard, the school doesn't teach about the exterior world anymore, the men hold bloody brawls for fun because they know any broken nose will be fixed, and the children routinely play with poisonous plants. No risk matters anymore. There are no consequences. But this time, the price of utopia isn't a tortured child: everyone is unfailingly kind to the miraculous girl. They ritually thank her for her gifts. She doesn't have to suffer for their happiness. She just has no clue there's anything more to life.

Among many possible readings, the film The King Tide seems to suggest that one of the dangers of religion is learned helplessness. Why make any effort, when you're guaranteed infinite blessings? Perhaps God is wise to keep his distance and stay invisible to us. We might not want to let him go.

Soon enough, the islanders get a glimpse of what they could lose. One day, while the girl is busy elsewhere, a kid dies. She arrives too late to heal him, and it turns out her gifts don't include raising the dead. The shock is so heavy on her that the magic seems to go away. People's wounds stay open. Hangovers won't go away. The sea carries no more fish. The village doctor may even have to reopen his old clinic. But don't worry: they still love the girl. They love her so much. They keep standing in queue every day to see her for a few minutes. They haven't lost hope. They won't countenance the thought of going back to the way things used to be, when health and prosperity took effort.

It's often said that people reveal their true face when they're given power. At first, you don't feel like the people of this village have changed. They don't think so, either: as far as anyone can tell, they're all smiles and polite words. But just because they don't mistreat the child, as in Omelas, doesn't mean she's any less exploited. That's the most chilling part about this film: until almost the very end, you won't find a sinister attitude in any of them. It's with the most level-headed, measured tone that they discuss the extremes they're capable of going when they discover that the girl can still work wonders when she's sleeping.

The King Tide examines how alarmingly easy it is for people to lie to themselves with open eyes in the name of sincerely good intentions. This time, the price of utopia isn't paid by one child. It's paid by everyone else, once they get used to actions not having consequences. They have so lost themselves that they react to the possibility of having their perfectly normal lives back as if it were the end of the world, and that panic makes them willing to turn their placid, guilt-free luckily-not-Omelas into a totally-definitely-Omelas if that's what it takes.

But there's another angle to this situation: the reason why the sea has no fish left is that industrial fishing leaves nothing for the villagers. They aren't to blame for their suffering. But since the girl's arrival, they've been buffered from it. Of the available strategies to deal with the ills of modern life, they've chosen denial. You don't need to help fix a broken world if you have your own personal Jesus who can multiply fish on demand. Over the years, the island has developed a strong local identity, but there's a difference between proud self-reliance and uncaring isolation.

That's the thorniest question throughout the film: every increasingly awful step these people take to preserve their little magical corner of the world is ostensibly done to protect the girl from what the modern world would do to her. And yes, it sounds reasonable to want to prevent her from becoming a lab rat. On the island, she plays with other kids, goes to school, is lovingly cared for. But the loss of her gifts reveals that love as conditional. The implication is left unspoken, because it burns the tongue: would you still love God if you didn't receive any blessings?

This is not the same question as the one asked in the book of Job; I'm not talking about a miserable life. I'm talking about an ordinary one, where you rely on what your hands can hold. If nothing terribly catastrophic were to happen to you, but you had no promise of eternal, painless bliss, would you be satisfied? Or more poignantly: if you had experienced a brief taste of that heaven, would that be enough for you? In the film, the villagers do have the impending disaster of running out of fish, but the script goes out of its way to highlight several times that at any moment they could simply move elsewhere. The danger isn't inevitable. It's by choice that they don't bother to interact with the mainland and possibly push for a better deal with the fishing industry. They have plenty of mundane options for fighting that injustice. But with a miraculous child, they can afford inaction. And it's very seductive to have a life that allows and even rewards inaction.

The thought experiment proposed in Omelas is usually framed in these terms: Is it ethical for all to enjoy infinite happiness if it requires the infinite suffering of one person? It's less common to find it in these terms: If one person could provide infinite happiness for all, is it ethical for that person to refuse? In other words, would you demand that Jesus die to save humankind?

It's subtle, but you can notice that it never occurs to the people in The King Tide to inquire what the girl wants. On one hand, it's unfair that people take her for granted. On the other hand, it looks like it pleases her to help people. On the other other hand, she's legally a minor who has not made an informed choice on the matter. The film wisely stops before she has the chance to walk into the exterior world, so these questions are left hanging for the viewer to mull over. It suffices to explore what our endless asking does to God. It's up to you to ask yourself what it does to you.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Book Review: Quantum Garden by Derek Künsken

Quantum Garden follows up on The Quantum Magician by throwing a new and pressing problem at Bel: the destruction of his own people

Being a Homo quantus, even one that has pulled the biggest con job in history, rescued a fleet, stolen a pair of time gates, reunited with the love of his life, and gotten rich, is not easy. The problem for Belisarius Arjona is that this has made it clear to the powers of the 26th century that the Homo quantus, thought to be a harmless, dead-end experiment, were in fact very dangerous. Dangerous enough to wipe their colony from existence. Luckily for Bel, he has a pair of time gate wormholes. But how to rescue his people and keep it from happening again? Bel is going to have to pull off an even bigger heist this time. A heist in time itself…

This is Quantum Garden, the second novel in Derek Künsken’s Quantum Evolution series, following on The Quantum Magician. I am re-reading this series in audio, narrated by T. Ryder Smith.

For those who haven’t read the first even once: to catch you up, there are a few gene-engineered variants on humanity in this 26th century setting where wormholes have been used to explore and settle nearby solar systems, but two main political polities, the Union and the Congregate, are in a warming cold war. One of the gene-engineered variants of humanity is the Homo quantus, who have been designed and bred to try and “see the future” through a more intimate connection to quantum states. This design has turned out to be not as useful as people thought, and so the couple of thousand Homo quantus peacefully live on an asteroid, doing mathematics and theory and living quietly. Belisarius (or Bel for short) is the wild exception (aside from the aforementioned love of his life, his partner Cassie), and that is why he was recruited for the heist in the first book.

But after the events of the first book, the danger and potential of the Homo quantus is now clear, and in a world where the two interstellar superpowers are in a deadly cold war, the quantus are a threat to be removed from the board. So Bel and Cassie, fresh off their heist, witness the destruction of the asteroid that houses their people, and then resolve to save those people as best as they can: by using the time gates.

And so a story is told. This is a novel with a lot more philosophy of quantum states, history, and grandfather paradoxes than the first novel. It is in this novel that the author really delves into what some of the newest generation of the Quantus project, like Bel and Cassie, can really do, and the consequences of those actions. The observer effect of quantum superposition states and information theory come into play right from the get go. After seeing the asteroid from a far distance blow up, Bel’s immediate reaction is NOT to go in and look for survivors, because that would resolve reality and constrain the possibilities of those actions. Instead, Bel uses the time gates to go and travel in time to warn his people to evacuate before the deadly attack. Bel didn’t see the evacuation because he was too far away to, and thus it COULD occur.

That is not enough, of course (they could just be found and destroyed again), so Bel has to go much further. The quest to find a safe and isolated location for the Homo quantus has Bel having to go cap in hand to the officer whom he double-crossed in the first book, and taking a perilous journey back in time to get the resources he needs in order to put the Homo quantus beyond the easy reach of the rest of humanity.

This launches the book into a nest of ideas and concepts that are the real heart of the book. Bel discovers not only where the time gates that he stole in the first book came from, but the secrets of the intelligent lifeforms that live around it on a desolate colony planet. Bel’s discovery of the vegetable intelligences and their true relationship to the time gates and to quantum reality itself are part of the wonder and discovery (and origin of the title) of the book.

The other half of the meat of this book is a lot of speculation and thought and consideration of grandfather paradoxes and time travel as a concept. We got a bit of that in the beginning with Bel’s rescue of the Homo quantus, but given that an older version of a character sends Bel and his team to this colony planet to eventually meet her younger self (as she in fact remembers that Bel did it), this leads to a whole nest of paradoxes, closed time loops and more. They soon learn that trying to escape messing with history is far harder than they realize, and the consequences of doing so are debated again and again. There is a lot less action than in the first book, and a lot more philosophy.

The novel focuses on Bel and Cassie as our primary characters, and once again Bel has a team. He does once again hire pilot Vincent Stills, a Homo eridanus who has been designed to live in a high-pressure environment. Stills is foul-mouthed and foul-tempered, but he is one of the most memorable secondary characters in the author’s oeuvre, and the narrator brings him to glorious life. And he really is as good a pilot as he thinks he is. Sadly, the explosive expert Marie, a particular favorite of mine from The Quantum Magician, does not make a return this time.

One other thing that is quite refreshing, like in the first novel, and helps the author’s space opera stand out, is that it is not the too-common “America in space” that for so long dominated the genre. The author’s future has the Anglo-Spanish main culture that Bel was created from, but there is also a strong element of French and French culture in his universe (How *that* happened is explored in his later prequel series The House of Styx). So, yes, in case you were curious, Stills can and does swear in English, Spanish *and* French.

The book definitely has a bit of middle-book vibe in some respects, when we cut away from Bel’s point of view to that of his antagonists, the Scarecrow. And even by the end of the novel, it is clear that the simmering conflict is going to blow up in the third book of the series. This is not a placeholder book, but it does have some of the limitations of a middle book, which is possibly why the author went with this bottled time travel narrative. The book does improve on some of the not-fully-realized potential of the first novel; that’s clear on this audio re-read.

This is definitely not the place to start with Künsken’s work. Even if you really were more jazzed by these quantum theories and time travel speculations, jumping in here would remove most of the context to the space opera universe that the author has created. I do appreciate that the author, off the heels of his first novel, did not simply have Bel “pull another con,” and instead has him engage with the consequences of his actions from the first book, while introducing a whole set of complications, both theoretical and practical, to his continued well-being. I applaud the author’s willingness to expand his horizons, and look forward to continuing my re-read of the series.

Highlights:

• Improvement on the first novel, especially exploring the potential of the setting
• Less action, more philosophy
• Middle book in a series.
• Excellent narration by T. Ryder Smith

Reference: Künsken, Derek. Quantum Garden [Rebellion Publishing, 2019].

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

My 2019 review of The Quantum Magician is here. That book was previously reviewed by Adri Joy as well.

Film Review: Clown in a Cornfield

The kids are alright—try telling that to the parents

One of the things that comes so piercingly apparent to young people growing up in America is that America hates you. In the ideology of the ruling class, children have no rights their parents are bound to respect. You realize that on some level you are your parents’ property. When you are a teenager, you are more an object onto which the anxieties of the political class are projected, and are banned from many public accommodations where teenagers could reasonably be otherwise. Any emotions you have are called ‘drama’ or ‘overreacting,’ any affection you may feel is a ‘sweet nothing.’ Your interests are ‘fads’ or ‘phases’ or otherwise degraded as ‘unserious.’ Your schooling is less about educating you and more about turning you into a taker of tests. If you are bookish enough, you may learn that the United States is the only member of the United Nations to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. You will learn that basically any civil society organization in America that advocates for parents as parents is usually an Evangelical front that seeks to turn children into the wretched property of their parents. In the eyes of the people who have total power over you, you are less a person and more an annoying rodent.

On its face, Clown in a Cornfield is a rote example of a very common sort of schlocky horror movie, the sort where stupid teenagers encounter something that wants to kill them. In these films and in others (the more recent Jumanji entries being an example), Hollywood makes its protagonists teenagers because Americans have (or, more accurately, like to think they have) all experienced a certain idealized version of ‘youth.’ America usually thinks of teenagers as monsters, and this carries its way into film; what Clown in a Cornfield asks is how much of that is on the kids, and how much of that is the world that their parents made.

Quinn Maybrook (played by Katie Douglas) is a high schooler who has moved away from her friends in Philadelphia to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, with her father Glenn Maybrook (Aaron Abrams), after her mother died of cancer and Glenn found a new job as the town’s resident doctor. Very tellingly for the rest of the film, they are introduced in the car with Glenn blasting 80s hip hop and expecting it to be relatable to his daughter, who points out that such music is as distant from her as the 40s were from his youth (he is visibly taken aback by this).

Quinn’s arrival in Kettle Springs reveals this little Missouri town to have seen better days, and none of the adults will hesitate to tell you that. Kettle Springs lives in the omnipresent shadow of a beloved corn syrup factory that was the lynchpin of its economy back in the 20th century; the factory recently burned down (which was blamed on teenagers), and it has a rather unnerving clown mascot named Frendo. She also, by virtue of being her age, is now consigned by the town elders to be an opprobrium, a scapegoat for the town’s ills no matter her actual culpability. She is not believed when she tells her father that one of her teachers is singling her out for no reason, and she is not allowed the emotional space to spend time with other teenagers without the presumption of foul play afoot. She arrives in the leadup to the town’s Founders Day, an unabashed orgy of nostalgia that is primarily an opportunity for the town’s adults to celebrate themselves.

Quinn realizes soon enough that that clown shows up in places where it probably shouldn’t be, culminating in a teenage barn party the night of Founder’s Day being massacred by heavily armed clowns, and Kettle Springs rapidly dedicates itself to making the lives of its teenagers nasty, brutish and short. The slasher movie comes into its own here, with as much blood and guts and brutal violence as fans of that genre have come to expect.

I’m going to do something I don’t usually do here and spoil the film’s big twist, as it is that twist that provides the film with its thematic depth. The clowns are, to nobody’s surprise, the parents of the town, blaming all the ills of this century on their young people instead of looking into themselves. Admittedly, I figured out this twist early on, maybe a half-hour in, as the film just didn’t leave enough space in its narrative for it to be anyone else (I would suspect attentive readers of this very review would have been able to figure that out too).

In making the parents the enemy, the film takes its critical aim at reactionary nostalgia. Most of the adults in the film take up arms in the name of defending an idealized version of America that existed during an idealized version of their youths. They are mortally offended by the inexorable march of history, and by the notion that their children are people and not vessels through which they can live vicariously. So many little details of this film are organized around this theme, such as one particular plot point revolving around the obsolescence of rotary phones (another involves cars with stick shifts). This film is therefore a very good example of why narrative works should have themes, not for didactic reasons but because a well-conceived theme serves as a sturdy architecture holding up the story. Themes make stories feel more deliberate, less like combinations of random ideas thrown together, more like coherent statements of intent. This film does that well.

It is telling that this film is set in a fictional town in Missouri, a state that has voted for Republicans every year since 1996 (the year of my birth). While never naming the man or the party (and being filmed in Winnipeg, for that matter), the film is a direct attack on the ideology behind the Republican Party under the nigh-absolute authority of a certain Donald Trump. The MAGA movement, and many other far-right parties throughout the developed world, are based on reactionary nostalgia. The parents in this film are without question the sort who would be thrown into existential terror upon learning that their children are transgender or autistic, and will make their children’s lives living hell in order to make them ‘normal,’ to recreate a time when such children allegedly did not exist. These parents would have absolutely loved Moms for Liberty and gone feral upon seeing books in the local library that they deemed too ‘woke.’ They want a town and a nation that is whiter, straighter, manlier, and more conforming, and will literally kill to see that about, because that is what they remember. There is some queer representation in this movie that is both quite touching in and of itself, as well as demonstrating this point very well and explaining in retrospect some odd behavior.

Where this particular line of critique fumbles is in its depictions of race. I could not help but note that the two prominent Black characters die relatively early, not in terms of the runtime per se, but in terms of their context. Each Black character is part of a group of characters and they die early on when those characters’ heads are on the chopping block. From there, the role of race in American reactionary nostalgia is not interrogated at all, when the opportunity was there the whole time. There is no doubt in my mind that, a hundred years before the events of this film, Kettle Springs must have been a sundown town, the sort of place that would have lynchings as a community event, and have enough social cohesion for all the town whites to say nothing to any reporters who pass through. More recently, Missouri was the site of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and in 2017 the NAACP issued a travel warning for Black people who may pass through the state. On this subject, the film missed an opportunity to be even more cutting.

Where Clown in a Cornfield succeeds, it’s because it’s unafraid to directly attack one of the near-uncontested orthodoxies of American civic life: that young people are evil and that parents always know best. Here, the kids are alright, and see clearly what their parents are simply too blinkered to perceive (even better, one of the adults learns to see the light, a rarity when it comes to younger characters). This film knows intimately that the world’s children are the world’s hope, if only adults are willing to listen to them and let them live.

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

Film Review: Thunderbolts*

Who will gain the world, and who will lose their soul?

I think it is fair to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been flailing around since Endgame. The decade’s worth of intertwined storytelling across several film series culminated in a bang, and everything since then, entertaining as it may have been, has lacked a spine that made it satisfying, like before the big angry purple guy. In that regard, it’s like the Star Wars sequels in that it has been reasonably entertaining but lacking any real direction, any underlying idea that the whole enterprise was aiming towards, anything that it really wanted to say (the Star Wars prequels, for their myriad sins, certainly were saying something). As of May 2025 I am happy to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly getting back on its feet with Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo.

The film’s cast is primarily the dregs of previous movies and shows, side characters who had chips on their shoulders and had beef with the heroes in one way or another. In that subtle way, this movie flips the script of the previous movies, where the antiheroes are now, for better or worse, the heroes, and have to save the world because nobody with a purer heart is available at the moment. They are a rowdy, cantankerous bunch, most of whom have been working as contract killers on the behest of those with great ambitions and deep pockets. What holds for a lot of them, most cuttingly Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, is a profound sense of moral injury. As defined by the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

Pugh does an admirable job of depicting someone who is haunted by her own livelihood. She has killed, stealed, destroyed, in the name of her own survival. In a pivotal early scene, she asks her handler if, after this last job, she will get a more public-facing role where she gets to do things that are more obviously good. Her handler tells her ‘yes,’ but being in the beginning of the movie, this inevitably does not proceed as she would hope. Instead, she is forced to confront the monster she really served as it threatens, quite literally, to destroy her.

Such is the same with the other reluctant heroes. John Walker has much the same dilemma as Yelena, following from his actions in Captain America and the Winter Soldier, as does the Winter Soldier himself, now elected a member of the House of Representatives for a district in Brooklyn. More generally, these are workers in a bloody, violent line of work who have been alienated from their labor and are now reckoning with how that has ruined them psychologically, spiritually, and all too often physically.

All these characters have their foil in the film’s antagonist, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played with compelling coldness by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has been involved with the same world of espionage, subversion, and bloody murder that our heroes have been in, but unlike them, she has no symptoms of moral injury because she never had any morals to begin with. If there was ever a self in those eyes that cared for the world, for other people, it has long since been crushed under the treads of ambition and American policy.

(De Fontaine, as she quite loudly insists upon being called in a Congressional hearing in the film, is a personality I am far too familiar with. When I was in college, I knew a lot of people like her who have since gone into the Foreign Service or other wings of the American terror state. I used to be one of them; being from the DC area and growing up among its striving middle class, government service was the most admirable thing imaginable, the State Department and the Department of Defense and the armed forces most admirable of them all. They were the great bulwarks against the world’s barbarian hordes, the farmers who tilled the shining city on the hill. But in my reading of history, I read of how the Nixon Administration actively supported genocide in Bangladesh so that the Pakistanis would be an intermediary in the lead-up to his visit to China. I decided my morality would not let me work for such people. Gaza has, to my dismay, only proven me right).

De Fontaine is such a compelling character because she is the sort of person who runs the American terror state, the sort of person who can talk in the abstract morality common in American propaganda, and adept at contorting it to make murder sound respectable. In that regard, she resembles more the lackwits that surrounded Joe Biden as he let Gaza be razed to the ground. She is fluent in doublespeak, and in that regard I think she would be considered too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ‘woke’ for the new Trump administration. She, like Debora Lipstadt, would find surprising agreement with Trump in the abduction and disappearing of pro-Palestinian activists; she just wouldn’t like the fact that he was so gauche about it.

Completing the sturdy triangle of character that holds the movie up is Lewis Pullman, who plays this film’s version of Bob Reynolds, or Sentry. He is a young man with a life lacking much warmth and color, and as such ended up falling in with a government experimental program to produce a super soldier more powerful than even Captain America. He is a character that reminded me very much of Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, particularly one line said by Wally Weaver:

"I never said, 'The superman exists and he’s American.' What I said was 'God exists and he’s American.' If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

In this regard, Pullman’s Sentry is not in himself breaking new ground. What is new is how he reacts to becoming a godlike being: Doctor Manhattan saw his power, and the strings behind the puppet show of the universe, and saw that all was vanity; in doing so, he still comes off as someone who found a way to reckon with all that. Sentry, on the other hand, could not handle it, and had a psychological break. He is aimless, adrift, and not sure what he should do with his power. This makes him a prime target for radicalization by an unpleasant group, like a terrorist organization or criminal gang.

And, to be provocative, what more is the CIA than a particularly well-funded terrorist organization? Indeed, the entire apparatus of the American security state could be considered a terrorist organization, having been birthed to exterminate the indigenous and terrorize its Black population, and later turned those guns abroad. A good chunk of the movie is De Fontaine grooming Sentry into such a position, offering him compassion and community if he accepts the role of America’s ultimate weapon. As is common in this country, American national interest and common decency are conflated as the same thing, and he is pulled into the vortex where morality is sacrificed because it offers him purpose.

Much has been made of Sentry’s arc as a metaphor for depression or mental health struggles more broadly, and it is right in that regard. However, the criticism I have read has not gone the next logical step down that road, in terms of how those mental health issues can be exploited to advance evil goals. What De Fontaine does to Reynolds is straight out of the radicalization playbook, done by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS and state terrorist organizations like the CIA. She does it because she has the resources to fill a psychological need in Reynolds that broader society cannot; see how common similar messages are in military recruitment ads (such as “be all you can be,” originally from the 80s and recently resurrected) for a display thereof.

Much of the drama of the latter half of the film is on whether Bob Reynolds has enough of his basic human decency to stop what he is doing, placing him in between the namesake team, who have made that realization, and De Fontaine, who has denied it is even a question. There is another character that is interesting in that regard, and that is Mel, De Fontaine’s personal assistant, played with a certain bookish intensity by Geraldine Vinaswathan. She felt like someone who could have been in my very year in college, who grew up in the world I did, and idolized the abstract idea of service that I did, but took far too long to notice the morally compromised nature of the job. As the film goes on, she slowly comes to the realization that she has sold her soul to the devil, and then finds, first with trepidation and later with more intention, a way out of the bargain. She is a relatively minor presence, but the most familiar to me.

This is an aside, but it is interesting that this movie came out so close to another film about the morality of working for the CIA: The Amateur, directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne. Malek plays a CIA operative whose wife is killed by what turns out to be a CIA operation’s collateral damage, and goes against both the killers and foes at the Agency to avenge her. Both films wrangle with how moral it is to work for such an organization; ultimately, The Amateur trusts the process enough to see ‘adults in the room’ set things right (after a lot of violence, of course); in Thunderbolts*, the process is revealed to be untrustworthy, and the adults in the room are the enemy. I am frankly surprised, in a positive way, that the big-budget superhero film is more radical than the smaller spy thriller.

I would go so far as to state that, in the right hands, Thunderbolts* can be as radical as Andor in taking aim at the oppressive structures that envelop us. The film takes time and pains to remind you that there is always a choice to either surrender to tyrants or to fight the evil before us in the name of common human decency. Still being a mainstream film, the ultimate conclusion involves a certain compromise, although a far more justified compromise than many similar films would advocate for. It is a film that is willing to look at what created the whirlwinds of danger that are raging around us, and gives you an honest answer. For that brutal honesty, as much as its thrills, it earns the title of best MCU movie since Endgame.

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

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E4

A year after the trauma of Min-Rau, Cassian and Bix have uneasy peace on Coruscant

Andor has always had a heavy pour of spy thriller in it, part of which I’ve attributed to showrunner Tony Gilroy’s earlier work on the Jason Bourne franchise. In “Ever Been to Ghorman?”, the spy genre is in full swing as Cassian and Syril Karn both go undercover on Ghorman.

Cassian is hesitant to leave Bix as they’ve started to relax a little in Coruscant, where the density of the city keeps them safe. Even so, Cassian doesn’t let his guard down, avoiding areas with cameras since his face is known and growing frustrated when Bix returns to a bodega she frequented a month ago. As Bix says, trying to ease his tension, today “the mission is shopping.”

While Cassian’s struggles are outward, placing stress on his relationship with Bix, hers are internal. She can’t sleep, and the episode opens with her stalking through their apartment with a drawn blaster, following the ghost of her torturer from season 1. The trauma of being tortured by the Empire at the hands of Dedra Meero still haunts Bix. In this dream, her torturer confronts her about Cassian killing a young imperial pilot on their last mission.

When Bix can’t let it go, she accuses Cassian of making the choice to kill the young pilot because he’d seen her face, but Cassian insists it was necessary because he worked for the Empire. This moment is in nice juxtaposition to episode 1, where a low-level worker assists Cassian in stealing the TIE fighter. She accidentally looks at his face and apologizes because she was told not to, but he says it’s all right, and they have an uplifting moment of connection as they both risk their lives for a nascent resistance. In that case, with a supportive, vetted person, Cassian was willing to break the rules, but he has no tolerance for anyone supporting the Empire—which we see throughout the series as the body count rises.

Meanwhile, Syril is living his dream by working under his girlfriend, Dedra Meero, for the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB). In the last post, I know I didn’t touch on one of the best scenes between Syril and Dedra, but I’ll come back to the dinner scene with his mother when I talk about Syril’s character as a whole in episode 9. For now, Syril is playing spy and living the life. He’s been moved to the capital city of Ghorman, Palmo, where he works in an Imperial office overlooking the square where the Tarkin Massacre occurred. Every day, a small group of protestors call out against the Empire’s presence in building something—perhaps an armory—that will shadow the square.

Syril is cast as the sympathetic Imperial worker and plays his role when video-calling with his mother, Eedy Karn (with an amazingly cringey performance by Kathryn Hunter). She’s been overtaken by the propaganda machine utilized by the Empire to turn public opinion against the Ghor, and Syril tells her to watch something other than Imperial television (in a conversation all too familiar to most of us). The Ghorman Front—the relatively inexperienced and untested resistance on Ghorman—is listening in. They demonstrate their naivete by inviting Syril to a townhall and quickly bringing him into their group, even introducing them to their leader, the public-facing city councilor, Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel).

While important to the plot, the townhall is also a beautiful feat of worldbuilding. As discussed by Reactor Magazine, the Ghor conlang sounds distinctly French, and primary speakers were played by French actors. Before I knew about the effort that went into the conlang, I was struck by how fluidly the actors spoke the language. It felt natural in a way conlang doesn’t always come across, especially during emotional scenes—and the townhall certainly has a lot of emotion as people yell at the council and make rude gestures, leading Lezine (Thierry Godard and my favorite Ghorman) to interrupt the meeting with his comments. The gestures, such as tapping the chest in addition to applause, are what add a lived-in feeling to this world and make the Ghor feel like a fully developed culture.

Of course, the connection to the French resistance during World War II is obvious, but like all of Andor’s historical storytelling beats, the series never becomes an allegory or parable. Instead, the Ghorman Front is a demonstration of early mistakes by those new to resistance, as they trust Syril too quickly, which we know will lead to the eventual destruction of Ghorman for kalkite to build the Death Star.

While some of the general conversation around the show is that the pacing isn’t as strong as the first season—or just too slow generally—I’ll take that for a depth of worldbuilding that not only develops the plot but deepens the show’s commitment to anti-imperialism and to demonstrating how anti-fascist action works. In many interviews, Tony Gilroy, as well as the cast, has talked about the level of detail that has gone into the show, whether it’s the quality of the costumes or the hand ritual from this episode that Bix and Cassian conducted. In an episode heavy with interpersonal conflict between Bix and Cassian, this moment of tender ritual is deeply moving and shows their dedication to each other. As Adria Arjona told The Hollywood Reporter: “But Diego slowly started doing this thing with his hand, and then I just followed in a way. It was really beautiful, and it was a moment of connection between two actors. […] It was so simple, but it had so much depth to it in the making of it and even the performing of it.”

I’ll take these moments of worldbuilding—from the space bodega to hand ritual—over a blaster fight any day, especially when such moments demonstrate the importance of relationships in the face of fascism. As critic and writer from France, John Berger, said about tenderness: “[Tenderness] is almost a defiant act of freedom.”

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

Book Review: Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel by Chinaza Bado

A rich and interesting start to an epic fantasy story that may not suit all readers.

I don’t normally put cautions or content warnings in my reviews, it's not been my general practice. But I am going to begin there, of all places, in my discussion of Birth of a Dynasty by Chinaza Bado because I think burying it would be a disservice to a reader. Birth of a Dynasty has violence and rather bad things happening to two child protagonists, ranging from death of their families to imprisonment in rather dire circumstances, violence against them directly, deadly violence committed by them, and other threats to their mental and physical well being. If that is your red line, this book may not be for you.

With that out of the way, let’s begin again as I normally would in a piece like this. Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel is an African infused and inspired location, setting and cultural matrix for a secondary fantasy world. There has been a slowly growing crop of epic fantasies with their roots in Africa, ever since I lamented their relative lack 15 or so years ago. Epic fantasies whose kingdoms, cultures, social structures are inspired by a part of world often just seen as the colonized, or the oppressed, or exoticized as a place to visit or hear stories about, rather than a power, a center of their own, worlds where African influenced cultures are the axis mundi of their secondary world. Evan Winter, Nisi Shawl, N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James and a slew of others have been exploring this space. Chiaza Bado is the latest.

Our two primary point of view characters do start as children. Let’s start with M’kuru. M’kuru is the youngest scion of the Mukundi family, a powerful and rich noble family in the kingdom. But his status starts to fall from the moment he comes onto the page. We see a vicious attack on his family and its holdings by representatives and envoys of the king. The author has taken to heart the idea of starting a novel with a “bang” as we are quickly plunged into a conflict. It is a conflict that we do not quite understand all that is going on or why, with young M’kuru in the middle of the storm.

And then his counterpart, Zikora. Like with M’kuru, Zikora is a child and the novel again does a good job of portraying a child protagonist. Like M’kuru, she lives a young and sheltered life, but is a bit of a wild child, and definitely willful. She wants nothing more than to train at arms and become a female warrior, even if she doesn’t quite understand what that means in her culture. We do get to see more of Zikora’s life, unlike M’kuru, before her own inciting incidents change her life forever.

There is a prophecy that the ruling Zenzele dynasty is worried about, that a union of scions of these two houses in particular will bring down their kingdom. In true fashion for such stories, the book opens with the Zenzele making that aforementioned vicious attack to wipe out the Mukundi entirely to prevent this from happening. If there are none left, there can be no union, and the prophecy can be averted. M’kuru, as noted above, manages to survive and escape the massacre, but not without cost, emotionally and otherwise. The problem, and it drives the plot for a good portion of the book, is that the Zenzele know that he survived, and so he lives under a cloud, unable to say who he really is, and alert for the possibility of being found out.

M’kuru finally finds a village and winds up getting shanghaied into a family of an elderly father and his daughter and living as a peasant amongst them. He gets a new identity, as Khalil, the bastard son of the daughter. There is a definite riches to rags feel to this sequence, but the intensification of a rather alarming set of events for a child continues. It’s not just a riches to rags, but a degradation of his existence.

Meanwhile, not doing everything by halves, our primary female protagonist, Zikora, is bundled off to live at the royal palace. This is a two-fold affair -- to keep a potential fulfiller of the prophecy under wraps, and also as a check against her father. Zikora’s father is even more powerful than the Mukundi were, and to do the same to them as they had to the Mukundi will require a little more leverage and preparation, But that is, judging from other points of view we get, entirely the plan of the Zenzele. And so Zikora does go to the palace, as one might go into the lion's den.

The story alternates between these two points of view, although M’kuru/Khalil's point of view gets more play and he is the more active character in some ways. And that is where I think the book misses a trick. With Zikora, inside of the royal palace, we get to see how women, in a rather strongly patriarchal society, can and do wield power and influence and manipulate events as best they can. Queens, concubines, and “guests” like our protagonist all are in a sharp competition for status and influence and these passages were, for me, some of the best in the book. They are a marked difference to M’kuru/Khalil's story and in general, I kept hoping that the story would return to Zikora more frequently than it actually did.

Both M’kuru/Khalil and Zikora grow into their roles as their paths converge toward their first meeting. There is plenty of in-palace plot in the last portion of the book, and while the book does break from our protagonists' points of view to give us information, it is here in this section that those non-protagonist point of views become crucial to the reader to piece together just what is going on.

I was thinking of Forged for Destiny by Andrew Knighton, which I read recently, since that novel deconstructs the whole idea of destiny and fate and a chosen one (or here, what seems to be indicated as the chosen couple). This novel does play it straight and shows how the winds of fate and destiny can be opposed, but never thwarted. I am not as familiar with the underlying cultures that inform and infuse this book. So for me, the Zenzele trying to stop the prophecy that will doom them has a very Greek myth sort of feel. Your child will murder your father and marry your mother, so you expose the baby on the mountainside and thus set the chain of events in motion because your child grew up ignorant of his real family. This novel is in that mold (or at least the portion of the story as far as I can tell).

And so I sit here on the tenterhooks of how I felt about the book overall. It’s well written, and has some rather vivid imagery--but some of that imagery is rather hard to take, especially when it involves children. It’s a rich and interesting world (but again, mind, it's very patriarchal in nature and there is not even a hint of anyone who is queer -- but would children raised in a society like this even know what that is or what it means?). But the genre elements, aside from being in a secondary world, are relatively slight for epic fantasy. There are a few things here and there and there is a setup for Zikora that doesn’t have much payoff in this novel, although it is clearly set for future books. It is mostly a story of prophecy, and politics and the hard road that two children undergo in the stews of both.

As far as the ending, this is the first book in a series and the narrative comes to a stop without any sort of offramp whatsoever. It’s a fraction of a larger book, not a complete story in and of itself. The protagonists have aged into teenage years by the end of the book, and so the threat of violence to children protagonists is unlikely in subsequent volumes. And there is a sense that Bado is trying for a grand sweeping epic that will take years or even longer of the lives of its protagonists to accomplish. I admire the ambition and the drive to try for it. The prophecy is not at risk of being fulfilled in a short while.

There are definitely readers that will enjoy this book and eat it up with a spoon and craving the next book. And I wanted to. But this first volume... did not leave me, alas, wanting more of the epic.

--

Highlights:

• Reread the content warnings. Seriously.

• Classic fulfillment of a prophecy story.

• African-themed epic fantasy, immersively so.

• Only the start of the story.

Reference: Bado, Chinaza, Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel [Harper Voyager, 2025]

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