Film Review: 28 Years Later

The third entry in the series is a breathtaking glimpse at brutality, humanity, and hope

The week prior to seeing 28 Years Later I reactivated my long-dormant account my local video rental store to catch up on the series, since 28 Days Later isn't streaming anywhere. I reacquainted myself with the rage virus (it's important to remember that the infected in these movies are NOT living dead zombies, but deeply ill human beings with a horrible disease) and remembered that the focus in the series (like all good post-apocalyptic media) isn't on the monsters but on the people left behind. I think some folks forget this key part of dystopian storytelling.

If you want just a run-of-the-mill shoot 'em up of infected, play Call of Duty: Zombies with unlimited ammo. The nuance is in the horrible reality and choices that human must live with in a post-apocalyptic society, and the thrill and terror comes in knowing that we're only a failed power grid away from having to make similar choices.

I loved this movie, and was in awe of its intellect, direction, acting, and storytelling. It takes the traditional zombie film and adds so much lore expansion that it ends up surpassing the genre entirely.

28 Years Later opens with a throwback to outbreak day as a young British boy named Jimmy watches The Teletubbies as a horde of infected break into his house. He manages to escape to the local church where his father is welcoming judgment day, allowing himself to be killed while Jimmy escapes yet again. (This is the first part of a bookend that we'll revisit later.)

Flash-forward 28 years and we're in what appears to be a thriving small community that's separated from the mainland by a tidal causeway. Things seem nice, if a bit old-timey. Spike, a 12-year-old boy, is being taken to the shore to go hunting with his father Jamie in a sort of rite of passage, and the two embark on their voyage to raucous celebration and cheer. Spike's father sees the voyage as a sort of respite from his ailing wife, Isla, played by Jodie Comer, who is suffering from a disease that the local population cannot name nor cure.

Hunters and searchers are free to go visit the mainland, but one rule of their society is that you do at your own risk—no rescue parties will ever be launched. When Jamie and Spike make landfall, the countryside, which is England untouched by industry, pollution, or commerce, is a vibrant green. They're out for only a short while before they come across the first new evolved form of infected appear—the slow and lows, which are large, slow-moving, and consuming enough calories from the ground to survive on non-human protein like worms. (This reminded me of the bloaters and shamblers from the Last of Us, and it's fascinating to ponder how these two IPs have influenced each other by leapfrogging around various installments over the years.)

This is such an important point, since in prior films the infected died after around 7 months due to starvation. The existence of the slow and lows means that the virus is evolving and mutating. Once again, you have to keep remembering that the infected are not dead—it's so easy to forget and just think things don't make sense.

Seeing the feral groups of rage-infected human is fascinating because they're living together in what appears to be harmony—a sort of society, almost. Humans, no matter what, are still social creatures. And their depiction in 28 Years Later is far different from the brain-thirsty, mindless hordes of zombies in other movies.

Okay, back to the plot: Spike hesitatingly makes his first kill on one of the slow and lows, and he and his father continue on their journey. They next encounter an Alpha version of an infected—enormous, smarter, and more cunning. Also, he's possessed of a comically large phallus that's impossible to ignore in every single shot it's in.

The existence of an Alpha infected is not only incredibly cool, but also makes total sense given its place in the grand scheme of humanity. Maybe he's just the examplar of an evolutionary new type of human—homo sapiens ira, ira being the Latin word for 'rage.'

The Alpha hunts in such a menacing way that Spike and Jamie are forced to sprint back to the island over a half-flooded causeway, cutting it close to the wire before making it in.

This scene is my absolute favorite in the movie, as it's visually stunning to watch, the panicked running kicking up saltwater as the northern lights and bioluminescence in the waves throw colorful shadows all over the scene—all while the looming Alpha bears down on them with cruel efficiency.

Fun fact: 28 Years Later was filmed with hundreds of iPhones. Contrast this with the fact that the original 28 Days Later was also filmed on a portable camera, and it's fun to see just how much video technology has changed in three decades.

Back on the island, the town celebrates Spike's victory as Jamie lies about how courageous Spike was. The scene is very Wicker Man-esque—in fact, the entire vibe of the isolated and strangely violent island society is very folk horror. The town seems frozen in time because it is, as society is regressing to hunter-gatherer-type activities along with very clear gender roles.

In this isolated island world, Queen Elizabeth II will forever be the monarch hanging in frames upon their walls. Underscoring this thematically is director Boyle's decision to splice in footage from Henry V films, along with the incredibly creepy recitation of the poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling.

Later on that evening, Spike sees his father cheat on his mother with a townswoman, which disillusions him as to his father's god-like status. While on their mainland sojourn, Jamie told Spike about a doctor that lives alone and isolated on shore, but mentions that he's crazy and anti-social.

Spike, stewing in his anger and disillusionment, takes Isla the next day and escapes to the mainland in search of this doctor, hoping to help his mother heal from the disease that's affecting her mind and body.

On their search for the doctor, they meet up with a Swedish soldier who was shipwrecked, and he's the sole survivor after members of his team were killed by the infected. There's a fascinating scene where the soldier discusses everyday normal things like online delivery and smartphones, which Spike has absolutely no knowledge of. Another thing it's important to remember about this universe is that only the UK is ravaged and quarantined—everywhere else in the world it's the modern day with all of its conveniences and technology.

The trio comes across an abandoned train that's echoing with shouts of pain and investigate it. An infected woman, feral after years of living with the rage virus, is alone and in the process of giving birth. From start to finish, this scene is absolutely WILD and moving and shocking. Isla, an empathetic mother, approaches gently and actually assists in the birthing process.

For a brief moment, it's just one woman helping another, as has been happening throughout all of human history. The infected woman delivers a regular infant (though most definitely a carrier like the mother in 28 Weeks Later). As the mother begins raging again, the soldier shoots her, and Isla grabs the baby and keeps moving as an Alpha then in turn kills the soldier. Isla and Spike, a new baby in tow, continue on their journey to find the doctor.

This point is where people begin to either start loving or hating 28 Years Later. Up until now, it's been a straightforward look into a new civilization and a raucous infected bow-and-arrow turkey shoot. Pretty standard.

But once Isla and Spike encounter Dr. Kelson, the film turns into an incredibly moving treatise on family, loss, and grief. Meeting Dr. Kelson is a delight, as it's a bald Ralph Fiennes-covered-in-iodine jump scare (a very welcome one, of course!).

Kelson has been living alone and coexisting amongst the infected, in a sort of Jane Goodall-type way. When he saves Isla and Spike in their first meeting, he blows a morphine dart at the Alpha rather than shooting an arrow at his heart. This is the first time I can recall in a "zombie" type movie that someone is approaching them with a nonlethal motive. Again, this could be because they're not zombies, and as a doctor, Kelson appreciates a person's humanity, however little of it there may seem to be.

Kelson is not crazy, despite Jamie's insistence, and over the past 30 years has been building an elaborate Bone Temple as a monument to the countless dead in the UK. He bleaches and sterilizes bones for this process, and the result is towering pillars of femurs, arm bones, and skulls, and it's very reminiscent of catacombs in Europe.

Kelson evaluates Isla and realizes it's metastatic cancer. With her wishes, he euthanizes her while Spike is slightly sedated, returning with her cleaned skull so that he can place it atop the piles of skulls.

This scene is wild, to be fair, but it works for a number of reasons. Isla is finally no longer suffering. Spike is learning first-hand how cruel and horrible and indiscriminate death is. He also is realizing that in this world, no matter grief-struck you are, you cannot stop—you have to keep moving, keep evading, and keep trying to live.

He returns to the island and drops off the infected child, whom he's named Isla, and leaves a note saying that he's going to off on his own for a while. The island that had raised him, he has realized, is not the only way forward.

The movie could have ended here, and it would be completely fine. But we get a few minutes of Spike wandering through the green countryside before being overrun by infected. Then, a posse of jumpsuit-clad long-haired blonde men jump to his rescue—it's Jimmy from the beginning of the movie all grown up! And he and his gang kick butt Power Rangers-style and save Spike.

Now, as a non-British person, I neither knew this was a strange allusion to British entertainer Jimmy Savile nor do I feel qualified to really speak as to how jarring this was for British people to watch. Savile worked with children and was a known predator and abuser, but I didn't know any of this until watching TikToks later about it. For a more in-depth discussion of it, check out this article.

I thought this bizarre ending was truly surreal and definitely very different tone-wise, but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the movie. I've not been able to stop thinking so many different parts, and I can't wait to watch it again.

And good news for fans—28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is set to release January 16, 2026 as the first installment in a new trilogy. And yes: that is roughly 28 weeks later from now. We see what you did there, Danny Boyle.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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.

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E9

In episode nine, “Welcome to the Rebellion,” Mon Mothma begins to understand the cost of what she has been supporting financially for years

The episode opens with the Ghorman ambassador being arrested in the wake of the Ghorman massacre. Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt) and Mon Mothma know now is the time for action, especially since the Imperial news is continuing the propaganda machine. As Organa says, “The winner writes the story.” To which Mothma responds, “Well, they haven’t won yet.”

It’s Mon Mothma’s moment to use her power in the Senate to attempt to make a difference. Organa decides to stay to buy more time for Yavin to develop, but after her speech, Mothma will flee to Yavin and join their leadership.

While prepping for her speech, her assistant, Erskin (Pierro Niel-Mee), finds a listening device, which Mothma destroys, alerting the ISB that something may be happening in her office. She goes to the plaza to practice her speech, where Luthen finds her. Perhaps unsurprisingly to viewers, her assistant works for Luthen and was recruited at the wedding of Mothma’s daughter. Mothma sees it as a betrayal that neither Luthen nor Erskin told her about the connection, but Luthen sees it as her assistant protecting her. Even so, feeling betrayed by Luthen, she struggles to trust his next piece of intel—that the extraction team Bail Organa has prepped to take her to Yavin has been infiltrated.

Meanwhile, Cassian is exhausted and shaken after escaping the Ghorman massacre. He meets with Kleya to receive what he claims will be his last mission with Luthen. She confronts him: “You’re tired. It’s too much, it’s too hard. You were a witness to the Ghorman massacre; one would think there’d be no stopping you.” He emphasizes he needs to “start making my own decisions,” but Kleya has a response for that, too: “I thought that’s what we were fighting for.”

Even so, he agrees to help rescue Mothma and enters the Senate as a reporter, at the same time as Organa’s compromised team also enters with an ISB agent in their group. Cassian connects with Erskin, using the now iconic line, “I have friends everywhere.” Even though Mothma immediately dismissed Erskin, he continues to help make sure she escapes.

In the senate, Mothma waits for Organa to create an opening for her. Earlier in the episode, an ISB agent had made clear that no pro-Ghorman senators would be allowed to speak, and the glimpses of the Senate narrative throughout the episode continue the Imperial line that the Imperial soldiers are “martyrs,” and that the Ghormans were not massacred but causing an insurrection. With some political maneuvering, Organa is able to break through the blockade of voices and yield the floor to Mothma. When his ploy works by invoking a specific Senate rule about emergencies, the ISB immediately orders the shutdown of the feed.

I often comment on the brilliant monologues and speeches throughout the show, but Mothma’s speech is perhaps the most important and moving in our current moment. Since I heard her speech, I have not been able to stop thinking about the line, “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.” Immediately after the episode ended, I had to look up when the episode had been filmed, because it felt impossible that Gilroy and his team had written this speech with such prescience, but in interviews, Gilroy has discussed they had wanted the speech to feel as timeless as possible, which they achieved. With rising fascism and the violence of empire globally, there are certain patterns, and the pertinence of Mothma’s speech comes from recognizing those patterns and exploring them in Andor.

Rewatching this episode, the “death of truth” shook me even more as the U.S. enters yet another war on the lie of weapons of mass destruction, as more of my neighbors are disappeared off the streets of my rural hometown under the lie of being “illegal” or a “criminal,” of watching the lie that Palestinians are receiving “aid” when they are instead being murdered while world governments do nothing. Mothma counters the death of truth by speaking the truth aloud, which is when the Senate reacts to her speech: she calls the Ghorman massacre “unprovoked genocide.” Saying the word at that moment is what causes the Senate to react, and is part of claiming that truth. Words like “genocide” and “fascism” are brushed aside as extreme, as incendiary, but Mothma’s speech shows the power of using the word in the right moment, of calling something what it is.

Interestingly, Andor sets up this as being one of the most important moments in Mothma’s career. In the Senate, we see moments of her advocating for different ideas—especially for the Ghormans throughout  both seasons—but we don’t necessarily see her as being impactful in the Senate. Rather, in season 1, she is useful to Luthen because she funds his actions. In season 2, her attempt to help the Ghormans with a petition is ineffective, and even she knows that. Instead, her disruption of the Senate and her speech being aired is demonstrated as being impactful as opposed to her political power. I’ve been curious about what tactics of resistance Andor shows as working versus failing. For example, Ghorman’s plaza protest fails, but Mothma’s speech scares the Empire into frantically cutting it off.

Importantly, the only reason the Empire doesn’t succeed in immediately silencing Mothma is because of two unnamed technicians. These two technicians have maliciously followed the rules in order to slow down operations by locking out their supervisor. The exchange is worth repeating:

Supervisor: “It’s locked. Why is it locked?”

Technician: “It’s supposed to be.”

Supervisor: “It hasn’t been all year.”

Technician: “We know. We fixed it.”

Supervisor: “What?”

Technician: “We checked the protocol.”

Supervisor: “Open it.”

Technician: “You need the sequence key.”

Supervisor: “So let’s have it.”

Technician: “We took it up to the security office yesterday…”

The technician even speaks slowly compared to the frantic supervisor, who runs off to find the key, while the technicians smile to each other. Much like the hotel clerk Thela, this example of how to commit malicious compliance—a way to gum up the Empire without breaking any rules—is yet another example of praxis in this show that anyone can do off the screen.

At the very end, Mothma’s speech is cut off, but she’s successfully delivered her message to the galaxy, and finds Cassian standing outside. With the help of Erskine, Cassian kills the ISB agent on Organa’s team, then they escape to her ship. The titular moment of this episode comes as they are hurrying away from the dead body of the ISB agent and Mothma is struggling with the moment of violence, getting her hands dirty in a different way than she’s used to: “I’m not sure I can do this.” Cassian responds: “Welcome to the rebellion.” 

Cassian brings Mothma to the safehouse where he and Bix used to live, and he’s informed by Kleya and Erskine that Yavin will take over Mothma’s travel, and Cassian will essentially be written out of the story in order to make a grander narrative for Yavin. Cassian takes this in stride, but it mirrors how Mothma’s very public moments, like her speech, can only happen because of the work of Luthen, Cassian, and Kleya, which they receive little to no credit for.

These types of moments undermine the larger hero’s journey that Star Wars is so known for. The only reason these heroic moments happen—like Mothma’s speech or blowing up the Death Star—is because of the unsung work of people like Cassian, Bix, Wilmon, the hotel clerk, and the technicians, and all the other large and small acts of defiance.

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: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Bringing a new found family perspective to the story of the greatest Greco-Roman mythology superhero.

When I wrote my review of Stephen Fry’s Troy in 2022, I had imagined it to be an endpoint to a boomlet of books interpreting and reinterpreting Greek mythology from a variety of perspectives. Little did I know that Fry himself has a new book in his series, but more importantly, and germane to this review, John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) would step up to the plate of tackling and interpreting Greek mythology. And, what's more, take the biggest of swings to the most famous hero of Greek mythology in the process.

And so we come to his second novel, Wearing the Lion.

If you are at all familiar with anyone in Greek mythology, you probably know something about Heracles (or, if you want to go Roman, Hercules). Having a TV series devoted to him in the 1990’s certainly helped. His labors come up (even if why he had to do the labors sometimes is fuzzy in the minds of many people). His prodigious strength, certainly is the stuff of legend. He is really is the OG superhero of Classical western literature.

 
And then there is of course the monsters in Heracles' story, where Wiswell comes in.

In many stories of his even before his breakout novel, John Wiswell has been writing and thinking about monsters¹. Monsters are one of his core themes and ideas and exploring monsters, from the inside as well as out, is one of his strongest power chords. And Heracles’ story, let’s face it, is positively littered with monsters. Nearly all of his labors are capturing or killing something monstrous. Probably, the most famous of these is the Nemean Lion, the one whose hide is impenetrable to weapons. How do you defeat a monstrous carnivore you can’t hurt with a spear or a sword? In the main line of the myth, Heracles wrestles it to defeat, uses its own claws and teeth to cut the hide, and then wears it for the rest of his life as some rather good light armor.

 
Wiswell comes up with a rather different idea, and hence the book’s title and the throughline for the book. Why would Heracles, himself a monster in some ways, not seek to befriend monsters rather than to slay them? And what does that do to his myth and story? The Nemean Lion is the first, but far from the only monster that Heracles meets and befriends in the course of the narrative. Heracles is not afraid of a fight, or of war, but this is a Heracles that would rather make a friend. Again, and again. Wearing the Lion is not an act of violence... it is an act of love.

The book alternates point of view between Heracles and Hera. You might be familiar that in most myths, Hera hates Heracles and from birth tries to kill or weaken him². Wiswell plays on the fact that while Hera hates Heracles (for being a bastard son of her philandering husband Zeus), Heracles himself is for most of the book absolutely and positively devoted to “Auntie Hera”. He takes the “Hera’s Glory” of his name (that is what his name means) and hits that theme again and again. This imbalance between a Heracles who is always trying to live up to his divine stepmother and be worthy of her, not knowing she is seeking his downfall, drives a lot of the plot, and some of the more mordant humor of the book. There is the damoclean sword hanging over the narrative--what happens when Heracles finds out what Hera really thinks of him?

 
But the book begins lightly and sprightly enough, in a style that I’ve come to associate with Wiswell’s writing. It almost, I think, strays over to being twee. The conversational tone of the chapters contributes to this, as we often have Heracles, or Hera, talking to (or even more often addressing ) another character in the chapter. The second person point of view gets a workout in this novel and uses it frequently

For all of that rather light tone at the beginning, though, Wiswell is willing to go dark, and in fact to tell his story has to go dark.. I should not have been entirely surprised given his short fiction but there is definitely a gear shift in this book, before and after the death of his children. I had wondered, being relatively familiar with the Heracles story, how Wiswell was going to go there, since he changes a lot of the rest of his labors and background. But indeed, Heracles does in fact kill his three children thanks to a bout of divine madness. What had started as a relatively light Heracles and the monsters story shifts into a more serious and somber tone with less humor and more drama. Heracles of course wants to know why this happened, convinced some god must have done this, and so the rest of his narrative shifts to the quest to find that out.

There is also good work on the theme of identity and who you are. The fact that one of Heracles’ early names Alcides is used again and again, and Heracles reverts to that name when he feels no longer worthy of the name Heracles. This reminds me of Doctor Who’s The War Doctor, stripping himself of the title Doctor, and having in his own mind to re-earn and regain the right to use that name. Lots of Wiswell’s characters at some point have crises or have to come to terms with who they are and their nature. His take on Heracles is another in that spirit and mode.

Meantime, on the other side, Hera has reconsiderations of the fallout of what she has done. A strong beat Wiswell hits again and again is that Hera is Goddess of the Family. Families, especially pregnant mothers but all families in general, are her divine mandate. And instead of killing Heracles with the madness, she wound up killing his family instead³. Coming to terms with all that and what happens next, along with Heracles’ own quests, makes up the back portion of the book. And as Heracles befriends more monsters and completes more quests, the eventual conflict of Hera’s plans and Heracles’ own quest head toward inexorable conflict.

 
So the novel is really in the end about Heracles and his found family of monsters and how they intersect with Hera and her family of gods and goddesses. There is a lot of lovely bits set on Olympus with Hera and the parts of the Olympian pantheon we see--in particular Ares and Athena, although a couple of others come in as well. A criticism I might have for the book is that a few opportunities were definitely missed on this side of the equation, especially with Hera given the divine mandate of motherhood and family being an important theme of the novel. Demeter and Persephone for instance, aren’t even named. The wrangling between the deities we do get and see, however is gold, and their squabbling never gets old⁴. The novel really is, from Hera’s perspective, the slow realization that Heracles’ group of monsters with him are, in fact, a family. Heracles’ story is the slow realization of his own nature, what he did, and coming to terms with himself. And, not to bury the lede, learning to actually accept his family for and what they are.

 
Wearing the Lion shows off John Wiswell’s talents for humanizing and making monsters into people and again, like his first novel, showing that people can often be the real monsters of society. This book doesn’t quite hit that theme as hard as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, this novel though is much more about building and creating a found family...and accepting them and accepting them and their love into you, as much as you loving them. Heracles gets the latter part right off... but he (and Hera) need to learn the first half of that equation matters, too.

--

Highlights:

• Interesting take on the Heracles myth exploring his relationship with Hera in a new way
• Strong theme of found family of monsters
• At turns funny, mordant, and without warning, will tear your heart out (a John Wiswell book in other words)

Reference: Wiswell, John, Wearing the Lion, [DAW 2025]

¹Dream conversation at a con or literary event ? Get John Wiswell to talk to Surekha Davies (author of Humans A Monstrous History) about monsters. That’s box office gold. 

²As Fry notes in his books, though, there are a multiplicity of varieties and variants to Greek mythology. Heracles' story is no exception and in fact, he was enormously popular across the Mediterranean. Heracles is actually Hera’s chosen champion in Etruscan mythology and we get none of the “try and kill him” business.

³In this version of the myth, Hercules kills his children but not his wife, who remains loyal to him and important to his redemption. Is that “correct” to the myth? See footnote 2.

⁴Allow me once again to lament the cancellation of KAOS, with Greek Gods set in the Modern Day. 

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

Film Review: Ballerina

Change the accoutrements and this movie would be low fantasy - prove me wrong

Ballerina is, on some level, a blatant cash grab, more so than the other John Wick movies, by virtue of being an interquel. It is an interquel because it needs to be set at a time when John Wick, the man you hire to kill the boogeyman, is alive, and by the end of the fourth movie John Wick is dead (spoilers for a movie from 2023, sorry). Trying to slot in a film between two other films in a sequence is ungainly at the best of times (the good people over at TVTropes have discerned a rather thorny continuity issue with this movie vis-a-vis the other movies in the series). But, for this movie, I choose to look at its continuity in the way I look at James Bond movie continuity, where the whole thing is malleable and something of a mess, and as such I will care about continuity about as much as the films will.

Ballerina contains within itself another iteration of the John Wick series’ spectacular worldbuilding. This series has the best worldbuilding I have ever seen that has not a single obvious supernatural element to it. By virtue of being set in a criminal underworld, there is room for all sorts of weird micro-societies and cultures, some of them bordering on a religion. The one that takes pride of place in this film is the one in which our protagonist is immersed. It is an all-female organization of assassins and bodyguards who, in addition to all their combat training, also have to learn to be first-class ballerinas. You see your main character, played by Ana de Armas, be grilled in her ballet technique intercut with her more obviously violent education, and by the end of it the stage on which she practices is covered in blood. Ballet as an art form is brutal on the body, as shown in previous John Wick movies as well as 2018’s Red Sparrow, and for that reason is so often juxtaposed with more violent endeavors. On an aesthetic level, it works as a juxtaposition between beauty and death, and the whole thing feels like something out of a fantasy novel, or even a Greek myth about the Amazons.

The Ruska Roma, the ballet/homicide organization that our protagonist, Eve Macarro, joins in the beginning of the film is confronted with an enemy that likewise feels like something out of a fantasy novel. This organization is a religious/homicidal cult whose raison d'être is shrouded in mystery (which is a polite way of saying somewhat vague, but it works) that has existed for centuries, and based in a town in the Austrian alps. In some ways, they are the perfect mirror of the Ruska Roma, also being fanatical and cold-blooded. Every little bit of world-building you get here is through character actions, rather than ham-handed exposition or hackneyed dialogue. You are finding out who these people are right alongside Eve, and the strangely impassioned but always scary behavior makes for a compelling villain.

An aside - there is a bit where the head of this cult in the Alps mentions that a leader of said cult has not had to flee in two hundred years - I would read the shit out of fan-fiction about this cult’s involvement in the Tyrolean Rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, because I am a fucking nerd.

The action here, as in all the other John Wick films, is spellbinding. There is the obligatory shoot-out in a nightclub, this time in New York. As familiar as such scenes are in this series, the film still justifies its presence by virtue of the use of the bright, contrasting colors used decoratively. You also get a good deal of mileage out of that town in Austria run by the cult; there is a well-done fight in a kitchen with use of kitchen utensils (in a manner far more creative than this year’s Novocaine). You will also get the most off-the-wall usage of flamethrowers I have ever seen in any film ever, as well as the most creative use of a hose I have ever seen in any film ever. The series has, fortunately, not devolved into cliché.

Ana de Armas brings a strong presence to her leading role as Eve Macarro. Eve is what I would imagine John Wick himself was like as a young assassin learning the ropes (and how to hang people with them) of the homicide business, but of course gender-swapped. Eve has to build up a tolerance of killing, something John Wick has had the entire run of his namesake series, so there is a trepidation here that has to be overcome. Her gender, of course, changes a lot. The most spectacular, and most poignant, of these is during her training in the Ruska Roma, where her superior tells her that she will be weaker and smaller than any man she fights, and she must always remember that. This immediately cuts to Eve fighting a man in a spar; to make up for the difference in size, she attacks his groin repeatedly, and he is clearly in incredible pain. Throughout the movie, you see a woman turning from someone relatively normal, albeit having gone through a tremendous loss, into an amazon who can dance.

Only a few days after I saw this movie, I read David Foster Wallace’s (no known relation to the author of this piece) essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, whose namesake essay is about his time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He finds a brochure aboard the ship with an essay-cum-advertisement by the acclaimed writer Frank Conroy. Wallace is quite perturbed by this essay, not because it isn’t good (on a craft level, he says, it is superb), but that nowhere it is disclosed that Conroy was paid for it. This essay, argues Wallace, is an advertisement pretending to be art:

“In the case of Frank Conroy's ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

This is an argument that I think is worth thinking about in relation to big media franchises, of which John Wick has most certainly become in recent years. The purpose of a media franchise is to be enjoyed first, and then to advertise future works in the franchise for the ultimate financial gain of the franchise owner. John Wick, the man, the character portrayed by Keanu Reeves, is something of a modern folk hero, in what Henry Jenkins described as “a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” The question, then, are franchise films art? Is Ballerina art?

I would argue yes. So many great works of painting and sculpture are here in this world for us to appreciate because of the patronage of the wealthy; hell, the art on the Sistine Chapel is a prominent example. It bears mentioning here that Ballerina started out as an original project before being retrofitted into the John Wick universe. Like the great works of the Renaissance, Ballerina owes its existence to men of great wealth, but ultimately it has enough substance, enough meat on the bone, to be enjoyable.

(also the song at the credits is extremely catchy)

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

Film Review: Elio

Disney loves to write orphans, but doesn't seem to understand them

Recently orphaned Elio Solís has been adopted by his aunt Olga, who has a busy military job and had to give up a chance for career advancement in order to take care of him. She's struggling to adjust, but hasn't said one word that would imply she resents him. Still, he feels unwanted and unwelcome. This misunderstanding on his part sparks an entire allegorical journey in which he meets a distorted mirror version of himself (no, I don't mean the clone) and learns that he isn't as alone as he thought. The message is sweet and valuable, but the way it's expressed through the narrative is sometimes muddled, which is unfortunate in a movie that focuses so much on efforts to communicate.

What sets things in motion is Elio's visit to a space museum where he learns about the search for alien life. After reasoning that there's no one on Earth who loves him, he becomes obsessed with contacting aliens, hoping to be taken by them. Any viewer who grew up with terrible parents will recognize this fantasy of adoption, but it's hard to understand in Elio's case, because his aunt is in no way whatsoever mistreating him. It's Elio who convinced himself that his presence is bad for her life. He takes too long to figure out that her choice to pause her career plans is not something he inflicted on her but something she willingly did for his benefit.

All right, she does make one mistake: she signs him up for a summer camp that teaches military discipline, which ranks very, very low on the list of things you should do to a kid who already feels lonely and expects to be abandoned. He soon gets dragged into a fistfight with other kids, which the movie treats as a pivotal moment in the course of his life.

From this point on, the emotional trajectory of Elio is best understood by placing in parallel the plotlines of the human kid Elio and the alien kid Glordon. They don't even meet until well into the runtime, but Glordon's story is basically the heightened, hyper-dramatized version of Elio's. From Elio's perspective, Olga has dumped him in that military summer camp because she's had enough of him, and also because military life is all she knows. In Glordon's case, his father, Grigon, is an interstellar tyrant who expects him to one day wear the battle armor that is traditional in their species. The armor is full of a ridiculous variety of deadly devices, and it hides, constricts and pierces the creature's soft skin. It's meant to be worn permanently. What this prospect means, when translated back into Elio's life, is that he has before him the option to deal with his complicated feelings by squeezing them under a mask of toughness. But the kind of person who would make that choice, as the movie illustrates rather literally, is not Elio's/Glordon's authentic self. It would be a disturbingly people-pleasing version of him. Olga wants a polite, obedient child, as the warlord Grigon wants a ruthless conqueror, but that's not who Elio/Glordon is.

Where this beautiful allegory falls apart is in the manner of its resolution. Elio's injury from the fistfight at the summer camp shows Olga that she was wrong in trying to steer him into her steps; Glordon's almost-death shows Grigon that galactic conquest isn't worth losing his child. The problem here is that Elio is the one who needs to change his incorrect beliefs (the movie even literalizes this point by giving him an eyepatch during the entire second act to represent his limited perspective), but the allegorized version of his struggle has the parental figure be the one who learns a life lesson (notice how it's the battle armor which has eyes, in the manner of a reverse blindfold, while the actual alien body has none). The emotional resonance is pointed in the wrong direction. Grigon's neglectful, harsh style of parenting is not the proper translation of how Olga behaves toward Elio. A charitable reading would say that Grigon stands for Elio's distorted idea of Olga, but even in that case it would still be Elio who needs to learn and grow. This thematic misfire brings to mind the better execution of the same dynamic in The Lego Movie, where the villain and the father follow neatly parallel arcs.

Despite this confusion in the handling of its ideas, Elio is not without highlights. A thrilling scene in which Olga and Elio have to pilot a spaceship through floating debris reaches a triumphant peak when they get unexpected help from random strangers, which is a better thematic conclusion to Elio's yearning for a community where he fits. Maybe he won't join the diplomatic elite of the universe, but there's plenty of excitement to be found on Earth.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: The Life of Chuck

Dancing and Dreaming as the world comes to an end

As a writer and as a critic, there are times I wonder what the point of writing and critiquing is when [gestures vaguely at the world] is on the march, with no sign of abating. Writing stories and reviews in the hopes that someone will enjoy them, or take something away from them that is beneficial, can feel like you’re a member of the dance band on the Titanic, plucking and thrumming away while everything around you is sinking ever more quickly, right before you drown and your corpse is crushed by the water pressure. To quote an old meme, we had the misfortune of living in the one apocalypse where we still have to go to work. The fact that I drove to the theater to see The Life of Chuck in a massive rainstorm that seemed to appear out of nowhere only heightened the mood. This film is based on the namesake novella by Stephen King, and directed by Mike Flanagan.

There are three interrelated portions of this film. The first is about the slow end of the world, an exaggerated version of the existential dread felt by those of us who follow the news (and also a solid piece of evidence in favor of the idea that ignorance is in fact bliss). The second is about an accountant who, while in another town on a business trip, decides spontaneously to dance to the music produced by a busking drummer in a public square. The last is the coming-of-age of a boy who loses his parents in a freak car crash, grows up with his paternal grandparents in a home where he is absolutely forbidden from entering the uppermost room, all the while learning how to dance. Running through all these is the story of Charles ‘Chuck’ Krantz, the axle around which the wheel of this film spins.

The first section, the one involving the end of the world, is one that is equal parts completely unnerving and deeply relatable (and a good chunk very, very funny) by how familiar it is. It is, to quote a Bluesky post from around the time of the Los Angeles fires, selfies taken in disaster areas closer and closer to you until you are the one taking the selfie. The characters in this segment are on some level resigned to the whole thing, the casting away of the accoutrements of quotidian society feeling almost inevitable, for we have all planned for it, fantasized about it, dreamed of it even, as we try to numb ourselves from reality. The first thing that heralds apocalypse is the loss of the internet. There’s one particular scene, where two men commiserate about how they no longer have access to PornHub, that filled me with an emotion that I have a hard time describing (but I’m certain there’s a seventeen-syllable German word for it). It’s the humor that arises when you see that people will always be like this, but also despair at how we will never change.

The second part is a celebration of human joy and spontaneity. The businessman, for no reason that even he can ascertain (and he himself admits this), starts dancing to drums in public. He puts down his briefcase, but doesn’t change his shoes (I can attest to you that dancing in business shoes is a massive mistake - he would be sore for a week afterward, if his experience is anything like mine), and he just starts going at it. He is joined by a young woman whose boyfriend has just dumped her via text, and had the brazenness to ask if they could still be friends afterwards. They both are jolted out of day-to-day numbness, or worse, and in their wild, raucous, jubilant dance, they bring a similar jolt to the drummer, and to the crowd that is watching them. It likewise brought a jolt to me, for reasons I will explain soon.

The third part is the most meaty. This boy, who grows to be a young man over the course of years, spends his time asking ‘why?’ He asks it of his grandmother, his grandfather, his teachers, his crush, and of the world. Some of it is asking questions about injustice, some of interpretation, others arbitrariness. This kid has seen a lot, starting with losing his parents and his sister-to-be in his mother’s womb. He is also struggling with questions that his grandparents refuse to answer. Who is Henry Peterson? Who is the Jeffries boy? And why is he not allowed in the cupola of his own home? In the light of all of these, he pushes on, trying to make something of himself, trying to find joy. He finds joy in a dance program after school, and it gives him the strength to carry on in spite of loss and mystery.

I’d like to take a bit of a detour and talk about how the film portrays the act of dancing. Since college, I have been an avid ballroom and swing dancer. I credit learning to dance these dances as being the thing that dragged me out of the purposelessness and depression of my high school and early college years. Without dance, the world was cold and gray and joyless to me. With dance, life was warm and full of color. As such, my heart surged when I saw the two characters in the second part dance with such aplomb, such buoyancy, to those drums that filled a town square. My heart soared when I recognized their steps as coming from cha-cha and from lindy hop.

My heart absolutely leapt out of my body in the final section when this boy was being taught in his class by a teacher who proudly calls herself the ‘dance monster.’ She taught them cha-cha with steps that I recognized, and then she said words that are inscribed on my heart, a simple “rock step, triple step, triple step.” That is the way of counting the basic steps of six-count lindy hop. Those are the first steps any swing dancer learns, and they unlock a world of excitement, a world of joy, for those who persist in following that route. Those words are not simply steps to me; they are my second heartbeat. I swear to you, I cried when I heard them, and saw this kid inelegantly repeat them, his teacher drilling them, but doing so very accurately.

I have been deliberately coy about the actual supernatural element of this film, but I assure you it is there. The first part is the most obviously supernatural; it uses that supernatural conceit to make you very nervous, absolutely on edge, by virtue of not giving you a single explanation for it (one can detect a tonal similarity to the more cosmic, existential SCP articles). The world is ending! There is a mysterious man on a billboard! His image keeps appearing on a variety of surfaces! All of this culminates in an otherworldly scene that I am almost absolutely certain Stephen King cribbed from Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God. This whole film absolutely feels like a Stephen King story, where the bizarre, the strange, and the otherworldly are found hiding in plain sight, poking around among the everyday as if it were always there, waiting to be found by someone in thrall to the mundane.

The end result is a film that is unabashedly humanist and unashamedly existentialist. It reminded me of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, which likewise has a deeply strange alteration to the world, and asks us to find meaning in it. The man who dances to the drums in the second part of the movie says that that particular incident is why God put him on this Earth. In light of the cruelty, the arbitrariness, and the despair that have ensnared us, the movie tells us to make our own beauty, our own meaning, our own light, because those are what make life worth living. It tells us to push on, to keep fighting and to keep dreaming and to keep dancing and to keep creating, as that is the beauty of the whole thing to begin with. As odd as it is to say about a film based on a Stephen King story, it’s beautiful.

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

6 Books with Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of two short story collections, two poetry chapbooks and her first novel, The Migration. Her stories and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Abyss & Apex, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Tor.com. She is the author of the forthcoming The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. I'm on a big speculative detective kick after working my way through Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir series. I love how science fiction melds with detective stories—they’re both fundamentally about investigating the way the world works, peeling back layers to reveal hidden truths. There’s something so satisfying about that combination of mystery and speculation, where the detective isn’t just solving a crime but uncovering how reality itself functions. Detective stories often end with “and this is how the world is—we’ve just uncovered the truth of it,” while SF stories end with “and here are the possibilities.” I find it fascinating to see which way an author is going to leap when they're combining both genres.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Kathleen Jennings’ Honeyeater. Kathleen is one of the most interesting, curious, and creative people I’ve ever met. She has a poet’s attention to language, an artist’s attention to detail, and a novelist’s attention to world-building. Everything she touches becomes something extraordinary—her illustrations, her short fiction, her academic work. We’re actually working on a non-fiction book about writing speculative short stories together, and I snuck a peek at the first page of Honeyeater and immediately wanted to slip the book into my bag and abscond with it. I have a feeling this book is going to be something genuinely special and surprising.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again?

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta. I read it during the pandemic and it was absolutely perfect—that rare kind of fantasy that completely transports you to another world that’s strange, wonderful, and utterly immersive. It’s about two girls living in a whale made of dreams, which sounds impossible to pull off, but Tashan makes it feel inevitable. The book has this incredible sense of wonder mixed with deep emotional truth. I genuinely think this represents the future of fantasy writing—bold, inventive, unafraid to take risks that pay off beautifully.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. It’s a book I reread every couple of years, but each time I discover more to appreciate—more depth arising from apparent simplicity, more emotional resonance hidden in what seems like a straightforward fairy tale. It reminds me again and again of the beauty of the form of the fairy tale, how it speaks to our longing and honours the craving we have for mystery and meaning—something fantasy is deeply interested in. Increasingly I have been thinking about how becoming a mother has changed me as a writer. Like, it rewrote the emotional landscape of my world and charged it in new ways, some of which have been quite confronting and difficult to manage. For example, I am so sensitized, so raw, that I find horror writing much more difficult than I have in the past. But this book brings me a sense of comfort and joy. My husband read it to me while I was pregnant to help me sleep, so it holds a very special place in my heart now.

5. What’s one book you read as a child or young adult that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Impro by Keith Johnstone. As a university student, I was terrified of public speaking, so I took an improv course out of what I can only describe as a mixture of self-hatred and self-improvement. But this book taught me so much about creating narrative on the fly—how to understand the shifting balance between characters, how to build toward satisfying endings, how to say “yes, and...” to unexpected possibilities. The principles of improvisation—accepting offers, building on what others give you, finding the story in the moment—have become central to how I approach both writing and life. It’s not technically a writing book, but it’s one of the most useful books about storytelling I’ve ever read.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death follows two women across generations: Sara, a circus master’s daughter seeking revenge, and her granddaughter Irenda, who becomes entangled in a web of state-sponsored illusions decades later. It’s a story about how grief and love echo across time, set in a world where the line between political spectacle and magical performance has completely dissolved. At its heart, it asks whether stories liberate us or trap us—and whether we can tell the difference. But what makes it truly awesome is that it’s also narrated by a godlike talking tiger who may or may not be trustworthy. The tiger represents something wild that we think we might tame—which becomes this perfect unreliable guide through a world where nothing is quite what it seems. It felt like the ideal narrator for a story about the power and danger of storytelling itself.

Thank you, Helen!

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

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E8

In "Who are you?", the best episode of season two—and a top-tier moment in television generally—, we bear witness to the Ghorman Massacre. 

Content Warning: Discussion of domestic violence, violence against protesters.

As Cassian is preparing for his assassination of Dedra Meero, the plaza is opened and the Ghorman Front immediately starts to rally people. In a surprising moment of clarity, the leader of the Ghorman Front, Carro Rylanz, points out the danger of gathering, but his rebels refuse to listen to him. Meanwhile, Dedra speaks to her supervisor, Major Partagaz about the plan. “The only story that matters is Ghorman aggression,” he says. “The threats, the inexplicable resistance to imperial norms.” He points the success of their propaganda and media, revealed in the board meeting during episode one: “Our struggles with Ghorman are well documented at this point.” 

In a great piece of cinematic storytelling, a few minutes later as Syril walks through the memorial plaza, a news reporter repeats Partagaz’s lines about resistance to imperial norms. The propaganda plans have fully taken over the media, demonstrating there is no help for the Ghor from the story being recorded by traditional media sources. They are fully part of the Imperial machine.

As Syril makes his way to ask Dedra what’s going on, he’s confronted by Carro Rylanz as people file by, chanting: “We are the Ghor! The galaxy is watching.” Rylanz tells Syril about the mining equipment that’s been witnessed on different parts of the plant, which Syril still tries to deny, but at this point, Rylanz knows Syril must have been helping the Empire and says: “What kind of being are you?” Syril has no response, and Rylanz demands to know: “What’s in our ground? What is it you’ve been sent to steal from us?” Like Rylanz, though, Syril has no knowledge of the mining as Dedra has kept it from him. 

He tries to see Dedra, but he’s blocked by other Imperial officers as things become more volatile during the protest. When he is finally brought in to see her, she reveals the plan he has already guessed. In this moment, Syril finally finds his agency, even though it’s through an exertion of power via domestic violence. In true fascist fashion, he can’t express himself except through domination (as opposed to being dominated by the other women in his life who dictated his agency, such as his mother or Dedra). He chokes her while asking about the mining. His shock seems to have two layers—the destruction of the planet and people he’s come to admire to some degree and the fact his girlfriend kept the information from him. He rushes out to join the crowd.

While Syril’s capability of violence has been demonstrated in season one when he tried to find Cassian, this intimate partner violence demonstrates a shift in his character. Throughout season two, Syril has received much of what he’s wanted. His partner is an officer in ISB, his mother is finally respecting him, and he’s on a special mission for the Empire. Importantly, much of these “successes” haven’t happened due to his choices. In a brilliantly acted scene early in the season, Dedra tells his mother, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), that she will control how much Syril sees his mother and that contact will be dictated by if Eedy can behave. Syril trades one domineering relationship for another. While it does seem like Dedra cares for him in her own way—both of their abilities to care dictated by their lack of empathy—Syril is also controllable, which is why he’s the perfect person to infiltrate the Ghor, because Dedra knows she can control him. 

As Syril realizes he’s been used by his partner, he watches the breakdown of the protest in the plaza as the new recruits from the previous episode are sent out to clear a path to the memorial. While their commanding officer says that’s a bad idea, the officer in charge of the operation sends them out anyway.  

In an intensely powerful moment, Lezine starts singing the Ghorman national anthem. The crowd picks it up, and soon the whole plaza is singing, united in this moment of oppositional nationalism. As they sing, the green recruits go out to clear a path to the memorial, and the crowd grows angry, harassing them while stormtroopers blocking off the plaza observe the situation. Above the plaza, a sniper watches while TIE fighters fly over. 

Partagaz orders Dedra to continue the plan: a sniper takes out one of the young recruits, which prompts the imperial forces to open fire, including the stormtroopers. What had been a crowd singing the Ghorman national anthem becomes stormtroopers and imperial officers shooting into a plaza. A few of the Ghorman Front have blasters, but most of them are unarmed civilians. The sniper continues to take out people from the rooftop.

In the panic, Syril watches the stormtroopers kill people he had been working with, murder the citizens he’d walked past every day, and destroy the plaza his office had overlooked. In a series of slow moments, the camera focuses on Syril standing still in all this violence. 

Several commentators have suggested that Syril might have had some sort of awakening in these moments, and Disney’s official episode guide seems to support that reading as the episode summary states: “[Syril] comes to the realization that he’s been a pawn for the Empire’s machinations.” It’s easy to want to look for redemption for Syril. While he’s not a sympathetic character, we do come to know him intimately over the course of two seasons, from seeing the inside of his bedroom and how his mother treats him to the manipulation from his partner, Dedra. But, he’s always been an active part of the Empire. He wasn’t swept up into it out of necessity or drafted into the stormtroopers or even just passively involved. One of the first introductions to Syril is while he attempts to create an even more stringent sense of law and order on Ferrix. It’s his dream to be recruited by Dedra to be a spy, even if the reason for his spying is at first a lie. To me, what makes Syril such a compelling and well-written character is not this moment where he perhaps regrets his actions but because he is as dedicated to the cause as Cassian or Luthen. Cassian also has moments where he questions their tactics, but he still has resolve. So does Syril as his opposite.

Meanwhile, as Syril is having these confrontations, Cassian is quick to recognize the gathering in the plaza is a bad idea and will end in violence. As he hurries to check out of the hotel, the bellhop, Thela, tells Cassian, “Don’t worry, you were never here. Didn’t log you in.” This moment demonstrates some of the brilliance of the storytelling in Andor—and I want to point out a similar moment in the next episode. Gilroy and his team take careful pains to show how one resists. The tools are documented, and this moment is one of them. Thela breaks a small rule in order to make sure Cassian remains undetected. When Cassian responds that he hopes everything works out, Thela says: “Rebellions are built on hope.” By giving this key line to Thela, it emphasizes even more that it’s not the great leaders like Cassian, Bix, Vel, and Luthen who make the rebellion work, it’s the small acts of resistance that create great opportunities. As Nemik from season one says in his manifesto: “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

Cassian joins the Ghorman protest outside, trying to find Wilmon, as they both realize the stormtroopers are prepared to “kettle” the Ghorman, cutting off their escape in a great visualization of tactics currently being used against protestors in L.A. these past few weeks. Much like Thela’s small act of resistance, Gilroy and his team also show the tactics of empire to disrupt protest. The stormtroopers contain the protestors, fly intimidating TIE fighters over the crowds, and, most importantly, they start the violence by killing one of their own people to then pin on the protestors. K2 units are released on the crowd, and their efficient violence and nearly impenetrable armor makes them horrific enemies as they are able to crush people to death. 

In the violent chaos, Cassian still tries to complete his mission of assassinating Dedra, and as he is about to take the shot, Syril finally sees him in the crowd. Syril reacts with an intensity of violence that we nearly saw when he threatened to kill his partner. Now, he turns all that anger onto Cassian, the man he’d hunted and had caused him to lose his job. It’s a brutal fight as they both go for the soft parts—the eyes, mouths—and use whatever weapons are at hand as the Imperial forces continue to massacre the Ghorman. 

Syril is relentless, dragging himself upright after an explosion that Cassian thinks has taken him out. He finds a gun and has Cassian in his sights. With desperation in his voice, Cassian asks: “Who are you?” Cassian’s lack of awareness of Syril’s existence makes Syril hesitate. It’s easy to imagine what might be going through his mind, that the only reason Syril is standing in that plaza, a contributor to a massacre, is because of Cassian, the man he became obsessed with. In that moment of hesitation, Syril is shot through the head by Rylanz.

In interviews, Gilroy and Diego Luna have talked about how they had to fight to keep the line “Who are you?” in the episode, which seems wild. The moment provides so much clarity for Syril’s character—all that hatred for a person who doesn’t even know him. As a piece of anti-fascist media, this moment feels important to the broader message. A necessary tool of fascism is an “other” that can be blamed for the ills of the world. On an interpersonal level, Cassian represents that “other” for Syril (and from a casting perspective, Diego Luna and Kyle Soller replicate the current fascist othering happening in the U.S. right now). This question from Cassian dramatizes how all that hate from Syril is a one-way street and not representative of reality. Rather, Syril was trying to turn something he'd imagined into reality.

After Syril’s death, Cassian and Wilmon escape the plaza. Wilmon chooses to stay on Ghorman to help his girlfriend, a member of the Ghorman Front. In the final shots, Wilmon’s girlfriend Dreena (Ella Pellegrini), attempts to broadcast what happened during the massacre. Wilmon also charges Cassian to spread the story. 

A long shot shows Cassian’s face as he escapes and Dreena's message plays as narration: “We are under siege. We are being slaughtered…” This message contrasts with the news media, which shares the Imperial narrative that the Ghor started the violence and that the dead imperial officers are martyrs (including Syril). 

What makes this episode, and the following episode “Welcome to the Rebellion,” so important is the familiarity of it all. Videos on TikTok juxtapose shots from these episodes with protests actively happening across the country as I write. Someone graffitied an ad for Andor, adding a speech bubble to Luthen’s mouth condemning ICE. Like the best revolutionary media, Andor has captured our current moment. While Gilroy has stated in interviews that this season wasn’t meant to be predictive, the prescience is still uncanny and speaks to Gilroy and his team’s understanding of fascism.

In a recent video post, resistance scholar Dr. Tad Stoermer points out that Andor is “practically an instruction manual” and sums up what he sees as the takeaway: “Resistance, to have any hope of success, requires regular people…to risk, to sacrifice, to lose with no force on their side other than their own will. […] What are you …willing to risk…for a better world you might never live to see?”

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

The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025: A Shortlist Discussion

Right in the heart of brimming awards season, we come to the Clarke Award shortlist, whose winner is due to be announced on the 25th of June. While we wait to find out the winner, myself and a very exciting guest decided to read the shortlist, and see what we think of the nominees as individual books, a group together, and as part of the wider fiction conversation of 2024 and 2025.

Joining me for this discussion is 2024 Clarke Award nominee, Hugo winner, Astounding Award Winner, World Fantasy Award winner and excellent-opinion-haver, Emily Tesh!

Per their website blurb, the Arthur C. Clarke Award is given to the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. As a juried award whose judges come from a variety of UK groups - the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival - one of the key features is its ability to pull up gems that might not have made it onto popular voted awards, placing them alongside more well known authors and works, and giving a different slant on the year’s SF - as evidenced by this year’s shortlist, some of whom have (at least so far) not been honoured elsewhere, and sit here alongside Hugo Award nominees.

This year, the shortlist is as follows:

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Extremophile by Ian Green

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

Emily and Roseanna got stuck into the shortlist and come here to share their opinions on the novels, the shortlist as a whole, and what the Clarke is covering that other awards may be missing, as well as their thoughts on who they might want to win.

Roseanna: Shall we start by going right in there, rather than a gentle introduction? I want to kick off with Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, because it’s one we both had a lot of opinions about, and that we kept on coming back to to think about more for days after we’d finished it.

The story follows the titular Annie, a robot girlfriend owned by a man named Doug, who has been slowly developing in her complexity since she was put into “autodidactic mode” two years previously. We spend time immersed in her perspective, as she struggles with what Doug wants from her, how to please him, as it runs up against her own growing and individual desires. A meeting with one of Doug’s friends - and a secret, somewhat coercive sexual encounter with him - kickstart a lot of painful, traumatic and dramatic events for Annie, changing her life immeasurably and leading her to think outside the rigid confines of the existence she’s always known.

For me, it didn’t fully work. There are a lot of ideas thrown up across the book, a lot of side-threads into different angles on the central metaphor of Annie’s robot nature, but overall, it feels like an abusive relationship novel that is being undermined by all these different pieces that aren’t necessarily pulling in the same direction as the central ideas. I’m not sure how the AI parts work with that premise, rather than muddling it.

Emily: One thing that really jumped out at me from reading the whole shortlist was the primacy of metaphor in the shortlist's approach to science fiction. I don't think a single one of these novels asked the reader to take a speculative concept purely on its own terms. Whether it's artificial intelligence, cloning, time travel, or climate fiction, the reader is expected to join the dots in a kind of extended simile: this thing in the story is like this thing in real life, and this is like this, and this is like this. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the function of the speculative metaphor and the ways it can fail. Annie Bot is a book where the central metaphor did not succeed for me, and this undermined my entire reading experience. Annie is a robot, an artificial person. She was created to provide sexual satisfaction and emotional companionship for her human owner. She spends the novel struggling with what this means–what does it mean to be owned, what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to create herself as the kind of person whom Doug wants her to be. And I spent the novel struggling with what the actual point of the metaphor was.

Is the book arguing that straight womanhood is essentially false, a performance rooted in misogyny created by and for the benefit of straight men? (There are many, many sequences of Annie lusciously self-objectifying as she tries on different outfits, wears different kinds of impractical sexy underwear, simulates orgasm for Doug's satisfaction.) Is it trying to say something about transgender identity? (At one point, Doug and Annie attend couples's therapy; Doug points out that the therapist is a trans woman, and asks Annie if she noticed; the implication is that he longs for Annie to 'pass' as a human just as the therapist 'passes' as a woman; later he assures Annie that he doesn't mind that she can't have children, they can adopt, his family will never know; I wrote, with a large question mark, TRANSMISOGYNY METAPHOR THEN?) Or are we meant to read Annie's repeated fascination with the idea of her own artificial mind placed in a male robot body as a transmasculine identity suppressed by the requirements of Doug's patriarchal ideal of what his perfect girlfriend should be? Or, no, wait, is the book actually trying to be about race? (Annie's appearance is a copy of Doug's ex, but whiter; the entire emotional arc turns on a question of how she can ever escape her enslavement by this man.) Because in each case I found myself wondering–so what are we saying about trans identity, what are we saying about race, what is the book actually saying about any of the ideas it touches on; is it really saying anything at all?

It is saying something. When I was growing up my mother had a shelf of books she called the Ain't It Hard Being A Woman shelf. Annie Bot would fit right in. It's terribly hard being a straight white woman with an abusive boyfriend. Leave the boyfriend. I'm still not sure why she had to be a robot about it.

I think this struck me particularly hard when read in contrast with another book on the shortlist that manages its central metaphor with striking deftness. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a book about being a lone survivor of a disaster, pulled out of the familiar and into a world of terrible ease and mundanity where your past makes you a perpetual stranger; it's about being a refugee from history, a person struggling constantly with hereness and thereness, reckoning with the world created by imperialism from a position of safety, comfort, and collaboration which you'd rather not think about too hard; it's about being lost, in time and space, forever. Also, nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Graham Gore is there.

Which is to say: I thought this book was spectacular. Bradley knows the thematic work she wants her metaphor to do and she goes to work with a scalpel, unpicking every layer of 'refugee from history' with perfect sharpness. The book's conceit is that the narrator is a bureaucrat selected to keep an eye on Graham Gore when the Ministry abducts him from history at the moment of his disappearance in the Arctic, incidentally killing the rest of the mission. Then they fall in love. But the book is about the experience of living in Britain as the mixed race child of a refugee who escaped genocide in Cambodia. Why does the narrator fall in love with Graham Gore: well, how could she not? They're the two most different people imaginable (a classic of romance, which I always like to see done well) and thanks to the Ministry's decision to abduct him from history they are also fundamentally Exactly The Same.

This is a debut novel for Bradley and I can't wait to see what she does next. It's very, very good. It's extremely funny. The thematic work is beautiful. It does fall apart a little in the last fifty pages–speaking as a person who has done a time travel plot: dear god is it hard to manage all the moving pieces of a time travel plot in a satisfying way. I almost wish Bradley hadn't bothered. I would have been happy with just the romance, the jokes, the brutal thematic underlayer, and the moody descriptions of the weather.

Roseanna: If Annie Bot is a shotgun, then The Ministry of Time is a scalpel. Or possibly a hammer. In any case, I entirely agree - it knows precisely what it wants to be and then goes at it at an unapologetic full tilt. Every single piece of what feels like such a disparate set of genre-components all eventually turn towards the job of supporting that one thematic core of the exploration of “refugee” as a concept. Bradley uses different ideas extremely skilfully to triangulate on her points, and never more clearly than in the three characters whose different experiences of racism in Britain come up throughout the book. The first is the unnamed main character, for whom that racism permeates all aspects of the story, and not least her relationship with Gore, whose vocabulary and approach to race are entirely drawn from his historical context (more on that in a moment). She keeps her head down, and her path is one of survival, just getting through it with the least impact and harm on her as possible. By contrast then, are her sister, whose emotional working through of her own experiences the main character disparages in her thoughts, or Simellia, a colleague at the ministry who offers the protagonist solidarity (and is rebuffed), and has a much more resistance-minded approach to the constant impacts they both suffer throughout the story and beyond. Three ways of existing under racism, three conflicting and contrasting approaches. The narrative does not commit to a clear model of which is correct - however much the story does not always support the protagonist in her (often terrible) choices, there is always an understanding for how she got to where she got - but does always give an insight into why, and uses the triangulation of the three separate approaches to deepen our understanding of all three as characters, especially by their interactions with one another. The frustration palpable between Simellia and the protagonist as their different approaches slide past each other, the fundamental misunderstandings of this person who should get it but doesn’t, forms a critical part of us seeing each of them as the person they are.

And, because Bradley seems to love efficiency with her many tools, is an obvious thematic crossover with the frustrations faced in working with someone from the past.

This, too, I think she does amazingly. It is so hard to find books that incorporate historical characters or settings that get historicity right, and I think Bradley has done a remarkable job here of something that could have gone wildly wrong - making Gore both authentically of his time and intensely charming and likeable and interacting authentically with the modern-day context. I never lost a sense of him throughout the book as coming from a particular context - and the same is true, to a lesser extent, for the cast of supporting historical figures pulled out of different pieces of history alongside him - and having his whole self be a product of that context, for both good and ill.

It means we get a romance with someone who feels like a whole person, not with a projected retrofit of modern morality, but with their own sense of identity and self that does not always fit neatly up against the protagonist’s. That, alongside the way Bradley crafts the atmosphere in which they interact, makes it a far more successful romance for me than many others I’ve read.

And then, speaking of atmosphere, she does just as good a job of crafting the sense of place - the hereness to contrast Gore’s thereness - of this nebulously near future London baking in a heat that is familiar but intensified. Writing in Zone 3 now as the temperatures climb into uncomfortable summer, the miserable claustrophobia of some of the midsection of the book feels only just that tiny bit out of reach - a horrible prescience on what is to come that provides the contextual realism as well as the atmosphere and helps ground the more fantastical elements of the story.

Which brings us nicely along to one of the other bangers of the list - Private Rites by Julia Armfield. It’s on the other end of the weather spectrum - every single review I’ve read of this book, including my own, starts with the constant rain in the story on the first line and for good reason - but it forms an atmospheric substrate in just the same way as in The Ministry of Time. And these aren’t even the only two near-future horrible-climate Londons of the shortlist.

Where The Ministry of Time reaches out of SFF and into romance, spy thrillers and contemporary literature, Private Rites has more than half an eye on horror and literary fiction, and it’s from the interaction of the SFnal elements - climate fiction - with those two that I think its greatest strengths lie. It presents climate change not as a novum, not as a problem to be solved by daring heroes, but something akin to an act of god. It’s a prompt for psychological exploration and a backdrop for the melancholy lesbian sisterly shenanigans that take up the centre stage of the majority of the plot.

Emily: Private Rites is such a very assured, intelligent, well-crafted book that I feel a little guilty for not liking it more. This is not the only book on the shortlist I have this feeling about (more on that later) but I think this is perhaps the book you and I disagree on the most, because I know you really loved it and I just thought it was pretty good. It is absolutely leaning on literary fiction–Armfield's prose is strong. And it's another one which is doing thoughtful, complex, interesting things with a central metaphor. The conceit Armfield has borrowed from horror fiction is: what if there was a mysterious guy secretly in your house, would that be spooky or what? Sometimes the Guy is your father and the house is the emotionally horrific architectural masterpiece he built to refuse the effects of the climate crisis. Sometimes the Guy is your half-sibling and the house is the drowned and ruined and still madly functioning remains of London. (I did really enjoy the layers of sibling relationships in this book: it acknowledges, as few books do, that sometimes a much younger or older sibling is simply a person you don't know very well who was, unfortunately, also there.) Sometimes the Guy is God, maybe, and your house is the ecologically devastated planet?

Also–spoilers–sometimes there is literally just a spooky mysterious bad guy secretly in your house.

I saw this outcome from a long way off, which is not necessarily a problem. Horror sometimes turns on anticipation! Unfortunately, I found the reveal more comical than spooky in the execution. That's actually something this book has in common with The Ministry of Time–both succeed better as literary fiction (with their interest in language and human behaviour, and their layered, considered thematic complexity) than as genre fiction, because both of them do the genre fiction plot in the most underbaked and obvious way possible in the last fifty pages. Private Rites actually made me think a bit about 'science fiction' as a category. (Of course, people are constantly thinking about science fiction as a category; a bad habit of the entire genre.) I found myself dwelling on the 'science' part, on the suggestion that the fiction of the future is necessarily a fiction of science, which has always struck me as an oddly triumphalist understanding of how history and technology interact with one another. Private Rites is staunchly unscientific. I like the book better for it.

Roseanna: That was one of the things that really struck me as I was reading it, and I haven’t got a better way of explaining it than thinking it’s climate fiction but not science fiction (which is awkward, given what the Clarke is for). I think that is something of a contentious take, and drilling into it would be a whole “what is SF anyway”, leading me straight into that bad habit as well, but my short, high level version is pulling on that “fiction of the future” piece. Climate change is rapidly becoming the fiction of the present, not the future, and so it’s resolving into non-SFnal genres more and more often now. Especially in Private Rites, where the imagined future on display is non-specific and very proximate-feeling, I think that veneer of futurity is about as thin as it could possibly be. It’s climate as spectre of the current zeitgeist (in the way that all fiction about the future is actually concerned with the now), just with the dial turned up a little way. So I think this is a case of the future catching up with the genre - clifi may once have been a disastrous science fiction prediction, but it’s now just horrible reality.

Which is a long way of saying - I absolutely agree, it’s litfic first and foremost. Where I disagree (maybe) is that the genre it rushes into at the end is horror more than it is SF. We see the seeds of it through the latter half of the book, in the intrusions of inexplicable oceanic life into the scenes from the city’s perspective (which, incidentally, are some of my favourite parts of the book - I love weird descriptive sections, and these are brief but very atmospheric). It explodes out in the final confrontation, but I think it was an undercurrent (sorry) for a while beforehand.

I think I was a bit more into it than you, but I have been an enjoyer of Julia Armfield’s brand of melancholy lesbians encountering the uncanny for a while and was entirely primed for it.

Emily: I am tragically impatient with the sorrows of melancholy lesbians. It's probably a personal failing. And now, moving to another book which I filed under 'well this is very good and I feel bad that I'm not more into it': Extremophile by Ian Green is the story of yet another near-future ecologically-ruined London, and of the underground world of criminals, indie bands, ecoterrorists, and biohackers who survive beyond the still well-cared for Zone One. The book moves vividly and competently between the heads of its narrators–Charlie, a biohacker who plays bass in a band; the Ghost, a powerful corporate executive; Scrimshank, a brute; the Mole, the sole survivor of a horrific biohacking experiment. The character work is really, really good. I found the Ghost's chapters genuinely hard to read: there is some real stare-into-space body horror, framed coldly and painfully in the point of view of a man who thinks himself extraordinary and is constantly mentally workshopping unfunny little jokes. 

One cannot accuse Green of underbaking the plot. This is a heist book, and heists rely on tight, propulsive plotting. It's a heist book where the most attractive character is named Parker and there is a Nathan floating around in the background, which made me laugh. The book winks at you: we've all seen Leverage. In fact, referential is a word that kept coming to mind. This is a book that made me stop and DM Roseanna to make her listen to The Mountain Goats. (The song you need. You'll know when you get there.) This book enjoys both Leverage and Le Guin (the word for world is–). Maybe the referentiality is part of what made the book feel so strangely nostalgic to me. Extremophile is set in the future, but in the future London has a lively indie punk scene where young people gather to fuck and dance and plan their environmental protests. The narrative loves a thriving independent live music scene, writes from a place of affection and knowledge about it, in a way that felt so entirely real and tender that it also felt, somehow, more like the past than the future.

But this is not the only thing nostalgic about Extremophile. Unlike The Ministry of Time and Private Rites, this is near-future climate-inflected science fiction where the science is front and centre. Our protagonist and chief narrator, Charlie, is a scientist. Underneath the slick machinery of the heist plot, the book asks questions about how much it actually matters to do the science: to be a scientist, to love knowledge, to look at the natural world with care and attention–a tree, a pigeon, a marsh spreading through Hackney–to quantify, analyse, and create, as a scientist. Charlie begins the book doing shit science, exploitative nonsense–here's your zodiac reanalysed in light of your DNA–squeezing money from the gullible with a mix of fact and fiction designed to give idiots what they want. The monstrous Ghost with his custom-designed biological cruelties is only the logical conclusion of the path she's already on, and on some level Charlie knows it. It's no wonder she's a nihilist. The question is whether she's wrong to feel this way, in a world where science has already comprehensively failed to save the day.

In other words, I read this book and went 'aha, this is definitely Science Fiction'. (You know it when you see it.) And that also felt nostalgic to me! I found I was a lot more interested in the Science Fiction than the heists, and my sympathy for Charlie grew through the book. And I thought the London of the book was perhaps the most persuasive and aesthetically powerful of all the near-future Londons we read for this shortlist; the book has a really extraordinary sense of place. So why, after several paragraphs of well-earned praise, was I not actually all that into Extremophile? Well, I feel like I got handed a first-rate scotch and now I have to sheepishly admit I don't like whiskey. Heist plots don't do it for me–I have to be in exactly the right mood to watch Leverage. I find most live music an exquisitely miserable experience thanks to my loathing of crowds and lifelong hearing difficulties. Bio-horror freaks me out so much that I kept having to put the book down for a bit after the Ghost chapters. You see the problem?

Roseanna: Not to add another problem to the mix, but the thing that hit me right between the eyes while reading Extremophile was: this is cyberpunk. It’s not. It’s not about the tech in the way classic cyberpunk is. It’s bio far more than it is cyber (is biopunk a thing? Everything -punk is probably a thing if you try hard enough, much to my despair), but the atmosphere, the anti-corporate-ness, the unregulated techno future full of violence and individualism and fancy crimes? That’s cyberpunk. And that was what gave me that big nostalgic whiff, alongside all the science.

It’s just unfortunate that I don’t like cyberpunk at all. I also don’t really get a heart-squeezing burn of affection for the live music scene (I too hate crowds, but also my taste in music is simply atrocious), I don’t like heists - especially watching people plan them, I don’t like extended scenes of violence and fighting, and I generally struggle with climate fiction. It felt like a recipe for me to absolutely hate Extremophile.

And yet… and yet. You’re right. It is entirely embedded in this futuristic, muggy London that I can fully believe and feel as I’m reading. Charlie’s journey from nihilism to tentative hope is genuinely touching and emotive. The characters all have wonderful, distinctive voices when it’s their turn to be the viewpoint, and each provided something different to the narrative to make their inclusion worthwhile. One of them - Mole/Awa, a physically and genetically altered woman upon whom those changes were enacted forcibly in her childhood - gets some absolutely gorgeous writing that made me want to linger over every sentence. By the end, all of that somehow managed to charm me into liking it, against all my native inclinations. Not all the way to loving it. But a lot lot further than I ever would have expected from someone giving me a plot summary.

If it has a failing (and that failing isn’t just “me”), I might suggest that the ending could do with dialling back a little on the sentiment, but given by that point it had worked its hooks into me, I can’t complain too much. It does the legwork of grounding all of its climate work in very realistic pessimism, and doesn’t let its resolution drift into the sort of world-changing optimism that would have been at cross-purposes with its ongoing messaging. The world is still shit, it says, but maybe it’s worth fighting anyway. And, critically, maybe Charlie thinks it’s worth fighting now. It works extremely well on the level of one person’s path back to resistance and action against the injustices in the world around her. Like Private Rites, it’s a book interested in the human, and the human experience of *gestures* all this.

So I think I prefer Private Rites in the end, but it’s an aesthetic preference far more than a qualitative one. Clearly I just prefer the rain.

Actual footage of Roseanna reading Extremophile and Private Rites

But climate isn’t the only common thread in this shortlist. There’s a common line of “hellscape (possibly techno) ravaged or being ravaged by capitalism” that links back up to the remaining two, both of which also join up to Annie Bot by being personhood stories.

Starting with the more obvious overlap, Service Model is another robot servant story, though this one far more in the traditional mode of robotic servitor (Uncharles) who must obey his programmed task hierarchy, even as the situation he’s in spirals further outside of his control, and the frame of reference his programming can encompass. It’s a story of a journey - a set of connected vignettes in different, equally unexpected locations - as Uncharles the robot grapples with his existence after the death of his master, with a bit of free will and agency thrown in for good measure.

I have two problems with it. The first, the ever-tricky sense of humour. The book is very much trying to use the surreality of the scenarios Uncharles finds himself in to generate comedy. That comedy, unfortunately, did not land with me. And when most of the jokes tend to draw from a common thematic pool… they continued not to land for me the whole way through.

The second thought is that I struggled with what this book was really trying to achieve, and why it took a whole novel to do it. SF has, over the years, done the “am I a person?” story to death, whether from robots or clones or any manner of other person-adjacent consciousnesses. Personally, having been on this ride a number of times, I am primed for the inevitable answer of “yes”. When is the answer not “yes”? I’m not sure, unless you’re really pushing some boundaries (or hey, maybe drawing on the current cultural consciousness and “AI” situation), what can be added to this narrative? And I don’t think Service Model does. Instead, it’s a set of mildly comedic scenarios strung together, with a bit of a conclusion at the end about societal collapse (turns out, the free market doesn’t solve everything and capitalism may, in fact, be bad - see the aforementioned hellscape).

Emily: The trouble with being as good and as prolific as Adrian Tchaikovsky is that the person you're going to end up most compared to is yourself. Tchaikovsky released two science fiction novels in 2024. Both of them are on the Hugo shortlist, but only one made the Clarke. And I am absolutely baffled by the judges' decision to elevate Service Model over Alien Clay, because I thought that Alien Clay was a much better book–a book with more to say, and more interesting ways of saying it; a Clarkey book, as I understand the term.

I quite enjoyed the first act of Service Model. I read it thinking: aha, a light satire running on a spine of Agatha Christie but they're all robots mindlessly going through the motions of the detective novel even as the culprit in their midst confesses over and over. Charming! Funny! A sharp comment on the plot-on-rails that is also a comment on the society-on-rails! I see what you did there!

And then the book did it again. And again. And I found it less charming every time. When you got the joke the first time, it's tiresome to hear it repeated. And the book never quite expands beyond its initial conceit: here is a robot, in an absurd situation which he does not understand but which you, the reader, can smile at from your position of superior knowledge. This continues, in my very pretty hardback edition, for some four hundred pages. In the spirit of this meeting could have been an email: I do really think this novel could have been a novella. I love a novella, and Service Model could have worked really well as a very sharp, very funny, very dark example of the form, answering none of its initial questions about the failed society Uncharles comes from, making its satirical point and moving on. But as a novel, it drags. And for me, the book also suffers because I read it back to back with Alien Clay and I loved Alien Clay. Alien Clay does so many of the things Tchaikovsky is really, really good at. I loved the weird biology and the mystery of the planet and the final irresolvable moral dilemma! So why on earth would you pick Service Model for your shortlist when Alien Clay was right there?

Roseanna [lurking for the opportunity to say that Alien Clay is indeed banger]: I am boggled by exactly this same thought. I did not read them back to back, but even with a fair separation, I felt like Alien Clay was just the tighter, more controlled novel. I’d link it up to The Ministry of Time as books with a thematic hammer that know how to use them, which does feel, to me as well, inherently Clarkey. But I guess we must have something to argue with the judges about.

As something of a strange contrast, the final book also never quite expands outside of its original conceit (at least not successfully) for me, and yet my feelings on it are far more positive - and that’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, in which the thirteenth clone of a movie star must hunt down all her predecessors and kill them to (spoilers, supposedly) generate publicity for an upcoming film. But this description doesn’t do justice to the weirdness of that original conceit, which also contains a fair heap of musing on bodies and ownership and identity (including a scene in which the newly-woken clone looks her body over in the mirror and keeps flipping between referring to it as her own or as Lulabelle’s), some workplace comedy if the job is untrained freelance assassin, funny and sometimes startlingly real pieces of character work and, somehow, tarot. Also some self-love (but uh, not like that).

I’m not sure I could say that Lulabelle is a great book, but something about its quirky unexpectedness and ability to turn a phrase charmed me, in a way that the slightly better structured Service Model never managed. Unfortunately, I think it loses control of its threads by the time the need for an ending rolls around, but I find myself admiring the ambition, because this one does try to push some boundaries. It doesn’t succeed, but I respected the intentions a great deal.

Emily: I really liked this one! I thought it was enormous fun nearly all the way through. It did new and interesting things with the very well-trodden SFnal ground of 'who, exactly, gets to be a person?' and the structural conceit of the tarot, while silly, was silly in a grounded way: it chimed with the protagonist's own desperate need for structure, for understanding of who she was and how she could exist in the world as one of thirteen identical clones–Portraits–of a lesser celebrity. The tight structure of the book meant that it telegraphed exactly what it was going to do, well in advance. When the assassin gets a car, you know she's going to crash the car at some point. But it executed the expected beats with humour and verve. I laughed out loud at the point where the assassin finds herself face to face with two Lulabelles each insisting that she is the real one and so you have to kill that bitch, and just thinks: couldn't you two have worked this out between yourselves?

And then the penultimate twist landed beautifully. The question of who, exactly, is the real Lulabelle runs all the way through the book. Ultimately, no one is. I was genuinely moved by the way the revelation landed, and how it reframed the whole conceit of the book. The thirteen clones cease to be a vapid exercise in celebrity self-promotion and become a sadder and deeper exploration of how on earth one is supposed to manage a life well-lived, and what it means to live well.

For me the only place where this book didn't quite work was the very end, where I felt it veered into sentimentality, and a final twist that felt like a broken promise. It seems silly to say 'not enough murder' about a book where the protagonist commits so many murders, but when you have spent the whole novel signalling that there is eventually going to be a violent and cathartic reckoning with your evil creator… I felt thwarted that no such reckoning took place. Surely we could have murdered someone in the end. Of course, part of the joke of the book is that none of the murders of Lulabelle ever really seemed satisfying: as these were meaningless, unsatisfactory lives, so they ended in meaningless and unsatisfactory deaths. But I would have liked, I think, a single satisfactory death, for narrative closure. After all, our narrator's card is Death: she deserves it. I'm not picky. It didn't have to be the evil creator. We could also have murdered Lulabelle's horrid agent.

And that brings us to six books! What are your thoughts on the shortlist as a whole? Do you have a favourite? Do you have an expected winner? And are those two the same?

Roseanna: My favourite is Private Rites. I love it. I am a sucker for all the things Julia Armfield does. I went into the shortlist reading knowing this would be the one to beat, and lo, so it was. I don’t think it’s entirely my terminal optimism speaking when I think it might just win it, but I am not a reliable predictor of awards, so I’m not saying that with any great certainty.

If it doesn’t, I’d be very happy to see either Extremophile or The Ministry of Time take the win, though with a preference for the latter as I just had the absolute greatest time with it, and I would love more books in SFF to be quite this charming. How about you?

Emily: My personal favourite read of the shortlist was The Ministry of Time. I am very weak to themes and jokes and romance, and it did all of those extremely well. However, I just went back to the Clarke Award home page, which reminded me that 'the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.' With that in mind, my pick for a winner is Extremophile. I think it would be a well deserved win for a book which is entirely and self-consciously science fiction in theme and intention. I also think there's great value in reading, from time to time, a very good book which is absolutely not your thing. Extremophile is not my thing but I respect what it chooses to be and I think the execution is splendid. I'm glad the shortlist prompted me to it, because I would probably not have picked it up otherwise. Also, Roseanna, you really should listen to The Mountain Goats.

Roseanna: I did! I had Tallahassee playing while I was working this afternoon. It would have possibly been fun to have it playing while I was reading as subconscious thematic overlap, but I did not plan anywhere near that well. Possibly a recommendation for anyone who hasn’t picked it up yet to try (and if you don't think you recognise The Mountain Goats, try listening to the song No Children, and you may well realise you do).

I can’t disagree that Extremophile is the best at science-fictioning. And it was the biggest surprise in reading for me - to find myself persuaded into all these things I don’t enjoy, so I’d certainly be clapping along with everyone else on Wednesday for it if so. I just find myself constantly drawn back to Private Rites for the vibes, the prose, the intensely palpable atmosphere. It just grabs me.

And that’s it! Or is it… because we are doing vry srs crtcsm we did do a nice little chart as we were discussing, so have our very authoritative, totally conclusive visualisation of the shortlist as a thematic continuum.

If you have read or are planning to read the Clarkes, we hope you have as great a time with the process as we did. The winner will be announced evening UK time on Wednesday the 25th of June, so watch this space to find out if either of us were right.

Thank you so much for joining me Emily - this has been amazing!