Martin Cahill’s debut novella, Audition for the Fox, has a premise that at first feels light and frothy and before cracking open the novella. The setup is that Nesi, who is a godblooded descent of one of the 99 pillars (gods) needs a divine patron in order to leave the temple she has lived all of her life (there are those who would capture and kill people like Nesi for their power, so it is non-negotiable that she can't leave the temple without such a patronage). There are 99 gods in the pantheon, and Nesi has had interviews/tests with 96 of them, and failed (in a funny bit, one of those is her own divine ancestor, Bison). So, if Nesi does not want to stay at the temple, or wait years and try auditions again, she has three choices, the God of Assassination, a God of Battle...and the God of Tricks, the Fox. Nesi decides on the last. And does she get an audition!
While the logline does say that she is thrown back 300 years in time when her homeland was occupied, that doesn’t quite show how dire Nesi’s position is, and how a god of tricks is far deeper than you might think. The novella opens us in a in medias res, and only gives us some background and establishes what is in the logline after Nesi is already in the deep end. Indeed, Nesi is back in the past, the past is not fixed, and yes, she could absolutely die here during the occupation.
Audition for the Fox, then, is a story that starts off as a story of survival, adaptation, and resistance. In that, instead of dealing with a relatively shallow god of tricks, Nesi and the reader find out just how complicated and complex Fox really is. Nesi asked for this trial, and Fox is not going to let her get out of it as easily as Fox’s brethren seemingly shrugged off her failures.
And it’s a story of belief and revolution, and resistance. This is not to say that there isn’t humor in it, but it is a far far more serious novella than I expected. I was going in to this thinking, even when the time travel was revealed, that this would be a much lighter fare than it actually is. The power of trickery to mildly befuddle an occupation, or showing a small light against the darkness of that occupation. And there is that, too but there are more and much deeper things going on here.
You see, the Wolfhounds of Zemin, in this era, are devotees of one god, the Wolf of the Hunt. The 100th God (which, yes, already made me start wondering right from the get go). They are the kind of monotheists who forbid, absolutely, the worship or respect of any of the other gods. Why the 99 other pillars do not intervene at all is not precisely clear, but given how hands-off Fox is once Nesi is going, there may be a timey-wimey effect here¹, or a reluctance to muck with the human world as the Wolf has done. One parallel I thought of, in contemplating this, is how little for so long the Maiar and Valar actually do anything to stop Melkor/Morgoth in rampaging across Middle Earth.
So, Nesi, babbling about the Fox in an era where such outward belief will get you punished, puts her on the radar of the occupying force. In turn, it makes her a leader, of a very small force, to commit small acts of resistance against the Zemin. As the story proceeds, then, Nesi realizes that while she can’t start the revolution against the Zemin alone (one that will take decades), but she can certainly be one of the first pebbles in the eventual avalanche. And it is recognizing that her potential is to do that, and in the precepts of the Fox, act on that, that is in the end the story of the novella.
So there is a lot more here too, in a tightly and sometimes to the brim novella Cahill writes to overflowing a bit in the book, I find this to be a feature. A fair chunk of this story and the worldbuilding are conveyed through stories within the narrative and the power of story (which clearly is something the Fox has in spades) is a central pillar (pun intended) of the novella. Fox tells some of their background through some of their encounters with other pillars. Nesi tells her story of some of her failed challenges. Fox addresses the reader and breaks the fourth wall. Cahill makes it clear that story alone can’t overthrow the Zemin and won’t (and also shows us how her people, the Oranoya, changed after the occupation, a “build back better” approach to their society in the wake of that authoritarian takeover), but story and narrative are important and central to Cahill’s narrative.
The novella also shows how authoritarianism is bad for the oppressors as well. We are introduced to a character, Teor, who is definitely not of the marching to victory type of Zemin. And yet, the society that he is in him is forcing and molding him into a shape, a design, an ethos that he himself does not want. Teor is a great example of how toxic empire can be to the denizens of the imperial system itself, as well as to the oppressed. Teor is shaped and molded to be an oppressor and is not allowed on his own to pursue his point of view and ethos. Part of Nesi’s ultimate arc is not redeeming him on her own so much as to show him that there is indeed another way of being.
I do have a criticism of the novella that I want to highlight here, for as much as I enjoyed it. It is something that broke my immersion a bit. As mentioned above, we have an invading and occupying force that is intent on universal conquest and universal devotion to the Wolf God. We are in a relatively isolated fortress far away physically from the main centers of their control in Oranoya and power. It’s a backwater, plain and simple. And while they do give a justification on why they hesitate to murder her, it didn’t sit with me, given what we see of the Zemin (see above, Teor). So it felt more likely to me that long before her grand and culminating strike against the Zemin, they would have had her killed or permanently imprisoned as a brutal example of what happens to resistance. Instead, she gets a series of lesser punishments, even when it is clear that she is a Troublemaker and probably should be dealt with harshly.
Aside from that concern, I found the nuance, depth and exploration of theme in Audition for the Fox to wipe away my changed expectations and draw me into a novella that has a lot of things to say about authoritarian systems and living under them that is unfortunately very relevant for today. With a richness to the worldbuilding and its approach to story, I highly enjoyed Fox and Nesi’s story. The story ends satisfactorily without any need for a sequel, a one-and-done story that will draw you in with its deceptively light premise, and leave you thinking much about authoritarianism, oppression and how to resist it--and the costs of that.
So this novella sits in a spectrum of recent books that clearly are playing in overlapping spaces. The epic fantasies of R R Virdi (The First Binding) are entirely about the power of story. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is theatrically staged. Much more recently, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson has a strong element of a trickster god manipulating events. Other works are exploring god spaces, the spaces of what telling story can and does do to a narrative, and, I will note, fighting authoritarian oppression or resisting it.
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Highlights:
- A bright and delightfully playful cover...that belies the contents
- Strong themes of resistance and fighting against oppression and authoritarianism
- A powerful story that uses the power of story within it.
- A novella not from the 800 pound gorilla of novella publication and award winners and nominees.
Reference: Cahill, Martin, Audition for the Fox [Tachyon, 2025].
¹ For the Fox, anyway, it's absolutely timey-wimey.(and I use that deliberately, given the grace note that the novella ends on). They know this past, has brought Nesi to it, and they are aware of the opportunity and possibility to change history (and not necessarily for the better). I do appreciate that it doesn’t feel like a stable time loop here, that what Nesi is doing is new and fresh and not just “playing out” something that is foreordained, which is true of a lot of time travel narratives. Nesi even calls them out on this and Fox responds that the future is NOT set in stone.
