Anime Review: The Summer Hikaru Died

Creepy, artistic, poignant, coming of age, horror

The Summer Hikaru Died is a unique, hypnotic, creepy horror series with lots of coming of age angst addressing the stress of social and family pressures. The series is a perfect addition to the list of cerebral horror stories for those who don’t always like horror, but enjoy solid, mind-bending storytelling. High school age Yoshiki is devastated when his best friend Hikaru goes missing in the creepy mountains in their rural village. Hikaru is cheerful, funny, outgoing, and popular, whereas Yoshiki is more serious and reserved. The boys have been close friends since childhood, growing up in a small town where everyone knows each other. Hikaru is found safe a week later and his family and friends rejoice but Yoshiki is the only one who realizes this returned person is not the same Hikaru. When Yoshiki confronts the returned Hikaru, Hikaru admits the deception and quickly reveals his inhuman nature but states he wants to live as a human in Hikaru’s body. Hikaru asks Yoshiki to keep his secret because he doesn’t want to have to kill Yoshiki, (but he will). Yoshiki, in a moment of grief, decides that he would rather have this monster version of Hikaru instead of truly facing his loss. However, Hikaru’s presence begins to attract grotesque spirits and a mercenary demon hunter. All of this leads to disturbing revelations about the town’s dark past and danger for Yoshiki and his friends and family.

The Summer Hikaru Died is a clever combination of horror, coming of age, and friendship that artistically addresses deep questions about grief, identity, and the value of human life. Most of these themes are explored through Hikaru himself. The returned Hikaru has the face and persona and memories of the original young, fun-loving boy. But he is also lethal, physically monstrous, and comfortable killing innocent people. Through their strange friendship Yoshiki tries to teach Hikaru to respect life and understand emotional connection to others. Over time we also learn the secret backstory of the real Hikaru and the troubling history hidden by his family. This mix of slice of life, horror, and coming of age is vaguely reminiscent of the first two seasons of Stranger Things. However, the result is much more subtle and hypnotic.

The art design of the show is highly unique and captures the quiet horror aesthetic by contrasting normal slice of life vibes with sudden terror. The characters are drawn in soft lines with flowing movements that exude the soft fluid vibe of Studio Ghibli. However, that softness is dramatically contrasted with jump scares of shadowy, grotesque humanoid monsters with fearful faces. Additionally, the animated scenes are sometimes interrupted with abrupt real-live photographs, jarringly interposed on an intense moment. Even ordinary moments are given a creepy vibe by using unusual “camera” angles. For example, in one passing scene, Yoshiki is buying items at a small grocery store while the middle aged cashier gossips non-stop about the problems she perceives in Yoshiki’s family. We see the cashier from various angles including an odd view looking up at her face from below and close ups of her mouth. The criticism filled conversation is punctuated by the incessant beeping of the scanner and strange views of a cat shaped speaker near the register. All of this happens while Yoshiki stressfully absorbs the cheerily delivered comments about how messed up his family is. That small scene is filled with as much macabre tension as another scene where a very creepy monster directly attacks Yoshiki in the woods.

While the art design and the primary plot emphasize, and solidly deliver, traditional horror, the series is, fortunately, not oppressively grim. The creatures who haunt the town are more creepy than horrific and the violence is mostly off camera. In fact, much of the show is focused on Hikaru moving from faking an understanding of society (through his acquired memories) to actually seeking to truly understand his community. Through Yoshiki, Hikaru is encouraged to develop a taste for treats and to bond with their fellow classmates, Asaka, Maki, and Yuki. However, the show deliberately chooses genuine and terrifying complexity in the boys’ relationship rather than a happy linear redemption story. Hikaru and Yoshiki’s interactions becomes more fraught as Hikaru fails to maintain control and Yoshiki realizes how dangerous Hikaru is and is forced to make an upsetting choice. Against this backdrop, the series explores larger life themes of sexuality as well as societal and family pressures. Hikaru openly teases Yoshiki about possibly being attracted to him and the two have highly unusual and terrifying symbolic intimate moments in the form of body horror. It’s all so well done that it feels both hypnotic and horrifying at the same time.

The only disappointing element of the series is the subplot about the hired demon hunter, Tanaka. After a promising introduction in the early episodes, the character mostly just lurks and doesn’t offer up any helpful content to build the story. The other old men who hire him (and constantly yell at him) are equally problematic in their lack of usefulness to the story. Every monster movie needs a stereotypical monster hunter to explain the monster and to add tension. However, this character, despite periodic encounters with Hikaru and Yoshiki, ends up not really contributing anything in either of those regards—at least not in the current season.

The Summer Hikaru Died offers an unusual story in a gorgeously intellectual and artistic horror palette. Although I’m not primarily a horror fan, I do enjoy a well-executed, low gore, cerebral horror. The Summer Hikaru Died is fascinating, engaging, creepy, and disturbing, and is definitely the kind of show that is worth a re-watch to catch the subtle hints and one of a kind art design. The quiet storytelling and fluid art style stand out from most other anime and deliver an engaging experience on multiple levels. If you are in the mood for something creepy and emotionally fascinating, this story of a boy and a monster navigating life and death in rural Japan is definitely worth watching.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Engaging, cerebral horror
• Thoughtfully presented themes of sexuality as well as societal and family pressures
• Unique animation elements

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

Film Review: Queens of the Dead

Tina Romero, daughter of the legendary George Romero, directs a comedy zombie thriller set in a queer nightclub that's all style and no real substance, despite an all-star cast and great vibes.

When I found out that Katy O'Brian was going to be in a new queer zombie movie directed by George Romero's daughter, I could not have been MORE excited. You may remember her and her incredible range from last year's excellent Love Lies Bleeding or opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. 

Alas, not even her incredible biceps (which should get second billing) could save this hot mess of a movie. I do not make this review lightly, as I wanted very badly to love it. I am no stranger to camp, and as y'all probably know by now, I tend to like almost every movie I see. And while I can definitely focus on a few fun parts of this one, I haven't been so underwhelmed at the cinema in a long time. And what's worse is that it's got a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes! What am I missing?

First, a brief plot synopsis: Queens of the Dead asks the question, "What would happen to a motley crew of LGBTQ+ characters if a zombie plague descended upon Brooklyn while holed up at a nightclub called YUM?" They would fight, battle, make up, get resourceful, and even have a craft session. 

If this all sounds incredibly cutesy, it is. And again, normally, I'd be down for this, but something just doesn't work right. It reads as cliché, boring, and very, very low-stakes. I love horror, I love comedy (I still am the only person defending SNL after 50 years), and yet I left feeling deflated. Let's see why.

What works

The casting in this movie is legit insane. Apart from the aforementioned Katy O'Brian, we have Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow), Dominique Jackson (Pose), Nina West (RuPaul's Drag Race), and tons of others from TV and Broadway. At one point, Margaret Cho rolls in on a scooter in coveralls, and the theater I was in exploded. Watching all of these people hang out for 100 minutes and throw shade at each other isn't the worst way to spend your time. It just doesn't make for a compelling narrative experience.

I read one of the must-haves for this movie was that most of the queer characters have to make it out alive. If you know about the #buryyourgays trope, you know that LGBTQ+ folks generally tend to meet tragic fates in films, books, and other media. By subverting this trope — and having the queer people be the heroes — you get a refreshing take that actually feels good. There's even a straight-man character sidekick who, literally, is a straight man from Staten Island.  The team of lesbians, drag queens, transpeople, and non-binary individuals work together to make it out alive, the very opposite of what happens in her father's Night of the Living Dead. It's also a breath of fresh air to see folks come together instead of tearing themselves apart with in-fighting.

The movie is filled with one-liners and sight gags, and given the sheer amount peppered throughout, several really land. I had more than a handful of actual belly laughs, including an aptly placed "death drop" pun by a dying drag queen. But for every one that lands, 5 or 10 more fall super flat. Again, I present to you my credentials: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is one of my favorite films. And you, Queens of the Dead, are no Elvira. In general, the movie starts out strong but sort of just runs out of steam by the end.

What doesn't

Many reviewers declare the movie to be "camp," as if that magical word somehow expands on the film's hollowness. But generally speaking, just because a movie has drag queens and puns, that doesn't make it camp. Susan Sontag, in her essay "On Camp" lays out the groundwork for this phenomenon. Here's where I think Queens of the Dead fails the camp test: 

“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”

The movie is by turns incredibly disingenuous and then, a split second later, it will be cloyingly saccharine about a friendship breakup or drug abuse. It just doesn't work. It could be because the actors don't have the range to play at this level of theatrics (there's an extended plot line where a character has stage fright, and it goes absolutely nowhere), or maybe it's that worrying about emotions in a time of live-or-die lowers the stakes. 

With pure camp, you're also aiming to make a good movie and it fails. I don't think they set out to make an Oscar-winning film with Queens of the Dead, but neither do I think they set out to make a camp masterpiece. It's complicated, I guess. I just know that I adore honest-to-goodness camp and this one doesn't rise to the heights(or maybe the nadirs) of the likes of John Waters' films, Rocky Horror, and others. 

Another thing that doesn't work is the heavy-handed commentary on club culture and influencers. If George Romero was using zombies as a metaphor that could be read as reactions to the Vietnam War and racism, Tina Romero is addressing the "zombification" of young people due to smartphones and social media. When I say heavy-handed, I mean it: the zombies are literally walking around carrying their phones and live-streaming. It takes you out of the movie, and it's not even funny or thought-provoking! You've got to have at least one of those things to make a real point.

Overall, I think this could have been a great SNL sketch. Or an absolutely FANTASTIC Halloween episode of the late, great Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It's just not funny enough to be a true comedy, and it's not scary enough (or at all) to be a horror movie. 

Am I glad it exists? Yes! And I'm very happy for folks online who seem to love it. I just expected a lot more depth, edge, and nuance.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10

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

Book Review: The Everlasting, by Alix E Harrow

 In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.

Do you remember back in, oh, 2017 or so, when a certain variety of shellshocked well-intentioned liberal looked at the news, wrung their hands in distress, and bleated ineffectually, This is not who we are? People are resistant to changing their opinions on the basis of something as unreliable as mere factual evidence, but still, some facts get through, and some opinions do change. It’s been very clear for a while now that yes, this is, in fact, very much who we are; it’s who we’ve always been; and it’s who we’ll always be, without some powerful work to leave that rut and break a new path.

The Everlasting is a story about the stories nations tell themselves about who they are; and what it takes to change the story, in the hopes that changing the story will change the nation. It is deeply embedded in modern times. It responds directly to the creeping, running, leaping, bounding, racing encroachment of fascism, but it drapes the conversation in the costumes and set dressing of historical fantasy, because every message is always more palatable when we have knights in armor acting out the lesson.

The tale is told by Owen Mallory, a historian by training in the nation/republic/empire of Dominion, which is not at all Great Britain. Before returning to academia, he served as a soldier in the not-at-all World War II against the Hinterlanders, who are not-at-all the rest of Europe. Although Dominion won the war, the conflict — the latest in a long series of similar such conflicts — has left lingering wounds in the nation and the people. Owen himself is scarred across the throat from a wound that did not arise from honest combat, and speaks with a rasp in his voice. Owen’s father has been left a drunk, a frustrated pacifist forever getting into trouble. His political agitations, a produce of his own participation in the previous not-at-all World War I have for years brought shame and scorn upon himself and, by association, Owen. Now, he is joining activists for change within the Dominion, whose increasingly vehement demands are causing embarrassment to the government.

The novel opens with Owen, in the proud tradition of academics everywhere, struggling to write a book in his chosen specialism, the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion, and especially the legendary founding figure of Una Everlasting, who is not at all King Arthur. Any resemblance between the name of Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, and our own Owen Mallory, is entirely coincidental. One day Owen receives in the post an inexplicable book: a manuscript entitled The Death of Una Everlasting, an apparently contemporary record of the legend herself, written in the hand of someone who knew her personally, loved her, and watched her die.

Owen throws himself into the work of deciphering the book, and the moment he has finished it, he is summoned to a government office, to meet Minister Vivian Rolfe, whose position is at risk as she absorbs the blame for the civil unrest. The nation must remember what it is, she tells him, and the publication of this new, contemporary account of their founding hero is just what the nation needs. Only Owen Mallory, a lifelong devotee of Una Everlasting, can write the translation that will save the nation from descent into factional violence. Then Vivian stabs Owen’s hand with a letter knife. His blood spills onto the book, and he awakens in the past, under a tree, in the presence of Una herself. The book is in his hand, its pages blank. His task, it turns out, is not to translate an extant manuscript, but to write it himself, in the time and place where Una’s story happened.

The first third of this novel seems straightforward enough: a time-travel tale, a nascent romance, a man struggling to reconcile his view of a myth with the reality of a person. He follows Una on her famous quests: to slay the last dragon in the land, to retrieve from its lair the Grail, which is the sole hope of saving the life of her beloved queen and benefactor, Yvanne. He is with her during the last, final betrayal, in which her comrade, the fabled Ancel the Betrayer, stabs her, so that she dies at Yvanne's feet. 

Una's death seems like a logical stopping place for a story that is. . . simpler than I would have expected from Alix E Harrow. All we need is an epilogue, time enough for Mallory to return to the present, process his adventure, and make some grand decision about whether he will serve as a government propagandist for history, given that he now knows the  reality of the past. Except the book is only a third of the way through, Part 1 is titled The First Death of Una Everlasting (emphasis mine) and things develop in ways that are far from simple. 

I hesitate to write more, because part of the wonder of this book lies in following the timey-wimey twisty turns, the betrayals and revelations, and the long thread of cause-and-effect that makes up the history of a nation. But even in that first third we have a skilled depiction of the parallels between past and present, illustrating the inexorable repetition of historical events. The glorious martial campaigns that Una leads in Queen Yvanne’s name mirror the Dominion’s conquest in modern days against the Hinterlands; and although the historical records and modern newspapers both report heroic victories and cries of welcome from the liberated populaces, the actual mood on the ground is very different from reports. The quest to kill the last dragon is justified with tales of dragons’ dangers to civilians; but evidence of that danger seems scarce when you approach the dragon itself. Still, every story needs a villain; and when there are no more dragons to kill, Ancel the Betrayer steps in to serve that role in the national mythology, just as the Hinterlanders do in the present day.

It is hard to control the flow of history so that the sequence of events arrives at a particular desired present. The whole genre of time travel fiction is one long conversation about the challenge of truly understanding cause and effect. But controlling past events is not the only way to control the present. One of the brilliances of this book is its meditations on the types of stories that a nation uses to serve its interest. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war, says Vivian to Owen, and he thinks, There was no God in Dominion; there was only Vivian Rolfe, telling a story. 

A truly powerful story is not created on the spot, however. It must age. It needs the legitimacy of myth and history behind it. Owen, sent back in the past to tell Una’s story, is given the opportunity not only to affect events, but to affect how they are remembered. I’m not entirely sure his final solution is all that different in method from what Vivian wants him to do; but it is very different in its outcome. Do the ends justify the means? There’s an argument to be made in this book that they do. Or rather, at the end I was unconvinced that this argument was satisfactorily refuted. 

This is not necessarily a criticism of the book. Vivian is an extraordinary character, and I found myself at more than one point musing that her side of the story would make a magnificent tale in its own right, far more sweeping and epic in its scope and deeds than the focused, personal narrative we get from Owen. Owen values the individual; Vivian values the nation. Or her version of the nation. Or, perhaps, her view of what the nation should be. This book is not, I think, discussing whether the ends justify the means, as much as which ends those means are pursuing. And it's a hard question. Vivian's ruthless utilitarianism is not a mere strawman argument here. It's given a chance to make its case; and to the extent that you agree that there is a case to be made for it, you might find yourself, like me, wishing that there were a companion novel telling Vivian's story.

But perhaps cliches about ends and means are not the perspective to take here. Perhaps we should turn our eyes to a different idiom. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Vivian Rolfe does not learn. But Owen Mallory does.

Give this book to your friends, your family, your enemies. Propose it at your book group. It needs to be discussed by people who have read it to the end.

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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.

Highlights:

• Time travel
• National myth-making
• Not-at-all an allegory
• Medieval knights and armor

References:

Harrow, Alix E. The Everlasting [Tor, 2025].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: EC Comics Library: Weird Science Vol. 1 (Taschen)

 The Rolls-Royce Collection of Era-Defining Sci-Fi Comics

Photo: Taschen

 When you close your eyes and think of 1950s comics, you're probably thinking of EC Comics. From 1950 to 1955, they published iconic horror comics, some of whose titles will still be familiar today: Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and Vault of Horror. Never a superhero house like DC or Marvel (previously known as Timely Comics, then Atlas Comics), EC specialized in original genre comics that coincided with broader trends in popular entertainment, such as crime comics that evoked film noir, war comics, and Westerns. But EC's publisher, Bill Gaines, said at the time that they were most proud of their flagship "Weird" titles, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, which evoked the popular sci-fi short stories and radio dramas of the time.

This gigantic collection from art-book publisher Taschen collects the first 11 issues of Weird Science, and complements them with an informative introduction by jazz guitarist and EC collector/superfan Grant Geissman, credits for each of the collected issues, and biographical sketches of the artists and personnel involved in the issues.

These comics are collected elsewhere, in far more wallet-friendly versions. I personally own digital copies of several Fantagraphics EC collections, but those are black-and-white, line-art only collections organized by theme, artist, or style. They're great for what they are and I personally dig them a lot, but they don't present the full issues of the comics as they originally appeared. Dark Horse has published these comics in digitally-recolored editions that are even less expensive. I've looked at these, and they're not for me. I find the digital recoloring pretty clinical and I don't get the same feel from them as I do from the original halftone prints with all the little ink dots and offset printing that gives such a very particular look. But if you just want to read these comics, you have options that will allow you to do so for less than the steep Taschen price tag.   

But the pre-order announcement for this book came at a particular moment where I was able to treat myself, so I pulled the trigger. And months later when the book arrived, I was... shocked. Guys, this is a BIG book. I mean, it's literally the biggest book I own. It's the size of my teenage daughter:

I can caveat this whole book with the acknowledgement that these are comics made for predominantly male audiences and created almost entirely by dudes from 1950 to 1952. There's a lot of sexism, and if you're looking for a comic that passes the Bechdel Test, you're not going to find it in any of these (gigantic) pages. I don't want to hand-wave that away, because it does effect the experience of reading this book today. There are moments that had me cringing, for sure, but one thing I will say is that it's not that the female characters are flat and one-dimensional, it's that all the characters are flat and one-dimensional. Ray Bradbury didn't write these stories, you know? But at least in my experience of this collection, the stories themselves weren't really the main draw.

Experiencing these comics, printed exquisitely on high-quality paper at a size that far exceeds their original dimensions, in the format they were originally presented, gave me a ton of joy. The collection lays out each issue as it originally appeared, including with ads, reader correspondence, and the two-page throw-away short stories in the middle of each issue that qualified as enough "print material" to give the issues access to the second-class postage rate. It's learning details like that that really heighten the experience. 

Photo: Taschen

 The supplemental materials offer other details, as well. Both through included process photos, draft vs. final comparisons, and the introductory essay, I learned things I always wanted to know about how these books were actually produced in an entirely analogue age. I discovered how the covers were colored and those choices communicated to the offset printers, and behind-the-scenes information on the editorial and art process that went into each issue. I found myself having flashbacks to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I learned the story of how publisher Bill Gaines inherited a comics company from his father that had chiefly only printed illustrated Bible stories, and experienced a rocket ship launch of success, scrambling with a small group of artists and editors to put out an expanding catalogue of titles that took the public by storm.

Line-art and hand-colored cover to be sent to the engravers. Photo: Taschen

 

One thing that this volume doesn't go into -- and maybe it's a more natural fit for a Vol. 2, should it ever come along -- is why the EC story came crashing down two years after the end of this collection. Due to the early-1950s moral panic over "juvenile delinquency" and the junk-science work of the previously trailblazing child psychologist Fredric Wertham, a Senate subcommittee led by Estes Kefauver hauled EC publisher Bill Gaines in front of them in the opening salvo to censor comic books, which led to the end of the "pre-code" comics period, a collapse in jobs for comics illustrators, and decades of self-censorship across the industry. Gaines himself would pivot and go onto create MAD Magazine after the fallout.

This story has been covered elsewhere, as have the groundbreaking efforts of EC Comics to address and combat racism through its science fiction comics (which probably didn't help endear Gaines to the U.S. Senate of 1954). 

In the end, then, I agree with the decision to focus the supplemental material in this collection on processes and people. It helped inform my appreciation of the books themselves. And I can't speak highly enough about the actual printing of these pages. In the book's notes, it discusses the restoration process, which eschewed digital recoloring -- even with advanced tools available today that can create period-specific results. Instead, original copies of each issue were photographed at extremely high resolutions, and then errors such as line smudging and misalignment of the original four-color plates were corrected digitally. 

The results are truly breathtaking.

If you are a fan of pre-code comics and are able to splurge $200 on a high-quality volume, I would encourage you to take a look at Weird Science, Vol. 1. Taschen has outdone themselves with the restoration, and I have to be honest -- if Vol. 2 does come along, I'm going to have a hard time not squirreling away my nickels and dimes to try to get my hands on that one, too. And, like I learned from the 1950s ads in this book and an inflation calculator, back in 1951 this book only would've cost $14.95.

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Posted by Vance K - cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together.     

Book Review: Stars Uncharted and Stars Beyond, by S. K. Dunstall

A charming, lively space adventure, in which fashion requires advanced degrees in biochemistry

Imagine you’re 14 years old and reading some classic golden-era science fiction. It is awesome. Spaceships! Plasma cannons! Aliens! Shoot-outs and heists! Hidden treasure, secret discoveries, futuristic disguises, and in the end good triumphs and evil is exploded or vaporized or ray-gunned into oblivion. The adolescent satisfaction produced by this kind of story—specifically, in readers who are young enough not to notice all the wildly problematic aspects of the rest of the story—is, I believe, the source of the nostalgic myth that golden-era science fiction was unmatched in its excellence, and nothing ‘these days’ can compare.

The truth is, many things ‘these days’ can match (and in my opinion, surpass) golden-era SF. The duology Stars Uncharted and Stars Beyond is a fantastic example of modern science fiction that feels very golden age, but lacks the misogyny and white supremacy and colonialist default thinking that plagues much midcentury SF. Even better, it evokes in me—me! A middle-aged nitpicker whose ability to overlook problematic issues in fiction declines ever further with each passing year—that same sense of adolescent awesome! that forms the basis of golden-era SF nostalgia. These books are just fun.

The setting: the future, in space. Humans have expanded throughout the entire galaxy, in the simplest possible way. FTL travel is achieved by jumping through ‘null space’ and landing anywhere you want, in seconds. FTL communications is achieved by… calling someone on a comm link. How does the signal travel fast enough for real-time conversation? Who knows? Who cares? Jam the comlinks or throw in a space anomaly if you want to interfere with communication or transport. Maybe an asteroid broke your engines. Not important. This is not hard science fiction. This is fun science fiction. These are the rules of the game, and if you’re not willing to accept them and go for a ride, then go back to Greg Egan. (This is not a slight on Greg Egan. I thought the Orthogonal trilogy was fantastic. But you can't deny that his SF runs rock-hard.)

One spaceship, a cargo freighter, picks up a new engineer, Josune Arriola, as part of the crew. But this engineer is not all she seems. In fact, she’s a spy! She’s actually a crew member of an exploration vessel whose captain is convinced that the captain of the cargo freighter, Roystan, knows a secret. Eighty years ago, a young explorer named Goberling discovered a vast trove of transurides, incredibly rare and valuable metals that live in a pocket of stability waaaayy down the periodic table. Arriola’s captain is convinced that Roystan can help her track down the path to Goberling’s lode. Unfortunately, word gets out, and evil corrupt Big Company bad guys destroy Arriola’s vessel, leaving her stuck on Roystan’s ship, with Big Company baddies chasing her.

A second plot thread follows Nika Rik Terri, a body modder. Body modding is exactly what it sounds like. In this future, fashion goes beyond hair and clothes and makeup. Trained professionals can remake your entire bodies to suit the prevailing fashions, sculpt your physique, look younger, look older, change your gender, add bright blue scales—whatever you can imagine, a body modder can make you look it.

Naturally, the same technology behind body modding is at the heart of modern medicine too. But doctors? Pfft. Anyone can become a doctor. The machines do all the work fixing damage to the body. To be a modder, you must be an artist. It takes six years of training at the best academy to be certified as a body modder, and the best ones are famous all over the galaxy.

Nika Rik Terri is the best body modder. The most exclusive, sought-after body modder in the galaxy. She has the best brands of custom-made body mod machines; her designs are featured in body-modding museums. Unfortunately, she has discovered how to use her body mod machines not only to change appearances, but also to switch consciousness, and that brings unwanted attention from evil corrupt Big Company baddies. So she has to desert her beautiful studio and go on the run. Naturally, Nika ends up with Josune on Roystan’s ship, and shenanigans ensue from there.

To be honest, most of the main plot is not terribly novel. As I said in the first paragraph, it’s got your pretty typical spaceships and plasma cannons and aliens and shoot-outs. Pretty soon things got to the point where I could tell, with each set piece, when to expect things to go wrong, and when the shoot-out and capture (or after-capture shoot-out and escape) would start. There’s a romance that is harmless, but in the end proves entirely snoozeworthy. Neverthelesss, the perspective of body modding gives everything about this book a delightful, unexpected sheen.

Nika sees everything in terms of body modding. She looks at everyone she meets with a critical eye: That’s an awfully nice hair colour; I should take a reading for future mods. That’s an excellent body, which would look very nice if I modded it using X design. Oh, good grief, those teeth are much too white; you must have gone to Samson Sa’s studio. Sa always overdoes the teeth. Well, you’re wearing a Rik Terri design, but I never modded you, and I can tell from the blotchiness around the hairline that whoever ripped off my design didn’t do it as well as I would have.

She also has very strong opinions about machines. The best, of course, are the Songyuns, and there’s a substantial amount of plot that revolves around getting her one, to do plot-critical body modding that is impossible in any other machine. But Songyuns must be custom-ordered, and when evil corrupt Big Company baddies who want to capture you will know the instant you place an order to buy one, you have to make do with other brands. Deckers are awful, but they come with nice air cushion transport trolleys, which is useful if you need to use it as a battering ram when evil corrupt Big Company baddies show up at the salvage shop and start chasing you. Deedles are very common in hospitals, but they leave ugly pink streaks on your skin, and Nika Rik Terri would not be caught dead in a Deedle. Netanyus are perfectly serviceable, actually, but they don’t allow you to design your own add-ons for the most advanced work the way a Songyun does.

The centrality of body modding, and body mod supplies, and body mod machines in the plot and characterization of this book reminds me of how other SF books might give loving descriptions of space ships, or armaments, or combat training. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a futuristic SF industry that feels so fully developed, is as charming and engaging as this, rather than the much more familiar let me tell you about my space guns. I had a wonderful time reading these books, and I hope that you will too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Body modification
• Body modification machines
• Body modification snobbery
• Classic-feeling space adventures

References:

Dunstall, S. K. Stars Uncharted [Ace, 2018].

Dunstall, S. K. Stars Beyond [Ace, 2020].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott

Elen’s story continues and finishes in a land of lost magic, royal intrigue and much more

The Nameless Land is the second half of the duology started in The Witch Roads. The setup of the book as described in the first one holds: Deputy courier Elen winds up escorting a royal prince to the north, but things do not quite go as planned, with intrigue, conflict and revelations about Elen’s extra-empire origins in the final chapter.

And so we continue on with her story. The novel really can’t be taken on its own; it really is pretty much written as a second half. While there are references, now and again, back to events in the first book (especially in times of explanation), the novel relies on you having the preceding situation freshly in mind in order to fully appreciate the intricacy of the plotting. That also makes it difficult to recount the specifics of this novel without a lot of foreground explanation.

So let it be said that the scheming and intrigues of the first novel, between and within the Royal Court, as well as the provinces of the Empire, get an additional factor, as Elen and the others find themselves heading into territory only Elen knows—lands outside the Empire itself, her origins. So, in this half of the duology. Elliott expands the physical playground by introducing new societies, characters and conflicts. She does a great job in hooking them into the existing worldbuilding and further complicating the plot. Elliott loves to contrast how the Empire does things versus those (and there are multiple values of that) who handle a world where the Pall is a threat. Elen’s extra-empire origins, a secret she has mostly held from everyone (even Kem), become extremely important in the main thrust of this book. Through her unexpected return to her roots, we get a rich sense of someone who has a perspective on what she’s seeing that she doesn’t always share with her compatriots, but shares with the reader.

Also, once again, we have some small sections from the Imperial investigator Luviara, providing an outside perspective here and there. And once again, Elliott shows that more characters than just the protagonist(s) can have their own arcs and developments. We find out what Luviara has really been up to all this time, and why. I must say,as much as I love Elliott’s worldbuilding, her mastery of character may be even better and stronger.

As a result of all this material that we get, the classic “stop asking questions and start answering them” rubric for this book in terms of its placement doesn’t quite fit the duology as a whole as one might expect if these were two separate books rather than one book split into two. What this means is that there’s a lot of run-up, especially counting the first book’s narrative, to the point that, when the final revelations of what is going on and what is to be done become clear, and Elen and the others are forced into decisive final action, it is a timebomb that goes off with explosive speed and power and narrative compression. This is not to say that nothing happens, but there is a continual slow burn, and bursts of action, up to when everything goes off. Elliott has plotted both novels very carefully and pays off the promises made way back at the beginning of The Witch Roads.

In keeping with that, Elliott has the space, will and interest to continue to explore her fascinating set of characters and include new ones. The universe is queer, diverse, with many women in varying kinds of power, and at the same time, thanks to the Empire, has a chance to criticize various abuses and frames of power, including patriarchal ones. Readers of the first book will see that Elen’s nephew Kem’s story and their attempt to hold onto and make their own destiny and autonomy are a strong strand within this book. Also, looking at the novel as half of a single work, one can also see that the story of Elen is, in the end, a romance. But to say more about that would be spoilery. Readers of the first book can be assured, however, that the second book does return to the romance of the first novel, unexpectedly but delightfully.

The novel doesn’t quite explain everything in the plot and background explicitly and completely, and does leave a lot of wonder and mystery in the playground of the imagination. We do get some answers and a rough sense of why things are as they are, as far as the characters know them. The reader can piece together a little more of the background of the world that the characters miss, but there is still plenty of mystery left in this world.

The obvious pairing for this book is another duology: The Witch King and Queen Demon by Martha Wells. Both are interrogating imperial societies, one pair as a resistance to a hegemon, and the others as people living in a quite flawed one—but one that has a purpose given the dangers of the world around them with the Pall¹. Both interrogate gender and gender roles within a narrative, although Elliott is far, far more direct about it than Wells. Both of the books feature fascinating worldbuilding, with a setting that doesn’t stand still. Here Wells has the better of it hopping in time and space with Kai in both books. Elliott, on the other hand, has a character with a wider perspective, but the considerations of past societies are as overhangs and problems of the past affecting and poisoning the present. Both novels, moreover, talk about the uses of history and narrative and how misunderstanding what happened in the past can lead to issues in the present. The novels aren’t quite in dialogue with each other, since they were written contemporaneously. However, in a time and age when questions about power, empire, control, gender, autonomy and more are prevalent in our society, The Nameless Land takes its place with The Witch Roads, and with Wells’s novels, among others, in exploring these themes and concerns of our society, our moment—and beyond.

I know there will be at least one more story set in this fascinating universe. Once again, Elliott has paired characters with a deep and fascinating setting, and while Elen’s story is clearly finished here, there is still much to see and many more potential stories to tell in this world. And the geopolitical situation at the end of this novel is significantly changed compared to the start. Elliott’s worlds are never static and never go status quo ante. I’m sure that will influence what comes out in any subsequent story. I look forward to reading it, and more of them.

Highlights:

• Ably completes the second half of the single story
• Much more detail about Elen’s homeland
• Strong character-focused narrative
• Alas, still no live Griffins!

Reference: Elliott, Kate. The Nameless Land [Tor, 2025].

¹ Given the other two societies we see in the novel and how they handle the Pall and its threat, is the Empire the best of a bad set of choices for dealing with it? I think Elliott is deliberately showing us a variety of possibilities here, and that there is no definitive best society. But even given it being terrible in many ways, I think the Empire is a preferable society for the average person to live in.

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

Book Review: Living Memory, by David Walton

An effective blend of dinosaurs (and all that that entails) with social commentary

Thailand is apparently a great place to dig up maniraptor fossils. Maniraptors, in case you are not as up on your Cretaceous zoology, were a carnivorous dinosaur in the same clade that gave rise to modern birds. This is well accepted among modern-day paleontology, to the point that the Wikipedia page features photographs of geese and albatrosses alongside dinosaur skeletons. What is less generally accepted among modern day paleontologists is that maniraptors were sentient, with a scent-based communication system which operated by means of the synthesis of complex organic molecules that encoded thoughts, commands, social status, and even mathematics. Indeed, so advanced was this maniraptor civilization that it could create telescopes and calculate trajectories of stellar objects.

In other words, they knew that the asteroid was coming.

66 million years later, a team of American paleontologists working in collaboration with a local team of Thai scientists are on a promising dig in Thailand, and discover that bones are not the only things preserved in the stone. A strange, crystallized green chemical can also be found, which quickly condenses into liquid upon contact with air, and then evaporates into fumes. And when you breathe in the fumes… weird things happen.

The dig is further complicated when a Chinese-backed coup removes the Thai government. The new government nullifies the scientific contract with the Americans, on the grounds that they are CIA-funded spies rather than legitimate paleontologists. Worse, this accusation may not be entirely wrong: the CIA did help fund the expedition, after all. And then weirdly powerful organized crime syndicates start muscling in on the fossils, as if they knew something about them that the research team don’t.

Interspersed with these present-day events are scenes from 66 million years ago. A male technician, dreadfully subordinate to females in maniraptor society, discovers an anomaly in the sky, and calculates, with increasing terror, the probability of it hitting Earth. He struggles to convince the females that the danger is real, hampered by the habitual disdain with which females regard males in their society, and hampered further by the biological subordination they impose on him by virtue of their pheremones. If they don’t like what he’s saying, they can exude the right chemicals to silence him forcibly, rendering him unable to do anything but obey their will.

It feels like it should be goofy. I mean, it is goofy. We’ve got talking dinosaurs and magic fossil juice and spies and crime bosses and helicopter commando raids and a deposed princess alongside valiant scientists in white coats making discoveries in the lab. This is a fun book.

But also, it’s a book with a certain amount of heart to it. Yes, it’s telling us a slightly silly story about dinosaurs. But at the same time, it’s aware that there are political statements to be made, and it does a very good job at raising some quite thorny questions about the ethics of pretty much every plot point.

Consider the sequence at the beginning, when the research team is deported from Thailand after a coup. One of their colleagues, Kit, is a Thai paleontologist, who is excited about the work and eager for the project to be successful. But also he resents the fact—and rightfully so, I think—that this project would be impossible without the Americans paying for it. He dreams of a country that can afford to excavate its own fossils, led by its own scientists, without relying on international funding and losing the results to international universities. But the Americans do not feel the same. When the new regime forces the Americans out, without permitting them to take the excavated fossils with them, the team leader, Samira, is furious. I signed a contract, she keeps insisting. I have a right to take those fossils with me!

First of all, it’s cute that Samira thinks a new government will honour the agreements of the previous one that it deposed in a coup. But even leaving aside the political forces at play, her sense of entitlement to another country’s priceless scientific discoveries is not entirely comfortable. And that discomfort sits even more uneasily with her own personal history. She was adopted as an orphan in Nigeria by a married couple running a charity clinic. Her whole life since then has been shaped by her parents’ desires to Do Good In The Developing World, to the point that she sometimes feels less like their daughter and more like a tangible trophy of the Good that they have Done. This friction is exacerbated by their religious beliefs: they are young-earth creationists, which doesn’t mix well with her work in paleontology. And yet their love for her is real, and the career which she values so highly would have been utterly impossible if they had not adopted her and taken her to America—just as the paleontological research in Thailand would be impossible without American funding. It’s quite an elegant commentary on unequal power relations, which can appear in parallel ways in contexts both personal and international.

The other elements of the plot don’t shy away from engaging with the ethical complexities either. Gender inequality has a role in both maniraptor society and modern-day Thailand. With the maniraptors, it is entirely biologically coded. No dinosaur gender rights movement can change the fact that females produce pheromones that utterly dominate the will of the males. Still, the challenges that male dinosaurs face in society are a pretty straightforward mirror of the challenges that women face in the present day, especially when organized crime makes a good chunk of its cash through kidnapping and selling women into sexual slavery.

But what is a good solution to these injustices? The maniraptors are very skilled genetic engineers. The apparently insurmountable biological basis of their gender inequalities may not be so insurmountable to them as they appear to us. Unfortunately, the asteroid put an end to them before they could undergo their own equal rights revolution. The humans, by contrast, do get a chance to challenge the gendered misdeeds of the crime bosses. But when they do, the brutality of the retribution for the sexual violence gave me pause. In a simpler book, I would have been left with an uncomfortable sense that I was supposed to be cheering on the slaughter. But Walton does a good job balancing the inherent goofiness of his premise (magic dinosaur fossil juice!) with some genuine thoughtfulness about the complications inherent in combating and undoing unequal power structures.

I should acknowledge here that we have a white American author writing a book set largely in Thailand, with a lot of the plot focusing on Thai people’s thoughts and feelings about government, culture, crime, and the challenges of living in an internationally weak country beset by more powerful nations looking to exploit it. Viewpoint characters include Thai people and women of colour. There’s a lot of potential for missteps here, and I don’t myself have the lived experience or specialist expertise to assert confidently that Walton avoids them. I will, however, say that from my perspective as a reasonably attentive reader, the characters felt real; the details about Thai culture and politics felt as if they had research behind them; and the discussion of power imbalances seemed respectful and nuanced. It did not feel like a book designed to exoticize the Other; and to the extent that the nuances of Thai politics and culture were oversimplified, the exact same thing happens with the CIA and US politics and American universities.

The result is a ripping good yarn that absolutely delivers on the premise in the cover illustration. I had fun. How could I not? Dinosaurs!!

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Dinosaurs!
• Paleontologists digging up stuff better left buried
• Scent-based communication
• Thailand

Reference: Walton, David. Living Memory [Archaeopteryx Books, 2022].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

A good entryway to non-Western fantasy for readers in search of new ground

When I was a kid, most epic fantasy novels were decidedly Eurocentric. A lot hewed close to the Tolkienic blueprint; others diverged from it, but rarely from its Eurocentrism. Over the past three decades, fantasy authors have grown more daring in terms of the source material they draw upon, and more willing to explore the world and its rich tapestry of mythical traditions, so to speak.

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah is by no means the first work of epic fantasy to draw from The Thousand and One Nights for inspiration, but it is an excellent place to start for readers seeking something new and fresh, yet also familiar. After all, while these stories are not as central to Western culture as they are for the peoples of the Middle East, they long ago entered into our own cultural discourses—through art, books, film and so forth. Aladin’s lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor—not everyone will have read or heard the actual stories, but few people who read books (or blogs about books) aren’t at least passably familiar with these myths.

The Stardust Thief centers on Loulie al-Nazari, more popularly known as the “Midnight Merchant.” She is a famous collector—and purveyor—of magical relics, and as such is a celebrity in the great city of Madinne. Wherever Loulie goes, so does her companion Qadir, a jinn who can take the form of a human or a lizard. As the book progresses, we learn that Qadir saved Loulie’s life and gifted her an enchanted compass, a relic that leads its owner to other relics and the source of Loulie’s trade.

The city is ruled by a cruel and mercurial Sultan, whose son Omar bin Malik leads the Forty Thieves—a group of assassins who seek out and kill whatever jinn try to enter the city and pass for human. We learn that, in doing so, Omar obeys the commands of his father, the Sultan; and that wherever jinn blood spills, an oasis forms. This too, it seems, is at the heart of the Sultan’s rule—an onslaught of violence that transforms the city’s desert environs and enriches its inhabitants. This is clearly metaphor.

The Sultan, however, is restless and greedy. He hears of a famous relic hidden deep in the dunes of the Sandsea, far outside Madinne’s imposing walls—a lamp that cages a jinn, who will grant wishes to whatever human possesses it. He summons Loulie to his palace, coercing her to seek it out—and sends Omar with her to make sure she does not betray him. But Omar has other plans…

Since this blog’s inception, I have ruminated on the nature of imaginative genre fiction and why I’m drawn to it; why, in comparison, mimetic fiction often seems so dull and dreary. In part, it is the opportunity to “travel” to and “inhabit” different worlds. Given the sorry state of our own, it’s no surprise that readers increasingly want to imagine something different. But even the most imaginative epic fantasy (or science fiction) draws upon and ultimately is a vehicle for understanding the world we actually do inhabit. Sometimes this is hard-hitting and serious; other times, it is like a lightbulb that illuminates a part of the house you’ve never really explored.

That’s ultimately how I think about The Stardust Thief. This is a good story, with a brisk pace, centered on strong characters in a world you immediately want to get deeper into. It isn’t a work of high-minded literary fiction, but its prose is smooth and never gets in the way of the story. Its cliffhanger ending implicitly offers you a difficult choice: to go straight into the sequel or go find the latest translation of The Thousand and One Nights and explore the novel’s source material. At a high level, The Stardust Thief is a fun book that I wholeheartedly recommend to fans of epic fantasy who are looking for a fun summer read.

With that said, it’s not perfect. A few major character decisions are confusing; the goal is clearly to surprise the reader, but there’s a difference between a surprise that makes sense in retrospect and one that just leaves you scratching your head. Some of the interpersonal relationships are not well developed, which in turn makes character motivations more opaque than I’m guessing Abdullah intended.

Overall, though, this is a fun read that I highly recommend for readers who are looking for a good escapist fantasy novel that tries and mostly succeeds in treading new ground.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Fun, escapist “Arabian Nights”-derived fantasy
• Likable, relatable characters—but sometimes their motivations are unclear and confusing
• Different take on magic in a fantasy setting, which feels fresh

Reference: Abdullah, Chelsea. The Stardust Thief [Orbit, 2022].

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

Anime Review: Gachiakuta

Classic story elements reimagined with unique animation, heavy social symbolism, and diverse characters

Imagine a world with extreme class stratifications and aggressive indifference to the environment, where policing is extreme and justice is arbitrary. Gachiakuta brings viewers a new allegory for society’s shortcomings by using a fantastical concept to deal with real life issues. With heavy symbolism and archetypal characters, a gray world of trash, treasure, graffiti, and monsters becomes the dystopian setting for an angry child’s coming-of-age story.

Young Rudo lives in an elevated world called the Sphere, where society is divided into two geographically separate classes: the wealthy, snobbish elite and the poor, struggling working class that is despised by the elite. The community is policed by white-uniformed officers known as the Apostles. Rudo is an angry antisocial orphan being raised by his compassionate and thoughtful foster father. His biological father was executed by the elite’s police system, and the fate of his biological mother is not explained. His only connection is a pair of unusual gloves inherited from his biological father.

Rudo is an outcast even in his outcast community. He is obsessed with secretly repairing discarded items from the garbage, although doing so is not allowed in their society. In a moment of courage, he gifts a carefully repaired toy stuffed animal to a young girl who is his only friend in the Sphere.

Rudo’s poverty-stricken outcast existence is upended when he comes home to find his beloved adoptive father murdered. In the Sphere, those believed to be criminals are hung over an abyss and publicly dropped to their deaths as the preferred form of execution. Rudo is quickly blamed for the death, despite opposing evidence, and is sentenced to public execution even though he is only a child. No one supports him or comes to his defense, not even the girl he befriended. However, he somehow survives the very far fall to the hellish surface world below, which is covered with the bones of other victims, dangerous garbage, toxic air, and lethal monsters.

He is rescued by Enjin, a charismatic masked young man who helps Rudo survive in his new world. Enjin is part of a group called the Cleaners, specially gifted people who destroy the monsters in the wasteland and allow semi-safe communities to be created in other areas of the dismal surface world. The Cleaners use spiritually infused objects to channel their powers into individual weapons called vital instruments. Rudo’s special fighting prowess, through a series of unfortunate events, alerts Enjin that Rudo also has the power to be a Cleaner. However, Rudo just wants to find a way to return to the Sphere to kill those who wrongfully condemned him and those who murdered his adoptive father.

Throughout his time on the surface world, Rudo hones his fighting skills and reluctantly builds friendships with an eclectic team of fighters, support workers, and artists in the grungy Cleaner community. He also encounters various antagonists, all with unique motivations and some with disturbing and upsetting backstories.

Gachiakuta initially seems like a traditional coming-of-age shonen, drawing on elements of classic stories such as Naruto, Black Clover, and My Hero Academia. However, the show subverts the trope of the idealistic, determined hero by giving us Rudo as a protagonist who is (understandably) angry, cynical, distrustful, and violent. Rudo is the hero we would get if we let Naruto’s Sasuke or My Hero Academia’s Bakugo take the lead role. Rudo is also intensely immature. On the surface world he is dazzled by sweets (which he had never tasted before) and embarrassed to have a girl in his room. However, his true nature is anger. In one unexpected scene he loses control and beats a defeated opponent almost to death with his fists. In addition, his wrongful execution and the disturbing backstory of antagonists such as the child-like Amo, along with the surreal landscape of garbage-based monsters, make Gachiakuta seem closer to more mature and violent stories such as Hell’s Paradise.

Gachiakuta also stands out for its distinctive art style and character design. The intense facial features fit the cynical, fantastic vibe of people building a life out of decay and garbage. The characters are drawn with stylishly grunge clothes that fit the apocalyptic background. If aspects of the anime experience feel vaguely familiar, it may be because Gachiakuta is from the amazing Kei Urana. She worked with Atushi Ohkubo on Fire Force, and some of the story’s elements and design style resonate in a way that almost makes the two shows seem like different parts of the same larger universe.

The story of Gachiakuta also leans into very strong use of symbolism. Rudo is cast off by society and treated like garbage, but is saved and mentored by his foster father. In the same way, Rudo is obsessed with saving and repairing physical items that have been cast away as garbage. In the Sphere, the separation of the elite and the working class is symbolic of racism and classism. In the surface world, art, runes, tattoos, and graffiti are sacred expressions with physical power, and artists are essential to their society’s survival. Community is another strong theme, with Rudo building bonds with the confident Enjin, cynical Zanka, and cheerful Riyo. There is also a nice exploration of community, with the Cleaner team being made up of not just fighters but also equally important statisticians, support workers, and artists. The anime also has several distinctly Black characters in key roles, including the Cleaner’s team leader Corvus, the intellectual Semiu, and the antagonist raider Jabber.

Beyond the engaging art style and thoughtful social symbolism, Gachiakuta also has plenty of the usual shonen fighting and action, with dramatic monsters in the wastelands and lethal human antagonists trying to steal the weapons (vital instruments) owned by others. However, the show also delves into difficult subjects, including a particularly unexpected and heart-rending episode about sexual abuse.

With so many thoughtful visual and emotional elements, Gachiakuta is a unique storytelling experience that continues to build as each episode progresses. The worldbuilding is intense and sometimes slows down the narrative pace, but the overall effect of the symbolism and social commentary is unexpectedly powerful and fascinating as viewers follow Rudo through his resurrection into a world of outcasts and rejects who, despite society’s hierarchy, turn out to be the real heroes.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Unique art style and heavy social symbolism
• Antihero energy
• Diverse characters and mature topics

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

Book Review: Of the Emperor's Kindness by Chaz Brenchley

A new and modern approach to fantasy of manners. 

Malance, as I like to say in these reviews, has a problem. One year into the job, she’s the ambassador of Verantha to the court of the Emperor of Feremandas, the older, larger and more stately of the two competing empires in this part of the world. Her problem is that Verantha does not physically exist in territory any longer and has not for years, it has been absorbed by the rising, burgeoning and grasping Empire of Clath. Clath is dead certain that Verantha is just now a province of their realm and Malance’s existence and role is a joke or worse an insult to Clath. It is fortunate, perhaps, that Malance has a balance of the Feremandas Emperor’s favor, and is in a relationship with his niece. But when refugees from her vanished homeland arrive, Clath’s response may put her at odds with their plans, a rather dangerous position to be.

This is the story of Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley, projected to be first in a series.

I am going to look at this book through the lens of a subgenre of fantasy that had risen, peaked and in these days where seemingly the majority of fantasy books published are either grimdark or romantasy¹. That subgenre is the fantasy of manners, or even mannerpunk. It was first recognized in the early 1990’s as a category by Donald G Keller, describing a spectrum of books from the 1980’s by authors like Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kate Elliott, Ellen Kushner, Caroline Stevermer, and others.

Fantasy of manners is fantasy by way of, to use contemporary references, works like Downton Abbey, although at the time authors such as Dorothy Dunnett, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, and Georgette Heyer were seen as inspiration and progenitors for this type of fiction. It’s fantasy where (generally) the supernatural elements are a light touch or even entirely non-existent, just taking place in a secondary world. The focus of these works is intensively social. While there can be action and adventure in these works and often are, that is not the propelling power of these novels.

Instead, fantasy of manners are social novels, focusing on social constraints, social relationships and conflicts, the growth and development of social contacts, and in general are relentlessly about the people, first and foremost. Fantasy of manners novels are, in my experience, either urban, or take place in tight social spaces (c.f. Downton Abbey or Bridgerton).The conflicts that erupt are not orcs coming over the barricade, it is the cut and thrust of words at a party, the scheming to bring peers on side for a petition or power play. To maneuver socially even as the threat of violence within the peers might erupt. But that violence and action is subordinate to the social conflicts and interactions.

All this is what fantasy of manners does. Fantasy of manners is a subgenre then that can be subtle, with the reader having to do legwork in picking up clues from context and deciphering what precisely is going on in the machinations and social maneuvers. It is a subgenre that you immerse yourself in a party, and try and figure out as you are reading the description of the party just who is aligned with whom, and what is happening even as it slowly unfolds.²

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at Of the Emperor’s Kindness. Our protagonist Malance is the ambassador of Verantha, and we see her go about her duties, such as they are. She’s the ambassador of a nation that no longer exists and so she has no official duties at the beginning save to attend court like the other ambassadors do. This is complicated by her relationship with the emperor’s niece, a force of nature of her own.

We remain steadfast within Malance’s point of view as events unfurl but the plot and subsequent series of events are relentlessly social in nature. There are clashes with Clath, of course, but it is the titular kindness of the Emperor that really kicks the ball rolling on the plot, as well as the arrival of the refugees. Malance, a young woman who never expected to be anything other than a dusty young ornament at court, is plunged into social conflicts, and perhaps, a rising conflict between the two great empires of Feremandas and Clath. There is plenty of backstory here and revealed worldbuilding. Clath is an up and coming empire, just about ready, or so they think, to start to possibly take on the older, established Feremandas. And Malance, as you guess, is right in the center of that.

Like fantasy of manners of prior years and authors, the plot is very much more of a skeleton for the social immersion that the novel provides the reader. We are put entirely into Malance’s life and circumstance. Like the novel’s progenitors, there is a lot of sensory detail that the reader is introduced to, from the foods of Verantha, to the look and feel of Malance’s house, to the opulence of the Emperor’s palace, and the feel of the city. This is, in fact, one of those books where you can get immersed into the world and worldbuilding and the characters, and that is what and who the book is for.

 
The book is not in line with the main contemporary strands in fantasy, which may be a hindrance for readers who have grown up on relentless grimdark action, or the widescreen of epic fantasy, or coming from the heights of urban fantasy, or have crossed the porous border of romance into fantasy by way of the growing field of romantasy. There is a relationship between Malance and Vivi, a queer loving one that goes through challenge and change as things unfold, but it’s not a romance or romantasy--the relationship is there at the beginning. It’s not epic fantasy either, with a widescreen canvas, we never really leave Feremandas City, really, at all.

A key to novels like these, as you might imagine, is a sympathetic protagonist. I am pretty sure that a unsympathetic fantasy of manners protagonist could be written, but they would have to be so magnetically interesting as to overcome their repellent nature. Malance is much more in the traditional vein. We feel for her and her plight, seemingly the “last Veranthan” right away, and as the complications of the Emperor’s attentions, and the plotting and maneuvers around her rise, we feel for her and her situation. The author does a great job, using tight point of view, of keeping us in her head, and keeping her someone relatable for the reader. Malance grows into her strength and role as challenges mount, and while characters like Vivi threaten to overwhelm the narrative at points (to say nothing of the emperor), Malance rises to the challenge, on the strength of the writing.

While the subgenre of fantasy of manners may have peaked in the 1990s and the field has largely moved on to the aforementioned other subgenres, there has been and is relatively recent fantasy written that if not labeled as fantasy of manners, is certainly in the tradition--authors like Freya Marske (A Marvellous Light), the fantasy novellas of Aliette de Bodard, too, and the works of Stephanie Burgis. Also, too, the Glamourist Histories of Mary Robinette Kowal align with this book. Readers who enjoy those works are likely to enjoy Of The Emperor’s Kindness as well.

Does the novel innovate the fantasy of manners sub-genre? Like some of the more recent of the works listed above, it is more openly and boldly inclusive than what was readily publishable in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s. Not just the Malance-Vivi relationship in specific, but in general the novel and the world it presents to the reader is queernorm through and through.

 
Readers who are looking for more action, more and more complicated plot (although to be fair, it is deceptively simple since we stay in Malance’s point of view) and more magic are not going to find favor with this book. This is a book for readers who do want to read paragraphs discussing the social implications of livery and colors worn, for readers who will be fascinated to see how Malance’s household has to adapt, change and grow after a series of gifts from the Emperor, and readers who will enthuse to see the social machinations at court and within Malance’s own household.

As for myself, having read and am still reading a swath of fantasy of manners, Of the Emperor’s Kindness brings a breath of new air to the subgenre, showing that it can still have a strong and major place in the empire of fantasy. While the ending of the novel does feel like a closing point and a place to exit this world if one should wish, I am curious enough about Malance and her world to want more.

--

Highlights:

• Unapologetic Fantasy of Manners
• Strong attention to immersive detail
• Engaging and well written protagonist

Reference: Brenchley, Chaz, Of the Emperor’s Kindness (Wizard Tower Press, 2025)

¹The thought of a romantasy grimdark book has just occurred to me. I am not sure such a book would quite be for me.
²Sculdun's Investiture party in Season 2 Episode 6 of Andor (What a Festive Evening) is where Andor approaches Fantasy of Manners, but in a Science fiction setting. In keeping with science fiction, A Civil Campaign by Lois M Bujold is entirely and completely SF fantasy of manners.

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

Film Review: Tron: Ares

A story about the ephemerality of life shouldn't be as instantly forgettable as this

The threequel Tron: Ares looks and sounds more expensive than it has any right to be. While the idea of transplanting the franchise’s iconic motorcycles and frisbee fights from cyberspace into the material world is undeniably interesting, the movie wastes its special effects extravaganza in telling the most generic tale of AI independence. To namedrop Frankenstein without any of the pathos is hubristic enough; to lift the plot of Blade Runner for mere nostalgic fanservice is sacrilege.

The plot is a simple case of corporate espionage between two software megacorporations racing to be the first to crack the secret of energy/matter conversion. Both have succeeded at 3D-printing physical objects from pure light, but for some contrived technobabble reason, these creations can’t sustain their existence for longer than half an hour. When the Designated Ethical CEO finds a piece of code that fixes the problem, the Designated Evil CEO deploys his AI assassins to steal it.

The ensuing chase sequence is executed with admirable technical virtuosity, but it feels redundant to go to so much trouble to retrieve a physical flash drive right after the villain demonstrates his ability to remotely copy data from his competitor’s servers. Instead of drawing so much unwanted attention trashing half a city, he could have simply waited for his target to add the code to her systems and then stolen it. But we need to bring the AI assassins to the real world so the next piece of drama can happen.

The titular Ares is a self-aware security program that our villain is trying to market as the ideal soldier: an obedient killing machine that doesn't eat or sleep, and can be reprinted infinite times if it’s killed. Somehow we’re expected to buy that this genius inventor didn’t anticipate that something that is self-aware could eventually form its own goals that don’t involve dying and dying again. During its brief presence in our realm, it quickly notices the sensory delights of corporeality and starts scheming to seize the permanence code for itself.

Unfortunately, this Blade Runner-derivative tale of an artificial person hoping for a longer lifespan calls for more acting skills than Jared Leto can be bothered to bring to the role of Ares. Even as his character learns about ineffable feelings, such as developing a personal aesthetic taste, or improvising a horrendously insensitive psychoanalysis of the woman he just kidnapped, Leto maintains a resting bored face that proves contagious to the viewer.

After an overcomplicated romp through cyberspace, the real world and then another cyberspace to obtain the permanence code, he ends up in a one-to-one fight with his fellow AI assassin who is still loyal to the villain. This climax is utterly unsatisfying because (a) the actual victory is won by secondary characters who spent the entire third act typing code in an office, and (b) it never occurs to our hero Ares that he could copy his own permanence code to save his former friend.

Anyway, with the Designated Evil CEO’s plans thwarted by his own absurd recklessness, Ares is free to experience humanity and… die of destitution, I guess. Meanwhile, the Designated Ethical CEO proceeds to take advantage of finally stable 3D printing to singlehandedly solve world hunger, the energy crisis and all diseases, which I suspect is a bigger story we’d rather have watched than this one. At no point does Tron: Ares make us care for the inner life of sentient digital minds. But hey, the motorcycles look cool.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Contributors Wanted

Do you want to write for Nerds?

Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together is looking for 3-5 awesome individuals to join our team of regular contributors! 

What do we want? We're looking for volunteers who can offer at least 1 review or feature per month to our schedule, as part of our regular Monday-Friday blog content. We're particularly looking for contributors able to cover comic books and graphic novels, or those with interests that range broadly - though all contributors are free to write about SF/F novels or anything else relevant to geek culture. 

What do you get? Nerds of a Feather is a fanzine, which means we means we do not seek or generate revenue. Rather, it is a fanspace run by fans, who work as volunteers. However, joining us does mean opportunities for free e-books and the potential for other free stuff, as well as the fun and support from joining a dynamic and flexible team of enthusiastic nerd bloggers at this here little Hugo Award winning fanzine.

We're looking for people who: 

(a) write well in long form (900-1500 words) and don't need extensive copy-editing
(b) understand and are ready to engage with our established formats and review scoring system
(c) are otherwise good fits with our voice and style

We are not, however, looking for automata who agree with the rest of us on anything and everything.

One of our goals is to feature a diverse range of voices on the topics that matter to us. As such, we encourage writers of all backgrounds to apply.

Caveat: we know lots of you have other awesome projects you want everyone to know about, but since these are regular contributor positions, we would like to emphasize that this would not be an appropriate forum to use for that self-promo.

Process: send an email to NoaFeditors at gmail dot com telling us what you are interested in doing and why you'd like to join our team. Please also send a writing sample, which can be either embedded into the body of the email or links to published work. We will try to respond to everyone as quickly as possible.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Regards

NoaF Team