Book Review: The Gryphon King by Sara Omer

A monster-filled secondary-world fantasy that takes its cues and worldbuilding inspirations from points east of the Bosporus Strait

In a world of Khans and khanates, opulent city states and dreaming complacent kingdoms, Sara Omer’s The Gryphon King revolves around the driven desires of Bataar, the man who would be the titular Gryphon King as his ambitions and desires run up against a kingdom and its formidable women. One of them, Nohra, has worked hard to be one of the Harpy Knights, given one of the powerful weapons of her kingdom; and she rides and cares for her carnivorous pegasus, Mercy. Quite frankly, Nohra would rather be flying and defending the throne. But when Bataar shockingly and suddenly conquers her kingdom of Dumakra as part of his very successful campaign for universal conquest of the continent, Nohra finds herself nearly a hostage in the palace, a Harpy Knight chained to the whims of the Steppe Conqueror. She is definitely interested in getting rid of Bataar and restoring her homeland. But in the midst of courtly politics, intrigue and trying to walk a fine line with Bataar, strange things have been happening in the Kingdom. Monsters are afoot… and not just the titular Gryphons, either. Nohra and Bataar find themselves the unlikeliest of reluctant allies.

This is how the novel thus unfolds:

We have an interesting set of flawed characters, with secrets, lies, and hidden agendas, drawn into uneasy alliances and conflicts. Bataar and Nohra are our sole point-of-view characters, except for a chapter at the end featuring a character about whom any talk is extremely spoilery, so I will leave them out of the discussion. In addition to the monsters, I wonder whether this character is more of a central axis of the novel and the trilogy than one might first expect. Bataar, despite being a capable warlord, a cunning strategist, and a clever ruler, is arrogant, and way too often puts himself right in the front line of danger. Nohra, despite being a Harpy Knight, has some rather large blind spots, and she is sometimes overfocused on her goals and misses the bigger picture. Qaira, Bataar’s wife and political right hand, seems to have scheming plans of her own that neither Bataar nor Nohra suspect. Other intrigues fill out the narrative. Having conquered Dumakra, Bataar has set himself a whole host of headaches. This provides plenty of drama for the reader in between the more bloody conflicts.

What I really want to talk about, of course, if you have read any of my reviews, is the worldbuilding and the structure of the book. This is epic fantasy, clear to the vein, but there are notes of grimdark and darker fantasy in here. One of the comps given in the promo kit is Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller, and I think that is a good book to tie this to. It’s not full-on grimdark, even if, as noted above, we have a whole raft of flawed characters whose motivations, secrets and desires leave us with no clear white and black hats. It’s definitely taking notes from grimdark, showing the influence of that subgenre on the main body of epic fantasy. The courtly intrigue and very rich worldbuilding put me in the mind of a more straightforward Jenn Lyons. No footnotes, and playing with reference and metafiction, but keep the very rich empire and complicated characters. Samantha Shannon, in The Priory of the Orange Tree mode, also feels like a book and author that has kinship with this one.

But the world itself is what fascinates me. Omer has described herself as taking notes from the Ottoman Empire, and there is definitely the courtly intrigue, including among wives and concubines, that you’d find in, say, Magnificent Century.¹ Also the decor, the social relations, the descriptions of palaces and spaces, all point to, as I said above, cultural and social touchstones east of the Bosporus, toward Anatolia, Armenia, Persia and Central Asia. The physiogeographic setup of the continent is varied, ranging from the steppe that Bataar comes from to the dry desert realm that dominates Dumakra, and high mountains as well. There is a map, but I admit that I have strong questions about the river setup on the map and the geology of the continent as a result.

But returning to the cultural worldbuilding: I think, especially with Bataar and his steppe origins, the feeling I kept getting was not the Ottomans at all, but rather Timur the Lame. Tamerlane was a Turkic-Mongol warlord of the 14th century. Born on the steppe, like Bataar, he was injured at a young age, again, like Bataar. Tamerlane got the steppe tribes to unite under him to go on campaign. Same with Bataar, although that part of his story gets skipped over; we go from his formative fight with a gryphon to him off conquering.

Tamerlane had a wide set of military victories against a variety of opponents. Bataar seems a little less cruel than Tamerlane (who was very cruel, so don’t be deceived here), but is no less ambitious and expansive, and clearly is “punching above his weight” in taking on polities that he really shouldn’t. Both men want to conquer the world, and Tamerlane did a pretty good job at it, and in the first few chapters until he reaches Dumakra, Bataar is doing an excellent job, and is eager to continue his conquest. Granted, in our world, Tamerlane didn’t have to deal with carnivorous pegasi and worse, but the military genius, the fluidity of his responses, and the determination are all things I see in Bataar.

But yes, going to the fantastic, this novel is full of monsters. The pegasi and gryphons in this world, besides being strong and ferocious with beak and claws, also carry a debilitating and sometimes deadly infection if you are scratched by them. There are aquatic monsters as well, and then there are the ghouls. The ghouls are nasty and dangerous, and remind me of the ghuls in Saladin Ahmed’s Tower of the Crescent Moon. And fittingly, like those, they are found in a set of ruins our main characters camp in—and really, really shouldn’t have. This goes back to the flawed characters, and how Omer effectively uses their weaknesses to help drive the plot, again and again. They might be competent, strong and talented, but they have feet of clay.

There is definitely magic and mayhem (and even a hint of Gunpowder Empire) to the magic and the weapons that the Harpy Knights wield, as well as other magical items that show up. Omer is tapping into cultural touchstones that have rarely gotten play as the center. Places like Dumakra and the Steppe of Bataar’s homeland have, if they have been shown on screen in fantasy novels, often been places visited rather than the focus. And when we do see Southwestern Asian fantasy, it’s often been hundreds of years before, in the Caliphate, rather than the Timurid and Ottoman Empires. The Mughals, a couple of centuries ahead, and some distance east, seem to be also finally getting their due as inspiration for cultures, societies, characters, and worldbuilding. There is a rich vein here that Omer is mining for plenty of untapped potential. I find it interesting that her “Europe” analogue, Aglea, is off screen to the far north of the map. Omer is exactly inverting the tropes of the Great Wall of Europe by having the “Europeans” be the area only seen on a map and of much lesser importance.

There is one other thing I want to mention about The Gryphon King, which you may have picked up on already. The book is neither marketed as, nor actually is, the hot new invented category of romantasy. It’s firmly and apologetically widescreen secondary-world fantasy, and while there are all sorts of dynastic and court politics, schemes of succession and ownership based on marriage alliances, concubinages and the like, this novel does not fit in the romantasy category in the least. Just to make sure, since I seem to see every fantasy novel written by a woman labeled as “romantasy” these days, I looked back at the publicity for the book. It is, in fact, not. That is not to say that there isn’t a loving and clever marriage in here, as well as characters plotting for such marriages, and various characters finding each other attractive. But the focus of the novel is on more sociopolitical relationships, and sibling relationships, and, of course, the monsters.

If you want courtly intrigue, adventure, politics, and a large helping of man-eating monsters, based on Medieval Southwestern Asian motifs and cultural touchstones, The Gryphon King is definitely for you. It’s the first book in a series, and it only comes to a stopping point, but with a very appropriate hinge. I look forward to more in Omer’s world and characters.

Highlights:

• #teamgryphon
• Strong use of Southwest Asia as inspiration for setting and character detail
• NOT romantasy: epic fantasy with notes of grimdark and plenty of intrigue
• Richly written, with an excellent eye for detail

Reference: Omer, Sara. The Gryphon King [Titan Books, 2025].

¹ A Turkish TV historical drama that tells the story of Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman ruler, and his wife Hurrem, former slave girl. I came across this show last year by complete accident (someone in a seat in a plane in front of me was watching it, I took a screenshot and eventually figured it out). It's hugely popular in the Middle East but much less well known here. Which, frankly, if Netflix or the like got wind of it, an American version would come out, yesterday. Complicated, crafty and fascinating.  Think of it as I, Claudius, except for Suleiman, and you're there.

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

Book Review: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite

Cozy noir-style space mystery featuring a gender-bending detective and lots of queer characters

You are aboard the HMS Fairweather, a spaceship that has been travelling from Old Earth for 350 years in search of a new home. The approximately ten thousand people on board regularly back up their memories in their own personal memory book so that, when they die, their new bodies will have access to their full memories. When someone dies, they are “reborn” at approximately twenty years old. There are no children on board and people are not supposed to be able to reproduce on ship.

So where did this baby come from?

Enter Dorothy “Dot” Gentleman, ship detective.

Her nephew Ruthie (short for Rutherford) and his partner, John, have found a baby in a basket on their doorstep. Dot quickly finds the baby’s parents, but the real mystery is that no one remembers having a baby at all! So now we have a memory crime, where people’s memories have been tampered with. Memory crimes are Dot's specialty.

If you are looking for a cozy sci-fi mystery with noir vibes that has mild gender bending and queer characters, look no further. Nobody’s Baby is the second book in the Dorothy Gentleman series by Olivia Waite. In book one, Murder by Memory (2025), Dot found herself awakened inside another passenger’s body and had to solve the mystery of how several memory books had been destroyed.

For me, the fun of this series is in the society that Waite creates abroad the Fairweather: no one should be able to die, and people’s needs are provided for, but they’re still incentivized to have jobs or run businesses to entertain themselves or to make a bit of money for their future.

Book one introduced a set of jobs related to the curation and protection of memories. Dot’s nephew works as a librarian who helps protect the memory books of the Fairweather’s passengers. His partner, John, is a memory bartender: he can mix you a drink that will bring back memories of a summer storm or fall in New York. He works at the Antikythera Club, the by-membership-only hideout for the ship's artists and literati.

In book two, we learn about “flickers,” movie-like stories crafted by a single projectionist wearing a “skimmer,” a device that lets them project a story from their brain onto a screen. We are introduced to an entire set of society that makes these movies, the devices that make them possible, and their fans. There are also more prosaic jobs: for example, Dot has a crush on a woman named Violet who runs a cozy yarn store.

So, come for the mystery, but stay for larger theories on how this future society works. In a society like the Fairweather, where everyone can live multiple lives aboard a generation ship looking for a new planet, how do people relate to each other? What rules do they create to keep their society healthy? What happens when you find yourself in a situation where the rules don't fit?

Peregrine, the foundling, falls into a gap in the ship’s laws. The ship has no procedure for creating a new identity onboard. They have written laws for once they reach a planet, but planetary identity does not come with a memory book or a right to new embodiments. Dot firmly believes in the Fairweather’s system, but can also see where the system needs to be bent to prevent a greater wrong. She tells us that “Paperwork is law and order. The papers are what make us a society and not just a gaggle of desperate people sharing a geography. We set up a system because a system can be permanent, where human beings are not.” Not everyone agrees: the system doesn't always serve people, and there are some who begin to think that the system is more important than the people. So what does this mean for Peregrine?

On Peregrine’s behalf, Dot must petition the Fairweather’s Board of Directors to officially grant the baby a right to a memory book and new embodiments. She must also convince them, since Peregrine’s birth parents do not remember having him and do not want a child, that Ruthie and John should get parental rights. And she must get justice for Peregrine’s mother, who was robbed of her memories of the baby.

The Fairweather may be a society where where you can live forever and you want for nothing, but people are still people: they are greedy and jealous and, sadly, will look for ways to hurt each other. But we can enjoy Dot's expertise in unravelling the mysteries.

You could probably read this book without first reading Murder by Memory. But the first book is novella length (103 pages) and the second not much longer (144 pages), so why would you deny yourself the pleasure of more Dorothy Gentleman?

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. An absolutely enjoyable experience.

Highlights: 

• Cozy mystery with a likeable detective
• Lots of queer characters
• Fun space-noir vibes
• Interesting questions about memory and society building 

Reference: Waite, Olivia. Nobody's Baby [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Video Game Review: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Exploring a capitalist wasteland one kindness at a time

Artist: Guillaume Singelin

I'm a lover of roleplaying games—especially ones that give you a chance to live a life and inhabit a personality. Sure, linear stories with lots of action are fine, but for me the real joy is in finding something where you feel like the world is alive, lives are precious, and decisions mean something. In other words, I don't have time for games where I'm asked to shoot a hundred goons in the face and then care about the big bad's moral quandary—the moral contradictions are just too jarring.

I had not come across Fellow Traveller as a publisher before, and the only reason I got into Citizen Sleeper 2 (having not played the first) was because it was included in my Playstation subscription. I say this to give you context for what comes next.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is about a character, a Sleeper, whom you play. The entire story is narrated in the second person. It’s set in a small part of a solar system not our own, which is now several decades if not longer after the collapse of a grand empire. That empire, a corporate behemoth that spanned multiple star systems, is gone, and in its wake so is interstellar travel.

All that’s left to the people living on the shore as the tide went out to never come back is an asteroid-filled star system in which they cling to the vestiges of what came before and try to make a life while they can. It’s clear that corporations still exist in this world—they occupy the fertile and rich inner system, but this game takes place entirely within an asteroid belt at the edge of their reach while they fight one another. The people here expect the war to reach them eventually but hope it won’t. In the end there’s nothing they can do about it, so they carry on with their lives.

You, as a Sleeper without a name, are an artificial being—a body made to house a partial personality someone sold to the corporation who made you so that the body you’re in could work as a slave.

The story starts with you on the run from your current master, who is quickly established as a pretty evil dude. From there you have a reasonably free hand on where you go and who you talk to within the scope of the game.

This isn’t an open-world RPG. In many ways it’s more of an interactive story with RPG elements. That’s an important distinction to make because the game has a story to tell, and although your choices make for a unique experience, the scope here is small.

Small is not an insult; it’s to set your expectations. I want to call out Disco Elysium as a companion game in its vibes. Not that you can die of a heart attack during character creation or be a destitute drunk; those are surface ornaments. Where the two games are similar and why Citizen Sleeper 2 works so well for me is that they’re concerned with telling a story and allowing you just enough freedom to build that tale yourself.

I would encourage you to experiment with its mechanics, because it doesn’t explain them beyond the most cursory help screens. I started this three times before I worked out how to navigate the systems in such a way that I didn’t choose myself into a frustrating dead end early in the game.

A lot of the game’s story is delivered one of two ways, through a series of dice rolls or through text that arrives in response to conversations and choices you make as a Sleeper.

This means there’s a lot of text on the screen. That wasn’t a problem for me because the narrative is well written, the text meaningful, and the game deeply immersive, but be warned: this isn’t an RPG where you’re moving people around the screen and getting into fights. All that could lead to a mediocre game that covers a lot of the ground anyone who’s been around the block is going to be familiar with. However, in an example of taking something familiar and executing it brilliantly, Citizen Sleeper 2 takes its elements and delivers a banger: a story involving the development of self, the essential nature of collective action, the plight of slaves and refugees, the need (or otherwise) to determine your own fate and how to build community when everything is objectively getting worse.

There are a good number of side characters, including some that arrive and depart after a couple of missions. Not everyone can be pulled together, but at the same time, there are only a few places where I think you can rupture your relationship with them once they’re on board. I note, though that your companions interact with you but not really with one another, and even then you can't just initiate conversations—the game dishes them out in response to events.

Citizen Sleeper does a good job of hiding the seams of the story, but they do occasionally show through—most often when you’ve botched a job or chosen a route that should break a relationship but doesn’t. I don’t mind this too much, because I found the process of exploration and of helping people to be extremely emotionally rewarding.

Most of all, just like Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper 2 doesn’t change the world—morally ambiguous people continue on after you’re done; others rise and some fall. The Sleeper’s arc feels complete but not finished, and the same is true of those around them. I like this kind of story because it remembers well that it’s never the case that the world revolves around an individual, no matter what we are told.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a deeply satisfying storytelling experience and roleplaying game. I felt love and sadness, urges towards kindness, and anger throughout. The game made me feel things. On top of that, it managed to make the stakes feel pressing and urgent, both via its mechanics that don’t let you sleep on making choices and also through its story.

It's not a game that wants you to rush, whether that’s in the delivery of a lot of text or in giving you free time on different stations to just potter about making friends and earning credits. Indeed, it rewards such patience.

The influences here are clear enough: from Saga, Descender, Cyberpunk and Bladerunner to Firefly and Silent Running. Citizen Sleeper 2 feels like the kind of thoughtful RPG you’re delighted to discover after playing D&D your entire life.

A last word on the characters. Each character gets some time to develop and interact with you as the Sleeper. Some are looking at their identities, some are trying to establish themselves. Some are on their own quests and some just want connection. Each of them feels like they matter, and it’s your intersection with their values and desires that brings the best out of the game.

Highlights:

• Miners unionising to defeat exploitative bosses
• All kinds of different intelligences
• Loneliness at the end of the universe

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, a patient piece of storytelling that takes the familiar and executes it almost perfectly.

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist, he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Book Review: Making History by K. J. Parker

Another novella set in Parker's mainline secondary universe, about a group of academics tasked with a seemingly impossible task by a tyrant. 

Uneasy lies the head of someone who is targeted by a tyrant for a special job. First Citizen Gyges, the tyrant of Aelia, has a plan for war but of a pretext beyond comprehension. The nearby Ana Strasoe is full of barbarians, and starting a war with them on the right pretext could give Gyges a chance to expand into their territory. That, once accomplished, could give him the power to go up against the regional power of Anticyrene. And if Gyges knocks them off, then Aelia would truly be in the heavyweight class and Gyges could contemplate taking on the biggest empire of them all, the Sashan. But it hinges on getting a reason for war that the Ana Strasoe, and his own people, will accept.

And so Gyges formulates a plan so that a few lead scholars, including our narrator, are to manufacture a false history of Aelis, complete with recently discovered artifacts and ruins, that will justify Aelia going after Ana Strasoe with a willing and eager populace. Gyges’ plan is as mad and grand as you might imagine--manufacturing a whole lost city and civilization that can be “discovered” and used as reason for the war to happen to recover lost glory. It has to be a bulletproof, fully documentable manufactured lost history.

This, needless to say, does not go to plan...

This is the story of the novella Making History.

Making History is set in the secondary world that Parker has, with often contradictory and twisty worldbuilding, been building for quite some time. Call it the Saloninus-verse, for the character he has alluded to, mentioned and referenced and written about the most. Or Parkerland, since that is what the author calls it. It’s a world based on areas of antiquity and medieval Europe from roughly the Mediterranean all the way to Central Asia, with lots of countries, polities and ideas that resonate with our world but aren’t quite our own. You can see the echoes and Parker has a lot of fun with that. The Sashan are very much in the mold of the Parthian or Sassanian Empire, except even more powerful. The Robur, who do not feature in this book, are the Roman stand-ins. And so on.

Parker’s trick and devilry for a reader who wants an organized timeline and the like is that his references are contradictory, mixed and tangled at best. Just where anything is in relation to anything else is often unclear, and when things occur in relation to other books is pretty dire to try and figure out, and that’s part of Parker’s joy. I’ve seen proposed maps and some time frames but they are all very speculative.

So figuring out when and where Making History takes place in this verse is tricky. We do have Aelia, and the Sashan and Anticyrene, so we have some basic ideas on when it occurs in the verse. It doesn’t actually matter when it occurs in the timeline and where. You don’t have to have to have read any previous Parker in order to enjoy this. Where it fits in a history that is unclear, contradictory and unclear doesn’t really matter to enjoy the novella.

And yet it does somewhat, given the plot of the story. The academics are trying to manufacture a history from scratch, a history that didn’t exist. They know the truth, mostly about where Aelia came from. They did not come from a fallen civilization that straddled the border of Aelia and the Ana Strasoe. They know that what Gyges wants is completely manufactured and unreal.

And yet they have to do it. The work is split up among these academics. Our narrator is tasked with an interesting problem, and that of language. A fair amount of the novella is concerned with our protagonist trying to reverse engineer a language that could be plausibly be seen as the ancestor of Aelian¹. Parker goes into a deep dive into a real historical subject but in a fictional context, something that he is awfully fond of doing. In this case, we get how to reverse engineer not only a plausible proto language that a high fallen civilization might have produced, but also its writing system as well. It’s a brilliant bit of worldbuilding backwards and forwards, which is ironic given Parker’s disinterest in presenting a coherent set of worldbuilding for his world.

In that way, Making History is Parker being self aware of what he is done in the universe, and having the opening of the plot having academics being tasked with making an articulate (if false) history of Aelia and making it all make sense and stand up to scrutiny and rigor. Is it a “take that” at the whole project of making consistent worldbuilding? Perhaps, because as the plot unfolds, the narrator and the other academics start to see echoes of their created past crop up in the present day, inexplicably. Artifacts that are clearly fake--they have to be, they weren’t made for the unearthed site but they are in the style. And then there are people speaking the language our narrator created. And documents as well...

And how and what is going on, unfolds the main plot of the novel. In classic style, Parker makes it clear that there are multiple answers as to what could be going on. The more fun and much more unlikely answer is the Borges answer. The academics hypothesize, that while their primary guess as to what is happening (redacted for spoilery reasons) is probably what is really happening, their alternate guess is even more fun and I will spoil that here: They think that by manufacturing such a large volume

Have you read Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? That is a short story where entries and information regarding a strange and seemingly fictional place start cropping up in the real world, and slowly and surely become real. It’s a horror story, in a way, that history and reality could be so weirdly warped as to have a fictional volume of an encyclopedia of a place that doesn’t exist start to intrude on reality and start to influence reality. In that story, artifacts from the titular Tlön, just like in Making History, start to appear. The false reality of Tlön becomes, in effect, real. The academics as their backup low-probability explanation think that the large force of their efforts to make a false history does, in fact, change the past and make it real.

And once again, it goes back to the theme I’ve looked at this novella through the lens with--the inconsistent and not defined worldbuilding of Parker in his Parkerland universe. There is no bible, no one set history of his world and the very act of him writing another book upsets and changes that applecart and the calculations of what has come before, all the more. It is all stone mirrors, all strange and invented languages, all Tlön.

The other book to tie this to is a book I’ve looked at over in Skiffy and Fanty, and that is All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily by Rhiannon Garth-Jones. That book is a non-fictional look at the legacy and responses to Rome by successor civilizations and how they change and take slices of that history and run with it. And in so doing, often distort or change aspects of that history, culture and society for their own ends. Just as one example, have you noticed that the Neoclassical style, so seen in Washington D.C, is all white marble? That’s a misinterpretation of the originals, the paint on Greek and Roman buildings being long gone. The actual originals, in the time of Plato, or Cicero, or Emperor Trajan, would have been polychromatic, even gaudy, by modern eyes.Were any of them transported to the modern day, they would take one look at the Capitol building and wonder what happened to all the color.

There is much more richness and discussion and thought in the novella, about the nature of truth, information, society and history. There is the classic dark humor and biting wit that Parker’s work features. It’s a thinking piece in many ways, much along the shorter works in his oeuvre, as opposed to direct action. But I do think it gives a very good entry point into how Parker writes, especially in the shorter vein, when he truly allows his nerdery and deep interest in subjects come to the fore. In some ways, I think Parker’s efforts in novels aren’t quite as sharp, or strong or rich as novellas and stories such as Making History.

About the only thing missing from the book is not even a jot of a mention of Salonicus. Is it set before him, then? Unclear! (see above).

-- 

Highlights:

• What is truth, anyway and can you manufacture it?
• Deep nerdery dives, a classic of shorter Parker work.
• Biting, dark humor.
• No Salonicus references in this one.

Reference: Parker, K.J., Making History (tordotcom, 2025)

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

¹Given Parker’s strong interest in engineering, going into this novella, I had completely expected that it would be focused on the engineering aspects of the story. If you are going to have a lost city, it’s not as easy as burying a city and then, voila, uncovering it. There are some concerns that our narrator discusses with one of his colleagues tasked with that part of the project, but it is not the focus of this novella that I thought it might be.

Festival View: The Ugly Chickens

Every now and then, there’s a short that comes across my desk that plays on each and every one of my things. The Ugly Chickens happened to be one like that. Subtle science fiction? Yep. Extinct animals? Quite. An adaptation of Howard Waldrop? No doubt. Felicia Day? In the extreme!

Let me start with a thing that has always been true: the best science fiction short films are gentle science fiction. This is what draws the line with features for me. Yes, effect-driven features are really where it's at (and you can fight me on that!), but the shorter the short, the more based on our world the science fictional scenario should be. When I came across The Ugly Chickens, I knew that it was going to be the one that made me happiest.

The story of The Ugly Chickens is fairly simple: it’s the late 1970s in Texas, and an ornithology associate professor, Paula (played by Felicia Day) is running to her class when she bumps into a woman who sees the cover of her extinct birds book showing a dodo. She says she hadn’t seen ‘those ugly chickens’ in years, and tells the story of how her neighbors had raised them. She’s been obsessed with the dodo for a long time, and that led to an adventure to find the dodo, who she hopes is not as dead as everyone had thought. Her obsession leads her to travel to Louisiana, and she finds proof that there were dodos, but runs into a local, and that sets her off on another series of adventures at tremendous cost to herself. The way it plays out is both utterly satisfying and completely non-ambiguously a let-down.

I can remember reading the story in the late 1980s. It was so smart, and it dealt with my favorite: the dodo. They were a sweet, loving bird. They weren’t dumb, just trusting. I might have identified with them a bit too closely, and when I read a story where these noble creatures were present, well, I dove in. It’s helped by the fact that it was a Howard story as well. His writing went into so many other areas and there's always the Waldrop style I miss so much now that he’s gone. I was lucky enough to get to meet Howard a few times, and even did an exhibit based on his book The Texas-Israeli War of 1997. The Ugly Chickens was easily my favorite of all his stories.

The short switches the gender of the ornithologist to a woman, which, when played by Felicia Day, is a perfect choice. I maintain that Felicia is the finest genre actor in America today. Yes, it is a different and more specialized form of the art. It requires the ability to interact with a setting as much as other characters. It’s a multi-tier reaction process that Felicia has mastered in a way that few not named Christopher Lee have managed. She gets to roll through a series of emotional tones in a way that brings her natural charm to the front, while also not blowing out the story as it progresses.

The film is beautiful. The cinematography, handled by Alan Poon, is magnificent. It looks gorgeous, and it takes the changing setting, various time periods, and regional environments, and gives each a deliberate sense of place. Poon also handled the shooting of American Born Chinese, one of the best shot TV programs of the last decade. The entire look of the film plays with Howard’s tendency towards the rural, the backwaters and backwoods. There’s a certain Southern Gothic sense even to the classroom scene.

Now, is this an adaptation that isn’t exactly fully faithful to the story, but it absolutely maintains the spirit of the original. George R. R. Martin, one of the producers, reports that Howard saw an early cut of the picture before his passing and much approved. The script is really smart, and moves between beats without dwelling too much. This is actually more difficult than it sounds to maintain across 30 minutes and still give time for character development and Day’s amazing emoting.

I’ve programmed thousands of shorts, and there are a few which I knew would be winning awards from both audiences and the jury. The Ugly Chickens was absolutely one that I knew would, and I wasn’t wrong. At Cinequest, it won both, and I could not have been happier.

I hope that The Ugly Chickens gets a release along with the other short films that are being made from Howard’s stories, including Night of the Cooters and Mary Margaret Road Grader. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Not much changed when the Fire Nation attacked

The Avatar saga remains faithful to its tried and true formula: visually breathtaking, narratively uninspired

There are truly interesting ideas in Avatar 3 that elevate the themes raised by the first Avatar to questions of thorny significance to the story, and time after time, their resolution goes for the easy answer, the overdone cliché. The Way of Water could be forgiven for delivering very little because it promised very little. Fire and Ash promises a lot and still fails to deliver, which makes this entry in the film series a more regrettable (forgive the pun) misfire.

Let’s begin with the film’s central conflict: Spider, the human boy adopted by the blue aliens. After a sudden bout of cosmic bad luck, he ends up convulsing on the forest floor, with no more human-breathable air left in his mask and far from his stack of replacements. As a desperate last measure, our miracle child Kiri connects to the web of nature and reformats Spider’s entire body chemistry to allow him to breathe Pandora’s air. So far, so good: no more depending on a 24/7 mask to survive. However, Spider’s new metabolism opens the door to a nightmare scenario: he’s living proof that the human body can adapt to survive unimpeded in Pandora’s environment. If the bad guys figure out how to replicate the process, the entire balance of power in Pandora will shift in favor of human colonization.

Now Spider’s existence is a danger to everyone he loves, and his body is an invaluable source of biomedical innovation. The rest of the film has him ping-ponged between enemy factions that want to either cut him open for the benefit of Earth or cut his throat for the benefit of Pandora. But the movie chooses the wrong Na’vi as the mouthpiece for the latter position, and there are no lasting consequences for the personal ties that should have been damaged between Spider and his would-be executioner.

It has a jarring effect that the film brings us to this immense rift between Spider and the blue aliens, only to give everyone a happy ending where he’s welcomed by the ancestors as a member of the Na’vi without further issue. Let’s stress the point again: Spider was almost murdered by people he deeply trusts and loves, because they became convinced that his life put all of them in danger. And this betrayal comes after Neytiri has spent half the film insulting and neglecting him because she’s still grieving her dead son and Spider is a constant reminder of which people took him from her. After his near-execution, the relationship between Spider and the Na’vi shouldn’t be able to go back to normal, ever. At the very least, it should take more for him to take up arms in their defense again. Even his evil not-exactly-father, the half-Na’vi clone of the late Colonel Quaritch, shows him more respect in this film than his adoptive parents.

The other conflict in the plot, which the trailers gave much attention to but actually doesn’t affect the story that much, has to do with the Fire Nation Ash People, a tribe of pillagers who some decades ago survived a volcanic disaster and have since rejected the cult of the nature goddess Eywa. Now they live off piracy and worship the same fire that destroyed their old way of life. This is a fascinating concept that the film does nothing with. It’s one thing to present a schism in a pantheistic faith and create what is essentially a demonic cult; it’s much more compelling to do so in a setting where the nature goddess is demonstrably real and present in people’s lives. What does it look like to despise the natural flow of the life force when that force is visible and has a tangible will?

But also, what does it say about Eywa that she plays favorites between Na’vi clans? The Ash People’s backstory has them praying to be saved from the volcano, but Eywa refused to send help. In such circumstances it makes total sense that they’d form a new religion around fire, which proved to be the more powerful force, and that they’d turn to pillage to survive, both because they no longer have fertile land and because they no longer trust Eywa’s generosity.

Eywa’s will is actually one of the bigger problems with the plotting of the Avatar series. In the first movie, she saved the day via literal Dea Ex Machina, and Avatar 3 repeats the same trick in an identical situation. The critique of real-life environmental devastation is loud and clear: the humans of this future are too dim to notice the obvious intelligence of the space whales they kill for profit, but it takes a civilization-sized Idiot Ball to ignore a whole sentient biosphere telling you to stop.

When you introduce a deity into your setting, and this deity’s opinion matches your stance as an author, it’s very hard to avoid turning your story into a pamphlet. Eywa steers the plot at the times when it’s convenient, in the directions that help the author preach his message, and thus can’t function as a character in the way that the rest of the characters treat her. And the only time we’re told Eywa makes a questionable choice, i.e. letting the Ash People starve, it’s presented in a way that makes them the bad guys instead of Eywa. As often happens with supreme beings in stories, there are no lessons for Eywa to learn, no need for her to change her mind or grow. The story assumes she can do no wrong, even when it clearly shows it happening. Instead of being a character, she fulfills the function of authorial (forgive the pun) avatar that stalls or pushes the plot as needed.

Another character whom the story treats far more favorably than their actions deserve: Jake Sully, whose boot camp style of parenting will probably push Na’vi culture to invent psychotherapy on its own. Even allowing for the sad reality that the entire Na’vi people is in a war for survival, Jake has no excuse for the way he treats his children, and he’s repeatedly portrayed as heroic for it.

Avatar’s in-your-nose parable about colonialism and predatory greed has been repeating the same basic points for three movies, and doesn’t have any original perspective to add to the discussion. James Cameron has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his box. This film series should stop before its incomparably gorgeous landscapes can’t disguise the mediocre storytelling anymore.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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