Book Review: A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau

An unflinching science fiction and environmental fable about the costs and dangers of societal extremes.

There is a strong movement, maybe the dominant undercurrent ethos of science fiction, that science fiction (and I am talking strictly about science fiction and not fantasy) is not about the future, alternate present, alternate past or whenever it takes place in which it is set. Instead, the rosetta stone of much of science fiction is--what is this novel, story, work talking about in the modern day. What is it showing, through a mirror darkly (or sometimes very much obviously). Figure that out, and you can really dig into what an author is doing, intentionally or otherwise.

So with that in mind, let’s look at Lauren C. Teffeau’s A Hunger with No Name. We start off in a slowly decaying herding village of Astrava. Our main character, Thurava, is training with her mother to be a herder of the sheep (or perhaps llama-like) lucerva. This is a herding society where herders take their flocks to pastures and then return with them with the change of seasons back to their village to be shorn. We quickly learn this itself is a change, the herds used to be kept a lot closer, but the nearby river has dwindled in recent decades, and so cannot support the village and pastures both. We get a sense of diminishment, that the way of life of Thurava’s people is under slow constant squeeze.

There’s more, though. This is a post-apocalyptic society, one that grew up in the wake of a dominant and highly technological civilization that collapsed. Astrava and its peers are what came out of that fall.
And then there is the Glass City. A city of wonders, of technology, of very different ways of life. Of, perhaps, a return to the life before the apocalypse. The Glass City has sent an automation, a representative, to coax and convince people to give up the herder life and come to the City to find work and stability. Is it a false premise? An illusion? Those who have gone to the city have NOT sent messages back as to their life there. Not even Thurava’s best friend.

Given the attitudes and fear and apprehensions of life before that apocalypse, you’d think an automation from the Glass City urging to come to its home with the hope and promise of those beforetimes would be a nonstarter. However with their way of life diminishing year by year, the trickle of people heading to the big city and a new life becomes a flood, once that eventually drives Astrava to come to the Glass City, and find out for herself what is really happening, and what she can do about it.

I very deliberately used the word fable in the tag line of this review and I want to interrogate and explain why as the focus of this review. A Hunger with No Name is a science fiction novel but it is even more so a fable¹, right from the name which has that resonance to it. What is, in fact, the titular hunger with no name? It does get a personification in this book, as Thurava finds out as the dark secret (even to most residents) of the Glass City. That monstrous personification is what has been driving the city, and also its effects on its neighbors, including Astrava, for quite some time.

But again, why is this a science fiction fable? It’s a fable in the same way the movie Snowpiercer is a fable, or In Time. If you want a literary parallel, the closest thing I can think of that really sits in the same space as this novel are the stories in Stanslaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, which explicitly says they are “fables for the cybernetic age”. But this is a novel-length fable which does veer against the usual short length nature of the form. And Lem’s fables are written for humor to leaven his fables and messaging. The author, here, is most deadly serious in her fable.

But now as to the clincher as to why this story isn’t just a straight up science fiction novel. Our main character, Thurava, is engaged directly in the idea of gathering stories. She goes from herder of lucerva to herder of knowledge, of stories, of the culture of her people. Once she reaches the glass city and see what it is doing to her, to her people, her ambitions to preserve and transmit and keep the stories and culture of her people makes her, in effect, a storyteller, a transmitter of culture, knowledge, and the philosophy of her people, their way of life. Even more so than the aforementioned Lem, by grounding Thurava as a storyteller, and infusing her story with stories she learns, collects, tells.

But while Thurava is at first trying to be a preservationist, trying to preserve, the force of the story as she learns the truth of the Glass City, is to be spurred to eventual reluctant but decisive action against it, especially once that hunger’s nature, and its all consuming desire becomes clear. Once Thurava learns the truth of it, she has no choice but to take action against it. She is a reluctant protagonist, but when the truth of the fable that she is in becomes clear, the inevitability of her course of action plays out in the denouement of the book.

So what is this a fable of? It’s simple. The heart of the city and what Thurava finds there, as well as the societal and social structures around it, are a metaphor and a personification of rapacious and unrelenting late stage environment-destroying capitalism². It is literally a hunger with no name, and a bottomless hunger at that. The author gives it a form and a shape for Thurava to fight against and oppose. That too puts this in the realm of a science fiction fable. Opposing an entire societal structure that we live in is hard to handle (or even believe can be done, and especially not by one person). But giving the hunger with no name a form (and a name), Thurava can take decisive and destructive action against it.

But this is also more of a fable than a hard science fiction story in that it doesn’t take a hard look at the long term consequences of her actions and their aftermath. One could really see Astrava’s ultimate course of action in apocalyptic terms, and it does fundamentally change the way of life for the residents of the Glass City, and not at all for the better. Thurava’s course is a radical one, but in keeping with the fable frame, we are looking at it as a response to the personification of the problem that the aforementioned personification embodies.

Thurava’s story may not satisfy everyone, in the end. It may not satisfy you if you are not in a mood and mindset to receive it. It is a fable that will absolutely enrage a strand of readers who see the fable and its metaphors as a call to radical action. It’s not a comfortable story, by any means, but it takes time to get to that discomfort. Like the slow fade and fall of the Astrava, the novel takes its time but the eventual descent into the solution Thurava takes takes on the air of inevitability, but uncomfortable inevitability.

As mentioned before, most fables leaven humor into the story. Some do not. All, however, are made to ask and answer moral questions and sometimes pose answers. A Hunger with No Name asks a moral question and while it does not use humor, it uses the unflinching lens of the author to give an answer to it.

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Highlights:

• Strong science fictional and environmental message in a novel length fable form
• Excellent use of Thurava as a main character as storyteller and reluctant but decisive agent of change

Reference: Teffeau, Lauren C, A Hunger with No Name, [University of Tampa Press, 2024]

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

¹There appears to be a difference between fables and parables that I can’t quite parse. Is this novel really a parable instead of a fable? I’m not sure, but the whole idea of a moral lesson or message is definitely on point here.

²There is also the possibility, given the nature of the automations and the works of the hunger with no name, that there is also a message against LLMs and generative AI at work here. That is less clear, and may be something the reader (me) brought to this fable.

Book Review: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

Working forwards and backwards in time to tell the story of a city and the demon who loved/loves it.

It seems Nghi Vo possibly likes to play around with the scale of her stories. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the small becomes the large; items spiral out to become stories. In her new novel (a short one, but she assures us, definitely a novel), she plays something of the reverse trick. Or possibly both at the same time. The story follows a demon, Vitrine, in the city she has helped shape for many years, a city that welcomed her as a refugee from her original, fallen home. She has curated it, whispered in the ear of its leaders, artists, librarians and pirates, sculpting it like a gardener with a well-tended hedge. And then, right at the start of the story, it is destroyed. Angels sweep in, unexplained, and put it to fire and the sword. All her work is gone. The story is of the aftermath, her memories and gried sweeping her up, telling stories of the large, spiralling down into the smallness of one single existence - her own - while reciprocally telling that grander scale through the moments of its individuals, day by day and year by year.

If it brings to mind anything - I'm not sure it truly does; it's a singular book in many ways - it is The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. At the simplest level, they are both stories of the soul of a city, told through a chorus of its inhabitants. The difference, however, is a big one. Where for Tchaikovsky the story of the city is the purpose in and of itself (and a very well executed one), for Vo here, the story of the city is only a half of what's going on. The rest is the story of Vitrine herself, and her care at that macro scale, using the humans that inhabit her city - and she is fiercely possessive of it, even after its downfall - as tools to shape it, things that can be discarded, that will pass even as the city endures, not stories or ends themselves. Vitrine lives outside of the scale of human life, and so the story must expand outwards, beyond those boundaries, to attempt to contain her.

This presents itself both subtly and unsubtly throughout. One of the most pleasing reflexes of it is the offhand remarks about how long Vitrine takes applying herself to a given task - stretched out into the days, weeks or months as debris falls and bodies rot around her in the aftermath. We observe the story through Vitrine's scale, experiencing events in a way that feels natural because it is natural to her, but then are jarred into awareness by these little comments, slipped around the edges, reminding us that nothing about her sits naturally with us, however it may feel in the moment. This is someone who can remain sat in one place for months, who can wait out a river. Vo manages to marry an extremely human and an extremely extra-human sense of wonder and scale throughout, with Vitrine's emotional reactions - intense, moving ones - lending accessibility to the broader scope of the story.

Where Tchaikovsky gives us the full view of his city by using multiple viewpoints, seeing it differently through each new set of eyes, Vo does is by using the same eyes, but seeing those people. There's a continuity that brings - Vitrine has been there and can keep on seeing, so can pull herself out of the "now", because she too experienced the "then". She can see change on a scale inaccessible to a mortal.

Even if it were only that, even if it were just a story of one demon's grief of her lost city, and the back and forward tale of its past and future circling around its apocalypse, it would be interesting enough. The prose is lovely, often bringing up moments of beautiful description, especially of colour and texture. You get a sense of the city as a physical place, as well as a cultural one, and for the complex mass of people moving within it. The beauty slips in even in the darker, more visceral moments of death and destruction and dismemberment. It is a lovely thing to read, just to exist in its descriptions and flowing use of language, just to be embedded within Vitrine's perspective on the world, swinging between abject sorrow, rage and a sort of wry humour about herself and the people she has experienced in her city.

For example:

Like comets who found the earth too cruel

or:

She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.

For a story so concerned with the grander scale, it is one profoundly unafraid of the physical, and it is enriched by it.

But it is not only that - the city, at the start of the book, is destroyed by angels, but not all of those angels escape unscathed by the angry demon who tries to stop them. One, cursed by Vitrine, returns. Keeps returning. And so, as well as the story of her city, it is the story of these two immortal beings, tied together by a cataclysm that was almost beyond human terms of reference, that they both lived through (though no unscathed). Theirs is a complex relationship outside of the usual human frame of reference, and one that takes the whole book to develop, not reaching its climax (no, not like that) until the very end of the story.

I want to stress here, it's not a simple enemies to lovers type of romance story. Whatever they are moment to moment, neither Vitrine nor the unnamed angel (she is not particularly interested in small talk with him) exist on a human level, with human emotions on a human scale. Whatever they experience with, through and around each other somewhat defies description. It is just that - experience. It is a string of captured moments that become something more, but evade categorisation. 

Which makes it rather hard to review. I don't, honestly, quite know what I think ultimately passes between these two characters, by the end of the story. It feels profound. It feels intense. But I don't think I entirely understand it. Instead, it sits in my head, making me wonder, making me chew at it, considering. I want to reread it, to ponder it again. It is the good sort of incomprehension, of a thing that may be currently evading me, but is graspable, and will be worth the time spent in reaching for it.

What I do know, even without that understanding, is that Vo has done a fantastic job in capturing a sense of two beings beyond the scale of human lives, who nonetheless interact with them. Vitrine and the angel feel different to one another, and yet also similar, tied to the same outsideness, that immunity to mortal scale, that makes them both alien and compelling to the reader. The holy is a rare sight in SFF - even more so than the religious - but there is something of it here, in the unknowable actions of powers beyond mortal control, seeking to reckon with one another in rules that are never stated, with powers that exist within a framework of intuition, not hard logic. They are as they are, and do as they do, and exist together, in this space for a little time, as we observe them, but cannot grasp them. The scene early on, in which Vitrine witnesses the destruction of her city, is powerful for its distance, its cold incomprehensibility. It's awful. But it also has the feeling of something so utterly beyond human power that nudges into the sort of boundaries quite apart from "magic" in the commonly used modern sense. If it is magic, it is at a scale beyond the individual, and thus its grandeur.

Wholly different from her other work, there is nonetheless an extremely distinctive feel of Vo here throughout, the deftness of her descriptions, the fierceness of her protagonist. It is a beautiful, sad, evocative story, that manages to compress something enormous and otherworldly into something graspable and personified, in a way that seems quite unique. It is thoughtful, provocative, and full of depth, and a story I think will reward multiple reads, and intensive discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, unusual framing, a complexity that keeps on giving the more you think about it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, The City in Glass [Tordotcom, 2024].

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

Film Review: Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 13 years is ambitious, messy, cheesy at times, confusing, breathtaking, and weird as hell. Is it fun? Oh yes. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. Is it worth seeing? I'm not sure.

I had many thoughts during this 2 hour and 20 minute movie. They include:

• Is this the same man that directed the back-to-back Oscar-winning Godfather movies?
• Is that eyebrowless man... Shia LaBeouf? (It was, and it took me an hour to recognize him.)
• Why is Jason Schwartzmann just wandering around here? (Oh, Talia Shire is here, and that's his mom.)
• Is Adam Driver handsome or is he just tall?
• Do I just want to get up and walk out right now?
• Why are there essentially PowerPoint slides and historical quotes scattered throughout this film? (To call it didactic would be the understatement of the year.)

Needless to say, Megalopolis has a lot going on in it. It's been rumbling around in Francis Ford Coppola's head since the 1970s, and he only just now managed to make it because sold off $100ish million from his winery business to finance it. It would be easy to just say "it sucked!" like nearly everyone else online is doing, but there's so much happening in this movie that that would be doing it a disservice. It's hard to even form cogent thoughts around it because they all bleed into each other, reflecting the countless inspirations and influences.

If I had to pick Coppola's Letterboxd top four while he was making Megalopolis, they'd be: Batman Forever, Caligula, The Hunger Games, and The Fountainhead.

The high-level plot

Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a brilliant designer looking to transform his city of New Rome, but at every turn he's stopped by the mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catilina is a genius that can stop time (which is used mainly as a little treat to do things like kiss on precariously dangling construction beams off of the Chrysler building, where his office is).

That's the main plot, as bare as I can make it. Where the story gets confusing is all of the side plots Coppola manages to squish into it, and these include:

• A dead wife mystery haunting Catilina 
• A teen singer scandal / rebranding effort à la Jo Jo Siwa
• A family drama involving a boner joke and an old-timey bow and arrow
• A hostile bank takeover
• A dangerous USSR satellite falling out of orbit and destroying New Rome
• A love story between Catilina and Julie, Cicero's daughter played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who I most instantly recognized as Misandei from Game of Thrones. 
• A science story involving megalon, a new material that can do... basically anything?

The characters

The characters are, arguably, the most interesting part of this movie, and even that's not enough to save it. Every single person is acting like they're in a different movie. This includes the old veterans like Jon Voight, Dustin Huffman, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, and Esposito. But it's also got younger folks ranging from Driver and Schwartzman to Aubrey Plaza.

Speaking of—Aubrey Plaza is an absolute high point of this movie. She plays a conniving, ambitious reporter named Wow Platinum, and she manages to sleep her way to power through various leaders in the film. It's a fascinating role for her, and very, very funny.

Every one is depraved, and like their ancient Roman inspiration, power- hungry and angry. At one point, there's a wedding held at the Colosseum (which is just Madison Square Garden), and the audience just watches while the patrician fancy folk celebrate on stage. Megalopolis is indeed intended as a cautionary tale about the excesses of a society's waning days, and this sort of attraction is something I could definitely see happen in America even right now.

How to fix this movie

First off, we have to reshoot this in technicolor. I'm talking about old-timey, super colorful, kinda grainy technicolor. This movie just feels old-fashioned, and I'm not sure why. Maybe its the hokey dialogue, or the Art Deco flourishes. While we're at it, let's give them all transatlantic accents.

Honestly? Maybe make it a musical! Every thing seems so over the top and emotionally pregnant that these people need an outlet!

If we're going to have a little magical realism, we need to go all in. Catilina can stop time, the statues can move, clouds reach out and grab the moon. It's unclear whether these are in a character's head or not. Let's make it REAL weird and go full magical realism.

Next, we're going to cut at least half the subplots. Let's focus more on Adam Driver's character. I could watch this man recite the phone book. And basically, he does—he recites on screen in the first few minutes of Hamlet's entire "To be or not to be" speech. And not just the fun first lines; he goes all the way to the proud man's contumely and bare bodkin parts.

Final thoughts

I still feel strangely compelled to defend this movie a little bit. Maybe that's the Stockholm syndrome talking, I'm not sure. I can say without hesitation that I've definitely never seen anything like it. Will I watch it again? On TV sure, so I can try to understand this bloated beast a little better. 

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10.

Bonuses: The cast is superb; the amount of time spent in the Chrysler building made me happy; I will always, always celebrate new stories versus just having another Spider-Man reboot.

Penalties: Too many to list. 

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a 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.

How come I never knew The Fall existed?

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pendant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

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Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

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

Review: Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones

Hanuvar’s story continues as he meets new allies, enemies, and challenges

This, third in the series, is not the place to really start with his story (that would be Lord of a Shattered Land). Shadow of the Smoking Mountain continues the story of Hanuvar, Volani General trying to survive and help his scattered and enslaved people in the wake of the Dervan invasion. The Dervans are expy Romans, the Volani are the Carthaginians, and Hanuvar is the terror himself, Hannibal. The story of his life after Carthage fell in our timeline doesn’t get much interest except for real enthusiasts of the period, and it is not a happy one. Jones, in his secondary world, has given him a different, and so far happier, path. But not an easier one.

The book continues its structure of being a series of short stories about Hanuvar’s adventures and efforts to free the enslaved surviving Volani. In doing that, he gets tied up and wrapped up in all sorts of local situations. This world is a sword-and-sorcery reflection of our own, so gods, demons, strange beings, and dark magics are all real, and to be feared. Hanuvar knows about magic, and at points in the book poses as a worker of magic, but in the end he is a general, tactician and warrior. He knows of magic as a tool, and struggles against it, but he is no spell-slinging wizard.

The title will give you a clue as to the culmination of where the book and its characters are headed. Indeed, Hanuvar is going to find himself on the slopes of a mountain ready to go boom, but in classic sword-and-sorcery fashion, it’s going to be even worse than a simple catastrophic eruption. The story of Hanuvar finding that out, and who the real enemy is, and the struggle against them, are the meta-plots of the novel, overarching individual episodes. Another overarching plot is one he’s had since the first book: what happened to his daughter? As much as he is working to free all of the Volani, he is especially interested, passionate, about his daughter and her fate.

That is an advantage to the Hanuvar novels that counters the view that a number of people have about sword and sorcery as a genre. The idea that Conan is just a muscle-bound idiot hewing through life idiotically with no overall sense of connection to anyone or anything, or other sword-and-sorcery heroes having few or no ties, is a misperception that Hanuvar seems tailor-made to counter. Hanuvar wants to free his people, abstract but concrete, but he is also looking for his daughter, and sometimes makes a bad decision or three in order to further that goal. There is a slow-burn romance for Hanuvar in the novel as well. One of the stories breaks away from Hanuvar altogether and makes Antires (his biographer) the main character in a very fun change of pace, as we get to see what makes him really tick.

My favorite character, however, is the “Catwoman” of the book, and that is Aleria. We met her in a previous volume, but she really swoops into the narrative here on multiple occasions, and her dynamic with Hanuvar is some of the best character bits in the book. The classic “heroine of her own story” with her own goals and motivations, but she wouldn’t mind having Hanuvar as a partner, far from it. One wonders, given Jones’ erudition, if Aleria isn’t meant to invoke Valeria from the Conan story “Red Nails”. (and yes, the Conan the Barbarian movie, but that Valeria is quite different than the original character). Aleria is the kind of character that could be spun off on her own adventures in stories and novels, easily.

And that brings me to a topic that, as of the writing of this review, has been in the air again,and that is worldbuilding. The worldbuilding in the Hanuvar novels, including this one, try to walk the line between infodumping and having the reader sink or swim. Some of the footnotes in the text also do help in this regard, but some of those are as much about the interpretation of the text as anything. They are not Vancean/Pratchettian in their design and intent.¹ Jones works heavily on the expy model to get readers halfway to their understanding of their world, and leans into some simplifications to make things easier. As you know, Jane, the Romans defeated Carthage once and for all over a century before they became an Empire. They fought three wars against Carthage. But for simplification for the worldbuilding, the Dervans are already in the Principate, they fought only two wars against Volanus, et cetera. But the smoking Mountain of the title, Esuvia, is most definitely meant to be Vesuvius under another name. The Herrenes are most definitely the expy of the Greeks. A lot of the names Jones uses, as you can see, are close enough to rhyme with the real world particulars to help get the reader there.

For me, worldbuilding is best when it provides the imagination a space that seems larger than the events in the book itself. It feels grounded and complete enough that you can imagine, afterwards. This doesn’t mean I need or want an RPG manual “The GM’s Guide to Derva” but when I am reading, I am putting myself into the world and into the characters. I want to be able to feel the road beneath my feet, and imagine, what if Hanvuar took a left here, rather than a right, and plausibly have enough of the world to imagine it. I don’t need to know what the other side of the globe is like (although I wouldn’t mind) but for the purposes of the work, there is a trompe l’oeil that there is much more to the world than the road Hanuvar walks.

Shadow of a Smoking Mountain accomplishes all this for me, and so for me, is successful at worldbuilding.

¹Like previous books in the series, there are footnotes in the text. The book is presented as a reinterpretation of a previous text, the Hanuvid, with commentary. Jones is having his cake and eating it too basically presenting the story in this frame.

Highlights:

• World continues to be rich and engaging.
• Good use of characters both as point of view and secondary, to provide a tapestry of interaction
• Strong sword and sorcery writing

Reference: Jones, Howard Andrew. Shadow of the Smoking Mountain [Baen, 2024].

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

Review [Video Game]: Astro Bot by Team Asobi

A beautifully-written love letter to fans of 3D platformers and of the PlayStation legacy

While anticipation for Astro Bot flew under the radar following its announcement, its reception has soared. Team Asobi may be new to the scene (originally a subsidiary of the now-defunct Japan Studio), spinning off in 2021 to become a standalone team. But from the release of their three Astro Bot titles, you would think they've been at this forever. As the first official Astro Bot for the core console (Astro Bot Rescue Mission being a VR title, Astro’s Playroom; a free download for PS5 to show off the Dualsense controller), Team Asobi has created an indelible game that excites and delights. As someone who usually gets bored halfway through platforming games, I found Astro Bot struck the perfect balance. Let’s get into it.

The opening scene sees the adorable little Astro and crew traversing the cosmos, partying in their PlayStation 5-shaped spaceship when they are waylaid by a fiendish green alien in a UFO. The alien pries open the PlayStation 5 spaceship, steals the CPU, and spreads the rest of the components and fellow bots across multiple planets. The spaceship crash lands on a desert planet where the player is given control. This cutscene is succinct, sharp, and adorable. This can be said for the rest of the game as well. While there is a story, Astro Bot doesn't weigh you down with expository nonsense for longer than necessary. What little is there, cooky or not, makes sense within the context of the story they’re trying to tell.

Astro Bot is a treat for multiple senses. At first, Team Asobi treats your eyes and ears to the immaculate visuals and fantastic audio, then the haptic feedback hits and the sense of touch is activated. Anyone who played Astro’s Playroom knows what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t, Team Asobi are masters of the Dualsense controller’s haptics, making the game not only visual and auditory but tactile as well. Raindrops, clanking metal, tiny footsteps on glass, snow crunching underfoot, jumping off of a diving board into a pool, and so many other sensations are meticulously crafted and implemented into the game to add a third dimension to gameplay. The game feels satisfying. While the promise of the Dualsense has gone mostly underutilized throughout this generation, Astro Bot is the perfect example of what can be done with the tech, and how it elevates an already engrossing experience.

But let's get back to the visuals. Beautiful, simple, crisp. Astro Bot looks amazing on the PlayStation 5 from boot up and is maintained throughout. The game has a Pixar-like quality, and it is easily one of the best-looking games on the PS5. This extends to the visual effects as well. Water, snow, textures, and reflections all look fantastic. This is in no small part aided by the art direction and level design. From some of the more vibrant, cheery levels to the darker, more ominous ones, Astro Bot shines in the visuals department. For instance, the Creamy Canyon level is based on confections. The pastel-colored level reminds me of Easter but with ice cream sprinkles that can be kicked around (and felt with the controller). Other levels are more vibrantly saturated but are nonetheless visually balanced.

The sound design is fantastic. The soundtrack and sound effects both make this game pop. The sound is implemented into the level design, assisting players in finding hidden bots throughout the level (you can usually hear them struggling somewhere nearby (and yes, it’s adorable)) and in helping with the timing of obstacles. The music is easy to vibe to and fits whatever level it's in. But my favorite songs were the mash-ups with the PlayStation classic levels, which I will allow you to discover for yourself. I wouldn't put the music on the level of a Mario game, but it stands on its own. Astro’s personal sound effects were adorable and didn't grate on my nerves like a certain Italian plumber I know. His sound effects are robotic, charming, cute, and quirky, just like Astro himself.

But what does Astro have to do? What is the player tasked with? Well, you have two tasks; rescue your fellow bots, and collect the missing pieces of the spaceship. You accomplish this via 3D platforming: jumping, hovering, punching, grabbing, and through the use of special items. The levels are straightforward and show you what you need to do. Most levels have seven bots to rescue and three puzzle pieces to find (some special levels have fewer). A few levels have some cleverly placed portals to secret levels in another galaxy, so be on the lookout. It’s easy to tell when you’ve missed a bot or puzzle piece because you’ll be notified on the UI which bot you’ve gathered, so you can always go back and recollect. If you’re having trouble, each level (after you’ve completed it at least once) allows you to pay two hundred coins to unlock a little bird that will follow you around and sniff out missing bots and puzzle pieces (though it isn't necessary in most cases). Astro Bot’s gameplay is inspired by the greats of the genre, especially the 3D Mario games, and it’s all the better for it.

One of my favorite aspects of Astro Bot is the pacing. Each level is short, mostly around ten minutes, some are two minutes, but none much longer than ten (not counting the challenge levels). This makes the game easily digestible. With every AAA game being sixty to one hundred hours nowadays, it's difficult to feel like you’ve accomplished something after ten minutes of game time. Astro Bot manages to do so repeatedly, all the while ensuring the game feels fresh. Every vista feels new, and every level creates new challenges and allows the player to feel like they're making progress in a short time. Not to mention, they don't overuse the supplemental items in the game. For instance, there is a robot bulldog that boosts Astro forward with a lot of force, damaging anything (almost anything) in your path. It’s used in a few levels here and there, but not to the point of exhaustion. And that’s the same with everything else. On some levels, Team Asobi uses a mechanic once and never again, which is refreshing. In addition, boss battles aren't repeated over and over. They use unique mechanics, despite being rather forgiving (Astro usually dies in one hit; versus bosses, he gets three). Each boss is one and done, and it’s a wonderful thing. I have to reiterate how much I loved the pacing: Astro Bot’s mechanics never overstay their welcome.

I mentioned the challenge levels a bit earlier, and there are quite a few. Some do put you to the test (curse you, rubber ducky lava level!), but for the most part, the game as a whole is quite easy. Exceptionally enjoyable, but easy. Now, I know difficulty is relative, but this is my personal experience, and I feel like the game could benefit from just a bit more challenge outside of the challenge levels (of which I would have gladly accepted more). Not only this, but I feel like it could have been enjoyable to hide some of the bots a bit better (some are brilliantly hidden, but most are easy to spot). The aforementioned rubber ducky got a bit frustrating at times because of its inconsistency when aiming, but other than that, I can’t think of anything else negative to say about the game. It’s that good.

One of the most special things about Astro Bot is that it’s a love letter to PlayStation fans, and to a larger extent, people who have played games that have existed on their platforms. Fans of The Last of Us, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, and Parappa the Rappa will find Easter eggs here, but so too will fans of Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Yakuza. PlayStation has been around for over thirty years (and goodness knows what kind of mischief they’ve been up to recently), and the platform has been home to so many first and third-party games. Astro Bot shines a light on some of those IPs and does so in a humorous, heartwarming way. Also, this is probably the only place you'll see any attention given to the Bloodborne IP from a Sony studio (sorry, Bloodborne fans).

From the lovingly crafted levels to the intricate haptic feedback implementation, Astro Bot is an impressive title that, despite its ease, goes on to compete with the heavyweights of the industry. If you like inventive 3D platformers, if you like your non-speaking protagonist to endear and charm you, or if you like to run around with a robot-chicken-rocket strapped to your back propelling you upward to new heights, this is the game for you. If you are a fan of gaming, especially PlayStation, then this is a love letter for you folks. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. If you like your video games to make you smile in childlike glee, go pick up Astro Bot now.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9.5/10.

Bonus: +.5 for perfect pacing. +.5 for art direction. +.5 for tactile feedback. +.5 for endless charm.

Penalties: -1.5 for overall lack of challenge. -.5 for a few brief experimental levels that, while good, weren't as good as the rest.

Nerd Coefficient: 9.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.