Review: Fallout

Quite the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. first attempt

The raging dichotomy on the Internet about video games and their film/television series adaptations can be a horrible place to find yourself at two a.m. on a Friday night, but someone’s gotta do it. The thing is, you won’t have too many dissenters when it comes to the recently released Fallout show on Amazon Prime. Sure, you have some folks grumpy about potential retconning to their favorite entry, Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian), but overall, fans seem pleased. The first two titles in the game series were developed by Black Isle Studios and Interplay Entertainment, and Bethesda Studios continued with Fallout 3 and 4 (with Obsidian on New Vegas). I never played the first two Fallout games, but I can attest to the rest of them having hefty hundred-plus-hour runtimes (if you like to explore like me). This breadth of content left showmakers with tons of potential inspiration. And boy did they use it. For better or worse.

Let’s get it out of the way: Fallout is a great adaptation of the series. Fans should be excited and generally pleased by the attention to detail paid by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, even if not every detail is precise to the world seen in the games. From the choice of soundtrack to costumes and dialogue, everything screams, “I’ve played these games and want to respect the source material.”

There were so many moments throughout the show that made me think, “This is Fallout.” One of my favorites sees a character decapitate another with a ripper (chainsaw sword) to the tune of the Ink Spot’s “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” If that isn’t quintessential Fallout, I don't know what is. There were quite a few laugh-out-loud moments that took me by surprise, some at the moment, some after a reflection. Some moments in the show felt like they were left up to the RNG (random number generator) Gods, which was one of the truest reflections of the series. Let me explain. In the games, you’ll frequently come across obstacles in which you can choose an option. Sometimes it’s dialogue, sometimes an action. There’s a percentage of a chance that some of these things will work and quite a bit of a chance that they won’t. While I won’t spoil anything, there were a few moments where I thought something was going to backfire but worked, and something that I thought should work backfired. It pulled me further into the narrative and character predicaments.

The aesthetic of the show is true to its roots, especially the Vaults and its inhabitants. From the Vault-Tec bobbleheads to the political propaganda, from the Nuka-Cola to the Red Rocket gas station, and from the Pip-Boys to the power armor, everything looks fantastic and authentic. Seeing all these things made me want to boot one of the old games back up and return to the wasteland. This applies to the sound effects too. From Codsworth’s line delivery and voiceovers to the sound a stimpak makes, you won’t find yourself wanting for authenticity. Fallout looks and feels just like the games.

Lucy MacLeane, played by Ella Purnell, is your typical do-gooder vault dweller on a mission to save a loved one. She is thrust forth from the safety of Vault 33 and into the dangerous wasteland that was once California. She wears her blue jumper with pride and encounters many obstacles with the naiveté of an ignorant rich person stepping into a slum. The rules are different and she soon learns that, to survive and complete her mission, she has to adapt. Her path repeatedly crosses with two other protagonists throughout her journey, and this is where I had some issues. While the other characters make everything more fun and engaging, their meeting on happenstance is too convenient. One character is in trouble and the other just happens to show up and find them at this particular place in a massive wasteland with no communication beforehand. This happens quite a few times.

There were some slogs in the pacing for me as well. While it seemed true to the games to have nothing going on for a little while, it doesn’t work as well for the show. However, there was a hilarious moment where being bogged down by side quests was referenced. One entire episode (of eight) goes by without showing one of the four major protagonists, which I thought was a poor choice.

One of the four protagonists, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias), is inside a vault and is trying to discover its secrets. One of the best parts of any Fallout game was discovering what lay inside a vault and what experiment said vault was testing. Watching Norm access terminals and using his intermediate hacking skills was satisfying. It’s unfortunate then that this parallel narrative is left hanging in the balance, despite being one of the most authentic and enjoyable parts of the show. I wanted a more solid conclusion, but they seem to have left it for the next season.

I’ve used the words “authenticity” and “authentic” a few times because I want to reiterate the clear love for the game that I saw throughout much of the show. People in power armor yelling and running for their lives is what I spend half my time in Fallout doing, and they caught that. That armor doesn't make you invincible (but it does help). As a gamer, I loved it.

Then I considered it as a TV viewer. Still good, but there are some awkward dialogue choices that don’t feel natural. The romance doesn't feel great, and some of the things that the characters come across seem even more farfetched than the world would seemingly allow. But then someone gets impaled from a shot to the chest, and the camera pans down to see a baby doll’s leg sticking out. That’s what I’m talking about. That's Fallout.

The dirty word that was once “adaptation” seems to be slipping away into the darkness. With The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Last of Us, and Castlevania among others, Fallout helps solidify the argument for using video games as a source material. While this initial season leaves a bit to be desired after the climax, it did have me yearning for more. I found that, despite some dragging segments, and that no one was called “smoothskin,” I was happy to watch multiple episodes in a row. When a derivative piece of work rekindles fond memories of your original experience with its source, you’ve done a good job. Now I just have to pretend that the Fallout games don’t exist so I can focus on my backlog.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10

Bonus: +1 for authenticity, +1 for gruesome over-the-top violence that the series is known for; +0.5 for the soundtrack.

Penalties: −1 for some pacing issues, −1 for convenient hero happenstance.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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.

Review: Civil War

An absolutely brutal depiction of photojournalism in the midst of an underexplored conflict

I met up with some friends to see Alex Garland's Civil War in IMAX on the Thursday evening before its wide release in the U.S. As a fan of Annihilation, The Beach, and Ex Machina, I thought I was in for a timely tale of American democracy gone wrong. Seeing Nick Offerman in the previews as a Trumpian presidential figure only piqued my interest even more—as a devout lover of all things dystopian, I was ready.

What I got, however, was not what I expected. This isn't to say that the film is lacking; it's just 100% focusing on things other than the reasons behind our country's fictional split.

It focuses on a team of war correspondents inching their way through to Washington D.C. in what may perhaps? be the closing days of said civil war. We never find out how long the civil war has been going on, nor who are the good guys.

Kirsten Dunst portrays a seasoned war photojournalist who is depressed, burnt out, and a war-battered shell of herself. She's joined by a young aspiring photographer who wants desperately in on this life, despite the absolutely traumatic nature of the job. Also along for the ride is the always excellent Stephen McKinley Henderson, most recently known for his role as House Atreides mentat Thufir Hawat.

They travel hundreds of miles through a ravaged American landscape—something that is in itself shocking as there hasn't been a full-scale war on mainland American soil in scores of years. At each stop they shadow armed combatants and bravely capture gut-wrenching photos of corpses, men writhing in pain, and other hideous atrocities.

The conceit of the film is summed up when Kirsten Dunst is asked a question about how photographers like her can document all this horror without taking sides or asking questions—she responds simply with "We record so other people ask."

By not giving the audience any insight into which is the right side of history (if there even is such a thing, in some conflicts) and following in the literal footsteps of these photographers, the film provides you with the full experience—you're not there to fight; you're there to record what is happening every step of the way.

If you judge the film by that metric, it succeeds. And maybe it would have by any other metric, had the film marketed itself as an Oscar-baity War Journalism Think Piece. But I was expecting a deep dive into cultural differences in America that led to a division and a war, which isn't terribly farfetched as I could rattle off three or four such catalysts right now that the U.S. is currently experiencing. Instead, we find out nothing of any substance. The scene with Jesse Plemons interrogating the journalists as to "What kind of American are you?" is as close to world-building as Alex Garland gets, though throughout the scene we have no idea which side Plemons pledges allegiance to.

I didn't realize until I got to the theatre that Civil War is an A24 production, and then things started to click. My experience with A24 movies is that they're nearly always about the horrors of trauma and what they do to humans. This film is no different, and you're brutally pummeled left and right through its relatively short runtime with ear-splitting assault weapon deaths, unspeakable violence, mass graves of U.S. citizens, and characters having literal (and multiple) on-screen panic attacks.

Among the reviews I've read, there seems to be a split. There are those who feel like I do, that it seemed like the previews made it out to be something else entirely, and that by refusing to take a stance about a political civil war, Garland didn't accomplish anything.

Then there are those who think it genius, and a much-needed depiction of the horrors of war and how no side is ever really right. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, like most things.

I'm glad I saw Civil War, and it definitely made me think—but I'll never watch it again. 

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: Kirsten Dunst's performance is fantastic; there are moments of cinematic artistry scattered throughout; if you've ever wanted to learn about the cold, hard reality of war photojournalism, you're in for a treat.

Penalties: No real worldbuilding; extremely traumatic and violent; some viewers may feel as if they were bait-and-switched when they learn nearly nothing about the war.

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

Interview: Into the Sauútiverse

The Sauútiverse, a shared science-fantasy world inspired by African folklore (of which the first anthology, Mothersound, is already out) is a fascinating collaborative writing project born from the creative space Syllble. (Full disclosure: I'm currently involved with the development of another Syllble project.) I spoke with Ghanaian author Cheryl Ntumy, one of the founding members of the Sauútiverse, about the conception of this fictional world and the ideas behind it. In befitting Sauúti fashion, the answers came from the writing collective as a whole:

Who came up with the idea for the Sauútiverse?

The universe itself (the name Sauútiverse, the planets, etc.) was created by all the members of the Collective, over the course of several brainstorming sessions. We have prepared insightful FAQs that can answer some of your questions.

Was the project originally conceived within Syllble or brought into it from a previous idea?

The project was conceived when Fabrice Guerrier, founder of Syllble, Wole Talabi and Ainehi Edoro of Brittlepaper first met to discuss the possibilities for an African collaborative writing project. While Wole Talabi spearheaded Sauúti as an African-focused shared world, aligned to the Syllble mandate, Syllble was already hosting other shared world projects. Sauúti sprang out from that source, using a lot of the Syllble base framework even as we adapted and expanded it.

How long did the project take from first idea to first publication? What stages were involved?

We had our first meeting in March 2022, and saw our first published Sauúti story, "The Alphabet of Pinaa: An AI Reinvents Zerself On An Inhabited Moon," set on our invented planet Pinaa, released in July 2023 by Interzone Digital. Mothersound, the first Sauútiverse anthology, edited by Wole Talabi, was published in November 2023.

First we had a lot of brainstorming sessions, not just for the fictional world we were creating but also for the communal ownership model we would use as the Collective. We used the existing Syllble framework for collaborative worldbuilding. We spent a lot of time worldbuilding, then we each developed story pitches and shared them with the group. We started writing our stories and many of us ended up writing more than one because we were so inspired! As we wrote, we also developed a story bible to keep track of the world and to help new contributors easily understand the Sauútiverse.

Next, we invited other writers to contribute to the anthology. They submitted pitches, followed by stories. While the process of refining and editing stories was ongoing, we were also looking for a publisher. We found a home with Android Press. During the whole process, we took the opportunity to promote the project at book festivals and conventions, including the Ake Arts and Book Festival, The Nebula Conference and the Africa Writes literature festival.

What elements about the worldbuilding of Sauúti can be traced to real-life cultures?

Many elements of the Sauútiverse come from real African cultures. We all drew heavily from the cultures that we grew up in, as well as other African cultures. The word Sauúti comes from "sauti", which means "voice" in Swahili. Most of the words and names we use come from real-life languages. We also drew from real-life cultural practices, rituals, beliefs, etc., though we tweaked them to fit in with our inclusive, futuristic vision. The primary resource in the shared world is sound, and there is no written language in the Sauútiverse; that element is representative of the importance of oral history in real African cultures. The Sauútiverse Creation Myth reflects this pan-African inspiration, as indicated in Wole Talabi’s introduction to the Creation Myth “Our Mother, Creator” in Mothersound:

“...we took inspiration from North African communities who center themselves around a matriarch and goddess. From the Ijaw people and their creator goddess Woyengi. From the Egyptian mythological Nut. Nana Buluku of the Fon who gave birth to the moon spirit Mawu, the sun spirit Lisa. From so many more.”

How was the process of recruiting the various writers who contributed to the project?

Wole recruited the rest of us to the Collective. This is the email he sent out, seeking writers: The History of Sauúti.

How are decisions made regarding what locations and events are official in the shared continuity?

We meet fortnightly, and make all decisions as a Collective. Once a location or event appears in a published story, it is considered "official" and key points from it are added to the story bible, where relevant. In terms of events, anything that affects the wider universe needs to be discussed and agreed on by the Collective.

Does anyone supervise that one writer's additions don't contradict another writer's?

We are switched on as a collective. Pitches and reviews are key to helping us avoid contradictions. We submit pitches before writing new stories so that the rest of the Collective can give feedback, take note of any conflicting or contradictory ideas and find ways to resolve any story challenges. We also review the finished stories to check and give feedback as well. It's just also a great way to support each other's work.

Where did the concept for the magic system come from?

Once we settled on the power of sound as the focus of our world, having sound as the basis of the techno-magic system made sense. It happened pretty organically—one idea led to the next. Sound is already linked to the supernatural in terms of spells, chants, prayers, etc., so it felt right.

In a culture organized around the magical study and manipulation of sound waves, what is the social status of people born without the ability to speak and/or hear?

Inclusion is an important part of the world we're creating, and those without certain abilities have the same status as anyone else. We view sound in this world as something rich and complex—it includes all kinds of vibrations and mechanical waves, infrasonic, ultrasonic, all varieties of sound. So people can manipulate sound in more ways than speaking and understand each other without hearing. They can play musical instruments and tools, use signs, use technology, etc. We are open to every interpretation of sound in the Sauútiverse.

We have stories that feature Deaf/deaf/Hard of Hearing (HOH) and non-verbal characters, some of whom are incredibly powerful. Sign language is used widely across the Sauútiverse and has the same status as spoken language (in some cases it's even required or preferred). The story "Lost in the Echoes'' by Xan van Rooyen features a Deaf/non-verbal DJ with extraordinary magic. Xan had a Deaf friend provide a sensitivity read for their story, to make sure the representation was accurate and didn't play into any negative stereotypes.

It’s also important to note that the founding Sauúti Collective includes queer and neurodivergent people and the Sauútiverse is queer-normative, so LGBT+ characters are fully accepted in society (i.e. queerphobia would be the exception and not the norm). Similarly, neurodiversity is represented in Sauútiverse stories.

If it's not top secret, can you mention other authors who will add more material to the Sauútiverse in the near future?

If we tell you, we’ll have to kill you... but I guess we can take the risk with you! I’m co-editing our next anthology, Sauúti Terrors, with members of my Sauúti family Eugen Bacon and Stephen Embleton, and we're stoked to see that contributing members of Mothersound —Tobias Buckell, Somto Ihezue and T. L. Huchu— are interested in sending us stories, and we're starting to receive exciting pitches! We also have newcomers like Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Ivor Hartmann, Kofi Nyameye, Nerine Dorman and Tobi Ogundiran on track in this new project. It's an anthology by invitation, and we're also accepting poetry. We're thrilled to confirm that we have signed agreements with five-time Bram Stoker Award winner and recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Linda D. Addison, Grand Master Akua Lezli Hope, and other prominent speculative fiction poets, including Miguel Mitchell and Jamal Hodge.

Members of the collective have also written and sold Sauútiverse stories to other venues outside of our own anthologies, so you can look out for them soon.

The plan for the Sauútiverse was always to have it expand beyond the original collective and keep growing—for it to be a sandbox of imagination for Africans and those of the African diaspora to tell new, complex and fascinating stories together and we are so glad that it seems to be right on track.

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

6 Books with Eliza Chan

Eliza Chan is a Scottish-born speculative fiction author.  Her short fiction has been published in The Dark, Podcastle, Fantasy Magazine and The Best of British Fantasy. Her debut novel Fathomfolk —inspired by mythology, ESEAN cities and diaspora feels— was published by Orbit in February 2024.

Today she tells us about her Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading Hannah Kaner's Godkiller, an absolutely gripping, explosive epic fantasy that is unlike anything I've read before. It's giving me American Gods meet The Witcher vibes at the moment but I'm early on.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Suyi Davies Okungbowa's new novella Lost Ark Dreaming is on my radar. It has a similar premise to my book, with post-climate change semi-flooded towers, but Okungbowa's is based in West Africa and has comps to Snowpiercer. It sounds like exactly my jam.

3. Is there a book that you're currently itching to reread?

Having recently watched Dune Part Two, I'm itching to reread the whole Dune series to see if it stands up to the test of time. The desert setting and the science fantasy aspects are still fairly rare even though the genre has developed a lot since then.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time--either positively or negatively?

The Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern books had a massive impact on me as a teen, with their strong female leads and, more importantly, dragons. The romance in them has not aged well at all, though. There's quite a lot of dubious consent (read that as severe lack of consent) as well as unhealthy power dynamics in the main relationships. I'm not sure I can recommend or reread them in good conscience apart from Dragonsong and Dragonsinger because they thankfully have no romance in them at all.

5. What's one book that has had a lasting impact on your writing style?

Cheating a bit, but it would be Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and other stories, short story collection. Liu has a way of taking a concept, a part of history or mythology, and asking a series of questions around it to make the reader think. For example, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary examines our obsession with seeing things before we believe them in this internet age, whilst Good Hunting is about nine-tailed foxes but also colonisation. His writing gave me permission to layer multiple meanings in a narrative, to strive for writing that asks difficult questions, even if there is no easy answer.

6. What's your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My debut adult fantasy novel Fathomfolk is what if the Little Mermaid was a pissed-off immigrant in a semi-flooded East- and Southeast-Asian-inspired cityscape, and it was never about the love of a man; it was for love of her home. It looks at prejudice, discrimination, class and the cost of change, through the lens of a myriad of disparate sea folk including kappas, kelpies, water dragons and mermaids. It's my love letter to multicultural cities and all their problems, but in a fantastical setting. It's out now from Orbit.

Thank you, Eliza!

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

Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

A "who is the real monster?" story that dodges the complexity of its own premise

(Note: there is a fairly significant (though not plot-revealing) spoiler in this review - read on at your own risk!)

Opening confession: before reading Someone You Can Build a Nest In, I didn't rate John Wiswell's work very much. Clearly, his writing is doing a lot of things right for a lot of people, since you don't get to be Hugo and Nebula nominated without folks thinking you're great at what you do. But beyond the cute ideas, I don't find a lot in Wiswell stories to sink my teeth into. On a technical level, the prose tends towards the same basic voice regardless of the type of story being told, and on a thematic level, there's a lot of narrative "flattening" to make stories about dark, monstrous themes resolve with a relatively small number of people carving out a safe space and calling it a happy ending. Short fiction might not have much space for complex characters or worldbuilding, but it provides plenty of space for moral complexity, and I find it weird to set up complex premises only to ignore their complexity. Maybe there's something radically cosy in that that I'm just too curmudgeonly to appreciate, or maybe I'm just not picking up on complexity that everyone else sees. Who knows.

Despite not loving the author's prior work and also having a finite amount of precious reading time, I read Someone You Can Build a Nest In for two reasons. First, Hugo and Nebula nominated short fiction authors have a very non-zero chance of landing on a Best Novel ballot, and I like to read things for award purposes. Second, I really wanted this book to give me the experience that it gives people who love Wiswell's writing, because if something different is going to happen for me, it's probably going to happen at a different length, right?

Alas, it didn't happen.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is the story of Shesheshen, an amorphous shapeshifting monster who eats people and repurposes their organs in order to survive. Shesheshen is content in her isolated, people-eating lifestyle, although she misses her mother - also a people eating shapeshifter, tragically killed by a monster hunter - and reminisces fondly about the father who she and her siblings ate from the inside out after he gestated them, as part of the people eating shapeshifter life cycle. She's also not much of a talker, and the whole book is told in her "voice": which means plenty of simple, unpolished prose. So I guess I'm not having my expectations of the author challenged on that front!

Anyway, when Shesheshen is rudely awoken from hibernation by some monster hunters (led by a posh asshole, so you know you're supposed to root for the people eating monster and not the hunters trying to put an end to all the people eating), it puts her out of her regular people eating schedule and she has no choice but to go into town to find some people to eat immediately (target: another posh and kinda sleazy asshole, also fine to root against). When that doesn't work, she falls off a cliff and is tended to a kind, fat, practical young woman called Homily, who is hunting monsters in the ravine. Shesheshen is delayed from eating Homily for long enough to fall in love with her, Homily is selectively dense enough not to realise the person who survived a fall off a cliff and has no recognisable human organ structures might actually be a monster, and thus begins a beautiful relationship.

Complicating factor number one in Homily and Shesheshen's relationship: for Shesheshen, "falling in love" coincides with getting a strong urge to lay eggs in Homily and have them eat her from the inside out. For me, this aspect of the story actually delivered what I wanted from it to a large extent, albeit without a huge emphasis on the actual wanting to build a nest in her girlfriend bit (you'd have thought... but no). I'd really like to read more stories where "alien" biological urges are things that sentient creatures can exert control and choice over, and while things work out rather conveniently in terms of Shesheshen eradicating those urges, she goes through an interesting process to re-examine what she assumed being in love with someone would look like versus what she actually wants with, and from, Homily. That she has to do this without guidance from a parental figure is both thematically relevant and also kind of interesting, and it makes Shesheshen's convenient discoveries about herself less annoying - maybe she's not the first people eating shapeshifter to do certain things, but she's never had any fellow shapeshifters to learn from. It's heavily implied, though not literally stated, that Homily is asexual ("enby" is a word in people's vocabulary in this queernorm setting, so it's perhaps a bit odd that "ace" isn't, but I digress) so Shesheshen doesn't have any human sexual preferences to figure out how she fits with, aside from an easily discovered mutual enjoyment of cuddling. Good for them, and a win for alien monster protagonist portrayal.

Complicating factor number two is, unfortunately, where things go off the rails. See, Homily isn't just some random monster hunter hunting some random offscreen monster: she's the daughter of the land's war hero leader, and her mother and siblings (one of whom was the posh asshole from earlier! Who already got eaten, oops) are back from the exile which Shesheshen's mother imposed on them by "cursing" the family if they stayed. Homily's family are abusive towards her, and Homily has adapted to this abuse by trying to make herself as "useful" as possible in any given situation, even when it hurts her to do so. Now that Shesheshen has avoided detection as a people eating shapeshifter, she gets roped into the expedition to hunt herself, and to try and help Homily with a toxic family reunion, while also throwing the monster hunting off her own scent.

To fully contextualise why I hated this plot, I have to give that one significant spoiler mentioned above: none of Homily's immediate family survive this book. That means her mother, her adult younger sister Epithet, and her child sister Ode (and her posh asshole brother, but he's gone and we've already mostly forgotten about him, except when Shesheshen uses his teeth to smile at her girlfriend) all meet their ends in ways that are apparently intended to provide context or even catharsis about the familial abuse. This is some morally grey shit right here, especially since one sister was a child eight years younger than Homily while most of her part in the abuse was taking place, and the other is still an actual child. That's not to say that children can't cause real physical and emotional damage to their siblings, even much older ones, but it's surely an open question to what extent the culpability lies with the child and not with the adults who had a duty of care to both siblings? Someone You Can Build A Nest In doesn't seem to care about that question. Instead, we get "straightforward" lessons, in 21st century therapist vocabulary, about how terrible abuse is, and therefore aren't abusers the real monsters here? If the text is nudging us towards answers more sophisticated than "yes", it's laying down clues too subtle for my reading skills, so I'm left assuming that "yes" is the desired answer, and I don't like it.

Ode's death is particularly egregious: having been a bratty bit of comic relief in the narrative, her death is mourned on page by nobody except her mother, whose grief is called out as toxic and wrong. Meanwhile, Homily learns the valuable life lesson that she didn't have to risk her own life trying to save her sister, she's still a good person and nobody should judge her for not trying a bit harder to rescue a child from a grim death. I'm glad we got that lesson sorted out and now you don't have to have any complicated feelings about your role in that situation, Homily! While the other family deaths are treated with a bit more weight, the whole familial comeuppance sits poorly, particularly because it was an authorial choice to make two of Homily's most prominent abusive family members children, set up what should have been a complicated moral situation, and then just... sidestep that complexity, because the story you want to tell is about how abusers are the real monsters, and not the people eating girlfriend. Also relevant: Shesheshen has conveniently gone the whole story without eating anyone who hadn't broken the law or been a posh asshole first, because having to grapple with the ethics of eating people to live is apparently also beyond this story's interests. Textual moral greyness averted again!

So no, I do not get anything cathartic or heartwarming out of Shesheshen and Homily's story. To find those things would require me to narrow down my curiosity and my empathy to the tiny number of characters that the story wants me to believe are worthy of it, and it did not succeed in convincing me of its judgements (was it the people eating? maybe...). In different hands, the messiness inherent in this story could have been kind of amazing. While reading, I drew comparisons to The Book Eaters, which also features obligate people eating and is fully aware of how bleak and antithetical to a heartwarming familial ending that diet is, even as it tries to bring that ending about. I also thought about Light From Uncommon Stars, which portrays an escape from abuse and into the loving orbit of an objectively fucked up person who needs to be convinced not to sacrifice the protagonist to the devil, and which tells that story in a way which acknowledges both the love and the irredeemable mess. But unless I'm missing something huge, that's not the story Wiswell wanted to tell, so I'm left with another question: is there a version of this kind of story, where all we are meant to care about is the comfort of the main characters regardless of what they do to others, that is uncomplicatedly cosy and heartwarming? I don't know, but I'm going to go back to seeking out the messy, fucked up monster stories, and the radical empathy they often demand, rather than putting myself through this sort of book too often.

Review: The Diviners Quartet by Libba Bray

A lively, flapperish adventure through 1920s America in all its diversity, plus ghosts

There’s something terribly satisfying about finding a long, engaging series. Not silly-long, like Wheel of Time, but long enough that things can get really gnarly. Kate Elliott knows what I’m talking about, as does Robin Hobb. On these very pages I’ve praised Chris Wooding’s Tales of the Ketty Jay, and now I’m pleased to be back again to tell you about Libba Bray’s Diviners quartet.

Do you like flappers? Do you like ghosts? Do you like thoughtful meditations on 1920s America, balancing gracefully on the knife edge between admiration for the optimistic spirit of a young nation and clear-sighted acknowledgment of the dark past on which that nation was founded, and continues to perpetuate as it looks towards the future? Sure you do, or else you wouldn't have got past the tagline at the top!

This quartet opens with 17-year-old girl, Evie O’Neill, a good Christian white girl raised in the heartland of Zenith, Ohio—the only surviving child of a respectable family who never really got over the death of their golden boy in World War I. Evie has a knack—a party trick, really—by which she can read objects, and uncover secrets from them. When she uncovers an awkward secret at a party, her family ships her off to live with her uncle, who runs a museum of the occult in New York. The plan is to keep her tucked out of sight just until things blow over in Zenith, but Evie, a party girl through and through, is thrilled at this opportunity to live a glamorous big-city life. In short order she is having a grand old time, cultivating friendships with philosophy-reading museum assistants, muckraking reporters, Harlem poets, showgirls, street thieves and union agitators alike. When the cops come to her uncle’s museum to consult with him on an occult-flavoured murder, she even manages to get herself invited to come along to the scene of the murder, and just like that our flapperish ghostly whodunnit is off to the races in Book 1, The Diviners.

The second book, Lair of Dreams, also opens with mysterious deaths, but in this case they are not obviously murders, but instead are related to a mysterious sleeping sickness. People go to sleep, and are enticed by some entity to dream something that starts out sweetly and turns into horrors. They do not wake up.

Although both The Diviners and Lair of Dreams tell self-contained stories, they are united by two threads: one occult and one mundane. The first is a repeated image a man in a stovepipe hat, lurking in the background of these deadly occurrences, who seems to be connected with the release of these supernatural horrors upon the mundane world. Yet the mundane world is itself up to no good, because a government agency, Project Buffalo, seems to be also involved in everything: from the death of Evie’s brother during the war, to mysterious disappearances in immigrant communities; to, oddly, other knacks that her friends turn out to possess. Some have the ability to walk in dreams, or to turn unnoticeable, or to heal, to see the future. These knacks are what define the titual Diviners of this series, in fact—so actually the occult and the mundane are intertwined in sinister ways. These twisty interweavings define the structure of the last two books of the series—Before the Devil Breaks You and The King of Crows.

What makes this series work so well is the way Bray never loses track of the larger plot structure even as each book-sized story plays out. Thus, we get hints of Project Buffalo and the man in the stovepipe hat from the very beginning, and we meet side characters that in the early stages seem to have no other role in the main storyline than to round out a rather sprawling dramatis personnae.  In some cases those appearances are only the briefest flash on the page before they come into their own in later books. For example, Ling Chan, a half-Irish half-Chinese girl who can walk in dreams, appears only momentarily in The Diviners, but becomes a central character in Lair of Dreams, where the mystery of the sleeping sickness makes dream-walking a valuable skill. Bill Johnson appears only as a blind beggar with a gambling problem at the start, but his character arc in later books is rich and important.

In other cases, the characters are fully introduced in The Diviners, but their contributions to the first book’s plot are secondary. In this way, we meet Memphis Campbell, a black poet in Harlem, and his little brother Isaiah. Theta Knight is a dancer with the Zigfield follies, living with her dearest friend Henry DuBois in the same building as Evie and her uncle. Downstairs from them is Mabel Rose, the daughter of a society lady and a Jewish progressive agitator. (I suppose I should mention  Jericho Jones, the mightily forgettable Jericho Jones, who is so dull that Bray literally drops him in a hole in the ground for the climax of The Diviners to get him out of the way. He’s very strong and broody and is kind of a cyborg.) All of their stories have a chance to shine because this series uses its ensemble cast so effectively across the entire stretch of narrative. Nothing feels rushed. Everyone gets their moment in the sun, even if that moment doesn’t come until Book 4.

In addition to the long-form pacing, this series excels at characterization and effortless diversity. We’ve got white people, Black people (both big-city northern and rural southern), Chinese immigrants (both newly arrived and nth-generation), Russian immigrants, native Americans, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, gay, straight, lesbian, ace. You name it, it’s there, unforced and natural because America in the 1920s was a diverse place, no matter what conservative critics might try to claim in their evocations of artificial nostalgia. And beyond diversity of people, we have a dizzying diversity of settings too, again taking advantage of every flavour of 1920s America. Not just the wealthy white flappers in New York, but the Harlem Renaissance, Chinatown, queer nightlife, glitzy showgirls, eugenics movements, Vaudeville. Outside New York, too, we have Midwestern small towns, the Deep South, hell, we even get a travelling jazz band and a circus. There are acrobats! Lions!

This book is a cornucopia of peoples and places and cultures and attitudes, richly researched, skillfully plotted and paced, sensitively told, and full of wit and humor and a joyful revelry of 1920s slang. Sure, at times the prose can get a bit purple; at times the sweeping meditations on ~*America!*~ can be a bit overblown; and as I’ve mentioned before Jericho Jones is a bit of a snore. But I can’t hold that against these books. They have so much to offer, and work so well, on so many levels, that the occasional clunker is a mere drop in an ocean of otherwise chewy, deep, captivating period fantasy.

(Oh, and I can’t end without mentioning that January LaVoy does a fabulous job on the audiobook narration.)

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Highlights

• Flappers and ghosts • Thoughtful meditations on the cultural foundations of America, both good and bad
• Balanced ensemble cast • A slightly purplish tinge in some meditative bits

Nerd coefficient: 8, well worth your time and attention

References

Bray, Libba. The Diviners. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2012]
Bray, Libba. Lair of Dreams. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2015]
Bray, Libba. Before the Devil Breaks you. [Atom, 2017]
Bray, Libba. The King of Crows. [Atom, 2020] 

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

Review: Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds

Gimme the straight dope, see

Machine Vendetta is the 3rd installment in Reynolds' Prefect Dreyfus series. It takes place in the broader Revelation Space universe, which Reynolds has been developing for more than twenty years. The basic conceit is that humanity has spread out across the galaxy. Unlike other space operatic settings, in this case humans are still constrained by the basic laws of physics - most notably, the speed of light. This means that each human-settled system grows and develops in unique ways; they are only connected to each other by "light-huggers," large interstellar vessels that take years to reach each destination (and so have developed cultures of their own). 

The Prefect Dreyfus series in't a trilogy in the usual sense - where you have three books in sequence, released within a short timeframe, that all tell chapters of a single story. Rather, these are more like novels in a crime series: individual stories that don't really need to be read in sequence but contain some added value for those who choose to do so. The same goes for the series writ large: you don't need to have read Revelation Space or any of the others, but having done so will make things a bit easier, as the world building is pretty complex. That said, the Prefect Dreyfus books are a solid entry point into the Revelation Space universe, so don't be put off on starting here. 

The series takes place in the Glitter Band, a series of orbital habitats that ring the planet Yellowstone (location of Reynolds' standalone novel, Chasm City). Prefects are the Marshalls keeping order across this expanse of semi-autonomous space stations. Their organization is called Panoply, and the events of the first two books in the series (Aurora Rising and Elysium Fire) involve the challenges faced by Panoply as it tries to handle two rival - and malignant - artificial intelligences. 

The Prefect Dreyfus books are hybrid space opera and police procedurals, in that the setting is space operatic but the narrative follows an investigation. This is a form of genre mashup that I've always enjoyed - ever since I read Asimov's Caves of Steel as a teenager. But it's also a tough one to pull off - I've read plenty of books in this vein where one half the equation (the procedural or the science fictional) is half-baked and riddled with worn-out tropes. But Reynolds does it masterfully in this series, leaning heavily toward the science fictional and creating detective characters that feel appropriate to that setting, rather than 1940s tough guys in space. 

The third book, Machine Vendetta, takes place in the aftermath of an apparent terrorist attack by hyperpigs (uplifted pigs) on lemurs (uplifted lemurs). The hyperpig in question is also a prefect, which is obviously bad for Panoply. Not long after, a second prefect, Ingvar Tench, arrives and goes missing on a war-torn habitat. Are the two events connected? Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus and his protege, Thalia Ng, are sent to investigate. 

I won't get too deep into what happens, as one of the book's great pleasures is seeing how the the investigation unfolds. But I will say this: it isn't often that the plot of a procedural - including, very much, those set in our world - surprises me in a way that feels both intuitive and parsimonious. There are no moments where the detective reveals the surprise conclusion based on information unavailable to the reader; no cliched "a-ha" moments where it turns out some rando we met setting up deck chairs in chapter 2 turns out to be the villain; nor, worst of all, a convoluted conspiracy that goes "all the way to the top." There is, of course, a conspiracy - but it actually makes sense. 

The book is also quite topical, in the sense that it extrapolates many of our fears and anxieties over artificial intelligence into a far-future setting. Overall the issue is treated well, though I would have preferred for the AI to be a bit less, well, human. 

My other quibble is that the characters are all extremely uptight, which is a reflection of Panoply's organizational culture (and the fact that they select candidates based in part on cultural fit). But it gets a little tiresome when every single one is the kind of person who would agonize over the misplacement of a salad fork, then submit themselves for punishment for this grave breach of ethics. Even the rebellious characters are like this. 

This isn't the first Reynolds book I've read, nor the first I've reviewed for this site - but it is my favorite. The prose is clean and efficient, the characters interesting, the plot moves along at a brisk pace and the world-building is rich without relying on tedious exposition. It's the kind of book that begs for a second go - and has certainly reinvigorated by interest in the Revelation Space universe. Machine Vendetta is, simply put, a thoroughly enjoyable book - one I would not hesitate to recommended for adventurous readers.  

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Highlights

• Crisp prose
• Brisk plotting
• Complex world-building that's nicely backgrounded and doesn't rely on tedious exposition
• Could use a bit more diversity in terms of character personalities 

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

Reference: Reynolds, Alastair, Machine Vendetta [Orbit Books, 2023]

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