Book Review: Children of Doro by M. L. Clark

Me and the AIs thinking about thinking

On\e of the really nice things about BlueSky is that I got to find so many new writers, especially bloggers. The thing that I find that really attracts me to different writers is humaneness, a sense of ethics that highlights the importance of every single human being on the planet, a sense that does not make exceptions based on political convenience (they are rarer than you think!). One such writer that has brought me no end of intellectual stimulation is M. L. Clark, whose blog Better Worlds Theory I subscribe to. Clark has written a science fiction novel that will be the subject of our review today: Children of Doro, published in May 2023.

The planet Doro is unique by virtue of its governing structure: it is run by an artificial intelligence that is a gestalt of copies of the personalities of its residents, of various species. This is not an attempt to lecture on ideal systems of government, such as Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, for Clark is not so naive to think that simply outsourcing our problems to a machine would solve the human condition. No, this book is a lot of things (clocking in at 475 pages, it would have to be), among them an investigation into what sentience even is, what life even is, what intelligence even is. This is a book that is not afraid to get abstract, in a way that is traditional in the genre.

This is most obvious in Clark’s choice of narrator: an artificial intelligence (no, not the one that governs the planet, but that one is important too), which ends up being both a blessing and a curse for the reader, but maybe a curse that works. The narrator on several occasions talks about how fundamentally different its thought process is from organic life, and how incomprehensible it finds us. The end result was something that I, as an autistic person, found at parts to be very relatable as I feel that I often do not understand the neurotypicals around me particularly well. At its best, it is a form of Brecht’s distancing effect, thrusting you out of the story to consider why things are the way they are. Clark goes even farther than Brecht did with it, as Brecht was concerned with society (being a committed socialist), while Clark is concerned with the basics of thought and of consciousness.

Unfortunately, this does not always work. There are times when the AI can be so detailed in its observations you can lose track of what is being observed. The AI narrator is not the only problem; many of Clark’s characters are incredibly verbose, and very few of them speak in a way that real human beings do. The effect, at its densest, is like the more impenetrably written Victorian or Edwardian novels that induce the 21st-century reader to glaze over, as it can be so hard to figure out what the actual point being made is. There are parts of the plot, more towards the beginning than the end, where there are so many tangents that you can’t tell what characters are actually discussing, and that can pull you out of the story. Clark cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a major influence on this book; maybe this is a borrowing from Dostoyevsky, but not having read that book of his, I found it a bit of a thicket. Fortunately, the plot starts moving faster at about the 2/3 mark, and by that point the paragraphs have a more readable length, and the story is overall more engaging. As such, that last third was my favorite part of the book, where the characters get to be themselves more and avatars of raw ideas less, or perhaps are given a chance to turn their ideas into reality as shocking events upend life on Doro.

I really like what Clark did with the worldbuilding. Every major character is shown to be simultaneously, and contradictorily, both fully formed individuals and deeply products of their environments. This is most interestingly done for an alien whose species is hatched from eggs, and in litters of eggs at that; this character’s first real shock is the fact that one of the eggs is diseased and ultimately does not hatch a sibling. The AI narrator is sufficiently detached to reveal things, but sufficiently close to make them feel like characters.

There are also quite long passages that explain the worldbuilding in a more history-book-like way (although still narrated in-universe by the AI). I for one thought that they were very interesting and made Doro feel more like a real society, one with its contradictions and inefficiencies and a history to showcase that. The narrator talks about a previous AI that had governed Doro, but was ultimately removed from its position over its choice to effectively advise the residents of the planet in the way that King Solomon dealt with the two mothers in the Book of Kings. It’s an elegant solution, one with mechanistic efficiency—and it is something actual living beings could not bring themselves to accept. It was something that felt very real to me, to Clark’s credit.

Children of Doro is not a perfect book. Frankly, had it been pared down to somewhere between 300 and 350 pages, it would have been a far more readable book. But in a more positive sense, this book feels like the best of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction, which for all its paleness and maleness was certainly capable of delivering satisfyingly high-concept romps through assemblages of interesting ideas. Clark succeeds in doing that fantastically (and being ideas-focused is no bad thing—Cixin Liu is another contemporary writer that does it well). I can see what I liked in the blog in this novel.  It is, for all its verbosity, a book that is philosophically curious and deeply moral, both things I deeply admire. I shall conclude this review with the words that Clark uses to conclude every blog post; they are wise words, moral words, for our troubled and miserable times:

Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.

Reference: Clark, M. L. Children of Doro (Self-published, 2023).

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Americana

In which much blood is shed over a shirt

There’s an old joke that after anything bad happens in America, some wisecrack will remark that it’s almost as if the country were built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Americans, like settlers everywhere, like to pretend that the genocide that birthed their country either didn’t happen or was a side note in the heroic tale of manifest destiny, which made possible either a white nationalist ethnostate (for conservatives) or a multicultural land of tolerance (for liberals). The Western genre is in one way or another a reckoning with this, a glorification or a condemnation but always an attempt to make sense of it. Such a formula has been once again modernized by Tony Tost in his 2023 film, released in cinemas in 2025, Americana.

Like many classic westerns this is a crime movie, with desperate people all needing something, for reasons good or ill, all hunting down a single object. The plot could be viewed as a chained heist film, with people chasing other people whilst being chased by still other people. The object in question is a ghost shirt of the Lakota people from the age of the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century, a spiritual rebellion against American rule. It is deeply sacred to the Lakota, a group of whom are prominent in this film, and also worth a lot of money to white people.

This film boasts an impressive cast. Sydney Sweeney is completely unrecognizable as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress who learns of the heist, and has dreams of being a musician in Nashville. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, the ex-girlfriend of one of the men who ends up starting this whole shebang, and the mother of a son, Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who is witness to an act of great violence and is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Zahn McClarnon plays the leader of a Lakota radical group seeking to reclaim the ghost shirt for their people. He has the right combination of intensity and chill to him for such a role, capable of being empathetic to a small child and quoting Karl Marx in his tirades against what white America has done to his nation. Of particular note that McClarnon is himself Hunkpapa Lakota; you can tell he knows the pain his character feels deeply and personally.

There is a character I am deeply conflicted about: Lefty Ledbetter, as played by Paul Walter Hauser (an actor who is having a good summer, between this film, his role as Ed Hocken Jr. in the new Naked Gun, and Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four). He is introduced asking Penny Jo Poplin for her opinion on the speech he will use to propose marriage to the woman he has been seeing for only a few dates. Cards on the table: I am autistic, and I despise cringe comedy. My life is filled with awkward moments that end with people disliking me; I find humor based on such situations to be viscerally unpleasant. Maybe he’s just socially awkward, but I can’t help but read his character as something of a caricature, and to be particularly caustic, a caricature of autistic people. I cannot know if Tony Tost meant him that way, but several jokes involving him rankled me. To Tost’s credit, he improves markedly as the film goes on and you get a better sense of his humanity, and a scene near the end is legitimately heart-rending.

White people have often treated the American West, comparatively less dense than the East and also the cities on the West Coast, as sort of a blank slate, an opportunity to build whatever they want. Such is the Christian cult featured in the film’s third act, where Mandy is revealed to have grown up. The women are silent in the presence of men, and all wear long dresses. They cannot wear makeup, and they cannot have phones. They are ruled with an iron fist by Hiram Starr, Mandy’s father, played with appropriate menace by Christopher Kriesa. But even so, you get the feeling that he and the other men in this bigoted little hovel in Wyoming are not strong, not virile, not the masters of their fate. This whole microcosm of Christian Nationalist patriarchy ends up looking like a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid ceasing to be emotionally stunted, and they are willing to make the lives of women living hell so they can continue to play god. When the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, you will cheer.

I also appreciated the way that the film portrayed this Lakota radical group. They are neither simple savages of the classic Western film, nor are they blinkered radicals along the lines of the namesake group in The Baader Meinhof Complex (a stunning film from 2008 about leftist radicals in 1970s West Germany). And neither are they cuddly caricatures, positive representations of nonwhite peoples with no flaws, no rough edges - and no personalities. These are rugged, rough men who deeply love their people, and are willing to kill for it (and they are quite good at killing for it). They came off to me as very realistic, very believable revolutionaries, if only on a small scale. They know that revolution is not a dinner party, to quote Mao Zedong. And, when confronted with the white world with all its maddening misunderstandings of their culture, they can be both very kind and very cold (such as one piercing scene at the end - you both feel that what McClarnon’s character does is wrong, but you also understand deeply why he did what he did).

The Lakota characters, McClarnon’s in particular, are also great foils for Cal Starr, the white child who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, for those unaware, was the nineteenth century war leader of the Lakota people who led his nation’s war of survival against the United States. He is a perfect personification of how settler colonies try to indigenize themselves, to claim a historic connection with the land they occupy that they simply do not have, not unlike the white men in faux indigenous garb who threw British tea into Boston Harbor at the eve of the Revolution. This child, submerged in the currents of history that he cannot comprehend due to his youth, has the fortune of coming across actual Lakota, and the film milks this peculiar juxtaposition for all it is worth. But he is not merely a comic character; he goes through a lot of pain in this violence, and by the end you just want to hug him.

Americana is a panoramic view of the contemporary American West, with all the cruelties that simmer beneath its bucolic, utopian presentation. This is a film about how the past is never past, and how it can come shooting into the present with all the force of a speeding bullet. There is a violence here that erupts into the lives of the characters very suddenly and without remorse - which is not at all unlike the violence that created the American West as we know it. The end result is a thrilling, somewhat pulpy crime drama that is both great fun and deeply thought-provoking.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim (tr. Anton Hur)

Taking Down the Corpse-Empire

The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).

You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.

The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.

The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.

None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.

There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.

Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence did I zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).

As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.

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Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: No Sympathy by Eóin Dooley

On using magic to slip away

Theo is a man who is almost invisible. He is couch-surfing with people he vaguely considers his friends in Berlin after leaving secondary school in disgrace in England. He does everything in his power to avoid calling himself ‘homeless,’ although after a certain point there is no other way to put it. He is rambling through the streets of Berlin in the middle of the night, looking for a place to sleep, when he stumbles through a hole in reality and winds up in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province not far from Hong Kong. Deeply confused, he meets a man named Gabriel who tells him that he is attuned to magic, and he is attuned because he is invisible to the world, someone who is so easily forgettable. Such is the opening volley of Eóin Dooley’s novella No Sympathy, published in 2024 by Android Press.

So much of the reason why this book works is because of Theo, its main character. This is a man who is aimless, with no ties to anything, no roots anywhere. He is a man who was not able to ‘make it’ in that striving middle class sense due to an inability to truly fit in a late-stage-capitalist education system, and as such becomes invisible to ‘polite’ society. Dooley never states this, but I suspect that Theo might be best read as being neurodivergent, autistic perhaps, as he always holds the rest of the world at arm’s length. I wonder if something more traumatic is lurking in his background. It is his rootlessness that makes him really able to find a use for magic; those of us in steady jobs and with families, given the opportunity to use magic, may hesitate as it may disrupt the delicate balance that stability requires under late stage capitalism. Theo, a man with nothing that is truly his and as such has nothing left to lose, can go all the way with it.

Magic here is heavily associative; the main thing you can do in this particular universe is to teleport between two locations that are similar on some level. It is remarked by Gabriel that, unlike most depictions of magic in contemporary settings, modernity has actually been a boon for magic. The easiest way to use this power of teleportation is to jump between restrooms, or between different outlets of the same fast food joints, which happen to be in different countries. I’ve never seen magic used in a modern setting like this before and I approve.

But this comes at a cost to the user, specifically in the requirement that the wielder be unmemorable. It means you cannot really have friends. It means that you can’t have community. It condemns you to nomadism. It prevents you from ever being able to make a truly systemic change in the world. It means you cannot indulge in local cuisine, as that makes a place less interchangeable with other places, so you cannot teleport nearly as well between that place and elsewhere. Theo ends up, for a time, in a group of magicians who teleport around the world doing small acts of charity and mercy, and eventually snaps at how much this particular way of living alienates him from anything that makes life really worth living at all.

No Sympathy is a book that poses a powerful question but never really answers it - but I’m not convinced that an answer was necessary for the book to work. Indeed, the book works best as a character study of Theo, the consummate drifter. He knows he has no roots, but being in that position makes him all too cognizant of what it means to have none at all. Beyond that, there isn’t an obvious thematic throughline, an obvious stance on alienation that the book is taking, where this nomadic existence is shown with both great benefits and great costs to the nomad. Indeed, this group Theo falls in with makes it almost a monastic enterprise.

Theo asks them if they could use their powers to throw wrenches into the gears of capitalism, to do what they can to bring evil men to justice and thereby prying loose the injustice of the world. The response they give him is something Theo finds to be sanctimonious and without any commitment to the broader well-being of humanity, the magical equivalent of white American church groups that go to Africa and build poorly-constructed houses or water pumps or what have you and do it primarily for the vacation and for the Instagram photos with smiling African children in their arms. His charge is that they have used their powers to become dilettantes, which really is not all that different from those who use magic for selfish reasons.

When not reading I am a swing dancer in my spare time, and as such I have familiarity with a good deal of midcentury American popular music. This book reminds me a good deal of one particular song from the fifties that is occasionally played at swing dances: The Wanderer, written by Ernie Maresca and sung by Dion DiMucci in 1961. It’s a song that, at first, appears to be an ode to an adolescent heterosexual male fantasy of arriving in a town, bedding the local women, and going off to the next town to repeat. But, as Dion has said and Bruce Springsteen has pointed out, the key to the song is in these lines:

Well, I roam from town to town,

I got a life without a care.

And I`m as happy as a clown,

I`m with my two fists of iron but I`m going nowhere.

This is a song about loneliness, about listlessness, about rootlessness. Theo is Dion’s wanderer, but so poor that he doesn’t even have the benefit of mindless hedonism. Both Theo and the Wanderer have discovered the truth of Ubuntu, the philosophy from Southern Africa, of how a person is a person through other people. We are social animals, and as much as we may fantasize of throwing it all away, it can never truly be done without wrecking us. We may try to fill that gap with pleasure or mindless distraction or, in our world, reactionary politics, but it never works. We are all bound together.

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Reference: Dooley, Eóin. No Sympathy [Android Press, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

On the cop movie spoof in the age of ACAB

When Frank Drebin Jr. saves the day, what is actually being saved?

Back when I was an impressionable elementary schooler, I saw the first Michael Bay Transformers film with my dad, and I remember being struck that this time around, the robot that turned into a police car is evil. The men and women in blue uniforms and caps who drive cars with sirens have fallen from the heroic status they held in the 20th century, and we now focus not on the uniforms or the cars, but on the guns they have on their belts, and the wide variety of ways they know how to kill people. As such, the very idea of the original Naked Gun trilogy, and the Police Squad show before it, feels like something out of an allegedly more innocent time (although the likes of Bull Connor would probably disagree), a quainter, more naive time.

When the decision was made to make The Naked Gun for release in 2025, it was to be made and released in a country that has had massive unrest over police violence. More and more Americans do not look up to cops, but fear them. As such, to portray the police as the heroes in a spoof movie will read differently than when Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker made the original Police Squad show.

To get the most pressing question out of the way: this movie is hysterically funny. It’s very much a modernized version of those old spoof movies where, if you don’t like one joke, the writers are banking on the prospect you may like one of the four other jokes occurring within the next minute. It’s that density of comedy that really saves the original trilogy for a modern viewer, as perhaps one in five jokes (and frankly that is being charitable) are hideously offensive by modern standards (one particular reveal in the third movie taking the crown for single most offensive joke in the franchise). There is a series of gags involving an infrared camera that, while not particularly offensive to anyone, are possibly raunchier than anything in the original trilogy. That density is preserved here, as the film is crammed with funny background events and a conga line’s worth of one-liners.

Liam Neeson is doing a Leslie Nielsen impersonation through all of this, and he is very good at it. What made Nielsen so good in his role as Frank Drebin Sr. was that he was capable of saying, and responding to, completely absurd horseshit with a completely straight face. Neeson is very similar, capable of making absurd Sex and the City references or questioning the use of a certain slur in an old song in a manner that sounds very earnest. Neeson sells Frank Drebin Jr. as a man who has no idea that what he’s saying is complete nonsense. In the younger Drebin’s mind, his responses are perfectly rational, and he is the rational man in an irrational world.

The basics of the plot are ripped from 2014’s Kingsman: the Secret Service, involving a sonic frequency that makes people kill each other. The villains here are what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor described as ‘end times fascists,’ wishing to see an end to human civilization so that they can make a new world atop its ashes. They feel like Musk- or Thiel-style technofascists, a clear departure from the villains in the original trilogy, whose aims were far more down-to-earth, relatively speaking. Since we live in a world that feels like it’s careening ever quicker into a dystopian future, this movie is the first time that the series gets openly science fictional.

That swerve into science fiction is one way that this film shows its origins in this century; a subtle shift in the characterization of Frank Drebin, and by extension Police Squad as a whole, is another. In addition to thinking that the completely ridiculous is completely normal, Neeson’s Drebin is portrayed as a violent asshole, going by several of the jokes. When he urgently needs to use the restroom, he fires a gun at the ceiling to get a crowd out of the way between him and a toilet in a coffee shop. Before doing that, he let a speeding driver get away with a warning. This Drebin is actively destructive to human life and property in a way that Nielsen's Drebin never was. He is, if not racist in his heart of hearts, happy to admit that his violence disproportionately affects people of color. One particularly memorable background gag in Police Squad headquarters has an officer escorting away some crying children while he holds their confiscated lemonade stand around his arm. The question eventually has to be asked: does Police Squad do anything other than terrorize innocent people?

It’s subtle, and easy to miss given the rapid-fire comedy, but this film portrays Police Squad as at best completely useless, and is very aware of the myriad problems of contemporary policing. Police Squad is filled with cowboy cops—the sort of cowboys that massacred Natives. I’m reminded of Peter Moskos’s book Cop in the Hood, his memoir of taking a job with the Baltimore police department to do anthropological work on policing. He says that most cops that he knew were not committed racists; the violence they meted out affected Black people disproportionately because of the broader structural inequalities of American society rather than any particular animus as individuals. But it’s not intent, but impact, that matters, and these cops, Frank Drebin Jr. foremost among them, are terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles like the imperial enforcers from which American police have drawn so much. They rampage around the city with impunity (for them, punishment for police misconduct warrants a pool party) and have brought the war home. In another world, Frank Drebin Jr. could be a particularly dim-witted officer of the Philippine Constabulary, brutalizing a people white Americans called the n-word. It was a service that attracted brutes, and this version of Police Squad acts that way.

[An aside—if you want to read more about imperial influence on policing, I recommend Julian Go's Policing Empire, Matthew Guariglia's Police and the Empire City, Alfred McCoy's Policing America's Empire, and Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop.]

Frank Drebin Jr. ultimately saves the day, as he was bound to do, fighting the villain outside of Ponzischeme.com Arena. It is telling that the only dangerous crime anyone actually stops in this movie is one that threatens the interests of the rich and powerful. He does so with the cooperation of his love interest, who makes up fictional stories and sells them as true crime, thereby saving Police Squad’s funding, after the Spirit Halloween banner had already been hung up on its building. Earlier in the film, it is shown that Police Squad is rank with nepotism, where the son of Nordberg heavily implies that his father (portrayed in the original trilogy by O. J. Simpson) committed crimes similar to that of his actor. The whole enterprise, the whole concept of policing, and indeed contemporary American society are all immersed in a slimy morass of corruption and theft.

Police abolitionists argue that policing, as an institution, does not solve crime, nor prevent crime, but rather punishes crime, to the detriment of the aforementioned. They often insist on referring to the American legal system, rather than the American justice system, as it is designed to execute laws rather than to pursue any real form of justice. Looking at the movie from this lens, the ultimate joke of The Naked Gun is justice in America, and the punchline is: “Justice? What justice?”

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Time's Agent by Brenda Peynado

You can't just stuff your problems in a pocket

Everywhere you go, there are places that feel like they would lead to another world. For me, it was one hallway in the middle school I went to that had a sign that said it was off-limits for students (I eventually found an excuse to go down it, and it ended up on the upper level of seats for the school’s rather large auditorium—prosaic, sure, but nothing makes a teenager want to do something more than being told not to do that thing). For many of us, these are backrooms, gas stations, airports, and places that you expect simply to pass through, never lingering there. It is this human impulse that Brenda Peynado stretches out in her novella Time’s Agent, published in 2024 by Tor.com.

Time’s Agent is set in a near-future Dominican Republic, where capitalism lumbers ever longer and teeters on the edge of collapse but never actually gives the satisfaction thereof. In this future, humanity has figured out how to access ‘pocket universes,’ other planes of existence that have different sizes and different rates of the passage of time. Since it is the nature of capitalism to enclose the commons, as was done to common lands in Europe in the early modern period, its forces march inexorably into these pocket universes and use them to suck ever more value from not only the pocket universes, but from the people who are sent to them.

Peynado spends a lot of time showing just how these pocket universes are exploited. It is common for the poor to do backbreaking agricultural labor in a universe where time flows much faster than in ours; they enter in their twenties and come out in their sixties when only a few days have passed in our world. It bears mentioning that the benefits of pockets are not only for the wealthy, as others have become wealthy by selling pockets to the poor; some parents use the pockets as cribs to put their children in while they work, while students at university use them to study for exams while saving time in the present.

A small thing that Peynado does that I liked is the distinction between how time passes in the main world versus time as experienced by a person in a pocket dimension, such as the farm workers mentioned in the previous paragraph. The very concept of different time streams accessible to a society can wreak chaos on how we usually reckon somebody’s age. I kept making mental comparisons to Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel The End of Eternity, where time travelers have to keep up with what Asimov calls ‘physiotime,’ a straightforwardly useful concept I am surprised more writers haven’t made off with. I have no idea if Peynado has taken a page from Asimov (the concept strikes me as obvious enough for someone to derive independently; indeed it was something I had thought about before I read the Asimov novel) but, being the massive nerd I am, I noticed the similarity.

And as with all new discoveries and all new inventions, the powers that be will use them in one way, and the downtrodden and marginalized will find their own uses. Such are your main characters: a lesbian couple, one of whom is of Haitian heritage (Haitians are very much a marginalized group in the Dominican Republic). In the early days of the exploration of pocket universes, they both belonged to a scientific institute whose investigations of the new phenomena are humane, even humanistic. They are rudely thrown out when the institute is commandeered by the sort of vulture capitalist that destroys anything good in the world, and through shenanigans related to pocket dimensions, find themselves hurled decades into the future, where the enclosure of the pocket commons is complete.

There’s a heavy throughline of loss in this novella. The two main characters had a daughter, but they lose her, and one of them tries to ‘resurrect’ her in a hamhanded way that bears the hallmark of someone stuck in the bargaining stage of grief (while at first the particular method of ‘resurrection’ felt like a digression, the more I thought about it, the more it fit into the book’s thematic core). More broadly, that same character has a fascination with the Taíno people, the indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola (which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), whom she suspects of having found a way to use pocket universes to their own uses.

In giving the Taíno access to the pockets, Peynado takes an old Orientalist trope and flips it on its head. Many works of white-written science fiction and fantasy give any number of ancient civilizations, often those in Africa or Asia or the Americas (rarely Europe, but occasionally so, such as the ancient Greek nuclear-powered mecha of the First Occult War in many SCP articles). In those works, this trope has unpleasant undertones, often with the sneaking suspicion that the white authors saw these cultures as inherently ‘mysterious’ and as such gave them license to just make things out of whole cloth. Sometimes, it ends up unintentionally justifying historical atrocities, such as in Wolfenstein: the New Order. Not so here; Peynado uses this trope in a very sensitive way, one that makes the Taíno come off as the reasonable, sensible people who don’t feel the need to obscure things with systems of thought justifying colonialism. The way it ultimately plays out is something I found to be very clever.

Time’s Agent is a very efficient book. I am very impressed with how many ideas could be packed into two hundred pages and change while still having fully-fleshed out characters and a gripping, often heart-rending plot. This book manages to be the synthesis resolving the thesis of those old idea-heavy ’50s science fiction (with modern descendants) and the antithesis of the more character-heavy SFF novel. Peynado shows she can do both things very well, and I feel that she is an author whose future efforts will be worth paying attention to.

Reference: Brenda Peynado, Time's Agent [Tor.com, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

A tale of two men pulled off the ledge.

Content warning: this piece deals with both suicide in fiction and disclosure of a real suicide attempt

I’m going to tell the readership this bluntly: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a book about suicide. This is a slim novella about a man who boards the subway to the end of the line intending to drown himself, but upon leaving the train finds himself in an endless maze of corridors and rooms, with only one other person for company.

I’m going to tell the readership another thing bluntly: in April 2023 I tried to kill myself by jumping off of a bridge. The way I experienced this book, and the way I have interpreted its themes, is completely and utterly inseparable from having had that experience. This is going to be a thematically heavy piece on that front so I am warning people now.

With that said: this whole thing also, at first, reminded me of the new season of Severance, which I watched the week before writing this review. The unending corridors with the occasional vaguely recognizable business (such as the convenience store, always empty, from which our protagonist pilfers his nourishment) strike the same chord as the featureless corridors of the severed floor of the Lumon building. Both works are wrangling with the meaning of living when the world around you is so crushingly, miserably oppressive, and why ending your own life wouldn’t be a rational response to it (such as when Helly R. tried to hang herself in the escalator). The severed floor, however, at least has decent lighting. For at least the first half of the rather slim book the narrator had the voice of Seth Milchick in my mind.

The supernatural element here is something that is more hinted at than displayed, the most vivid of that rare open depiction is a harrowing physical depiction of the narrator’s grief. The entire feeling of all of this is a certain grottiness, a sort of brutalist gracelessness that makes the whole novella feel cold, uncaring, impersonal. The few other characters there are in this wasteland of corridors are not much better; all of them are too locked in their own problems, their own focuses, their own obsessions to care about our main character, a man named Vicken who is of Armenian heritage living in Montreal.

Vicken is a medic who has himself talked people out of suicides. Ajram spares you gory details of what brought Vicken to the metaphorical ledge, and chooses rather to shine a light on the voids in his life. In Vicken, you see an ultimately decent human being, but one who is on some level deeply empty of things that make life worth living. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this is a very eerie book by Fisher’s definition, which is the deep unnerving lack of something that should be there, but isn’t. Vicken’s life is deeply and profoundly unwhole, and that is the focus of the novella: not details, but mood.

It’s a mood I can relate to all too well. When I look back to the months before I drove to that bridge in the middle of the night, the feeling was that of a profound emptiness. I am not comfortable making too many details public, but suffice to say it was about me, in my status as an autistic person, to be able to truly fit in a neurotypical world. Human beings are social creatures; we evolved to live in small groups. What had set me down that dark path was the fact that I had not even a small group, but no group, or so my mind had resolved, and that removing myself from aforementioned neurotypical world was my only realistic option. After my attempt failed due to the intervention of a kindly passerby, I spent the next several months in a sort of aimless state.

It’s that aimless state that this novella captures so crushingly well. Vicken is, and I once was, someone who had every intention of ending his life and then found himself in a situation where life was going to go on. The end result, for both of us, was an unnerving existential shrug, a sense of ‘now what?’ pervading every aspect of our being. There is the unpleasant undercurrent where you ask yourself what the point of any of this was, and what the point of still being here is. Once you’ve walked back from the metaphorical ledge, you are confused on an existential level. Your soul, as much as that could be said to exist, is bewildered, and you just keep thinking about it. Your internal monologue becomes a droning question, never ceasing, affecting every single fiber of your being.

Not everyone will like the ending to this book. I think it worked, for what it’s worth, but it absolutely refuses to wrap up the narrative neatly, all wrapped up in paper with a colorful bow with a knot. The ending is deeply, profoundly messy, and it will make you wonder, as I did, what in the narrative is ‘real,’ as firmly you can define that in a work of fiction. I think that was the right decision, creatively. It is of the same sort of issue that makes too many works about historical tragedies, the Holocaust and American slavery being the most prominent examples although by no means the only ones, end neatly, where the victims live on, learn to be happy, and are improved through suffering. This book does not do that; Vicken is harmed by all this, indubitably, but it is not a purifying experience in that nigh-omnipresent Christian way. I can speak from personal experience: attempting to kill yourself and surviving is not an ultimately uplifting thing to go through, and Ajram knows this well enough to leave enough threads dangling that it feels true to life.

The phrase ‘coup de grâce’ is a French term meaning ‘mercy kill.’ It is the shot from a gun that puts down a wounded animal that will never recover. When I was in that state, leading up to that dreadful night, removing myself from the world certainly felt like a mercy to myself, who would never fit in with the neurotypical world, and to the world, so that my inability to read it would harm nobody else. It is a title that is provocative, attacking not the need to talk suicidal people out of that self-destructive haze, but rather to everyone else, challenging them to understand the dejection, and all too often the crushing sense of abandonment, that leads people like Vicken, and me once upon a time, to take their lives. The title, and the novel, are pleas for mercy from the world towards those it has abandoned so utterly. It is a plea I hope you, the reader, will heed, if you feel you can handle the telling.

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Reference: Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce, [Titan Books, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Three Ruminations on the Themes of Elio

Alex saw Elio and had some thoughts

I know that this blog has already covered Elio, but I have had scattered thoughts about some of its thematic depths. The first part of this essay is a response to the review my colleague and dear friend Arturo Serrano wrote on this site regarding that film. He is an astounding critic and one I deeply admire (and I’m working with him on a shared world project), but there is one particular aspect of Elio that I feel his piece does not consider. It is regarding Olga, the aunt of the titular character, and how she fits into the broader narrative of the behavior of parental figures in regards to their children. Secondly, I consider the fate of the third child in the film that is thrust into a role that he does not want. Thirdly, I consider a parallel between Olga and Grigon that the writers almost certainly deliberately did not address.

Arturo makes the case that Elio is an inaccurate depiction of children who rebel against their parents (or parental figure, in the case of Olga, who is his aunt, and who stepped up after his parents died in an unknown event). He argues, basically, that Elio is rebelling against her because he sees her as abusive, and that the film agrees with him, even when Olga didn’t do anything wrong. He therefore argues that the film is wrong to condemn Olga for doing what anyone in her station would do.

This is where I disagree with my colleague and friend. I would argue that the film is not portraying Olga as an abuser. Consider all of this from her perspective. We do not know if Olga ever intended to have children, but in any case, she lost a sibling and the sibling’s spouse in some sudden awful event, and at some point must have realized that she must take over caring for her nephew very suddenly. She appears to be single, and she has a demanding job with the United States Air Force. I can very much imagine Olga having a conversation with Elio that resembles a conversation in 2025’s The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins, where two brothers who have likewise lost their parents are taken in by their uncle and aunt. There is a scene where the uncle point-blank tells his nephews that he and his wife never expected to have children, are inexperienced in the art of parenting, and should adjust their expectations accordingly. I can easily imagine a more tender, less wry version of that talk some years before the events of Elio. It is also similar to 2022's M3GAN, where Gemma is an aunt who is struggling to take care of a sibling's child; that film is very good at showing that exhaustion, and brings it down a horrifying direction.

One of the things that I think ought to be considered regarding why Elio wants to escape his life with Olga is the broader situation of his familial arrangements. Raising a child is hard. Raising a child by yourself, without a partner, is even harder. Raising a child without a partner while working a demanding job for the United States Air Force is harder still. It is, then, quite easy to imagine that Olga is running on fumes, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and after a certain point she has only so much to give, and that those points come with disheartening frequency.

When put in that context, I think a comparison with another recent Disney film regarding the treatment of parental figures is relevant. I refer to the 2025 live-action remake of Lilo and Stitch, which I have previously reviewed for this very blog. One of the things I praised that film was for explaining how difficult it is for the teenaged Nani, living in poverty and having suffered the loss of her parents, to take care of her little sister Lilo. Nani is slowly being ground down, having to forfeit a promising future to ensure her sister can survive. Without the intervention of close family friends (an intervention entirely absent in the original animated film), both Nani and Lilo would be sentenced to lifelong poverty. 

Elio made the mistake of not making the weight of all this on Olga obvious enough. What the film risks imparting, especially to younger viewers, even more especially girls, is to portray women with a certain martyrdom complex. Reading between the lines, one could argue that the film is portraying Olga as naturally a mother by virtue of being a woman. She is frustrated with her nephew, yes, and she wants her nephew to be a bit more orderly, yes (as so clearly demonstrated by her choice to send him to a military school). Perhaps more clearly, she wants him to be a bit more normal.

This is a bit of a side note but I think in one particular aspect the film really fumbled a very obvious way it could have solidified its central theme: that of the fake Elio the aliens sent to take his place. So much of this film is about what parental figures want of their children, and this fake Elio is designed to disintegrate. To put it more bluntly, the Communiverse has created a sentient being with the express purpose of dying when it is convenient for them. Despite being a clone and a tool, he is a character in this movie. He has significant screen time, and is the instigator of a number of important moments in the story, and yet he is never given the chance to come up with an original thought. Instead of contemplating this fact, he allows himself to disintegrate, making a Terminator reference in the process, and does so to allow the protagonists to continue in their adventure. One child in this movie is ordered to be normal, and another is ordered to be violent. A third child, however, is literally ordered to die. It would have required ripping the guts out of the film to accommodate this, or maybe bringing it up to the length of a TV show, but it was such obvious thematic content that is just left at the wayside. Letting a child die in this way while others got to live left a bad taste in my mouth.

In terms of thematic potentials left unaddressed, there is a very obvious one that the writers missed in terms of contrasting Olga and Lord Grigon. Grigon serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life; that much is clear. What is less clear, when taking in the film’s framing as perceived by an onlooker, is that Olga also serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life, namely the United States military. Can you truthfully say that a military whose ultimate antecedents are genocidal militias in colonial times, and is currently leveling Gaza, cares about life?

I know that such things would never get into a children’s movie. I know that Disney takes plenty of money from the American military. I know that Disney is committed to a vague midcentury form of patriotism that likes to pretend everything is fine and dandy. I know that Disney, ultimately, is simply not brave enough to challenge American empire that openly. I know that this film had advisors from the military. Ultimately, though, the film is still portraying a menace to the world as benign, and ultimately good. Fighting Kessler Syndrome is undoubtedly good, but it ultimately comes off as akin to the time when America conquered Veracruz and focusing on when American doctors fought syphilis in that city. It’s a good act, yes, but it came out of a very particular context, and that context is not one of altruism.

The United States has ratified the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the militarization of outer space. The United States also has laws preventing it from providing weapons to governments committing genocide, and yet it does so anyway. Unfortunately, as long as the world is divided into competing empires, I expect the Outer Space Treaty will be about as effective as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was (indeed, the wide variety of objects cluttering the atmosphere may well violate the treaty in itself). What I worry is that many adults who may be firing those weapons at whatever poor country may come in America’s crosshairs, at poor, defenseless children, will have entered that grisly service because they saw Elio in theaters and were enchanted by space, and by the military.

On a basic narrative level I enjoyed Elio. I did, however, leave the theater feeling like there was fertile soil to have done even more with what had been laid out. The whole film, while enjoyable, felt like a massive missed opportunity to explore issues it merely raised. I know that this is wishful thinking and in one instance not particularly likely due to the interests of Disney as a company. But it stood out to me all the same.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Ballerina

Change the accoutrements and this movie would be low fantasy - prove me wrong

Ballerina is, on some level, a blatant cash grab, more so than the other John Wick movies, by virtue of being an interquel. It is an interquel because it needs to be set at a time when John Wick, the man you hire to kill the boogeyman, is alive, and by the end of the fourth movie John Wick is dead (spoilers for a movie from 2023, sorry). Trying to slot in a film between two other films in a sequence is ungainly at the best of times (the good people over at TVTropes have discerned a rather thorny continuity issue with this movie vis-a-vis the other movies in the series). But, for this movie, I choose to look at its continuity in the way I look at James Bond movie continuity, where the whole thing is malleable and something of a mess, and as such I will care about continuity about as much as the films will.

Ballerina contains within itself another iteration of the John Wick series’ spectacular worldbuilding. This series has the best worldbuilding I have ever seen that has not a single obvious supernatural element to it. By virtue of being set in a criminal underworld, there is room for all sorts of weird micro-societies and cultures, some of them bordering on a religion. The one that takes pride of place in this film is the one in which our protagonist is immersed. It is an all-female organization of assassins and bodyguards who, in addition to all their combat training, also have to learn to be first-class ballerinas. You see your main character, played by Ana de Armas, be grilled in her ballet technique intercut with her more obviously violent education, and by the end of it the stage on which she practices is covered in blood. Ballet as an art form is brutal on the body, as shown in previous John Wick movies as well as 2018’s Red Sparrow, and for that reason is so often juxtaposed with more violent endeavors. On an aesthetic level, it works as a juxtaposition between beauty and death, and the whole thing feels like something out of a fantasy novel, or even a Greek myth about the Amazons.

The Ruska Roma, the ballet/homicide organization that our protagonist, Eve Macarro, joins in the beginning of the film is confronted with an enemy that likewise feels like something out of a fantasy novel. This organization is a religious/homicidal cult whose raison d'être is shrouded in mystery (which is a polite way of saying somewhat vague, but it works) that has existed for centuries, and based in a town in the Austrian alps. In some ways, they are the perfect mirror of the Ruska Roma, also being fanatical and cold-blooded. Every little bit of world-building you get here is through character actions, rather than ham-handed exposition or hackneyed dialogue. You are finding out who these people are right alongside Eve, and the strangely impassioned but always scary behavior makes for a compelling villain.

An aside - there is a bit where the head of this cult in the Alps mentions that a leader of said cult has not had to flee in two hundred years - I would read the shit out of fan-fiction about this cult’s involvement in the Tyrolean Rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, because I am a fucking nerd.

The action here, as in all the other John Wick films, is spellbinding. There is the obligatory shoot-out in a nightclub, this time in New York. As familiar as such scenes are in this series, the film still justifies its presence by virtue of the use of the bright, contrasting colors used decoratively. You also get a good deal of mileage out of that town in Austria run by the cult; there is a well-done fight in a kitchen with use of kitchen utensils (in a manner far more creative than this year’s Novocaine). You will also get the most off-the-wall usage of flamethrowers I have ever seen in any film ever, as well as the most creative use of a hose I have ever seen in any film ever. The series has, fortunately, not devolved into cliché.

Ana de Armas brings a strong presence to her leading role as Eve Macarro. Eve is what I would imagine John Wick himself was like as a young assassin learning the ropes (and how to hang people with them) of the homicide business, but of course gender-swapped. Eve has to build up a tolerance of killing, something John Wick has had the entire run of his namesake series, so there is a trepidation here that has to be overcome. Her gender, of course, changes a lot. The most spectacular, and most poignant, of these is during her training in the Ruska Roma, where her superior tells her that she will be weaker and smaller than any man she fights, and she must always remember that. This immediately cuts to Eve fighting a man in a spar; to make up for the difference in size, she attacks his groin repeatedly, and he is clearly in incredible pain. Throughout the movie, you see a woman turning from someone relatively normal, albeit having gone through a tremendous loss, into an amazon who can dance.

Only a few days after I saw this movie, I read David Foster Wallace’s (no known relation to the author of this piece) essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, whose namesake essay is about his time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He finds a brochure aboard the ship with an essay-cum-advertisement by the acclaimed writer Frank Conroy. Wallace is quite perturbed by this essay, not because it isn’t good (on a craft level, he says, it is superb), but that nowhere it is disclosed that Conroy was paid for it. This essay, argues Wallace, is an advertisement pretending to be art:

“In the case of Frank Conroy's ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

This is an argument that I think is worth thinking about in relation to big media franchises, of which John Wick has most certainly become in recent years. The purpose of a media franchise is to be enjoyed first, and then to advertise future works in the franchise for the ultimate financial gain of the franchise owner. John Wick, the man, the character portrayed by Keanu Reeves, is something of a modern folk hero, in what Henry Jenkins described as “a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” The question, then, are franchise films art? Is Ballerina art?

I would argue yes. So many great works of painting and sculpture are here in this world for us to appreciate because of the patronage of the wealthy; hell, the art on the Sistine Chapel is a prominent example. It bears mentioning here that Ballerina started out as an original project before being retrofitted into the John Wick universe. Like the great works of the Renaissance, Ballerina owes its existence to men of great wealth, but ultimately it has enough substance, enough meat on the bone, to be enjoyable.

(also the song at the credits is extremely catchy)

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: The Life of Chuck

Dancing and Dreaming as the world comes to an end

As a writer and as a critic, there are times I wonder what the point of writing and critiquing is when [gestures vaguely at the world] is on the march, with no sign of abating. Writing stories and reviews in the hopes that someone will enjoy them, or take something away from them that is beneficial, can feel like you’re a member of the dance band on the Titanic, plucking and thrumming away while everything around you is sinking ever more quickly, right before you drown and your corpse is crushed by the water pressure. To quote an old meme, we had the misfortune of living in the one apocalypse where we still have to go to work. The fact that I drove to the theater to see The Life of Chuck in a massive rainstorm that seemed to appear out of nowhere only heightened the mood. This film is based on the namesake novella by Stephen King, and directed by Mike Flanagan.

There are three interrelated portions of this film. The first is about the slow end of the world, an exaggerated version of the existential dread felt by those of us who follow the news (and also a solid piece of evidence in favor of the idea that ignorance is in fact bliss). The second is about an accountant who, while in another town on a business trip, decides spontaneously to dance to the music produced by a busking drummer in a public square. The last is the coming-of-age of a boy who loses his parents in a freak car crash, grows up with his paternal grandparents in a home where he is absolutely forbidden from entering the uppermost room, all the while learning how to dance. Running through all these is the story of Charles ‘Chuck’ Krantz, the axle around which the wheel of this film spins.

The first section, the one involving the end of the world, is one that is equal parts completely unnerving and deeply relatable (and a good chunk very, very funny) by how familiar it is. It is, to quote a Bluesky post from around the time of the Los Angeles fires, selfies taken in disaster areas closer and closer to you until you are the one taking the selfie. The characters in this segment are on some level resigned to the whole thing, the casting away of the accoutrements of quotidian society feeling almost inevitable, for we have all planned for it, fantasized about it, dreamed of it even, as we try to numb ourselves from reality. The first thing that heralds apocalypse is the loss of the internet. There’s one particular scene, where two men commiserate about how they no longer have access to PornHub, that filled me with an emotion that I have a hard time describing (but I’m certain there’s a seventeen-syllable German word for it). It’s the humor that arises when you see that people will always be like this, but also despair at how we will never change.

The second part is a celebration of human joy and spontaneity. The businessman, for no reason that even he can ascertain (and he himself admits this), starts dancing to drums in public. He puts down his briefcase, but doesn’t change his shoes (I can attest to you that dancing in business shoes is a massive mistake - he would be sore for a week afterward, if his experience is anything like mine), and he just starts going at it. He is joined by a young woman whose boyfriend has just dumped her via text, and had the brazenness to ask if they could still be friends afterwards. They both are jolted out of day-to-day numbness, or worse, and in their wild, raucous, jubilant dance, they bring a similar jolt to the drummer, and to the crowd that is watching them. It likewise brought a jolt to me, for reasons I will explain soon.

The third part is the most meaty. This boy, who grows to be a young man over the course of years, spends his time asking ‘why?’ He asks it of his grandmother, his grandfather, his teachers, his crush, and of the world. Some of it is asking questions about injustice, some of interpretation, others arbitrariness. This kid has seen a lot, starting with losing his parents and his sister-to-be in his mother’s womb. He is also struggling with questions that his grandparents refuse to answer. Who is Henry Peterson? Who is the Jeffries boy? And why is he not allowed in the cupola of his own home? In the light of all of these, he pushes on, trying to make something of himself, trying to find joy. He finds joy in a dance program after school, and it gives him the strength to carry on in spite of loss and mystery.

I’d like to take a bit of a detour and talk about how the film portrays the act of dancing. Since college, I have been an avid ballroom and swing dancer. I credit learning to dance these dances as being the thing that dragged me out of the purposelessness and depression of my high school and early college years. Without dance, the world was cold and gray and joyless to me. With dance, life was warm and full of color. As such, my heart surged when I saw the two characters in the second part dance with such aplomb, such buoyancy, to those drums that filled a town square. My heart soared when I recognized their steps as coming from cha-cha and from lindy hop.

My heart absolutely leapt out of my body in the final section when this boy was being taught in his class by a teacher who proudly calls herself the ‘dance monster.’ She taught them cha-cha with steps that I recognized, and then she said words that are inscribed on my heart, a simple “rock step, triple step, triple step.” That is the way of counting the basic steps of six-count lindy hop. Those are the first steps any swing dancer learns, and they unlock a world of excitement, a world of joy, for those who persist in following that route. Those words are not simply steps to me; they are my second heartbeat. I swear to you, I cried when I heard them, and saw this kid inelegantly repeat them, his teacher drilling them, but doing so very accurately.

I have been deliberately coy about the actual supernatural element of this film, but I assure you it is there. The first part is the most obviously supernatural; it uses that supernatural conceit to make you very nervous, absolutely on edge, by virtue of not giving you a single explanation for it (one can detect a tonal similarity to the more cosmic, existential SCP articles). The world is ending! There is a mysterious man on a billboard! His image keeps appearing on a variety of surfaces! All of this culminates in an otherworldly scene that I am almost absolutely certain Stephen King cribbed from Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God. This whole film absolutely feels like a Stephen King story, where the bizarre, the strange, and the otherworldly are found hiding in plain sight, poking around among the everyday as if it were always there, waiting to be found by someone in thrall to the mundane.

The end result is a film that is unabashedly humanist and unashamedly existentialist. It reminded me of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, which likewise has a deeply strange alteration to the world, and asks us to find meaning in it. The man who dances to the drums in the second part of the movie says that that particular incident is why God put him on this Earth. In light of the cruelty, the arbitrariness, and the despair that have ensnared us, the movie tells us to make our own beauty, our own meaning, our own light, because those are what make life worth living. It tells us to push on, to keep fighting and to keep dreaming and to keep dancing and to keep creating, as that is the beauty of the whole thing to begin with. As odd as it is to say about a film based on a Stephen King story, it’s beautiful.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red

Holding on and fighting on when your society is falling away

Mainstream Western alternate history fiction has a tendency to view Imperial Japan as a sidekick to the Nazis. This is doubtless because most writers in that tradition are Western and as such are more culturally comfortable writing about Germans rather than Japanese (and it’s not like the Italians get much devoted to them either). In Axis victory works, the Japanese are vaguely mentioned as ruling the Pacific most of the time when the action is set in America or Europe; the only major narrative alternate history about this that comes to me is Peter Tieryas’s trilogy beginning with The United States of Japan. That trilogy is very much influenced by anime, and has an accelerated pace of technological development to allow for mecha. Here, on the other hand, is what I believe to be the first instance of published alternate history involving a relatively realistic victorious Japan: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red (published on Itch).

The novel is set somewhere between the fourth and fifth paintings of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. In this world, Japan has waged a number of costly, bloody, and ultimately pointless wars as it tries to hold onto its empire, which has only lasted as long as it has by virtue of never having to fight the Americans. Korea has already wrested its independence. Now, understanding that this last vestige of empire is now a sunk cost, the puppet state-cum-settler colony of Manchukuo is now about to be handed back to the Republic of China. But, of course, something goes wrong, and the wrong people end up in the wrong place.

This is a very grotty novel, and by virtue of its grottiness it refuses to engage in the common allohistorical trope of giving losers of a war in our world technology beyond our own. The novel is the story of a community and a way of life, that of Japanese settlers in Manchukuo, that is rapidly becoming superfluous. They are now encountering the fate which has encountered pied-noirs or Ulster Loyalists or Russians in the Baltic in our world: they love their imperial masters far more than their imperial masters love them back, and their identity is falling out from under them. What is the point in your way of life, when the object of your devotion openly views you as a drain? The Emperor becomes the butt of jokes and the segregation laws are now laxly enforced. Japanese youth now eat McDonald’s and pepper German slang liberally into their spoken Japanese. What is to be done, when their whole worldview is imploding?

This novel, in one sense, does something very common in mainstream alternate history, and it is in making a good chunk of its plot a detective novel. This only makes sense; the whole point of reading alternate history (and, let us be frank, the whole point of writing alternate history, as I can personally attest) is to poke around in another world, peeking in nooks and crannies for odd little details. On the novel’s Amazon page, Robert Harris’s Fatherland is openly cited as an influence; I can also detect more than a whiff of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which likewise involves a political order that is about to end for good. Our investigator, a Japanese settler, a soldier-turned-Kempeitai investigator with skeletons in his closet, is a bit more Xavier March than Meyer Landsman. He knows what he has done is wrong, and is ever-so-slightly beginning to realize that the whole basis of his life, indeed the whole basis of his identity as a Japanese settler in Manchuria, is based on something atrociously evil. This is coming into conflict with his own basic sense of decency, and it is that conflict that drives him deep into the underworld of Manchukuo, where he meets powers both Japanese and Chinese looking upon the ever-nearer handover with trepidation and fear.

But to call this simply a detective novel is to reduce a sprawling panorama of a society about to be liquidated to merely one of its several parts. It is a crime story, with a complex criminal underworld. There are the remnants of the military, who show up mostly as Kempeitai officers, who are dragging the embers of war with them wherever they go. There is the portrayal of a small teenage social circle whose life is upended by something shocking. There is the Chinese underclass that interacts with great trepidation with their Japanese overlords, and looks forward to the day that the Japanese will simply no longer be overlords. This novel takes the intimacy of a few characters, a few situations, and a whole little world slipping away and turns it into an epic of a time that never was. What makes this so compelling is that the novel’s characters feel both universal, with broadly equivalent situations throughout history, but also very of their world. Murakata could not exist in our world, even if he resembles a jaded French policeman in Algiers on the eve of Algerian independence; this novel is a very good demonstration of K. S. Villoso’s argument about how the best characterization and best worldbuilding in speculative fiction are deftly woven into one another.

Another thing that struck me about this novel is just how rich it is, on a literary level. There are plenty of little details that concatenate into something astounding, of course, but just on a prose level, it is striking. I expected this book to take me three days or so, but it ended up taking me four. I have a hard time pointing my finger at exactly what makes the prose like this (one user on a forum I’m on attributed the effect to run-on sentences that work surprisingly well), but I found this novel’s prose to be a rich, immersive experience, one that can’t be wolfed down too quickly. It has to be savored. It has to be taken a bit more slowly than other novels like it.

Thematically, one could say that the core of this novel is striving, or struggling, or enduring. Everyone here is looking towards the future with great anticipation, some positive, some negative. Criminals want to rule more, as does the Japanese ascendancy in Manchukuo, whereas the regular Chinese folk simply want to live free as the masters of their own destiny. Imperial Japan promised Asia a ‘co-prosperity sphere,’ but there are too many holes in the sphere that have, by the time of the setting of the novel, made themselves glaringly apparent. The Japanese, in particular, are facing the fact that all is vanity, that everything is temporary, that all empires fail. To quote a song about another historical empire: “what’s the point of it all/when you’re building a wall/and in front of your eyes it disappears?” The novel seems to make the case that there is a profound narcissism, a profound vanity, in trying to maintain an empire, a theme that is quite poignant as America lashes out to stave off obvious decline, as Russia turns Ukraine into a charnel house in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, and Israel razes Gaza to the ground and drags the Middle East into a conflagration in the search for an ever-more elusive permanent state of security (and we ought to remember what A. Dirk Moses said about ‘permanent security’).

I have not felt this way after reading an alternate history novel since I read Arturo Serrano’s novel To Climates Unknown back in 2021 (a series of events which culminated in Serrano becoming a good friend of mine, and me joining the staff of this illustrious blog). I have seen in Manchukuo 1987 what I want the genre of alternate history to be in the coming decades: a genre more human, more willing to see that history is not merely the province of stultifying, dreary, power-worshipping history books. I for one would look forward to a sequel to this book, and I certainly want to see more by Yoshimi Red.

Reference: Red, Yoshimi, Manchukuo 1987 (self-published, 2025).

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: City in Chains

A well-executed fantasy story that is fighting yesterday's battles

I am going to be up front with the reader here and now: I cannot ever be fully objective about the oeuvre of Harry Turtledove. When I was an impressionable fourteen year old, I learned of his WorldWar series. For the unaware, that is his eight book series about an alien invasion that happens to land in the particularly eventful year of 1942. I inhaled those books, and then the eleven books of his Southern Victory (also called ‘Timeline-191’ or ‘TL191’ among online alternate history fans due to its point of divergence revolving around special order 191) series beginning with How Few Remain. I have read over forty of his books, as of writing, and he is the writer that gave me my enduring love of the alternate history genre. He is in a sense what I aspire to be as a writer, with several different speculative genres coexisting with a solid historical bedrock under all of them. I would not be the writer or indeed the man I am today without the hours and hours I spent reading his books, getting lost in his worlds. Not for nothing, his books consistently come with the blurb calling him “the master of alternate history.”

In the alternate history circles I frequent, the man’s work has something of a mixed reception. They say he relies too much on historical parallelism, such as his Southern Victory series quite clearly reenacting European history in the first half of the twentieth century in an American setting, or his Atlantis trilogy reenacting the early history of the United States on a landmass that consists of our world’s Nova Scotia to Florida, having drifted off of the mainland in prehistory. The man has had some deeply bizarre sex scenes in his work, some involving real people (although I will argue that Robert Conroy’s sex scenes are leaps and bounds worse). His work at points has had some very repetitive characterization (such as how often Sam Carsten is sunburned), as well as a few stock turns of phrase (“he said it with inevitability, like the sun will rise tomorrow”). As I have grown from an impressionable fourteen year old to a jaded twenty-eight year old, his books from the 2000s come off to me like the Star Wars prequels; with hindsight, I can see all the myriad flaws that others have pointed out, and many things could have been done better, but I still find myself enjoying the experience, and in awe of the worlds they opened up to me.

Much of the weaknesses of his big series are often connected to the fact that he had to pay for the college educations of his three daughters in quick succession, and writing is his sole source of income. He had to churn a lot out, and quickly, to give his children a future, and I can’t be mad at him for that. His work since then has been leaner, less dependent on well-trod periods of history, and with less bizarre weirdness (but plenty of fascinating weirdness). His book Three Miles Down (reviewed on this site by Arturo Serrano) is easily his most personal book, being a look at the Los Angeles the man himself grew up in, with plenty of wistfulness and added aliens. His Alpha and Omega is delightfully weird. Now, dear reader, I shall get to the point: his most recent novel, City in Chains.

This is one of Turtledove’s straight fantasy novels, with no direct textual reference to our history. However, those with familiarity with the periods that he likes to write about will see the inspiration, as the novel is rather clearly a pastiche of occupied Paris during World War II. The city is Lutesse (no relation to certain peculiar characters in the Bioshock series) in the Kingdom of Quimper, a name which it shares with a city in Brittany (mention is also made of a battle at a place called Carentan, which is also real, and I learned from the mission in the original Company of Heroes). This city, and this kingdom, are under the occupation of the villainous Chleuh, and the quotidian cruelties have become part of the fabric of life.

The exact aesthetic of this whole shebang is a little bit confused, or so I thought. There are trains, but the occupying forces are primarily still using crossbows. As such, the novel feels like an odd mishmash of the Middle Ages and the 19th century with some tropes of World War II fiction thrown in. Of the latter, the most obvious of these is a sort of magically-infused crystal that occupies the role of radio in the historical fiction that inspired this novel. Nighttime bombing raids are in this world nighttime dragon raids; there is a brief plotline where a dragon rider, having been shot down, is secreted away in the basement of one of the main characters and later handed off to the organized resistance (a plotline which, sadly, is ultimately underdeveloped). The whole thing is a mishmash, one with a lot going for it, but overall Turtledove neglects to really describe what this city looks like, smells like, sounds like. The entire project feels more than a little threadbare, abstract even, rather than something concrete.

The book does shine, however, in its two main characters. One of them is Malk Malkovici, a junkman of the minority Old Faith sect who is a refugee from persecution in another country now occupied by the Chleuh. The Old Faith is the target of genocidal persecution by the occupiers, who are sending them to vaguely described but clearly ominous camps in the east, territory occupied by the Chleuh and conquered (albeit apparently temporarily) from a strange monarchy that believes that the gods have declared that wealth needs to be shared. It becomes clear quite early on that Malk is a member of the group that is this world’s analogue for Jewish people under Nazi occupation.

What makes life more complicated for Malk is that his services as a collector of junk, including various types of metal, is in high demand by the occupiers who hate him and, on an ideological level, want to kill him. He and his family are complicit in the occupation and from there the mass murder and the genocide. He has rapport with officers who come to buy his wares, as well as a collaborating policeman whose beat is his neighborhood, and tries not to advertise his religious beliefs. He is wracked by the knowledge that he is, however indirectly and however reluctantly, complicit in evil, but he knows there is a huge price to pay if he were to stand up for himself.

The other main character is Guisa Sachry, a rich man, a great actor, the head of his own theater troupe, and the greatest star of the Lutesse theater scene. He has a much younger wife (his third) and had planned to keep his head down throughout the occupation with inoffensive slice-of-life plays until an officer of the Chleuh military came knocking, ‘asking’ him to appear as one of the Lutesse luminaries at a parade honoring the city’s new rulers. Knowing he stands to lose a lot, perhaps even his life, if he says no, he goes along with it. He is then asked by the occupation to write a play glorifying the occupation and demonizing the resistance. He does so, reluctantly (and the solution he devises to this is a very clever one on Turtledove’s part, one that he is capable of creating because he knows how people interact with the historical and cultural context in which they live), and from there is pulled head first down the vortex of collaboration.

Guisa Sachry is not a good man, and the narrative correctly emphasizes that fact again and again. He hires a dancing girl from another company on the condition that she have sex with him. He is deeply and profoundly unpleasant to his wife, with whom it is clear he doesn’t really love, and the feeling is mutual. He is ruthless to his underlings and sycophantic to the men who pay him off. But it is with that sycophancy that the novel really furnishes its theme, that of complicitness.

Both Malk and Guisa are men who are constrained by structural factors from acting free of the occupation. Malk dislikes working with the Chleuh out of his religious beliefs and his own moral principles. Guisa, on the other hand, has no principles whatsoever, and his own naked self-interest is what compels him to comply; even if he is the ethnic majority in Lutesse, the Chleuh would still make an example if he were to fall out of line. Both don’t want to collaborate, but both are forced into collaboration, their distinct characters and distinct paths nevertheless reaching the same destination.

As a longtime reader of Turtledove’s work, Guisa Sachry as a character reminded me strongly of another one of his characters: William Shakespeare, as portrayed in his novel Ruled Britannia. That novel is set in a world where the Spanish Armada succeeds, and England is under the cruel yoke of Philip II. This version of Shakespeare is a covert sympathizer with the English resistance who is coerced by the Spanish to write a play glorifying Philip, while simultaneously writing a play about Boudica, the ancient queen of the Iceni people who lead a failed rebellion against the Romans, and a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Spanish. Shakespeare, as portrayed by Turtledove, is a man with a strong moral conscience who is forced into collaboration, but takes covert action to resist. Guisa Sachry, on the other hand, is a man with no moral conscience at all, and his arc is almost that of a foil to Shakespeare’s in the earlier novel.

At its core, City in Chains is about collaboration. Many Americans in recent months have been beating the drum against collaboration with the new Trump administration, filled to the brim with neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a rogues' gallery of some of the most unpleasant, most boorish, most malevolent, and most stupid people on the planet. We have, rightly, been infuriated with the spinelessness of Democratic Party leaders in not taking a harder line against the wrecking of the federal government or the evisceration of trans rights in this country, to name but two examples (but a part of me thinks that Ta-Nehisi Coates was right in saying that you can’t really expect a party that had no spine to stand up against the genocide in Gaza to have the spine to stand up for democracy). We are in a moment where the moral imperative is not to comply, but to resist. Releasing a book like City in Chains in a time like this is an interesting decision, and one that is revelatory.

Harry Turtledove is an outspoken liberal on his social media; before he decamped from Twitter, his pinned tweet was “I didn’t mean to be topical” repeated several times. He is consistently good and well intentioned, if not radical, on racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and is blisteringly critical of the current administration. I remember that, in his novel Alpha and Omega, a novel set mostly in Israel (and released a few years before the current genocide), he states frankly, but does not dwell on, the the second-class status of Palestinians in that country. I do remember one particular interaction I had with him on Bluesky where told upcoming writers to share their new works, and I shared Broken Olive Branches, the anthology in which I have a story raising money for refugee relief in Gaza (and discussed on this blog here). He liked and boosted the anthology, for which I am grateful to him. In terms of his historical interests, he has been blisteringly critical of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates.

But the man is not without his blind spots. His portrayal of race is very much that of an older white liberal; his novel Guns of the South has been taken to task by multiple critics in recent years, such as by Monroe Templeton on the Sea Lion Press blog (which, for full disclosure, I have written many articles for in previous years). As an Asian-American (half Filipino through my mother), I was more than a little irritated by the fact that his Hot War trilogy, a series about World War III breaking out over Korea, has no Asian viewpoint character; the only Korean character is the plucky sidekick of a white American soldier.

Ultimately, I think the core of the issue is that Turtledove’s view of World War II is very much that of old war movies, where brave soldiers fight for justice, and innocent civilians bear the brunt of the ultimate evil. The conflict becomes a great moral drama between justice and injustice (in fairness to him, Turtledove has always been frank about American racism both in that period and in other periods). In that regard, he glorifies the resistance fighter and denounces the opportunist, but fundamentally casts the thing that they are resisting as a foreign force, an invader.

This is a view of fascism that has been superseded in the historical literature by a view that situates fascist regimes in the broader context of the imperial world of nineteenth-century Europe. Aimé Cesaire, in 1950, published Discourse on Colonialism, which made the argument that colonialism made Europe a savage continent, one that had come to accept racial hatred and mass murder as de rigueur, a formulation that culminated in Nazism deciding to do those things to other Europeans. Cesaire’s English translator called this a ‘boomerang effect,’ an abstract but effective translation of the original French phrase ‘choc en retour,’ literally ‘return shock.’ Not long after Cesaire, Hannah Arendt argued in her magnum opus Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazism was the confluence of millennia of European antisemitism and the race thinking of imperialism. Hitler himself openly stated that the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was explicitly modeled on the United States.

Here I shall analyze City in Chains as a critical work, in the manner that Phoebe Wagner on this very blog discusses Andor. In attempting to critique modern fascism, he falls into myths of the original fascism. Contemporary American fascism is not something that was imported from Europe; Trump is not merely the achievement of Russian propaganda, but rather a culmination of centuries of American bigotry. A president who is promising ethnic cleansing cannot be considered a break from a country that systematically expelled its indigenous populations from their homelands. A movement that is backed in no small part by violent militias cannot be considered a break from a country that has enforced slavery, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession with heavily armed mobs, some of which called themselves militias.

As a narrative device and as abstract philosophy, the theme of complicitness in this novel succeeds. As a description of complicitness in today’s injustices, it falls flat. This novel has a model of the theme that could work perhaps most perfectly for Ukrainians under the Russian jackboot (and Lord knows they need it), but not in America or Western Europe. For the latter, the complicitness we face is different and in some ways more totalizing. Does the company that makes our food give money to pay tribute to Donald Trump? Is the fast food place we go to supporting the IDF as they raze Gaza to the ground? Is our laptop made in a slave labor camp in Uyghurstan? The complicitness we face now is our own convenience, our survival on a very basic level. What we are complicit with is capitalism, and capitalism gives us no choice. This is the essence of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

That is the sort of question that City in Chains has no answer for, as it is uninterested in probing the broader systemic reasons for why this occupation, this war, this genocide are happening in the first place. We only get broad descriptions of the prewar status quo, and most of that is a pretty clear parallel to interwar Europe. If Quimper is France, as its name will show, there is no Algeria, no Senegal, no Indochina, and from there no equivalent to the American insistence that the first Allied troops to enter a liberated Paris be white. According to this novel, the enemy is foreign, alien even, and it requires of us no introspection, no questioning of basic assumptions. In valorizing resistance to complicitness with a foreign evil, it leaves open the door to complicitness with a domestic evil, letting us be comfortable in satisfaction while continuing to play our own little part in keeping evil alive, be it through our purchases, our tax dollars, our employment, our voting, or our own personal conduct. The parallelism that is one of Turtledove's standard tricks works to the detriment of the broader moral indignation, and as such cannot even really be said to critique contemporary fascism.

As such, the basic narrative scaffolding of City in Chains is perfectly entertaining as fantasy fiction, but as an answer to the current moment it feels woefully out of date. The novel on some level feels like it’s fighting previous battles, not the current battle. Its portrayal of the struggle against fascism is what America of previous decades wanted World War II to be, and what modern white liberals want the struggle against contemporary fascism to be. It is a book that is fascinated by abstract questions of morality in years gone by, while not having much to say about concrete questions of morality in the present. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how the current moment is the compounded result of previous historical moments, and how the problems of today are deeply structural. It is a book I enjoyed very much, and it has some very smart moments, but on the whole the novel reveals the weaknesses of Turtledove’s worldview in an age of resurgent fascism.

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Reference: Turtledove, Harry, City in Chains [Aetheon Books, 2025]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.