Book Review: Wickhills by Premee Mohamed

Manticores, vampyrs, and spies challenge a magical city 

Premee Mohamed’s Wickhills is a John le Carré-style spy story that manages to both critique surveillance states and the narratives we tell about the past while also distracting us with fantastic beasts and a fast-paced plot. We follow Ferec, an agent for Seaborne, a secretive government agency that he believes protects the people of Wickhills. Ferec’s boss has asked him to do an off-book mission to retrieve a mysterious package which turns out to be a defector from a nearby city. The problem is: no one travels between the two cities; it’s just not done (perhaps because of magic?). And the defector has something that cannot fall into the wrong hands, including those of the government that Ferec works for. Shenanigans ensue.

Wickhills is one of six regional cities, but people never travel between the cities. Ferec grew up with stories of how Wickhills was different and better than the other cities in the region. But, this mission forces Ferec to confront his view of his city, its government, and its past, coming to realize that our stories of identity are almost always crafted to make us feel like the ‘good guys’, even when we’re not (or it’s just more complicated than that).

On a micro level, Wickhills tells the story of Ferec. He’s a fairly broken man; orphaned as a child, he was forced and sometimes chose to do terrible things to survive. As a member of Seaborne, he’s had to kill to protect the city and he often wonders if he feels bad enough about those deaths. He sees himself as an imperfect defender of the city but this mission forces him to ask if he’s been the bad guy all along and if Seaborne is secretly the Gestapo.

Over the course of the book, Ferec acquires a small team that he tries to learn to trust. It includes a member of the city watch, Velasco, who gets pulled in deeper to their secret mission than he would have preferred and, my favourite character of the book, Agent Heopsachett, an extremely competent fat lady who comes from Seaborne’s archives and provides a counterpoint to some of Ferec’s more destructive impulses.

On the macro level, Wickhills tells a story of the long tail of generational trauma left by war. Most people do not remember the wars that made Wickhills and the agreements with the other five cities of the region, so the governments of those cities can tell the story of the war however they like. Ferec sees his city as the hero of those stories. But, of course, that’s the story that the state would want you to absorb, no?

Bringing a defector through the city forces Ferec to see Wickhills through they eyes of an outsider. Unsurprisingly, he does not see things the same way. Further, during this mission, Ferec learns more about the history of the city from some allies who actually lived through the past that is now covered up by the state. Ferec’s boss, Bardanes, is a manticore, an extraordinarily long-lived creature from Persian mythology that has the face of a human, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. He’s lived in Wickhills for more than 250 years, so he saw some of its history made. Bardanes reveals part of the history of Wickhills that has been buried and forbidden to help Ferec understand the significance of his mission. Later in the story, Ferec works with a vampyr named Cazenave whose people have been in the city as long as there has been a city. Cazenave also exposes more of Wickhills’ past and how it has been shaped by the people in power.

As with all of Mohamed’s work, the writing will sometimes make you just stop on the page to admire a line of description or the way she builds characterization into an idle gesture. For example, when we meet Agent Heopsachett, Mohamed tells us “her coat and dress had been tailored to fit her fat, powerful body, not to camouflage it.” This line shows us so much about Heopsachett and her personality, trusting the reader to get it without spelling things out didactically.

Mohamed also drops in incredible details that never get further explained, in a way that makes the depth of the world she’s built seem bottomless. For example, from just the first chapter we get this description: "The Market Street Wyrm slackened its sable coils around the dome of the old mall, somnolescent but not quite asleep, its great pre-hibernation yawns occasionally flooding the neighbourhood with amber light. At street level lay the dragon’s shrine, begging it to rest, to dream, the wooden box crowded with cheap tin amulets and wizened crabapples.” We learn no more about the Market Street Wyrm. It’s part of the scenery of Wickhills, but one that tells us of the incredible depths of this city, this world that Mohamed built.

I have been a longtime fan of Mohamed’s work, but Wickhills is really a standout for me. The characters, setting, and writing are all fantastically done. Go and read this book. It’s great. 

--

The Math:

Highlights:  

• Compelling John LeCarre-style spy story
• Deeper questions about narrative and history
• Outstanding writing and worldbuilding 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, "very high quality/standout in its category"

Reference: Mohamed, Premee. Wickhills [Tor Books, 2026].

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

Reading the Hugos: Best Series 2026

Joe and Adi haven’t been able to do as much Hugos coverage as in past years, so I am taking on an overview of the books nominated for Best Series. This category is usually the one where it feels hardest to have a fully informed opinion! This year has 39 novels in the category, constituting 14,708 pages (without considering any of the short fiction also written in some of these worlds). And this year, nearly half of those novels (and the word count) are from the October Daye series, which has its sixth nomination for Best Series this year.

This year's set of nominations has a good mix of fantasy and science fiction. There are several very recognized authors on the list, but also a couple of newer writers. The nominees: 

Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey US; Orbit UK)
October Daye by Seanan McGuire (Tor US; DAW)
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)
The Chronicles of Osreth by Katherine Addison (Tor US; Solaris UK; Subterranean)
The Craft Wars by Max Gladstone (Tor; Tordotcom)
White Space by Elizabeth Bear (Saga Press; Gollancz)

Emily Wilde:

 

The Emily Wilde series by Heather Fawsett has three books so far, with a fourth expected in 2027. The series focuses on a nineteenth-century Cambridge professor, the titular Emily Wilde, writing about the magical world around her. There's also a love interest, which the Goodreads copy describes as "her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby."

This series is the only one of the nominees that I completely could not get myself interested in. I do not vibe with books about eighteenth or nineteenth-century naturalists collecting data on the magical world. (I also bounced off of Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series for the same reason.) As a former academic myself, bluntly: I find the portrayal of so-called genius scholars running around a magic-infused elite academia annoying. It’s so far from the realities of an academic career that, even though I know that fantasy novels about the fae are not here to accurately portray higher education, I just can’t get past it.

But I think it’s definitely a case of the wrong reader! People love this series. The first book in the series is a bestseller in the UK, US, and Canada. It got chosen as an NPR Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Locus Award.

With only three books out so far, I think it's at a bit of a disadvantage in the competition, but it definitely has its fans.

October Daye: 

This series follows October (“Toby”), a half-fae changling and knight at a local fae court, as she navigates the complex politics of Fairie. Along the way, she makes friends and enemies as friends become enemies and enemies become friends.

If you do not like stories that center on elite bloodlines and who is the purest of the pureblood, this might not be the series for you. While Toby fights for changeling rights and recognition, refusing to kowtow to the rules of Fairie that say that the First Born and the Pure Bloods are the best, the special people in this world are usually special because of who their parents are.

But, at its heart, this is a very entertaining and diverting urban fantasy. Each book finds Toby facing new challenges (and sometimes it can feel like McGuire never gives her protagonist a moment of rest), solving new mysteries, and righting the past wrongs of Fairie. It's not quite a 'monster of the week' series, as it has a long and complex central storyline that gets twistier with each book.

Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series is the longest of all the nominees by a lot. It has nineteen books so far (book 20 is expected in September 2026) and a variety of short fiction set in the universe. This is its sixth nomination for Best Series. I kind of suspect that its fans will keep nominating it until it wins. 

Old Man’s War: 

The story of Old Man’s War begins with John Perry, a 75-year-old man on earth who enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). The CDF is a completely independent authority and maintains ‘quarantine laws’ that keep the info about what’s happening in space fairly secret. They allow some people on earth to enlist at age 75; people know that they will be made young again, but are not sure how.

As a new recruit, Perry quickly learns about various alien species (and how to kill them) and about CDF technology and politics. The first book tackles themes centering on the ethics of extending life; questions about mortality and what makes one a human or individual; and issues related to colonialism and war. It’s a clear update to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, where—to my great relief—Scalzi ditched the fascism and warmongering against aliens for the politics of a smart wifeguy curious about the universe around him.

As the series expands, we sometimes return to the life of John Perry, but we just as often get other stories in the broader universe. We learn much more about various alien species and the ways that the CDF has worked to keep earth isolated from the universe.

The Old Man’s War series is what started Scalzi’s career in Science Fiction and Fantasy. He began self-publishing the first book on his website chapter-by-chapter in 2002. It was popular enough that Tor gave it a chance: the first printing of the hardcover sold out in three weeks.

Scalzi has also used the series to explore writing from different perspectives and different ways of telling and releasing stories. While most of the books are told from a first person perspective, he tries out third person in Ghost Brigades (book 2). Books 5 and 6 (The Human Division and End of All Things) are both written from several different perspectives without a central plot and were released as digital serials before being collected into a novel for publication. And books 3 and 4 (The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale) both have the same plot, but told from different character perspectives. Scalzi has talked about how writing Zoe’s Tale, which is told from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl, was a new experience for him.

Scalzi is a very successful and recognized SFF author: Redshirts won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2013 and Scalzi has, amusingly, won Hugos for Best Fan Writer (2008) and Best Related Work (2009) for his blog, "Whatever." While Redshirts remains very popular, I kind of want one of his more serious (only ‘more’ serious; Scalzi’s books are never completely serious) works to win a Hugo.

I have to admit that this is the series that I am hoping wins. I am a longtime John Scalzi fan, but I deeply prefer Scalzi’s space operas (Old Man’s War; The Interdependency) and mysteries (Head On; This Dispatcher) to Scalzi’s standalone “silly” books. I mean, I have read them all! But I prefer the former. 

The Chronicles of Osreth: 

This series is somewhat unusual. The Goblin Emperor is a fairly traditional high fantasy that pairs Byzantine style politics and court intrigue with issues of discrimination and its intersection with empire. But the book allows us to enjoy the real fantasy of what might happen if an actual good person got to be a leader and make reforms to a racist system.

The next three books are The Cemeteries of Amalo series: all mysteries set in the Elflands featuring Thara Celehar, a side character from The Goblin Emperor. Thara is a Witness for the Dead; he can experience the last few moments of a person’s life, which puts him in a position to investigate murders and right wrongs. Thara sometimes feels like an unlikely hero: an often-depressed gay man with intense internalized homophobia, he doesn’t seem to think he deserves good things. But he doggedly works towards justice and readers get to see him begin to find a family and friends for himself.

I totally missed this entire series when it came out; I had never heard of any of them. I was confused when I began reading it: I accidentally read The Witness for the Dead and the first third of The Grief of Stones before friends on Bluesky pointed out that I needed to read The Goblin Emperor first. 

But I inhaled the entire series in less than a week. Even though high fantasy is not always my jam, I found the protagonist of The Goblin Emperor and the spinoff with Thara incredibly compelling. 

The Craft Wars: 

The Craft Wars trilogy is another slightly confusing entry into the Best Series category. The Craft Wars are a trilogy set inside The Craft Sequence series, although the books of The Craft Sequence are not included in this nomination. (Max Gladstone has also announced that there will be a book 4 in The Craft Wars series.)

Book one, Dead Country, follows the protagonist from book one of The Craft Sequence, Tara Abernathy, as she returns to her home town to deal with her father’s death. There are magical raiders, hints of wars with the gods, and a powerful girl that Tara takes as an apprentice. Tara must deal with suspicions against magic workers among the general population, even from neighbors who knew her from childhood. 

While this series has been marketed as a standalone entry point for the broader Craft Universe, I think it’s hard to appreciate without the world building of The Craft Sequence series. Without that additional information about Tara and the world, Dead Country’s world building felt a bit thin to me. I had actually read the first couple of books in The Craft Sequence series but…forgot and didn’t realize they were connected to this new series. Once I did and connected the books in my head, a lot of Dead Country made a lot more sense.

You may also recognize Max Gladstone's name from This Is How You Lose the Time War, which he co-authored with Amal El-Mohtar (it won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2020). Were this nomination for all of The Craft Universe books (The Craft Wars and The Craft Sequence), I think it would stand a good chance of winning. But I think its nomination will be hampered by the fact that it’s only for the unfinished Craft War series.

White Space: 

 

This series is comprised of three books: Ancestral Night, Machine, and The Folded Sky, which all explore a far-future society in space. They do not follow one protagonist through a larger plot arc; instead, each book focuses on a separate character within the world. 

Book one follows Haimey, a salvager, who has found evidence of a crime and relics of an incredibly advanced ancient technology. Book two follows Dr. Jens as she tries to sort out a mysterious illness affecting both crew and the shipmind that may have been caused by ancient alien technology. And Book three follows Dr. Sunya Song as she leaves her academic career as a historian who travels across the galaxy to help with the archaeological retrieval of an ancient alien artificial intelligence called the Baomind.  

The books are tackling fascinating questions about artificial intelligence, how future humans might use medications and therapies to modify their own personalities and experiences with the world, and how future humans might grapple with the discovery of advanced alien tech. But, possibly because the universe is so complex and because the three books follow three different protagonists, I found myself really struggling to connect with the characters. I think this is a series that might require more than one read to be appreciated, which I am going to attempt to do (but probably not in time for Hugo voting this year!). 

My vote:

1. Old Man’s War
2. The Chronicles of Osreth
3. October Daye
4. White Space
5. The Craft Wars
6. Emily Wilde

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

Book Review: Green City Wars

Uplifted raccoon investigator solves mysteries

When you begin Green City Wars, Adrian Tchaikovsky drops you into a world that looks a bit familiar but has enough that’s incomprehensible that you spend at least some time thinking, “Wait, what?” a lot in the first few chapters. You are wandering the very German-inflected European city of Neuwein-Grundstadt with Skotch, a raccoon who freelances as a finder of things and investigator of secrets.

Skotch is a Gehirner (which is the German word for “Brains”), one of many small animals who live in the city and have been genetically hacked and augmented to be able to do routine maintenance and labour. The people of the city all have some kind of Universal Basic Income and do what they want while these Gehirner unclog sewers, fix telecom transmission boxes, and clear plates at fancy restaurants. They are paid in Plangent, a drug that allows them to maintain their level of intelligence; if they cannot get it, they slowly feel themselves losing their ability to speak, reason, and solve problems. The Gehirner are an eco-friendly solution to the question of who will do the work of a city that no one else wants to do: hence, “Green City.”

In this noir-coded tale, the freelancer Skotch is pulled in for “one last job” to find a mouse that everyone wants to get their hands on. Usually no one would care about a single mouse, but this mouse is special. Skotch doesn't know why, but every Gehirner interest-group in the city wants this mouse, dead or alive. And, as Philip Marlowe might say, Skotch doesn't know if he's going to be able to get through this case with his own skin intact.

The world, while confined to one city, feels sprawling. There were times when I felt like I was being introduced to too many characters and gangs. There are literal squirrel armies fighting over turf. A gang of amphibians control the city's waste management, and corvids deal with the dead. There are cultists, anarchists, a sexy but villainous Stoatweasel, and a dangerous cat who might sometimes be an ally if it thinks it would be amusing. There are mystical parrots; a loud, nosy pigeon; and the rats have their own gang called the Rattenkönige (“rat kings”).

Humans are nearly completely absent from this story. In Green City, Rule One is “Don’t bother the humans.” The humans know about the Gehirner; they created them. But all Gehirner work must happen at night to avoid being seen by humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t clearly explain why, but it’s a central tenet of how Green City works.

If you are already familiar with Tchaikovsky's work in series like Children of Time, Dogs of War, or Shadows of the Apt, you will not be surprised to hear that he does a fantastic job thinking through how a group of uplifted animals might deal with building a society. In this book in particular, he’s considering what traits humans might want to add to animals, and then how those choices might affect the animals in question.

For example, humans tried to modify dogs. But dogs actually evolved around humans, so dogs pretty much did all the things humans really wanted them to do. Trying to make them smarter made them extremely neurotic. And, quoting Tchaikovsky, “being just so smart and no smarter turned out to be the way humans like their dogs. Nobody wants a pooch that can beat them at chess, basically… Dogs were already too smart to be properly engineered any smarter.”

Tchaikovsky is also interested in exploring the question of how human gene-hacking would interface with an animal's natural instincts. How would it change them? I adored this paragraph where Skotch considers religion:

“Do raccoons have a sense of the numinous? That the world might contain more than can be grasped, smelled, bitten? Skotch, despite being one, can’t say. If a lion could speak, the old human saw goes, could we understand it? And yes, it turns out you can understand the lion. But the act of reworking the lion to allow it to talk removes enough of its lion-ness that, when you ask, What’s it like, being a lion, the thing can only shrug with the new shoulders you’ve given it. It’s probably something about the engineering process, though, that makes space in a Gehirner’s head to think about the other and the beyond. Not a huge amount of space, because they’re small heads and full of work stuff most of the time, but still. The big questions squeeze in there somehow.”

So these uplifted animals are still animals, but they have—of course—been changed by having their genes hacked. In addition to considering religious movements, these changes have also led to other very human social developments, like a cutthroat, competitive, under-the-table economy where squirrel armies fight over resources. Skotch frequently stops to consider how the humans do not understand all of the changes they have wrought with their gene modifications; he hopes the Gehirner might someday break out of these very human systems caused by the artificial scarcity of Plangent.

If you've come to Tchaikovsky through Children of Time, The Tyrant Philosophers, or The Final Architecture, this book is going to seem a bit light. Tchaikovsky clearly had a lot of fun writing it, but it's a fairly basic private detective story under the animal skins. However, it does contain hidden depths: much of Tchaikovsky's work centres on how animal intelligences and technologies might develop, and it is interesting to see him explore it in a new world.

In many ways, it felt like reading the first book in a series, although Tchaikovsky has no concrete plans for further books in this world. (When I asked him on Bluesky, he said, “Like a lot of my work it's a standalone until I get an idea for a followup, which would likely be self-contained but build on the first.”) I would definitely like to see more of this world and I would be curious to see where else he might go with the Gehirner society.

Highlights:

• Raccoon solving mysteries
• Squirrel armies
• Deeper questions about personhood and intelligence

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. A mostly enjoyable experience that is worth your time and attention.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Green City Wars [Tor Books, 2026].

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

Book Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann

 Queer space pirates fighting the mundane evils of AI

Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman is a book about the power of stories to help us figure out who we are, the ramifications of giving a corporate AI the power to decide what kinds of stories are told, and what happens to the people it leaves out of those stories.

The story is told from the perspective of Kelli Reynolds, an autistic woman who lives on Callisto and works as a script supervisor for Inspiration, a media company that also runs the surrounding system. Kelli has been contacted by an ex, an old friend from school, named Rowan, who needs a favour. Rowan is trans, and Inspiration has outlawed surgery for trans people, meaning that hormones for trans people are a controlled substance. Kelli worries that he’s in trouble and agrees to meet him. Shenanigans ensue.

Interspersed with the chapters about Kelli in the present moment are chapters featuring Kelli as a child and teenager. In these chapters, we see the development of her friendship with Rowan (who we meet as a girl named Amelia, who quickly begins to go by ‘Am’ and eventually chooses the name Rowan).

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a fun heist story where Kelli gets tricked into helping her old friend steal intellectual property from Inspiration. To do this, they have to fight Inspiration’s community standards enforcement division as well as a criminal syndicate. Rowan has styled himself as something of a space pirate, smuggling “illegal” content and helping people jailbreak their computers so they can read without Inspiration looking over their shoulders.

The story was fun and absolutely worth reading! But for me, what makes this story great is how Hoffman uses it to reveal what a realistic world controlled by a corporate AI system could look like. Hoffman uses the chapters where Kelli is a child to explain the LLM, so they can explain it to the reader like we are also eight years old. This works surprisingly well. In a special lesson, “who does a story belong to?,” Kelli and her classmates are introduced to the idea that Inspiration owns all the stories because it solved the problem of having an LLM trained on stolen data by buying and trademarking not only story components, like pirates and dragons, but also story structures like “misunderstandings and redemptions, comedies and tragedies, romances and victories over impossible odds.” Then the company trademarked the names of places and famous people. It ended up owning all the intellectual property of storytelling, so it became the only one who could tell and sell stories.

The discussion of a world crafted by a corporate AI kept me thinking about this book long after I’d finished it. I have been an AI hater from the beginning, mostly due to ethical and environmental reasons, but Hoffman clearly shows the possible ramifications of allowing all our content to be created by a corporate-owned LLM: identities deemed “problematic” suddenly just do not exist in stories. Stories with unlikeable or unreliable narrators just don’t get published anymore. We no longer get to see stories where people grapple with trauma, hurt, and wrong, because those stories are too “divisive.”

Hoffman has a PhD in computer science, and their dissertation focused on AI systems; they know what they’re talking about with the tech. In the afterward, they discuss how they thought hard about how AI is portrayed in fiction: “Exaggerating AI’s power and intelligence, even if it’s the bad guy, can sometimes reinforce inaccurate ideas about what AI is really capable of and about what kinds of AI risk are most pressing, and AI companies adroitly use these misconceptions for their own benefit.”

Hoffman demonstrates how AI can constrain the stories we are allowed to tell when, in a flashback chapter, the kids write their own story with a special version of the LLM: “StoryGen—Kids’ Edition!” The program does not actually let them write very much of their own. They can write a sentence and then they’re prompted to ask the LLM to make it “more exciting!,” “happier!,” or “funnier!.” One of the kids wants to write about a shark that eats everything, and laments that there is no “angrier!” button. Instead, the StoryGen writes a milquetoast story about “a shark who was nice and made good choices, because sharks are an important part of the ecosystem and we should not be afraid of them.”

As Hoffman explains in the afterword, “At heart, large language models work—like a very sophisticated autocorrect—by predicting the most likely continuation of a given series of words. This preference for the most likely output causes any biases in the model’s training data to be not only reflected, but amplified. Even without censorious policies like Inspiration’s, the model will be more biased towards the majority, and more reliant on stereotypes in general, than whatever text it trained on, unless very careful training and prompting techniques are devised to counteract this effect.”

In the story, Hoffman shows us how Kelli and Rowan, now queer and neurodivergent adults, grew up without any ability to see themselves reflected in stories. While homosexuality is not illegal in Inspiration space, it’s considered “private” and inappropriate to discuss with minors. So Kelli and Rowan had never actually heard about queer people or different ways of presenting gender until they get access to a parent’s tablet to search for terms like “dyke” and “lesbian”—terms they’d heard as slurs but did not understand the meaning of.

This is a fairly dark book masked behind what Hoffman refers to as an “unsubtle cartoonlike aesthetic.” In addition to the disappearing of queer identities in Inspiration space, we also see what it’s like to grow up neurodivergent in such a society. Kelli, who is autistic, has been issued a companion robot that runs an LLM to “help” her learn to be “normal.” One of their friends, Elaine, goes to weekly appointments with an AI therapist. The robot and the AI therapist cannot help Kelli and Elaine because neither acknowledges that it’s okay to be different.

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a cleverly written space heist book, with surprising depth in its discussion of queerness, neurodiversity, and the harms of AI. It's absolutely worth reading.

Highlights:

• Well done queer and neurodiverse characters
• Contemplates harms of corporate AI
• Space pirates doing a heist

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

Reference: Hoffman, Ada. Ignore All Previous Instructions [Tachyon Publishing, 2026].

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

Book Review: City of Others by Jared Poon

Magic and bureaucracy in a supernatural Singapore

It seems like I enjoy a subgenre of urban fantasy that I am starting to think of as “books that involve the bureaucratization of magic,” where main characters working for government agencies try to tame the magical world with procedures, paperwork, and protocols. Examples might include Charlie Stross’s The Laundry Files, parts of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and now, it seems, Jared Poon’s new DEUS series beginning with City of Others.

Our narrator is Ben, who works in middle management at DEUS, the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders, part of the Ministry of Community, that oversees the “Others”: people with magic or connections to the supernatural.

The book is set in a Singapore where magic is everywhere, but most people don’t notice it due to what the ministry refers to as “Deviant Occurrences Blind Eye Syndrome” (DOBES). But most of the Others just all it the “DKP effect,” for “Don’t kaypoh” (kaypoh is Singaporean slang for ‘busybody’).

Ben’s team of government bureaucrats works to help Others fit into the overall fabric of Singaporean society. The team features a psychic, a spell-slinging bomoh (Malay shaman), a half-jinn intern, and Ben, who is a “Gardener” with access to a large well of internal magic. The team is eventually joined by a ghost cat who can rescue objects from the immediate past, as well as by Ben’s boyfriend, Adam.

Ben and his team face a dual threat: first, a world-ending attack from an endlessly ravenous shoal of creatures swimming in from a parallel but connected dimension; second, the possibility that their boss, Rebecca, may catch them performing an exorcism without a risk management plan and filing for official clearances.

There's just something I find charming about the juxtaposition of civil servants and bureaucracy with snake gods and other supernatural magic. For example, at one point, when Ben is trying to figure out what's going wrong in a residential neighbourhood, he tells himself, "OAR—Observe. Analyze. Respond. That was the DEUS framework for field observations around deviant phenomena. There was even a very nice set of slides, featuring clip-art people rowing a kayak together, that showed how the OAR framework could help us navigate complex situations.” As he considers what he can remember from the slides, he ends up submerged and frozen in a parallel universe for a few moments.

The OAR framework helps Ben navigate the situation, but his reference to it (and other government protocols) makes the magic seem possible to tame, which perhaps helps the reader feel like it could be real. Rather than forcing the reader into a magical realm, it brings the magic into our mundane realm with its informational PowerPoints and mnemonics to remember protocols.

Further, just as even mundane employees sometimes face top-down policies that make their lives difficult, Ben must deal with the DEUS’s past policies, which focused more on controlling and policing the Others rather than helping them. In the past, DEUS even violently shut down locations where Others gathered, calling them “unhygienic” and “lawless." Due to this legacy, many powerful Others do not trust DEUS, and Ben must work to prove that the agency has changed.

The book is peppered with pop culture references, with a light and humorous tone.  For example, Ben quotes both Aladdin and Star Wars at his boyfriend and, at one point, in the midst of the battle against the shoal, his team needs to stop everything to participate in the Ministry of Community Sports Day to demonstrate their team spirit for their boss. But the book also has a deeper core, where characters cope with past grief and mistakes while learning to grow and work together. Ben begins the book unable to ask for help and feeling emotionally estranged from his father. By the end, he comes to better understand how his father shows care, and also learns to ask for help when he needs it.

I enjoyed that this book was set in Singapore. We get to hear about different forms of magical beings based in Asian folklore, such as the manananggal, a mythical creature from Filipino folklore, and Semar, a Javanese demigod. Poon also integrates aspects of Singaporean history into the book, such as in the fact that the category of “Other” for magical creatures comes from a post-colonial era racial classification that the Singaporean government used as an administrative tool. People were asked to self-identify as “Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other.” This puts all the magic users together with racialized others: “We, of course, were in the last category, which included jiangshi [undead corpse creatures from Chinese folklore], diviners, and elves right alongside Eurasians, Filipinos, Arabs—all the ones who had to tick a special box and fill something in when they entered the National Service.”

City of Others is clearly the first in a series where we spend a lot of the book meeting new characters and being introduced to the larger context of magical Singapore. The city has several powerful factions of Others that vie for influence, and there’s even a shadowy private organization trying to build technology with magic taken from Others. Because we’re being introduced to so many new characters and settings, the narrative can feel a bit like it’s dragging at times. But it was an amusing first book, and I’ll be curious about how Poon continues to build out this world.

Highlights:

• Fun, magical Singapore
• Bureaucratization of magic
• Queer characters
• Ghost cat

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. Definitely enjoyable, but you’ll notice that it’s setting up for a longer series.

Reference: Poon, Jared. City of Others [Orbit, 2026].

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

Book Review: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite

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

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

So where did this baby come from?

Enter Dorothy “Dot” Gentleman, ship detective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights: 

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

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

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

Contributor Profile: Christine D. Baker

NAME: Christine D. Baker

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Vancouver, B.C. (Oops, I disclosed my location. Feel free to say hi if you’re local!)

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): History over all other things, especially ancient and medieval history. Memes and Early Internet culture. SFF books and short stories. Working to develop a specialization in Canadian SFF.

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: Plots that are entirely based on two characters failing to have a normal conversation.

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Definitely vampires.

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: I am almost always reading 6-10 books at a time (have I mentioned the ADHD?). These are the books I am actively reading at the moment: 

• How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World (2024) by Ethan Tapper.
• The Raven Tower (2019) by Ann Leckie.
• The Tapestry of Time (2024) by Kate Heartfield.
• Dreams Underfoot (1993), Newford #1, by Charles de Lint.
• Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of ADD (1999) by Gabor Mate, MD.
• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (2025) by Moudhy Al-Rashid. 

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: 

• Bog Queen (2025) by Anna North.
• The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, 2nd ed (2016) by Stephanie Coontz. 
• The Siege of Burning Grass (2024) by Premee Mohamed. 

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Honestly, I never know. It could be one of the books on my massive TBR list, the next book I have on reserve to pop up from the library, or something I hear about on social media and then immediately buy and devour. 

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... Hiding in my bed, under several cats, listening to an audiobook. 

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Favorite villain is Ivan/Fornax from Drew Hayes’ Villain’s Code series. I avoid heroes. 

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Reading. Is there a book that the team needs to get through to save the world/destroy the world, I will be the one who can skim-read it quickly. 

THE BEST/WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: I have no idea, as this is not my area of nerdery.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME/TERRIBLE: The secret truth about me is that I do not actually watch things. My ADHD does not allow it. 

NAME A BOOK  YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): I think that Peter Clines’ 14 (in the Threshold series) would make a fun movie!

Welcome Christine!