Essay: Language and Anti-Language in The Republic of Memory

cover art by Raja Nandepu

Republic of Memory, by Mahmud El-Sayed, previously reviewed on NOAF, is a deliciously rich text, full of chewy, intertwined meditations on memory, legacy, family, society, duty, revolution, collaboration, and identity. Since you all raced out to buy it and read it back when Stew's review came out in May, the details may be a bit fuzzy, so I'll remind you of the key bits here. (If you didn't race out and buy it and read it DO THAT NOW, jeez, how many times do we have to tell you a book is fantastic?)

The story is set on the generation ship Safina, two hundred years and halfway through its journey to its intended colony planet Hurriya, governed by an administration set up during a ship-board revolution shortly after launch. But the democratic, anti-fascist, anti-AI (w00t!) Compact that was put in place is breaking down. Time and and complacency have led to corruption, and disaffected crew have been dipping their toes back in the waters of revolt. In fact, the creeping collapse of the Administration resembles the Safina herself: ageing, suffering worsening technological malfunctions that range from transient inconveniences to deadly shipwide catastrophes. Complicating matters further are the cryogenically sleeping passengers, selected at ship's launch by the now-defunct Network Empire that funded the expedition. These sleepers are intended to be revived at Hurriya to from the first generation of colonists, and although the new Administration has broken from the Network Empire in most ways, this element of their mission is preserved.  Socially, the passengers are revered as Ancestors by the crew. But their preservation is eating up resources on a ship that is feeling the ever-increasing strain; and not everyone reveres them. They are, remember, perpetuators of the old order of the Network Empire that everyone now reviles, a symbol of everything both right and wrong about the ship's origin and purpose. Every time I try to pull on a single thematic thread to examine in isolation, the rest of the book comes with it; no one idea can be analysed independently of the others.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try. And because I'm a linguist, I want to discuss how brilliantly language — and, as we shall see, anti-language — is used to support all the other thematic components of this text, from culture to change to rebellion to rebirth.

1. Language and culture on the Safina

We can see this centrality of language from the start, in mind of Iskander Ezz, a Translator by profession. The first thing we learn about Iskander is that he feels like a different person depending on which language he speaks. This idea — that language affects thought — has been studied scientifically by Earth linguists from a number of angles, of which I will discuss two. The first angle, perhaps the more familiar to readers of SF, derives from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This idea, also known as linguistic relativity, was invoked brilliantly in Ted Chiang's novella Story of your Life and later dramatized brilliantly in Denis Villeneuve' magnificent film adaptation Arrival. (It was also invoked less brilliantly in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.) This hypothesis proposes that the different structural features of the languages people speak direct their attention to different elements of existence, and so modulate their perception of the world. 

In its strongest form, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often seems to invoke the concept of time, specifically. Benjamin Lee Whorf himself famously claimed that because the Hopi language lacks any capacity to express the concept of time, the Hopi people are incapable of understanding the concept of time as Europeans do. (Whorf 1941/1956). (He was wrong on both counts.) More recently, Chen (2013) proposed that, if a language doesn’t explicitly encode for future tense, the grammatical unity between present and future might prevent speakers from discounting future gains or disregarding future harms. The future is now, Chen argues, and so the potential gains and harms are more immediate. As a result, speakers of tenseless languages they smoke less, watch their weight, use condoms, and invest their money more responsibly.¹ In the limit, for the Chiangs and Heinleins among us, it's a short step from this sort of claim to add the SF-sparkle, and write stories wherein learning a language like Martian or Heptapod B, with sufficiently temporally transcendent grammar, grants its speakers the ability to see the future. 

Although no one has demonstrated tense-based clairvoyance in the laboratory, there is some reasonably persuasive evidence that language can affect perception in limited ways. For example, the range of basic colour terms in a speaker's language does seem to shape colour perception in small but measurable ways (Thierry et al 2009). If a language encodes agency, its speakers might better remember intentional actors than unintentional actors (Fausey & Boroditsky 2008).  Although most linguists agree that strong Whorfianism is not terribly well supported, weak Whorfianism may not be complete bunkum.

An alternative approach to this idea — i.e., that different ways of thinking depend on different languages — relates not to the linguistic structures of the languages themselves, but instead to the distinction between thinking in a native language and a second (or third, or fourth) language. If you have ever learned another language, think of how you might relapse into your first language in moments of high stress. Native languages tend to be more tied to emotional processing than second (or third or fourth) languages, and this difference can affect cognitive processing. Keysar et al. (2012), for example, asked people to choose between two options in both their first and second languages — e.g., selecting one of two treatment options for a deadly disease. Mathematically, the treatment options were equivalent in their outcomes, but they were framed differently across experimental conditions. In one condition a treatment option was presented such that it had a certain percentage probability of saving lives, while in the other the same option was described in terms of its failure rate. Even though the two options in each condition were numerically equivalent, participants were more likely to select the option framed as saving 33% of lives, rather than the option framed as letting 67% of people die — but, crucially, only when they were considering the options in their first language. When they did the same task in their second language, they instead recognized that the outcomes were equivalent, regardless of framing. These experiments were replicated across a variety of languages and scenarios, and the outcome was reliably similar: people were less susceptible to emotional framing in their second language. The authors propose that the mechanism relates to cognitive load: when you're thinking about a language you know less well, you don't have the brainspace to spare for emotional reasoning.

Iskander's split personality could be understood from either of these two perspectives. Arabek, his native language, is rich with different expressions of emotion — especially cursing (oh, especially cursing!). Why shouldn't using a language which encourages emotional expression result in a personality that is is quick to smile and laugh, effusive and expressive? By contrast, in Inglez, the language of ship administration, Iskander's second language, he is formal and proper, as would be expected in a language whose sole purpose is directed towards formal pursuits. 

Alternatively, you could imagine that the cognitive load of operating in a foreign language like Inglez would tax Iskander enough that he must tamp down on cognitive indulgences like emotion. (However, since he falls in love with a woman to whom he communicates in Inglez, this seems less persuasive).

But I think the personality-language match here is doing a third thing. Forget linguistic research. Instead, consider Iskander's personalities through a narrative lens. The Safina houses its thousands of inhabitants in different berths, and although its original crew members came from different nations and ethnic groups, the Compact’s First Crew after the revolution decided to group people not by ethnicity or religion, but by language. By grouping people based on voluntarily mutable characteristics — anyone can learn a new language — the crew can guarantee equality and unity, with translators to ease linguistic barriers to cooperative group action. Thus, the different berths speak Arabek, Manda, Canto, Malay, Russ, Nihon, Torkdil² and others. And to communicate across berths, all are united by Inglez, the language of official administration. 

Inglez is no one's native language, but anyone who wishes to work in Administration, or indeed climb above the lowest ranks in other divisions, must learn it.³  But Iskander's role as a Translator also serves a second purpose: in addition to simply conveying meaning, he also serves as a kind of lawyer. He ensures that all the paperwork — for criminal defenses, marriages, births, deaths — is prepared and filed properly. His use of Inglez, then, is fundamentally administrative. No wonder he develops a stodgy, no-fun, stuffed shirt persona in Inglez: not necessarily because Inglez's grammatical structure encourages stodginess, and not because he is less emotional in a second language; but because that particular second language is tied primarily to the culture of paperwork.

And what goes for Inglez goes for all the other language on the Safina. The linguistic variety might have been intended to serve as a mutable grouping characteristic, but the different berths have preserved — or developed, or strengthened — their differences since launch day in more dimensions than just language. Religion, fashion, culture, and values vary enormously across berths, defying the original goals of preserving social mobility.

The fact that the ship's original crew contained so many speakers of so many languages, and yet not English, feels like a pleasing thumb in the eye of English linguistic imperialism. Whatever this future Network Empire was that had the power to dominate the world and build generation colony ships, it did not require English to do it. However, the fact that English — and thus Inglez — was consciously adopted to become the language of status and privilege on the Safina is harder to interpret. Is it a straightforward world-building consequence of what happens when one language is made the language of power? An authorial commentary on the inescapable dominance of English in our current world? A thematic invocation of the tensions inherent in any society where English-speakers specifically control all decisions, and vernacular speakers must learn English to have any power? 

The last option is certainly consistent with the unfolding events in the book. By 200 years into the journey, organized crime groups — or covens — are everywhere, spreading violence in their internecine disputes; and even law-abiding crew have started to develop linguistic bigotries, or 'berthisms' betraying the philosophy of social mobility that underpinned the berth-grouping structure. Administrators throw complications in front of crew who want to marry across berths, linguistic and religious fundamentalists are developing with berths. The Compact is breaking down (like the ship), or perhaps was imperfect from the start (like all societies). Chaos threatens; agitators whisper of revolution, and the crew, divided as they are across berths and languages, are losing touch with the shared purpose that is supposed to unify them in their mission. Iskander is different people in different languages. He's not sure which of them is the real him. It's not clear which version of the Safina will survive to see Hurriya. 

2. Language and change on the Safina 

Languages change over time. As we can see in the spellings of the Safina's languages, Arabek is not the same as its ancestor Arabic; Russ is not Russian; Torkdil is not Turkish; Inglez is not English. This shift is made all the more evident when one of the sleeping Ancestors, Heba Hilal, is woken from hibernation and finds herself confronted with 200 years of linguistic drift. From her perspective, she talks like a hard-boiled detective — appropriate enough, given her previous employment back on Earth as a military investigator. But when we see her from the Safina's crew's eyes, her speech is archaic.  'Grant you mercy,' she says. 'Wouldst thou like to come in?'

And yet not all speech changes at the same rate. Hilal observes that Inglez has changed much less from English than Arabek has changed from Arabic. This is linguistically believable: standardized languages that are formally taught (like Inglez) will remain far more stable across the centuries than  casual, vernacular languages (like Arabek). In fact, Arabek itself is diglossic, with different versions used in different contexts. Formal, scholarly, religious Arabek is much the same as Hilal remembers. Only the vernacular Arabek requires her to rely on her still-intact AI-implant to help her with automatic translations. 

This split in Arabek on the Safina echoes the status of Arabic in modern-day earth: Modern Standard Arabic is the language of news, politics, and education. It is no one's native language but everyone's second language (does that sound familiar?). Meanwhile, the vernacular Arabic dialects — Mahgrebi, Levantine, Gulf, Egyption, and others — have diverged from their common ancestor to the point that speakers of some varieties verge on mutually unintelligible. Speakers of Gulf dialects, spoken around the Arabian Gulf (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar) can understand each other easily, but have difficulty understanding Mahgrebi dialects, spoken in Algeria and Morocco.⁴ On the Safina, the Modern Standard Arabic from Earth, like English/Inglez, have retained much of their 200-year-old character. Only the vernacular Arabic varieties have continued to grow and change until they are nearly unintelligible to Hilal's ear.

The shifting rates of language development mirror the Safina’s social tensions between conservatism and change. This parallelism is beautifully apparent in the role of the Ancestors. Is it respect for culture and heritage that leads the crew to maintain the Ancestors in cryogenic stasis, celebrating them on the anniversary of the launch, visiting them and honoring them on ship holidays? Or is it mindless subservience to the last remnants of the brutal Network Empire, whose voracious violence eventually destroyed Earth itself? Is there anything to be gained by preserving the Ancestors? They were selected, after all, for their expertise in geology, meteorology, agriculture, and all the other skills that will eventually be necessary for colonizing a new world. But they also are the last representatives of that same Network Empire, with the technological augments still in place, ideologically devoted to a regime which the ship's crew rejected centuries before. And it should not be ignored that they consume enormous quantities of Safina’s resources, at exactly the time when the ship is itself strained and breaking down. How can the ancestors' potential future contributions be balanced against the equally undeniable dangers they represent — both now, asleep, and in the future, awake? When they wake on Hurriya, they will speak old languages that none of the crew understand. In their mouths, a world that is 400 years dead and gone will return. 

3. Anti-language and anti-society

The fracture lines between embracing change and conserving the past fuel both crime and revolutionary fervor among the crew, who coalesce into multiple activist groups, also called covens. These covens both follow the language-based divisions and also cross-cut them. Along linguistic lines, for example, we have the Karls, or Kommunists among the Russ-speaking births, and the more violently-minded Vory; the Haraka in the Arabek-speaking births; the Gokudo in the Nihon-speaking berths; the Zendistas among the Portuguese-descendents. Although these covens have their own primary linguistic affiliations, they must also communicate with each other, both for purposes of illicit trade, but also for coordinating larger criminal or political actions. Crucially, though, they do not communicate in the existing lingua franca of Inglez. They use a different mode of communication: Nupol.

Nupol is described as an argot, a polyglot blend of words from every language on the ship — and some that didn't make it into space — slotted into an Inglez grammatical frame. Russ contributes numbers and a lot of body parts; German or Yiddish's descendant seems to have provided negatives and some obscenities; Portuguese or Spanish or some other Romance language provided some abstract ideas about work and thought  and freedom, along with some personal and relative pronouns, and temporal adverbs. Still, each word can be more or less directly with an intended English counterpart. The reason it's possible to learn Nupol is because it is not an entirely novel language. The syntax of the sentences remains familiar. Even the morphology is unremarkable: To cog — to think or feel — inflects like any other verb: Today I cog, right now I am cogging, yesterday I cogged, tomorrow I will cog. Gulliver — head — pluralizes into gullivers. Nupol is Inglez relexicalized, but not regrammaticalized. 

Nupol is almost a textbook example of what Halliday (1976) called an 'anti-language'. Anti-languages are the communicative practices of anti-societies. In Halliday's words, "An anti-society is a society that is set up within another society as a alternative to it. It is a mode of resistance, resistance which may take the form passive symbiosis or of active hostility and even destruction" (pg 570). The covens on the Safina are all of these things. Some — the Zendistas, the Gokudo — seem to be content simply to to exist in their own carved out domains, existing in mostly passive symbiosis with the ship’s administration. Other covens take more active forms of hostility, but differ in the degree to which they advocate for active destruction. The Vory want to overthrow the administration and replace it with their own head, but otherwise preserve the social order. The Kommunistas want to go further, and set up  a new social order, build a new Compact.

These revolutionary goals make literal another feature of anti-languages. As Halliday argues, every language reinforces the agreed-upon social order that structures its speakers' consensus reality. Every time someone speaks, they must decide what to say, and what to leave unsaid; and every one of those decisions conveys something about the interlocutors' shared reality: This thing is new, and require explicit remark, and so we say it. All of those other things are normal, background parts of daily life, and not worth saying. So we say, 'Hey, your fly is undone' to identify the bit of the world that departs from the norm, without bothering to remark on all the shared knowledge about the convention of going about clothed rather than naked, the standard modes and mechanisms of standard garments, or the particular tabooness of crotch-associated wardrobe malfunctions. In this way, language helps to construct and maintain our shared reality. 

By speaking Nupol, the members of the covens, the coves, are not simply communicating across berths that speak different languages, or signalling in-group membership to other coves, or avoiding being overheard by out-group members — although they are doing that too. But more than that, they are also building the new social reality they want to spread: one without the Administration in charge; one run by the covens, structured by coven social hierarchies, governed by coven values. 

Because this new social reality is defined in opposition to the existing standard, it is not, in itself, fixed. There are many ways to oppose the dominant order, and as the covens shift their goals and membership and internal power relations, so too does Nupol shift. The Nupol spoken by Badreddine, the leader of the Haraka, sounds old-fashioned to the younger members, and indeed one of them reflects that Badreddine himself is the oldest person speaking Nupol that she has ever seen. To her, Nupol is the language of youth, of change, of agitation. 

An early scene in the book illustrates Nupol's quicksilver changeability in action. Iskander’s sister Damietta is aligned with Badreddine and the Haraka, and in this scene she is approached by a former friend called Britva to convey a message to Badreddine. This is the first time they've met in years. In her youth, Britva had been arrested for smuggling and spent time in prison; and following her release she joined the Russ-speaking Kommunistas. Although both women know Arabek, they converse in Nupol, because the substance of their interaction is aligned with coven activity: Britva's message is a proposed alliance between her coven, the Kommunistas, and Damietta's, the Haraka. During this conversation, Britva uses words Damietta doesn’t know, and so needs to explain their meaning to Damietta: strax — itself derived from a Russ(ian) root — means to fear something. In other words, as Britva’s Kommunist-aligned influence spreads through these proposed alliances, she also influences the Nupol of the people she contacts. New words enter the anti-language and spread, reflecting changes in the structures of the anti-society that uses it.

4. The Inglez substrate

I mentioned earlier that Nupol is constructed by relexicalizing Inglez: new words are introduced to replace standard vocabulary, without altering the grammatical frame. But why must the grammatical frame, the substrate language, be Inglez specifically? As I see it, there are two reasons: one trivial, the other metaphorical and delicious.

Trivially, the coves needs to be able to understand each other.  The crew don't necessarily know Arabek and Russ and Manda and Torkdil and Canto. (Even Translators like Iskander don't know all the languages themselves. Iskander is actively working on learning Nihon.) What the crew do all know is Inglez, to one degree or another. So if Nupol is built upon Inglez, everyone has access to a recognizable scaffold from which the unfamiliar bits can be puzzled out. (The reader must do quite a lot of this. It helps to know a certain amount of Russian.)

Metaphorically, recall that Halliday describes anti-languages as the language of an anti-society, and describes anti-societies as organizations defined in opposition to the dominant social order. A completely new language would be a thing in itself, able to exist independently of any other social order beyond the one belonging to its speakers. An anti-language, on the other hand, must be built upon the substrate that it exists in opposition to. You need to start with Inglez before you can build a language defined in opposition to Inglez. 

The delicious consequence of this metaphor extends further. Inglez is the language of privilege and power, but by providing the substrate of Nupol, it is also the means of unifying the coves who might otherwise struggle to unite their forces to greater action. If the brewing revolution is to be successful, then the new consensus reality, constructed and reinforced by the use of Nupol, will sprout from seeds planted in the earth of Inglez. And what could be more appropriate? On the Safina, the dead are composted to create food for the new generations that replace them. The old consensus reality is dying. The new struggles to be born. Now is the time of anti-language.

 ——

1 This particular proposal got a lot of attention at the time, although I don’t believe it was ever accepted as more than a cool idea that lacked proper scientific support. Just last year my department — and I'm sure other linguistics departments in universities around the UK — was approached by a banking firm, because they were considering developing a marketing campaign about savings and investments based on this idea. They wanted to get some real linguists to approve it as valid science. I do not believe campaign ever launched. 

2 The languages that Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, and English become after hundreds of years.

3 Given that one component of the growing corruption in the ship relates to the way plum Admin posts are passed down within families; and given that people who fall in love across berths often end up speaking to each other in Inglez — as Iskander and his girlfriend Taki do — I have my doubts about how long Inglez can remain 'no one's native language'. It's not explicitly discussed, but I suspect a lot of those hereditary admin families and cross-berth couplings probably do end up speak Inglez at the breakfast table with their children. 

4 This information comes from my PhD student, who is currently studying the use of intonation to interpret syntactic ambiguities in Kuwaiti Arabic, and the extent to which Kuwait Arabic-English bilinguals can use the same perceptual strategies to interpret prosodic cues in the two language.

References

Berreby, D. 2012. Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language You Speak. The Big Think. http://bigthink.com/Mind-Matters/obese-smoker-no-retirement-savings-perhaps-its-because-of-the-language-you-speak 

Chiang, T. Story of Your Life, in Stories of Your Life, and others. [Tor, 2002].

El Sayed, Mahmud. The Republic of Memory. [Gollancz, 2026].

Thierry, G, Athanasopoulos, P., Wiggett, A., Dering, B., and J. Kuipers. 2009. Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception. PNAS 106:4567–4570. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 

Fausey, C. M., and L. Boroditsky. 2008. English and Spanish Speakers Remember Causal Agents Differently. In Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Washington, D.C. https://escholarship.org/content/qt4425600t/qt4425600t.pdf 

Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. Anti-languages. American Anthropologist, 78(3): 570-584. https://www.jstor.org/stable/674418 

Heinlein, R. Stranger in a Strange Land. [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961].

Keysar, B., Sayuri, L. H., and S. G. An. (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases Psychological Science 23(6): 661 – 668. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41489753 

Liberman, M. 2012. Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3764 

Pullum, G. K. 2012. Keith Chen, Whorfian economist. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756 

Sedivy, J. 2012. Thought Experiments on language and thought. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3797 

​Whorf, B. L. (1940/1956). An American Indian Model of the Universe. In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Caroll. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. Pg. 57​.

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

Book Review: Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey

Guys, is this a romance?

cover art by Anders Røkkum

There are two Sarah Gaileys. One writes whimsical romps about rootin-tootin hippo-riding cowpokes (hippo-pokes) who do heists, and queer anti-patriarchal librarians on horseback who do revolutions. The other writes… um… well, works like Spread Me.

Don’t get me wrong. I like both Gaileys. It’s just very important to know which one you’re getting before you dive into a work. This one is written by the second Gailey, the one who wrote Just Like Home. This is important information for setting expectations.

Spread Me is a slim tale covering the misadventures of a research group in a near-future American Southwest, where repeated waves of pandemics have swept over the world and made a remote research assignment deep in the desert, far away from other people and contagions, look awfully attractive. Kinsey leads this research team, funded by some vague Big Money organization to do some vague Biology Research™. The logistics and funding and motivation for her project are simultaneously unconvincingly hand-wavey and also utterly irrelevant to the primary story, which is about what she and her team find underneath the sands of the desert.

It’s a sex pollen sex-virus-fungus-lichen thing. It’s a sex-microbiotum. It’s a sexy shmexy microscopic hive mind crittur thing. Despite a whole entire scene with a microscope, the science is as unimportant as the funding and project objectives. This book keeps its eyes on its prize: the sex-critter spreads by infecting things, and it wants to infect Kinsey. And although it seems to infect other people through incidental contact, with Kinsey it is determined to be an STI. The only problem is, it hasn’t quite figured out how to (a) make its hosts sexually attractive people, and especially not to (b) Kinsey in particular, who has her own particular tastes. She keeps bacteriophage macrophotography pinups behind her mirror for special alone time. Unfortunately, the crittur doesn’t know this, so it needs to experiment.

Cue the sexy body horror. How do you feel about a mouth-encrusted torso? A hand with a tongue on it?* ** An armpit with a vagina in it?*** My book group loved it. Kinsey also likes it—and that’s weird, because Kinsey typically finds humans pretty meh. No capsids, you see. An insufficiency of flagella.

So is that her superpower? Does she escape infection by the power of being a microbosexual?

Hah, not a chance! This book is not about defeating the evil sex infection that wants to take over the world. This book is about owning your kink, communicating with your partner about what you want, learning what they want, listening to each other and figuring out what it will take to make a relationship work. As my book group remarked, “Guys, is this a romance?”

It’s certainly something. Gailey always takes the horrific and makes it weirdly wholesome. There’s the occasional nod to conventionality here— some very boring interstitial chapters that flash back to how the research team met and coalesced, providing backstory and character depth that in a horror book would lend poignancy to their eventual fates. But if this is a romance, then what do we need with backstory focusing on secondary characters, when all the interesting stuff is happening now, between Kinsey and her body-modding love interest/horrifying world-threatening parasitic infection?

This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it was for me. It definitely was for my book group, though. So pay attention to your AO3 tags, my friends: This is one of those Gailey books. Dead dove, do not eat. You have been warned.

* But a cold tongue, because there are no lungs or breath attached.
** Yes, I know that hands are warm whether or not they have tongues on them! But remember, the science of warm-blooded bodies is not the point here.
*** This was the point where I got on Bluesky and started yelling at Gailey directly, who responded with a polite series of emojis.

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable (for some!) experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Sexy body horror
• Owning one's kink
• An appreciation of the value of communication in partners

Reference: Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me [Tor Nightfire, 2025].

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

Series Review: The Amberlough Dossier, by Lara Elena Donnelly

A clear-eyed, relevant exploration of the tragic humanity of flawed people, flawed countries, and how impotence does not excuse wrongdoing

I picked up Amberlough, the first of Lara Elena Donnelly’s rich, thoughtful, and distressingly still-relevant trilogy of politics and style, because of the style alone. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘Moulin-rouge-flavoured nightclubs with art-nouveau style, queer flamboyance, and a 1930s-bohemianism! Sounds like fantastic fun! Sign me up!’

And it was fantastic. The absinthe flowed, the nightclub performers danced and bantered and exuded fae-like glamours over their bewitched spectators. What is more, Amberlough city has a functional streetcar system, further adding to its already stratospheric base level of extreme sexiness. But was this series fun? Not really. Because fucking fascism always has to ruin everything.

This series is beautifully constructed in three parts: the fascist take-over, the resistance, and the aftermath. But where other writers might turn this into an inspiring, rah-rah tale of the RISING TO THE CHALLENGE and RESTORATION OF JUSTICE and EVERYMAN HEROES WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST EVIL THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, this series is decidedly more restrained. Everything is complicated. Everyone is complicated. There is hope for a better future, yes, but the flaws and constraints and uncountable opportunities to make the wrong choice temper that hope in a way that feels both realistic and depressingly relevant.

The story revolves around an interconnected ensemble of key players, who expand and contract in number throughout the series. In Book 1, Amberlough, we have Aristide Makricosta, a wildly popular, glamorous, (ageing) nightclub performer, who has, through a series of disagreeable compromises, entirely remade himself from a country boy of dubious ethnicity to the ne plus ultra of Amberlough nightlife. Cyril DePaul is a government agent who is simultaneously sleeping with Aristide and investigating him (not very effectively) for drug smuggling. Needless to say, this relationship necessitates a certain divide between work life and personal life. Finally, we have Cordelia Lehane, a stripper who works with Aristide at the nightclub. 

When the story begins, the nation of Gedda ---  a loose confederation of different regions, much like the UK --- is preparing for an election in which the governing party, a regionalist faction that favours backing off to let each region govern itself, is facing off against the rapidly strengthening One State Party or OSP. The OSP stands not only for a unified government, but a unified people, a unified culture, a unified ethnicity, a unified morality. People like Aristide, who work the wrong jobs, love the wrong type of people, and walk around with the wrong skin colour and shape of nose, face a rough future if the Ospies take over. And the Ospies have a good chance of it: When Cyril is sent to investigate the possibility of election fraud, they lose no time in finding his weak points and manipulating him to aid their efforts in rising to power.

In Book 2, Armistice, the action shifts to a different country of Porachis. Porachis has a subcontinental flavour, but it’s a subcontinent where British colonialism didn’t happen, and where Bollywood, not Hollywood, defines the international standard of film studio glamour. There, Cyril’s sister, Lilian DePaul, is working in the Geddan diplomatic office. Like Cyril, she is serving the Ospies, and like Cyril, they are enforcing her compliance --- in her case, by threatening her son. Yet Lilian is hardly a downtrodden victim here. She is very good at her job, highly respected in Porachis, and maintains access to her family’s inherited wealth. She may not like the Ospies, but she is doing well under their rule. Aristide, too, is making the best of matters. He has fled Gedda to land on his feet in the Porachin film industry, where he gains international acclaim and spends his time sleeping with handsome men much younger than him, drinking too much, and generally living the life of glorious public dissipation that often betokens internal emptiness and despair. Only Cordelia is suffering under Ospie rule, and only Cordelia has been doing anything about it.

In Book 3, Amnesty, the Ospies are gone, and Cordelia is a hero. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean everything is all right again. Are the heroes of the resistance the right people to lead a country once they’ve overthrown the government? Aristide and Lilian have returned home to Amberlough --- but how can you pick up the threads of your old life, when you and your home and all the people you once knew and loved have changed so much? And how can you build a future when the misdeeds of the past --- arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, collaboration with the enemy --- are brought into the open for some long-delayed justice? What value is there in justice, if it cannot bring back the dead, and serves only to hurt the living?

These books are profoundly melancholy, because they identify so precisely all the complications inherent in a story that a simpler book would present as a rousing, heartening, rallying cry to resist oppression and build a better world. Cyril and Lilian’s collaboration with the Ospies seems utterly unforgivable from the outside, the weak actions of weak people (especially Cyril --- oh, especially Cyril!) but when we see the story from inside their heads, it’s brutally clear why they act as they do. Aristide’s collapse into dissipation and despair is distressing --- but what would you do if you had clawed your way from the dregs of society into a moment of glittering triumph, only to have everything you’d built, and everyone you loved, ripped away from under you?

The set dressing of this story --- Art Deco Europe --- gives the rise of the Ospies a classic Nazi odour. But the book has more universal applicability than that. The publication dates (2017, 2018, and 2019) makes one suspect that a great deal of this series was inspired by living through the rise of the far right and the first Trump administration (although the parallels break down a bit now, during the second Trump administration, largely because the Ospies have much less interest in destroying science and medicine and general government function than MAGA). The agitations of regions wanting to break away from the central government give Brexit referendum vibes, or Scottish or Catalan independence. The complex relationships between certain regions within Gedda and other countries outside Gedda have a distinct whiff of Northern Ireland. And that’s not even leaving Europe! The reality is that every complex society will have its agitators against central authority, and authoritarian assholes are always lurking, eager to assume control. The central themes of this series, the flawed actors, the flawed governments, the flawed cultures, the flawed movements, are not specific to one point of time. They are universally, tragically, perpetually relevant. 

And what is worse, it remains unclear how much power any individual actually has to change anything. Would the Ospies still have come to power if Cyril hadn’t been coerced to aid them? Probably! Would there have been a resistance to bring them down if Cordelia hadn’t gotten involved? Maybe! Will Lilian be able to affect the form of the new government once the Ospies are gone? Who knows? This series is full of sympathetic, flawed humans, committing tragically understandable misdeeds, with no guarantee that anything they do matters. It is bleak. It is grim. It is complicated.

And yet: there is hope. The Ospies come to power, but they can be overthrown, and although we don’t know if Amberlough will find its way to a just future --- with or without Lilian’s involvement --- there is a path in that direction. People and society are complicated. The world of Amberlough is complicated. But so is ours; and it is a comfort to see these complications acknowledged on the page, without losing sight of the possibility of hope. 

--

The Math

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

Highlights:

• Complex people, complex setting, complex themes
• Glamour and style
• Melancholy
• Streetcars 

References:  

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amberlough. [Tor 2017].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Armistice. [Tor 2018].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amnesty. [Tor 2019].

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

Book Review: Villain, by Natalie Zina Walschots

Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.

Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?

Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they weren't so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.

Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer.  She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance. 

The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because he recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.

But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite? 

Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.

The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.

But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).

Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.

At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour. 

A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.

Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem. 

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9: very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
• Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
• Messed up romance

Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].

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

Book Review: Rainmaker, Rainmaker, by Kevin B. Hillstrom

A creepy, evocative Dust Bowl tale of con-men and folklore 

cover painting by William Holbrook Beard, 1885

Remember high school English class? Remember MAN VS. MAN, MAN VS. NATURE, MAN VS. GOD, etc? In my high school lit class, we did not use A03-style tags. These categories were mutually exclusive: if this then not that, certainly not both, let alone all of the above! But Rainmaker, Rainmaker, rises above such artificial categorization. It is all of these, and more. It's a skillfully written, deeply unsettling book that risks, I fear, being lost in the maelstrom of traditionally-published books that bear the advantage of professional marketing and word-of-mouth and established writer reputations. 

Unless I can change that here, today. Because this creepy story of folklore and con-men and Dust Bowl desperation does not deserve to be overlooked amidst the unnavigable volume of 21st century publishing.

MAN VS NATURE: Greenheart, 1936. A once prospering farming town on the great plains of USA is now crumbling under the destruction of the Dust Bowl. Storms bring blinding, choking, unbreathable dust that leaves behind dead bodies, drowned on dry land, their lungs choked with dirt. There is no water; crops will not grow; starving rabbits infest the land and eat everything that grows. 

MAN VS MAN: Into this slow, scrabbling decline, a stranger comes to town: Gideon Starling. He brings with him wealth, glamour, impossible tales of exotic travels. He has been everywhere, done everything. And he promises that he can make it rain in Greenheart. 

He hires our narrator, a teenager named Will Thorpe, pays him handsomely, and asks of him nothing more than his company. Oh, and also, everything he knows about everyone in town. Basic information, nothing huge: what do people say, what do they think, who do they like, who do they hate? Gideon makes friends; he sows hope. But not everyone is as dazzled by his worldly charisma, and fault lines develop.

MAN VS GOD: Who is Gideon Starling? What makes him so unnaturally compelling? Why does the reader find him disturbing -- well before Will starts having doubts -- and mistrust him so deeply that she finds herself putting the book down and avoiding picking it up again without proper mental preparation? Because I want to be very clear here: for all his charisma in the town of Greenheart, for all his sinister vibes, on the page Gideon Starling is no sexy shadow daddy. He's creepy as hell. The events of the first half or more of the book correspond to a straightforward enough bit of literary fiction about con men preying upon desperate people in an evocative setting; but the mood and tone make it clear that something much more disquieting is going on.

Properly exploring that last A03-style tag would bring me into the realm of spoilers, but playing properly coy would make it impossible for me to remark upon some of the most lasting and successful elements of the book. I'm not going to be shy about pointing out that the cover image, a 19th century painting by William Holbrook Beard of a fox-king receiving tribute from his woodland prey subjects, is less metaphorical than it first appears. I'm going to remind people of that awful realization that Julia experiences in The Magicians that a Trickster-fox is everyone's favourite bit of folklore until he actually works his mischief on you, at which point you realize that some types of mischief are not cute and quirky, but absolutely fucking awful. And I'm going to remark what a brilliant concept it is to have creatures from folklore falling into their own portal fantasy, ending up trapped in a world where their magic doesn't work and they must scrabble to survive. 

Just as the farmers were betrayed by nature, finding themselves trapped in someplace weird and terrifying, where everything they thought was true and reliable -- the rain, the wind -- no longer works as it should, so too are these creatures trapped in the wrong world, unable to return to the home they knew. Just as those displaced Dust Bowl farmers become itinerant wanderers, seeking to find a new place, to make a new life, so too must these creatures find-- or make -- or ruthlessly carve -- a new niche for themselves. Some are more successful than others; some make allies, some exploit enemies. Some betray the innocent. The best stories have layers, and the layers that make up this tale -- the unearthliness of the Dust Bowl, which drowns its victims without water; the unexpected cruel humanity of these trapped, homesick creatures of myth and legend -- make a compelling narrative.

Hillstrom is not the only writer to have recently observed the otherworldly potential of the Dust Bowl as a setting. Last year's excellent The Antidote, by Karen Russell, told a very different type of story that built on many of the same components as Rainmaker Rainmaker: the brutality of the jackrabbit drives, the terrible dust storms, the role of Works Progress Administration photographers as key sources of documentary evidence. They're wonderfully evocative narrative tools, and the fact that two such different books have come out so close to each other makes me wonder -- why only two? Why do writers not use this setting more often? It's fantastic!

There are a few issues this book that could have been tightened up. Some revelations rely on a rather tired trope of meeting someone who just happens to have some very esoteric knowledge conveniently stored in his home library. Others rely on essentially tying the hero to a chair and monologuing at him. But where some tropes are deployed in conventional ways, other issues of pacing are nonstandard, but thereby effective and novel. A leisurely epilogue might feel like an oddly slow fade-out, but it has the effect of properly acknowledging that people's lives can extend beyond the main events of a book. Learning how these characters grow and move apart and experience joys and successes and griefs and utterly mundane disappointments does a lot to make them more real than when they were merely actors in a fantastical story.

Give this book a read, friends! There is gold to be found in the roiling tumult of self-published, indie-published, small-press-published books that struggle for visibility in the shadows of the big names. It is my privilege to dive therein and come out with treasures to share with you. This is one such treasure. Please come and have a gander at it.

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 8: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• Evocative Dust Bowl setting
• Folklore
• Con men

References: 

Hillstrom, Kevin B., Rainmaker, Rainmaker [2026].

Russel, Karen., The Antidote. [Knopf 2025].

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

Book Review: A Fire Beneath the World, by Jas Treadwell

Demons and castles and the French Revolution

A few years ago, I wrote approvingly of Jas Treadwell’s most excellent novel The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach. The best part, I reported, was the delightful, opinionated, quarrelsome narrator, who lost no opportunity to make the most of the tools available to him, be they typographical—footnotes, capitalization, emphatic formatting—or more structural explorations of post-Aristotelian non-unities of time and place. Now, in the equally excellent sequel, A Fire Beneath the World, our narrator returns, and he is not alone.

Where Thomas Peach was set entirely in England, this tale turns its eye to revolutionary France. It splits its focus between English characters, familiar to us already from Thomas Peach, and a new set of French faces. Our friend the English narrator (as I call him in my head) handles the former, and the much more straightforward French narrator (as I call them in my head) handles the latter.

This split in narrators is a structural mirror of one of the more charming themes of the book: the attempt to split people into one of two types. Our English narrator ruminates upon this at some length, quickly dismissing the easy binary of men vs. women as utterly uninteresting and unfit for purpose, and instead landing upon (he asserts) a far more foundational, undeniable, and universal division—namely, whether or not a person supports the French monarchy or the French revolutionaries. Obviously. Clearly. I see no problems with this fundamental universal binary.

The English portion of the tale does its best to support this philosophy. On the one hand we have Miss Arabella Farthingay, a pro-revolutionary poet who is invited to appear in front of the National Assembly in Paris to declaim her verses in their honour. Orbiting around her is a mysterious swashbuckling rescuer of persecuted French aristocrats, known as Forget-Me-Not, a hero lauded across English society with appalling doggerel, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.

As our English narrator relates Miss Farthingay's story, the action eventually shifts to France, and our English narrator is not happy about that. You see, he does not speak French very well, and so unless the French people speak slowly and clearly, he has difficulty following a lot of conversations. And furthermore, he doesn’t much care for the French, actually. French druids, for example, built their stone monuments in straight lines rather than circles like Stonehenge, which is obviously very bad and inferior to English druids, who well understood the principle of the curved line. Modern French people are just as bad, inexplicably devoted to the swearing and keeping of oaths as a matter of honour. Good solid Englishmen know that a serviceable lie is an indispensable component of an orderly nation’s government and commerce. (I don’t quite know why this anti-French bigotry is so funny to me. Is it because it’s based on such absurd pettiness? Is it because it’s over two centuries out of date, and so its teeth are drawn? Is it even possible to draw the teeth of bigotry? Evidently yes. This was hilarious.)

The other half of the tale focuses on French characters, and for that we get a French narrator. This narrator has a great deal less personality than our English narrator, but does, at least, speak French, and so we can understand all the French conversations spoken by the French people. (The French narrator does not, however, speak English, so some degree of linguistic confusion is an unavoidable component no matter who’s telling the story.) We follow here the (mis)adventures of three adventurers: a young woman, who seeks to leave her small town and see the world; a scoundrel, who follows demonic guidance in return for escape from prison; and an ex-valet, whose previous employer was also not averse to more than a little demonic shenanigans of his own.

Our French characters both support and contradict the English narrator’s claims about the Great Division of people. In support: they defy traditional gender divisions. The young woman is so large and strong that she can believably threaten to squash the skulls of men who betray her. The ex-valet is so dainty and beautiful that he is frequently mistaken for a woman; and looming throughout the narrative is a mysteriously powerful government official who is addressed both as Monsieur and Madame in different circumstances. Clearly, the distinction between men and women is pretty useless as a way of splitting the world in two, exactly as our English narrator has asserted.

But in contradiction to the second half of the English narrator’s Great Division, we find that—in France at least—a great many of the French people do not actually care much one way or the other about the state of the revolutionary government. For some, the sheer weight of living crushes out any political opinions: denouncements and disappearances weaken the labour force; but the availability of labour to bring in the harvest is a moot point, because the endless rain is rotting grain in the fields. In the teeth of starvation, what does it matter who writes the laws and collects taxes you can’t pay?

Even among those who can manage the luxury of political identities, many adhere not to the monarchy, or to the revolutionaries way off in Paris, but to their own Breton brethren on the coast of France. Our English narrator’s great division of mankind falls apart utterly when it is put to the test in the country to which it applies most directly.

Knowing the English narrator’s opinion of the French, I suspect he would probably dismiss this failure to adhere to his principles as even more evidence of the deficiencies of French character. However, since he does not speak French well enough to ask the French people themselves about their political opinions, he remains blissfully ignorant of this counterexample. As, in fact, he remains ignorant of all of the French components of the plot. In the climactic pages of the book, revelation after revelation emerges that he lacks the background to understand, leaving him spouting indignant protestations of bafflement into (he imagines) our sympathetic, equally baffled ear.

But we are not baffled. Our view of the tale has not been divided—not by gender, not by language, not by political opinion, not by nationality. We have seen all of it, and the result is a delight. I can think of no better words to end this review with than our English narrator’s own footnote. It refers to the previous book, The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, in its original place in the text, but it applies equally well here:

You must take matters into your own hands. Seek out the book-sellers and the circulating libraries—hunt high and low—And find [this] volume for yourself.—Find it, and read it. We dare say, the effort will reward the toil.

Nerd coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/standout in its category.

Highlights:

• Two narrators, both alike in dignity (well, not really)
• French Revolution
• Demons

Reference: Treadwell, Jas. A Fire Beneath the World [Hodder and Stoughton, 2024].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 3: Assassin's Fate

Why couldn’t the dragons just fly the ring to Clerres?

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

OK, I’m going to confess something. I’ve been calling this whole project a “reread,” but in fact, I’ve never actually read this last trilogy. So I didn’t know what was coming when I wrote the last two posts, and I feel VERY SILLY now that I’ve gotten to the end about my ignorant comments blithely asserting that Hobb was mellowing in her cruelty, softening her blows, pulling her punches.

She wasn’t. She was just taking a deep breath before this last book. Be aware: I'm going to abuse italics. I'm very worked up about this.

And although I’ve seen the kinds of blows she can land, still—this book seems the worst, because it was all unnecessary. In the Farseer trilogy, Fitz getting tortured to death in Regal’s dungeons was part of the path to extract himself from his identity as a Farseer bastard, freeing him up to do things like find Verity and help him build his Skill-dragon to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ship raiders. In the Liveship trilogy, Vivacia had to become a slaver so that she’d get taken by Kennit, which would send her (and Paragon) on the path to recovering their draconic roots, thereby enabling them to guide the serpents to their spawning grounds and start a new nest of dragons. In Tawny Man, the Fool getting flayed alive in the Pale Lady’s ice cave was necessary to bring the other dragons back from extinction. These were horrible things that happened, yes, but they served a purpose. They made the world better.

What did we accomplish here in this book? Yes, we rescued Bee (although, honestly, she was doing a pretty awesome job of rescuing herself), but that’s personal. The Farseer line is doing just fine without her: Nettle’s got a baby, Elliania’s got a baby. On the large scale, rescuing Bee is a good thing for Fitz to do as a father, but it’s a very small story for a Robin Hobb trilogy.

But wait! you might say. What about the destruction of Clerres? you might say. That’s a huge thing! That’s incredible! That’s an amazing improvement in the world at large! you might say.

Yes. But Fitz and the Fool didn’t do it. First of all, it was Bee who burned the archives, and second of all, it was the dragons who finished the job. Fitz and the Fool didn’t even need to go to Clerres! For that matter, the Fool didn’t even need to go to Fitz! He could have sicced the dragons on Clerres, left poor Fitz out of it, and everything could have ended happily. Properly happily. Not whatever this together-forever White Prophet and Catalyst nonsense is. Clerres would be rubble, Fitz would be Tom Badgerlock, raising his little daughter Bee and meeting his grandbaby, and the Fool would be…

Well, probably dead. But as I consult my feelings about this book, I find that I don’t really care about the Fool as a character on his own. We have a good few chapters at the end when he’s trying to be a father to Bee, because they both think Fitz is dead and he’s all she has left, and everything about that attempted relationship just falls flat. The Fool on his own is not an interesting person. He only works with Fitz.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s actually a masterful bit of character work. By seeing how grim and lonely and empty the Fool’s life will be without Fitz—denied even by his own child (for a given value of “his own”), bereft of purpose—it is satisfying to see him come to his end, united forever with Fitz (and Nighteyes) in the Skill-wolf.

But I still don’t like him. I cannot forgive him for the misery he brought. The unnecessary misery. In the previous sub-serieses of this saga, it was possible to argue that there was no other way to bring about the events that had to happen.  But here, after all we’ve endured, the dragons rock up and just… tweet it out destroy Clerres to the bedrock, and it’s hard to ignore that big smoking sign trumpeting THIS WAS THE OTHER WAY.

Yes, fine, we’ve had 15 books so far establishing that Fitz will do whatever the Fool asks him, and the Fool loves Fitz and their relationship is complicated and deep and there are layers, and I get it. And also, yes, fine, the Fool was desperate and dying and going to the only person who could help him, the person who knew more of him than he had ever revealed to anyone else who breathed. He wasn’t thinking straight, so it’s understandable he wouldn’t think to ask why the eagles dragons couldn’t just fly the ring their vengeance to Mordor Clerres.

And, yes, we’ve had 15 books in which these sorts of character motivations have been key supporting elements of the plot, resulting in a united, coherent through-line of motivation to justify the troubles. But notice my phrasing there: the character arcs supported the plot. They united with the plot to produce motivation. They were not the sole load-bearing components. Until now.

It’s a cruel author who gives us dragons, shows how the dragons can easily right the most hideous wrongs—and then chucks Fitz into the meatgrinder anyway.

All throughout the book, I was taking notes for a very different write-up. I had all sorts of thoughts about the differences between identities that are assigned to you versus identities you take on yourself. Gender, of course: Fitz trusts the Fool, but not Amber. But also not just gender. Is Bee the Destroyer or the Unexpected Son? Is Beloved or the Pale Lady the true White Prophet? Are liveships liveships, or dragons?

But I don’t have the heart. I am disheartened. Hobb has stolen my heart, enchanted my heart, and then crushed it in her claws. I knew she had it in her. I just didn’t think she would do it to me.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Fate [Del Rey, 2017].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 2: Fool's Quest

Loose threads are tied off. Also, throuple.

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

This installation – the penultimate in the entire saga! – is the beginning of the wrapping-up. To be sure, there’s still a LOT of plot to get through when we reach the last page: little Bee is still lost, Fitz thinks she’s dead and is feeling pretty suicidal about it, and the Fool’s homeland of Clerres is about to get an almighty ass-kicking of a regime change, to be brought about by a (small) coalition of foreign powers.¹ And yet there’s a lot going on here that feels like it’s gathering in the loose ends of a dozen books to tie them all off.

First, we have Fitz’s reintroduction at court in Buckkeep as himself. Remember, he’s spent most of his adult life pretending that Fitzchivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, actually did die in Evil Prince Regal’s dungeons way back in Royal Assassin. Fitz? What Fitz? No Fitz here, no no, just Tom Badgerlock, one-time man-at-arms to Lord Golden, mentor to King Dutiful, and now the sort of master-caretaker of the estate at Withywoods. Not the Lord of Withywoods, let’s be clear, because that was given to Burrich, and upon Burrich’s death inherited by Molly. Fitz then married Molly, but upon her death the estate went to Nettle. Fitz was never entitled to any part of it, and remains there solely on Molly’s sufferance. 

Let me step aside here and mention how much I appreciated this detail about inheritance. It would be so easy to adopt a kind of knee-jerk assumption of male dominance in an otherwise entirely medieval-flavoured fantasy book, which would let Fitz remain the lord of Withywoods after Molly’s death. Or perhaps one of his stepsons might inherit the property. But no: Nettle is the oldest daughter, so Nettle inherits, which means that, as legal owner of Withywoods, she can kick Fitz out for any reason she pleases. And she’s not a jerk about it, but likewise she is willing to pull this string on him if it seems necessary. And when it comes to Bee, Nettle worries that it might be: Fitz is so paralysed by Molly’s death that she worries he is incapable of giving Nettle the care she needs. He does not want to give up custody of Bee to Nettle, and Nettle does not want to kick Fitz out of Withywoods, but if that’s the only way to force him to give her custody of Bee – even Fitz has the sense to recognize that he cannot look after a little girl if he has nowhere to live and no source of income – she will do it without hesitation. 

It’s more of that same trend I mentioned noticing in the previous book: the travails that assail our characters are exactly the same troubles that we see in modern life. A custody battle over a child is brutally common in our own world, and the shape of that looming conflict in this book invokes the identical stress points: neglect, income, and where the child will live. And Nettle has the power to hold her own. Indeed, it was pretty clear that she was going to win that battle before the Clerres people came, rampaged through Withywoods, and stole Bee away. It sucks for Fitz, and we know from Bee’s perspective that she does not want to go away, but it’s really hard not to see Nettle’s point. When we’re invited to view this custody battle between them from modern eyes – which it’s hard not to do, given how familiar the shape of the custody battle is – it’s hard not to notice that Fitz is neglecting Bee. Also don’t forget that he’s the kind of guy that will stab to death a dying beggar in the street for giving his daughter a hug. This kind of murderous impetuosity is not the behaviour of a well-regulated father.

So: Nettle’s exercise of female power introduces a bit of modern social sensibility into the Six Duchies. It would be a bit of a break from how that society worked in previous books, except that we've been seeing social change happening from the top, first through Kettricken's years of ruling as Dutiful's regent, which started back in the Farseer trilogy, and then from the introduction Elliania as Queen, which we got in Tawny Man. Elliania, recall, comes from the strictly matriarchal society of the Outislands. So far, she’s only had sons – fine for the Six Duchies, who inherit by the male line, but catastrophic for her family line back home. She needs a female child, and there isn’t any prospect of her creating one out of her own body. But Nettle is a Farseer, a relative of Elliania’s husband² and by extension now a member of her own family. And when Nettle becomes pregnant by her own lover, Elliania is thrilled! A possible female child borne into her line, to take up the responsibilities back in the Outislands! Except in order to take up those responsibilities, the child must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, Nettle must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, her relationship to Fitz must be acknowledged, which means Fitz can no longer be Tom Badgerlock, but must instead step into the light once more, and take up the role he has been denied for half a century. 

So Elliania makes it happen, entirely on her own authority. It’s a lovely scene. Court is assembled, Starling is summoned, and she tells Fitz’s story, his true story. Starling, who chafed so bitterly at being forced to keep silent all those decades ago, when her dearest wish as a professional minstrel was to bear witness to one of the most historic events ever to occur in the Six Duchies, is finally invited before the entire court to reveal what she knows. 

And thus the first loose thread is tied up. Fitz will not die in obscurity. Whatever happens in the next, last book, his story and identity are now known and acknowledged, his line will continue, and his life will be remembered for what he truly did, not the calumny that was the official story for half a century.

Of course, Hobb can’t give us any unalloyed joy, because on the heels of this celebration, news finally reaches Buckkeep about the raid on Withywoods and Bee’s abduction. But because Fitz is also finally learning to hold his goldang horses when it comes to tearing off in a rage to unleash some whoopass on people who have wronged him, he responds carefully. Methodically. He investigates. He asks questions. He gathers information. When the time comes to act fast, he springs into action – and indeed, the fact that he is only a couple of hours too late to intercept the kidnappers before they take Bee through a Skill portal is only bad luck. He almost made it. He is fast when he needs to be, and the rest of the time he makes the preparations that are needed. He has – dare I say it? – matured!

Not that this maturity does him much good, because he sees no sign of Bee on the other side of the portal, and so – in a bit of characteristic dumbassery (he does not grow out of that) – decides to forget all those hours and days and (in one case) weeks that he himself has lost in a Skill portal, and instead concludes immediately that Bee is lost forever. Dead. Gone. Alas! Nothing to do but join up with the Fool and bring vengeance marching down south to Clerres. It’s a great hook for Book 3. 

But first, on the way there, he must tie up another loose thread. Remember the Rain Wild Chronicles? Remember the very new baby Elderling city of Kelsingra that was just coming to life with the return of the dragons? Remember Malta and Reyn’s baby boy who was so sickly and ill-formed and needed Tintaglia’s touch to fix his heart and let his body grow? The path to Clerres leads through Kelsingra, and so Fitz and the Fool take us on a brief tour of that city to show us how it’s getting on. It’s always fun to meet familiar characters through someone else’s eyes. We see a city with a nominal King and Queen of the Elderlings (Malta and Reyn) being run like a Bingtown Trader’s council, because that’s who Malta and Reyn are: traders. We see that sweet, dopey Rapskal has entirely lost that portion of himself, and is now an absolute asshole of a General who is – nevertheless – extremely good at his job. 

And we see that baby Ephron, Malta and Reyn’s son, is a young man now, but still struggling with his health. All the Elderling children are. The whole city is struggling, because the physical changes wrought by dragons are not being properly overseen, and children are deformed and dying. Once upon a time, Elderlings could use the Skill. Once upon a time, the Skill was more widespread than just the Farseer line. Once upon a time, perhaps, the changes that dragons wrought in their Elderlings could be maintained, guided, adjusted, to mitigate the damage that would result from unsupervised changes. But now those lineages have split. Bingtown and Rain Wilders traders came from Jamaillia, not the Six Duchies, and had no tradition of the Skill. But they are the core of the reborn Elderlings, and they are suffering.

And then Fitz arrives. And he can heal their children. He can set right those meandering, damaging, wild changes that kill slowly and painfully. He – or the knowledge of Skill-healing that he can teach -- could be the salvation of Kelsingra. Another loose thread tied up!

I’d love to have a third loose end here, but I don’t just yet. Fitz teases us with the potential to bond to another animal with the Wit – a very nice horse and a raven are teased as potential partners – but can’t quite take the plunge. So for my third point here, I want to remark on parenthood. Fitz is constantly put in positions where he is almost but not quite a parent. Nettle is unmistakeably his child, but he never meets her until she has been claimed and raised by Burrich. Hod, the fosterling he takes in, could be an adoptive child to him, but actually Hod and Fitz’s relationship never does all that much in these books besides serve as a source of anxiety and responsibility. Dutiful, like Nettle, is the child of Fitz’s body, but there is never any hope of him being acknowledged as anything other than Verity’s son. And then we have Bee – lovely Bee, born the entirely legitimate, acknowledged daughter of Fitz and Molly.

Until, we learn here, that the Fool was somehow in on things too. Back at the end of Tawny Man, when Fitz and the Fool did their body swap, part of the Fool remained in Fitz, and so helped engender Bee.³

Poor Fitz. He just wants a kid to call his own. But when you are the Fool’s Catalyst, every relationship will always be some kind of a throuple.

¹Yes, I know, all right? I know. But this is fantasy. <sup>↩

2</sup>The precise nature of the relationship is complicated. If we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of King Verity, who was occupying Fitz’s body during Dutiful’s conception, then Nettle would be Elliania’s first cousin once removed by marriage. However, if we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of Fitz, since it was Fitz’s body that conceived him, then Nettle is Elliania’s half-sister-in-law. <sup>↩

3</sup>For those keeping track at home, that’s a full two third of Fitz’s biological children who are conceived during a magical body swap.^↩

--

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool's Quest [Del Ray, 2015]. 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool Book 1: Fool's Assassin

In which Robin Hobb, believe it or not, is merciful

Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci

And so, my friends, we come to the beginning of the end: the first book of the last trilogy of this magnificent saga. Do you feel a bit of melancholy? A twinge of guilt at joining with Hobb to inflict her narrative malice upon poor Fitz? Remember the end of Tawny Man? He was done! He was reunited with his beloved Molly, installed in Withywoods, settled with an estate, a family, released from Farseer demands upon him. It was all over!

Hah, not so fast, I thought, cackling in anticipation as I settled down to read this. Except there is a hint of mellowing in Hobb's approach here. More than a bit. We actually saw the start of this process in the Rain Wild Chronicles, where familiar torments of misery and despair are not quite so tormented as they have been in the past. For all that there was cannibalistic torture and the disintegration of self and identity in the memory-drowning addictions of dead civilizations, nevertheless the Rain Wild Chronicles lacked something of the keen edge of the previous trilogies. And that — not blunting, but let's say softening — of edge continues here.

We open with Fitz happily ensconced in Withywoods. Nettle is established as skillmaster at Buckkeep, the other stepchildren are grown and on the verge of departure. Fitz and Molly are the beloved and established Lord and Lady of Withywoods. They host Winterfest celebrations, they welcome guests; Fitz administers the estate, Molly runs the house. It is delightful. It is peaceful. It is . . . doomed?

Well, so I thought, foolishly imagining I knew what Robin Hobb had in mind. But there are many, many hundreds of pages of peace and plenty and prosperity that elapse before doom befalls. And although there are worries included in those pages, they are decidedly mundane and expected. Some mysterious visitors. A bit of light murder. A baffling, uninterpretable message. Molly is slightly unwell and needs to go to bed. And that’s it.

And between each of these events, YEARS pass! YEARS! Years more of Fitz's domestic tranquility pass domestically tranquilly elapse between plot points. He ponders the passage of time, the process of ageing. He has late night text message Skill conversations with Chade. Molly starts showing signs of dementia, claiming that she is pregnant. Fitz doesn't believe her: she is well past menopause, and the claimed pregnancy continues past nine months, twelve months, twenty-four months. Fitz and Nettle have hard conversations about how to handle Molly's mental state. And, yes, it's distressing that Molly's losing her marbles a bit, but this particular type of hardship is not the unique misery that Hobb tends to inflict. These unhappinesses are real things that happens to real people all the time. Ageing and eldercare and dementia is hardly comparable to getting tortured to death in a dungeon by your uncle-usurper-of-the-throne!

Eventually, a bit of magic separates these real-world cares from our world, but in so doing they render Fitz's life better, not worse. Molly was pregnant, it turns out, with a real child. An odd child, to be sure — slow in developing in utero, and freakishly small after birth, to the point that other people don't believe that the little girl, named Bee, will live. But Bee does live, and although she continues slow to grow and slow to talk, and hesitant around Fitz because his wild Skilling distresses her, she is the joy of his life. And so more years pass of domestic tranquility. A far cry from being forcibly separated from your loved ones, watching from afar as your father-figure marries your beloved and raises your daughter as his own. WHAT IS GOING ON?

And then! And then! Molly dies! Oh no, disaster! She dies — peacefully, painlessly, in her garden, with her little girl next to her, of some entirely natural heart-attack type of thing. Not great for little Bee to see her mother die, but as far as deaths in a Hobb book go, this is nowhere near being flayed alive. Even Fitz's misery is lessened, because he has around him his daughter Nettle, his devoted staff of household retainers, and little Bee. Again, the worst thing Hobb can inflect on Fitz and Bee — widowhood, single parenting an orphan — is nothing worse than people in our world must endure all the time. It's not even in the same ballpark as getting your leg chomped by a sea serpent, leaving a rotting gangrenous stump behind.

And Bee! She is small, and has a speech impediment for the first part of her life, and her peers bully her, and the tutor that Fitz arranges for her is snotty to her when he discovers she is not as stupid as people say she is. And what does he do to punish her? He makes her write lines! Which Fitz immediately puts a stop to the instant he hears about her treatment. Bee never even has to work on her penmanship, let alone get beaten to unconsciousness, almost thrown off a tower, and suffer permanent damage to her ability to Skill.

Even the basic PASSAGE OF TIME is softened. We've already seen Molly having a much-wanted and beloved baby well past menopause. But Fitz gets even more. He doesn't even show his age! Due to an over-enthusiastic Skill healing he enjoyed back in Golden Fool, which keeps him looking young and virile, his appearance tops out at 35 at most. Just look at the cover art! Alejandro Colucci's brief almost certainly included the instructions, 'More DILF than GILF.'

Ok, so, sure, at the end the Fool reappears and in a tragic misunderstand Fitz stabs him, and must leave Bee so he can rush the Fool to Buckkeep for Skill-healing. And then the Fool's people, who it turns out have been torturing him for years, murdering his friends, and chasing him to recapture him for more torture, invade Withywoods, kill people, fog their minds, and abduct Bee in Fitz's absence. Like, yes, that's all bad. That's the kind of thing I expect in a Robin Hobb book. 

But here’s the thing: I expect it to happen well before page 600 in a sub-700 page novel. Hobb is entirely capable of squeezing a lot of unhappiness into 80 pages. She makes a good showing of it here! But even she can’t make them rough enough to bring the average for this book back up to expected Hobbian mean. The mathematics of misery simply don’t allow it.

Is it a relief? A disappointment? I’m not sure. It’s not what I expected when I first read this book. I think a lot of the misery might have been self-inflected, as I perpetually braced for the never-dropping other shoe throughout the first half thousand pages. Come back next month to see whether book 2, Fool’s Quest, regresses to the mean.

——

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Fool's Assassin [Del Ray, 2014]. 

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