Book Review: Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall

Horny and intellectual by turns, this sapphic, spacefaring adventure is Moby Dick for the digital age.

I'll freely admit that a lot of things in this book are jokes, because I have a very short attention span and like kid myself that facetiousness is the same as satire.

So says I, the cryptically-monikered narrator of Hell's Heart, a sapphic reimagining of the story of Moby Dick, set on a ship out to hunt leviathans in the roaring storms of Jupiter. And on one level, this is a perfectly accurate summation of the novel. It's absolutely jam-packed with jokes. They range from the subtle, the referential (if you can read Latin, there are a number of sometimes apt, sometimes rather less so quotations that you may recognise, more on this later), through a Muppets gag, all the way to a long-running repeated bit about "sperm" being a funny word. It would be very easy to read this book and read it light, to skim across it with the glib, flippant tone the narrator offers, and be content. The narrator, as characterised, often seems to want you to do exactly that. It would be a perfectly good reading, and a great time. And, yes, conceivably both facetious and satire.

But it would be an incomplete one. Because Alex Hall is doing a heck of a lot more in Hell's Heart, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

To be clear before I dig in too deep, I've never read the whole of Moby Dick, and even my partial encounter with it was a time ago best measured in decades. But I have the cultural awareness of it as a novel that many do, so my perspective on it comes from a place of rough familiarity, but without the detail for a full comparison.

To start with the weakness, it's quite a long book. Not as much as its inspiration, but my copy clocks in at 464 pages, which is still relatively chunky, and more to the point long enough to start feeling long. In that time, while Hall packs in a lot of content, a lot of themes, a lot of angles (and less sex than might be expected, but still plenty), by the end, it starts to feel like there are a small number of major pieces that are being proffered up to the reader on rotation. Around page 370 or so, all of these were feeling just that little bit too familiar, so I was very glad once Hall finally got around to the dramatic end piece. And think to some extent the length is a product of doing all those different things all together and at once - they have to keep circling around and getting their various turns to make sure they're all covered off before the big finale. And just for that little while, for a short span of pages... it did get a tiny bit stale. Everything just became that bit too familiar. They hadn't quuuuite paced it right.

Which is a real shame, because in nearly every other way, that packed in variety was what made the book so enjoyable.

Starting with the religion stuff, of which there was quite a lot. In the space future Hall envisages for the setting of Hell's Heart, there are three major and a number of minor churches, but the ones that figure most into the story are the Churches of Liberty and Prosperity, and a cult referred to as the Church of Starry Wisdom, or just Wisdom. The first two are clearly based on Christian textual traditions (based on quotes, names and various pieces of information dropped across the book) but with radically different intents, both to each other and to my (admittedly weak and very Anglican-focussed) understanding of modern Christianity. Living up to their names, they preach a doctrine of radical personal freedom and profit respectively, and how those tenets interact with life in a solar system of dispersed exocolonies and habitats is deeply threaded through much of the story. The protagonist herself is a semi-lapsed Prosperity disciple, and she keeps coming back to her personal upbringing and relationship to money, profit and belief throughout the story. Which makes sense on a voyage where a captain is going to start prioritising vengeance over bringing in the goods that everyone signed on to hunt to earn their pay.

Meanwhile the Church of Starry Wisdom has a very different theology - they believe we're all going to succumb to the great beast, devourer of worlds, but that some are destined to be devoured before others, and those last-to-be-eaten are the chosen. Great beast, you say? In a monster hunting book? Yes, exactly. You see where that's going.

On the one hand, all of the religions are inherently parodic. Not necessarily of real world faiths, but certainly of strands within modern belief. It is hard to read a section in which the rich man and the camel passing through the eye of the needle story of the Bible is canonically interpreted as a mandate to be rich, and not see that this is poking fun at capitalism as we know it right now. And when that sits alongside pay-to-pray church services... well, it's not subtle. But it's also actually quite effective, and a lot of that is because the main character is really ambivalent about the extent to which she believes it all. There's a fair amount of musing on what it means and how it figures into her life, and that doubt makes it more than just a funny poke at the real world.

Instead, it's part of how Hall is drawing a hypercapitalist space future hellscape, from which space-whale hunting is a legitimate escape for those with few means and debts to pay.

Part of this hellscape is a medical one - several characters throughout the book are shown to have biological amendments, upgrades or replacements in their bodies, and a number of them are in perpetual debt to Aphrodite Corp. because of it - healthcare being extremely proprietary. There's even a throwaway line about someone being punished for inheriting copyrighted genes. And yes, this too is obviously satire, but it sits in that good and fuzzy zone of obviously satirical while also real enough to be effective worldbuilding. Because I is one of those characters with debts - hers being for unspecified body mods that I was interpreting as something gender-related but which is never made wholly clear in text - and the way that that is emphasised by her, and by the world around her in text makes her decision to run off to this incredibly dangerous, gross and difficult career make a lot more sense than it might otherwise do.

Another part, and this is something that only comes up in a few small lines but which nontheless made a deep impression on me, is the way Hall envisages art in this horrible vision of the world. This is a world with a divide between human-produced and procedurally generated art, it seems, and that is such a horrible, biting window into a possible future that I had to pause for a minute when I got to it. I've read a number of stories about and full of AIs in the last couple of years, and yet this little tiny glimpse in a book about space whales somehow grasped it all the better.

I suppose it's because the book is very much about, among all the other things, inequality and desperation. And that is so real, so graspable, that all the SFnal trappings around it work all the more.

That desperation is also part of what makes the narrator work so well, because it undercuts and grounds her sometimes... well, as she says, facetious tone. In some ways, she reads very similarly to another Hall narrator, Puck from Mortal Follies and Confounding Oaths. Both of them are incredibly cagey about real names, for one thing. But where Puck starts and ends with that light, mischievous tone they share, that fey nature, I is just as much defined by her wants, her humanity and her seriousness as by her rejection of it. Over 464 pages, the lightness might have worn thin without something substantial to be glimpsed underneath it. It comes in fits and bursts, but it's there, and it turns the lightness into something darker than just a person with a certain approach to life. The humour becomes coping mechanism, tied up into the darkness to which it offers a contrast. I is simultaneously comedic and tragic.

Outside of I, most of the other characters don't get an awful lot of depth. There are short portraits of key figures, but they take something of a sidebar to her main interests - digressions and sex jokes. Some of them are, themselves, jokes. Many of the ones that aren't are obvious parallels to characters from Moby Dick, especially the mates, and the Ahab figure, genderbent and referred to only as A. Her madness - characterised in part by a wholly different register of speech than the rest of the crew, archaic and formal and itself calling back to the source text - is made compelling. We can see why I loves her, just as we can see why that adoration (possibly infatuation is a better word, given how one-sided it all is) is absolutely toxic to her.

The other part of her madness is another thing that made me do a big "oof" and put the book down for a little while, for that sudden face slap of too close, too real. The captain has in her quarters a "networked machine intelligence", a computer programmed to provide advice, data processing and predictions, but in a chatty, colloquial manner. A machine with which she develops an unhealthily codependent relationship as it gives her the information she wants and the answers that best reinforce her existing priorities and intentions. Horribly familiar, isn't it? It's a damnably good take on that kind of obsession, updated to the modern world, and I sort of hate how effective it is.

The other character who gets genuine page time and development is... less easy to sum up. Her name is Q, and she is obviously a reflex of Queequeg from the original. In this multiplanetary (and more) future, however, her home is old earth, rather than Queequeg's South Pacific Island origin. In this future, Terrans, with their strange tattoos, are seen as backwards and barbaric compared to those in the habitats and expoplanet colonies. They are strange, insular and possibly cannibals, and don't have the same religions or priorities as the "exodites".

Given the obvious racial dynamics of the original, this is an interesting choice of update. And one I'm still not entirely sure how to take. Because on the one hand, Hall has taken a number of the stereotypes included in the original text and just shifted them over wholesale, but on the other, he's given them some aspects and accoutrements that point in opposite directions. My understanding (as above, incomplete) of the original text is that Queequeg is heavily othered and given a strong desire to visit "Christendom" which... brings up a whole bunch of associations. So to pivot that othering into a character who is from the most familiar place in this setting for us as readers seems to me a very deliberate choice to engage with the problems of the original.

Likewise, while Q in Hell's Heart speaks mostly in a language none of the other characters understand... that language is Latin, which comes with a bunch of assumptions about prestige and worth for a lot of readers. And if you either can read Latin or fancy googling it as you go through the book, you discover that Hall has cheekily used this as a way to pull in quotations from a wide, wide pool of sources. Some of them are Biblical, which makes a lot of sense for this retelling and the direction they choose to take most of the story. But some are drawn from Classical authors like Cicero and Catullus. Indeed, there is a phenomenally effective sex scene early on where Q speaks to I only in quotes from Catullus' erotic poetry. So again, Hall is taking a racist portrayal and making some very deliberate choices about how to mess with it, how to hold it in conversation with the original.

Q is also one of the very few seemingly altruistic characters in the book. While all the exodites are busy being out for profit (or worshipping an embodiment of entropy that just so happens to have white supremacy baked into its hierarchy of the universe), Q operates on a moral compass more easily comprehensible to the reader (even as it's opaque to I). Which on the one hand reinforces that she is the familiar one, not the Other. But on the other plays into ideas of the noble savage.

Does it work? I'm honestly still not sure. The Latin does, and there are moments where they deploy it brilliantly, where the quotes are exactly perfect for that piece of dialogue, and where I's uncomprehending response is a humorous dissonance. But as a whole thing? Maybe?

Despite my above complaint about length, I think possibly Q needed more page space in order to fully work through her character and its relationship to Queequeg. It's a big thing to grapple with, and while it's clear Hall is grappling with it, I think it's not quite clear what the actual thesis of it all is. It's just sort of all... there, in a jumble, not quite sorted out. And for something so messy, there does need to be some sorting.

Even aside from the Latin, Hall does like to play with language and quotation quite a lot throughout. And that? That is successful.

I mostly speaks a very modern vernacular - and one that screams "excessively online millennial" to me, an excessively online millennial - which is extremely informal and irreverent. Most of the exodites speak a slightly less sex-joke-laden version of the same. But some characters are marked out by their dialogue, and every time Hall does this, it's interesting. In the Captain, it's a sign of increasing madness, as she slips past modern formal right into "hast thou". In one of the Wisdom followers - who suffers an accident that either is making him hallucinate or given him access to the voice of something numinous, depending who you ask - it is likewise a sign of madness, but of a different kind. He speaks in riddles, taken as prophecies, but I think every single one is a Shakespeare quotation. Certainly I spotted a lot of them in his dialogue. Given I's resonance with Puck in a previous Hall work, this felt like a slightly elaborate, subtle joke. But it also worked really well because he feels immediately distinct from all the other speakers, and from the self we met at the beginning of the book. In a sea (so to speak) of mostly indistinct background characters, it gives the reader an instant cue that this one needs attention and that this one is, now, different.

And indeed, offers a stark contrast to I's dick jokes. Because Hall didn't pick the dick jokes bits of Shakespeare.

It's those contrasts, more than anything, which are the heart of Hell's Heart. Between modes of speech, between humour and tragedy, between the old text and the new. So much of the story feels like a homage to or an argument with Moby Dick, even to someone not familiar with the original text. There are long digressions about whale physiology and the logistics of hunting, of the realities of a long journey spent cooped up together with a limited number of people in a small space, surrounded by an environment that wants to kill you, which is itself full of monsters. It feels, in those, stunningly close to its predecessor. And then up comes the irreverence, the absolute refusal to take some of the core premises seriously, and that contrast brings it to life. Just as in real-world whales, the resource being hunted in the gassy seas of Jupiter is "spermaceti", or "sperm" for short. And I did not count how many times I comes back to this, to teehee about it being a funny word, but if I did I would run out of fingers and probably toes as well. And yet it's also doing some serious thinking about capitalism and religion. Hall keeps you coming and going, never quite settled into one thing, one feeling, throughout the whole of the story. I is by turns a philosopher, a slut, a pilot, a girl, a problem - and those in her own words - and it is her effervescent changeability that sustains the story most. She speaks directly to the reader, always chatty, always lively, often metatextual, and creates a sense of conversation and relationship between herself and us for the duration of the story. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the ups and downs of her life and self.

She - this complex, quixotic, messy, terrible, excellent character - is what makes the story sing. And because she, and it, are so many different things, she makes it a rich text. Where I found myself focused on the capitalism, I'm sure someone else would linger elsewhere. That someone else might be me, on a future reread even. Yes, it's a long book, and yes, it might be overstuffed. Yes, that's even a problem. But it is also a strength, and one that makes this book worth reading, despite and because of its faults.

--

The Math

Highlights:

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Alexis Hall, Hell's Heart, [Tor Books 2026]

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

Nanoreview: The Little Red Wolf by Amélie Fléchais

A small change to the tale makes all the difference

You know how it goes: there's a curious child, a worried mother, a meal to deliver to a frail grandmother. An errand through the forest. A chat with a stranger. And menace lurking. Except this time the curious child is the wolf, and the stranger in the forest is the girl, and the crux of the story is the mystery about who is more of a menace to whom.

But what does it all mean? The traditional versions of Little Red Riding Hood have given rise to all sorts of interpretations: a didactic fable about obeying your elders, a remnant of matriarchal initiation rites, a summarized model of heliolatrous cosmology, a Freudian dream of death and reemergence, an allegory of sexual assault. Amélie Fléchais, in her retelling The Little Red Wolf, recently translated into English by Jeremy Melloul, chooses to focus on the most salient theme that this story has always presented to young readers: the fear of untamed nature.

When the wolf loses his way in the forest and meets the little girl, she regales him with a song about the origin of the enmity between the hunter and the wolves. But the wolves remember a different song, one that completes the story and makes you want to reread the book and catch the visual clues that were there all along.

The illustrations fulfill this role outstandingly. "Show, don't tell" has always been a dubious rule, but if there's any art form where it would be wiser to follow it, it's graphic novels. In The Little Red Wolf, the text is precise and just sufficient, while the images are evocative of a deeper plot underneath what's said. The secrets hidden in the forest are heightened by ironic contrast with the gentle choice of palette. Both wolf and human faces eschew anatomic accuracy and go for pure emotion. With his huge eyes and tiny snout, the little wolf is a harmless creature that just wants to see everything the world has; with his overgrown beard and haughty expression, the hunter is a force of nature more fearsome than any beast.

Upon reading the promotional blurb, The Little Red Wolf might sound like your average fairy tale reversal. However, when the full backstory is revealed, the picture that emerges is more complex than just a switching of roles. Each party in this human-wolf conflict holds a portion of the truth, and few readings are more stimulating to the young mind than a tale told through conflicting versions none of which can be ignored. When you figure out that the reason this forest has a hunter of wolves is the same reason this wolf wears a red cape, your understanding of the plot goes full circle, and with that richer perspective, you'll want to go through the experience again.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Fléchais, Amélie and Melloul, Jeremy [translator]. The Little Red Wolf [Oni Press, 2023].

Review: Inanna by Emily H. Wilson

An interesting take on a Mesopotamian myth, but one that brings its own downsides along with its innovations.

One of my favourite fun facts (because I am a hit at parties) is that the earliest recorded text for which we have a named author was written by a woman. Her name was Enheduanna, and she wrote several hymns to Inanna, and to other of the Sumerian gods, back in the 23rd century BCE. The myth of Inanna - a... complex goddess of both love and war - alongside the Epic of Gilgamesh, is thus one of our oldest attested mythological narratives, rich in variations as all stories are when they've been around long enough. In a literary environment full of feminist retellings of goddesses and mortal women girlbossing it up, it feels somewhat surprising that we haven't yet had a heavily marketed attempt at this story of a goddess who seemingly gets to have it all (so long as you define "all" is as being the ability to wield both violence and sensuality). But we haven't, and so Emily H. Wilson's upcoming debut novel gets to attack the problem from a relatively clean slate.

Somewhat belying the title, the novel is actually a retelling of both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Inanna's descent to the underworld (is it spoilers if it's 44 centuries old? I feel like that may be past the statute of limitations on spoilers), linking the two via Inanna's interaction with Gilgamesh in his own story, but mostly holding them apart as two concurrent but mostly unconnected tales. They both take place in a historically authentic Mesopotamian setting, rich in details of how life is lived by people both within and without the structures of power. However, this is a setting where the gods live very literally among their people, in palaces and temples, exercising temporal power alongside their more numinous abilities. We see Inanna grow up here, the only child of the gods born after their fall from the heavens, learning what it is to be an immortal among the mortal, forever set apart by her blood and birth. Meanwhile, we watch Gilgamesh, born likewise in the mortal world to gods but without their immortality, reckoning with his own fragility in comparison to those he loves, and who love him, and how this affects his character and behaviour.

We also follow Ninshubar, born outside of the sphere of Sumerian society but drawn into it by forces beyond her control, and forced to learn how to deal with its power and its cruelties, before she finds herself allied with Inanna and her people. An interesting person, drawn from a much more minor mythological figure, she presents the outsider's perspective to everything, as well as just someone with a unique view of the world and how one interacts with it, as something of a balm in the face of the other two stories, as well as, sometimes, a strange sort of comic relief. She's such a fun person to inhabit the thoughts of, I always found myself glad when I got to one of her chapters, because the way she speaks, and thinks, was so specific to her and unlike most other characters I've read before.

In some ways, this is a heavily character driven story - it cares a lot with young Inanna's reckoning of watching those around her die, as well as Gilgamesh's various interpersonal relationships, and particularly that with Enkidu. It wants to humanise their emotional inner lives, and have us relate to them as people, first and foremost, even as they behave as gods and heroes.

However... there's a catch. And it's by far the most interesting choice Wilson has made in the novel.

From the moment we start, the prose, constantly, at both a sentence level and a broader structural level, has a ghost of reminiscence of the original Sumerian way of telling stories about it. It's not a full on pastiche, by any means, and it doesn't read like a bad translation at any point, but if you've ever engaged with one of those stories directly, whether in translation or original, you will begin to feel the kinship between the way they speak, and how Wilson has organised her prose.

One of the ways she does this is the use of repetition. On a sentence by sentence level, it looks something like this:

Take away water from a man, and he wilts. But you have given me water and I thank you for that water.

As an English sentence, devoid of context and relation to any other text, this reads as... somewhat artless. The repetition is strange, and very much unnatural to the usual way our literature is written. But, in the context of Mesopotamian myth*, this is very very normal. Some of the texts we have that these stories come to us from are also hymns, rather than simple narratives, and we find this repetition especially common in those contexts. Wilson here is evoking very strongly the sort of phraseology you would see if you picked up a translation of Enheduanna's work, for instance.

But it's not just on the small scale. There's one phrase that Ninshubar uses in her first chapter - one step and then the next - that crops up from time to time in her own later ones, her way of approaching the seemingly insurmountable problems she faces. But as the story progresses, we find it repeated not just in her perspective but in the perspective of Inanna, who now travels with her, and even in that of Gilgamesh. It stops being a set phrase, repeated word for word, but becomes a sort of ideal that permeates how they all approach the problems of the later half of the book, and so this simple sentence sets off echoes that reverberate and change across the whole length of the story.

We also frequently see repeated motifs, like the following that comes in a Gilgamesh chapter when he meets strangers in the desert and is offered tea:

I drank it down, but at once he poured me another cup. Only when I had forced down three cups did Uptu hunt around for other cups, and hand them around to the other men. Finally, he sat down cross-legged in front of me, with his own tea, and sipped at it. Since he said nothing, I said nothing.

And then a few paragraphs later:

Uptu nodded at me, and then handed me a small plate.
"Thank you," I said. I heaped my plate high.

<gap of a few lines>

I ate a second plate, and then a third one.
After that, the other men came forwards to shovel meat and breads onto their own plates.

This type of repetition and formulaic, almost ritualistic expression, even of a relatively minor event, is incredibly common in Mesopotamian myth, and to see it here very strongly evokes them, to anyone familiar. And that particular type of repetition - and how it feels ritualistic - lends an air of the mythic to the story, even in those moments when we feel that its subject has become as mundane as drinking tea and eating meat. The prose feels constantly considered and laden with meaning.

And I love this, I love how there's such a persistent thread of commonality with the source texts running through it, meaning you can never forget where this story comes from. Wilson has done an impeccable job making it palpable and present, but without ever letting it become overbearing - you never stop feeling like you're still reading a modern novel... it's just one that evokes something much older. I think it took a great deal of skill to manage, and it's something I think we see less in retellings, even ones that do a lot to heavily set their story in an authentic historical place.

However, and to loop back to where this all started, this approach has a downside. Where repetition can feel ritualistic, ponderous, laden with weight and meaning, giving the whole text the air of the numinous and potent... it also very much undercuts the more intimate, human moments, precisely because it conveys their opposite. For Inanna in the underworld, numinous is amazing. For Gilgamesh's newly budding feelings for a travelling companion, for his grief at the death of a beloved, it robs us of our intimacy and our sympathy. By elevating the events of the story above the mortal plane, Wilson unfortunately loses some of the grasp on those same events' humanity, and this is a terrible shame. There are some incredibly potent moments across the story that even through the prose were heartfelt, but because they felt stilted and formal, never quite reached the level of sob-inducing and gut-wrenching they might have done in a story told differently.

On balance, I think this is a price worth paying. If I want my heart ripped out by touching moments of intimate emotion, there are other authors and can go to, other stories I can find. There are very few that do what Wilson has chosen here with her prose, and I think that should be treasured. But I have to admit, I wish she could magically have done both, even as I don't see how - I think if you applied the prose techniques more inconsistently, it would ruin the atmosphere she's so painstakingly created, and so succeed at neither part at all.

On a more structural level, she also harks back to Mesopotamian myth narratives in the way her story is arranged - especially toward the end it begins to feel rather like one event and then the next, rather than a cohesive plot with coherent underpinnings. But again, I find I don't mind it. Does it feel like a modern novel? Mostly, but not entirely. Does it once again evoke the feeling of reading an ancient myth? Absolutely. Gilgamesh's story particularly is full of twists and turns of things just sort of... happening... and him going along with them, and there's a shadow of something very similar haunting all of his chapters, and everyone's chapters in the last quarter of the story.

But the joy isn't purely in the story's authenticity. In little hints that I hope point to much more significant developments in the sequels (because this is the first in a trilogy), Wilson starts to suggest that maybe the power and backstory of the gods isn't quite as... magical or mythological... as we might assume. It's never made explicit, but the hints build and build until a point where you cannot quite ignore them, and you start to wonder if maybe this one needs to be shelved as SF rather than F. Again, in the landscape of myth retellings, this is a nice twist to set this one apart from the many others, and one I really want to read the sequels for, simply to find out where it leads. To have something like that, a surprise and a mystery, in a story 44 centuries old, is incredibly refreshing.

You will note that at no point since my opening paragraph have I talked about this in the context of a feminist retelling... because it's not one. It's not anti-feminist. It just has other themes and threads its interested in, and in a literary context where girl-boss Inanna feels depressingly plausible, I am incredibly glad to see she has not materialised here. Is she powerful? Yes, undoubtedly. But her power and her focus is unconnected to her gender (though she is deeply aware of how her gender influences her situation), and so it just never becomes the point... which again, is refreshing. It is a gender-aware story, without needing to hit the reader over the head with its points.

On the whole, that level of subtlety and care is exactly what exemplifies all the good parts of the story. It's an incredibly thoughtful retelling, and one that sets itself apart by how it ties itself close and pushes itself away from the myths it exists in conversation with. You have no doubt that the author is deeply familiar with them, but also wants to make her own story, not just put us through the same events in a different voice. It does let itself down in how it portrays the emotional lives of its characters, and I do feel like there was something of an opportunity miss in the way Gilgamesh and Enkidu was rushed a little through, but on the whole, this feels like a price worth paying for a story choosing to do something unusual in both ideas and form.

*I say Mesopotamian here rather than specifically Sumerian because a lot of the storytelling traditions and forms did translate across the different civilisations there. What is true of Sumerian can also be seen in some Akkadian or Hittite texts, for example, and the stories told in one sometimes made their way across to the others.

--

The Math

Highlights: prose incredibly evocative of the myths from which the story draws, very clear descriptions of place, interesting hint of deviation from the story you expect

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Emily H. Wilson, Inanna, [Titan, 2023]

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

Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

A retelling of sleeping beauty that flips the original on its head.

T. Kingfisher has several modes in which she operates (I'm a big fan of "mocking paladins (affectionate)", though less keen on "horror, genuinely horrifying" because I am coward), and one of those is "fairytale retelling, but make it dark, vaguely feminist and contains at least one aggressively practical woman". Unsurprisingly, Thornhedge is an entry into that latter category.

I mean this as no insult at all, but you know what you're getting into when you start a T. Kingfisher novel. Maybe not in terms of the plot beats or events, nor the interpretation of the source material if it's a retelling, but in the tone. She has a very, very distinctive voice in which she tells her stories, and opening a new book from her is like greeting an old friend, because as soon as they open their mouth/you read the words on the page, you're back in a familiar, comforting place, even if they're telling you about their new partner you've never heard of, or the job you didn't know they had. In her own afterword to Thornhedge, Kingfisher protests that this book is sweet, despite it being filled with death and biting and curses - which... I agree, though it's not the word I'd use. I'd say "friendly" instead. Or "welcoming", perhaps. No matter how gruesome the murders, how many corpses are made to dance and how many demon chickens there are, a T. Kingfisher story is always a welcoming one, where the narrative voice is clear, and comforting and on your side while you watch the terrible things happen. In this, Thornhedge is entirely like her other fantasy works, and particularly her fairytale interpretations, like Bryony and Roses or Nettle and Bone. I think this is a wonderful thing, especially for an author with an extensive catalogue of work not in a single series or unified world. Once you know you like that voice - which, if it wasn't already clear, I very much do - you can dip your toe into anything in the back-catalogue that takes your fancy and know that, regardless of whether the plot is to your taste or the paladins sufficiently attractive and guilt-ridden, there will be something there, constantly, throughout the reading experience, that will make you happy. It reduces the risk inherent to picking up something new.

It then obviously helps if the story, characters and so on are well-constructed and enjoyable, but luckily she's got that covered too.

Thornhedge is a retelling of the sleeping beauty story, but one that asks "what if the briars, the sleep and the centuries of magic weren't to keep people out, but the sleeper in?". Our viewpoint character isn't the sleeper, but instead the godmother who put her into this position, who, through a mixture of flashback and present time slowly shares with us and a knight errant the series of events that led to her solitary vigil of a tower and a tangled hedge of thorns.

Because it is a solitary vigil, this is, primarily, a novella of few characters. We of course have our protagonist, Toadling, but outside of her, the time we spend with other characters, in memory and in present narration, is relatively brief, and most of them suffer a little for it. The minor exception is Halim, the knight errant, who manages to be endearing to the reader in almost no time at all, just as he is to Toadling. But even he could perhaps have done with some more space and time. We know a little of him, and we are charmed by him, but he lacks the depth many of Kingfisher's secondary characters achieve in other works, simply because he lacks the space to encompass it. Even Toadling is done a little dirty by this, and does not get the impact for instance Bryony does in Bryony and Roses. That being said, what we do get is incredibly sweet and wholesome, while never straying into the saccharine, so it's more a problem of wanting more, than an issue of what we actually get.

The balance between the flashbacks and the present time is very crisply managed, without feeling artificial, and the pacing is well balanced, so we come to the intersection of backstory and story at a very natural point. It never feels like we're being force-fed context and exposition, rather this is just how Toadling is thinking about her predicament. She's intensely inward looking - unsurprisingly, given her solitary situation - which makes it all the easier to achieve, but even so, it's nicely managed to give us those morsels of backstory sufficiently spaced out as to feel worth each wait to get to them.

There's also a pleasing brutality to the world - as is true of many of her books. It never feels gratuitous, like some of the Game of Thrones style attempts at historical "realism" that stray into torture-porn, but rather emblematic of a pragmatism that feels well situated in the period the story is from. Likewise, her fairies are deeply alien things, who do not behave, speak or feel as humans do, and this comes with a cruelty that links them into many of the traditional fairy stories. And yet, it always gets looped back to some essential piece of them, or their nature or their setting in the book, so it never feels forced. They are what they are, and that can sometimes be cruel, but it's never there simply for the sake of it.

And, as ever, there are some really cracking occasional lines dropped in without any warning - "thorns die from the inside out, like priests" hit me out of absolutely nowhere and I was thoroughly unprepared for it, and now it's stuck in my head, likely for the rest of the week. Some of this impact comes from the fact that, for the most part, she's not a prose-forward kind of author, so when you get those little snippets of gold (to horrendously mix some metaphors), they stand out all the greater. Or rather, to borrow Max Gladstone's phrasing, her work is primarily aerodynamic (though with its own, very distinctive style), but this means when it's got a little wing or spoiler or something that affects the flow, it's all the more distinctive for it. 

I'll stop brutalising analogies now, I promise. 

In any case, all in all, it's nice - more than nice, it's a very enjoyable read with some interesting and thoughtful choices about worldbuilding - and very much worth the time spent reading it, but it's not going to set the world on fire or be thrust into the awards limelight. Luckily not all books need to be that - it's a book for the fun of reading, one that you'll blitz through the first time, then put aside, and maybe come back to a few years later when you need something cosy and cheering. And those are just as important as the ones that break your heart or change the way you see the world entirely. Sometimes you need the downtime, the calm and the comfort, to leave you able to appreciate the bright and the brittle and the brilliant. And this is exactly that, done beautifully.

--

The Math

Highlights: lovable characters, enjoyable subversion of the fairytale tropes, fairies that are inhuman in all the right ways

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge, [Tor, 2023]

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

The Once But Never Again King - Two Modern Imaginings of the Arthur Mythos

A look at two works who ask the question - what if King Arthur was a dickhead, and someone to be kept from returning to aid the realm at all costs?

King Arthur has... a complicated place in our modern imagination about mythology. Even more than many of the things we retell, his canon of works is cobbled together from a lot of different sources, different times and different places, long before we get anywhere close to the modern era. He occupies a strange position between myth and reality, with the constant lingering wonder... was he a historical figure at all? Was he purely myth? Was he something in between? His stories, and those of the knights and wizards and fairies and ladies around him have been told and retold in Welsh and English and French throughout the centuries, and occupy a very particular set of places in various national consciousnesses. Speaking purely for England, the general consciousness line of belief (or at least awareness of the story) is that he sleeps, and will rise once again when the nation is in peril.

This presumes that a warrior king from the arse end of the dark ages would continue to be useful in countering future peril, which may have been a reasonable belief at the inception of the myths, but is a rather more dubious one when examined critically, or just pedantically, by the modern reader and reteller.

Which is exactly what's being done in Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee, and Once & Future, a comic series by Kieron Gillen, with art by Dan Mora and colours by Tamra Bonvillain. While they come at the problem from two very different angles, these are both works that wonder if Arthur... might not be the solution to our problems after all, and think about exactly what causes people to think he would be any help, and what sort of peril prompts people to think "oh, if only Arthur were here, he'd solve it". Both particularly dwell on the Saxons, as well as concepts of race and belonging to the realm, with Once & Future particularly having an interest in the idea of "purity" and identity, and what it means to a modern audience as well as to an ancient king. Both are also primarily interested in Arthur as a figure in English mythology - though very aware of his roots in Welsh stories, as well as later French tales - and in the modern English consciousness.

In Perilous Times, we follow Sir Kay, newly resurrected because of peril to the realm, a state that has happened numerous times since his original burial, for various levels of threat, as well as the also-resurrected and somewhat antagonistic Lancelot. We also follow Mariam, a near future eco-protester, who understands the world the knights have risen into, blighted by climate change and corporate greed, and who desperately wants to solve the problems of the world around her, but feels powerless to affect the necessary change. There's a running theme through the story of people absolutely failing to work together, no matter that it serves their best interests, and at times, this is used as motivation for bringing Arthur back - after all, he was a great uniter of men, could he not rally the disparate forces to work together against their problems? But it is left to those who knew him best, Lancelot and Kay, to be the voices constantly pushing back on this idea. We don't need Arthur, not just yet. He might be difficult. He might make it worse. He might not be the man we need, not now, not for the moment. They carry unease through much of the story, reluctance to deal with him as a complex, real, deeply flawed man, in the face of many other people's idealisation of him as simply a myth.

In Once & Future, which is, as yet, unfinished, we take a somewhat different tack. Our historian protagonist learns, rather abruptly, that his family have long been charged with defending the land from incursions of various avatars from stories, which these days mostly resolves into his grandmother and an excess of weaponry kicking fictional ass. They learn that a group of... neonazi racists, let's be honest about it, want to bring back Arthur as a tool for ethnic cleansing, and it is their job to stop this at all costs, because the stories are Bad News, and Arthur doubly so.

One of the things they both address really well, albeit in different ways, is ideas about diversity and "foreignness" and what that means in the past and the present. For Perilous Times, this means having a black Sir Kay as a viewpoint character (as well as Mariam for our modern view) and getting his internal monologue commentary on modern racial divisions, and his thoughts on how that compared to his own time, his Numidian heritage, and differing conceptualisations about it. It doesn't come up frequently, but getting it from Kay's perspective gives us a valuable source which - in narrative - is an irrefutably knowledgeable one, and when he says "the racism is worse now, as well as different", the narrative has to believe him. He's lived through a lot of British history, so we have to accept that he knows what he's on about, as far as the story goes. It's a nice way to bring in the author's presumed knowledge about historical views on race (given his academic focus is on Arthurian myth, I'm going to assume he's coming from a place of a lot more expertise than I could possibly have here), giving it both in-story authority but also making it feel a natural introduction into the text. 

For Once & Future, it's handled a bit more... on the nose. A group of people try to summon Arthur back. Why? They want him to rid England of the people they consider undesirable and too foreign. However, in the act of doing so, they are killed... because Arthur sees in them Saxon blood, and considers them to be the invaders, the foreigners, the problem. This is all part of a plot by someone with a lot more knowledge about how these things work than her unwitting racist stooges, but it's a very blunt intro into a lot of what the series is about - people want to use Arthur, whether ideologically or, in this case, literally, to reinforce their own notions of the idealised England. But he, someone with his own cultural context, beliefs and prejudices, simply does not conform. Not because he isn't prejudiced, simply that his prejudices are different, based on different concerns, and... well... a lot more enacted with the bloody sword the moment he rocks up.

The Arthur of Perilous Times is used just as much by those around him, and has just as many of his own prejudices to bring to the table. The secret corporate overlords of this near future want him as a convenient rallying point for the racist factions of England, and he is entirely willing to play that part, when his ego is tended to and the right persuasions are put into his ear. He has no issue with Kay as a black man - he is far more bothered by Kay as his elder brother figure and the man who seems to think he knows better than Arthur - but he is absolutely happy to serve as a racist figurehead, or doesn't particularly care that he is doing so, because he cares about other things entirely.

So what unites them here is the twin ideas of Arthur as a) someone whose own notions of what matters, who the enemy is, are very detached from our modern ones but b) someone nonetheless around whom those modern ones are catalysed, and potentially c) someone who can be used to further modern racism, regardless of his own views and context. And so, in both stories, Arthur is the problem, but Arthur is also a maguffin and an unwitting patsy for the plots around him.

And this is, I think, what makes both such interesting stories, because even as they overturn the idea of Arthur as shining knight and saviour, they play into the stories we have, and connect this modern inversion very closely to the originals. In Once & Future, both Merlin and Nimue (or at least, someone from the modern world who has stepped into the role of Nimue) are involved in guiding Arthur to their own ends, and in Perilous Times, it's Nimue who exists as someone who has lived in both past and present, alongside modern powerful men - so both stories link in to Arthur's susceptibility to seduction and thus distraction and persuasion.

In this, they are both perfect examples of retellings - or reimaginings - by taking something there in the original stories, and using it as the fulcrum through which to shift everything else in the tale. It grounds a lot of the wider-ranging changes by keeping them ideologically and thematically always tied back to something original, and means that they do always feel like they are reimagining something we are familiar with, rather than simply using the semblance to do something entirely unconnected.

And, like a lot of fiction, they use the past and the future to talk about the present. By being a perennial figure in British myth, Arthur is an ideal vessel for this sort of concern. His continued links with the very vague notion of "threats to the realm" makes him infinitely repurposeable for examining modern issues, and equally so for examining how he might be misused or unsuited to the problems. That modern Britain is experiencing an increasing wave of xenophobia and insularity makes it an excellent moment to choose to ask whether Arthur is really the person we want to hope for to solve our problems, and also to re-examine ourselves and the lies that make up the ideologies that fuel these hatreds - the very man who could be imagined as wanting what they want, could just as equally turn around and view them as the enemy they consider others to be. So, instead, these are two stories that hold up Arthur as an emblem of the rot, of the way that patriotism, nationalism, and hyperawareness of "threat" to the realm recur. They show us instead that even in his own stories, he wasn't the perfect king. He was flawed, he always has been flawed, and so, the idea that he can save us is just as broken - we are reaching back to an imagined saviour who wasn't what we conceive him to be, to be again the king he never was.

In many ways, these two stories are doing what a lot of our Greek mythology retellings claim, but fail to achieve - genuinely making us look at a figure from the past and re-examine why they're the hero. To do this, they choose to take that step further away in their setting and in their trappings, but that doesn't mean they aren't still thematically tied to them. They achieve a more interesting conclusion by being willing to change more.

This isn't to say they're both great stories - Perilous Times particularly has some issues in terms of pacing, humour and worldbuilding that do not always make it a brilliant read - but they do both contain the kernel of a really interesting idea, and one that bears examining further.

--

References: 

Thomas D. Lee, Perilous Times, [Orbit, 2023]

Kieron Gillen, Once & Future, [Boom! Studios, ongoing]

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

 

Our Retellings are Dull - the Problem of the Modern Mythical Reimagining

Most of the myth retellings we have right now are bland.

There are several reasons for it, not least because most of them are retelling a relatively small subset of the stories from primarily one culture (Ancient Greece). Even the best, most interesting work that only plays in this small sandpit would run the risk of being overdone. And, in my opinion, most of what we're getting isn't anywhere near that best.

For one thing, the way many of them are adapted to modernity, in format, but critically in tone, does them a disservice. The originals have guts and teeth and claws, and they may not be the ones we want now, but they have them. But, unfortunately, the majority of the retellings take them out, make them... more palatable, but less substantial. Sometimes, this is in service of not spotlighting and lauding some of the truly awful things that were valorised in the past, which I can get behind, but sometimes... the originals actually have a better message, or a theme that remains relatable, even without it being above moral censure. Even when meant in the best possible way, some of the modern simplification erases the glorious complexity of the original - why make Achilles gay when you can accept that he could have sexual love for Patroclus, but also father a child on a woman, and neither of these things defined his identity in the ancient world. Isn't it more interesting to look at a world that viewed sexuality differently than to cut the edges off a figure from the past to make him fit a single, modern narrative? Or take any of the dangerous female figures of myth, for example, and Medea or Circe in particular. There is something to be said for leaving a powerful, dangerous, vengeful woman in a world hostile to femininity exactly as the nightmare to men that she is, rather than softening her for approachability. The Romans particularly had a deep-seated fear of the power of the virgin woman... so let that fear be palpable.

And then for another, a large proportion of the ones published and heavily marketed in recent memory are billed as "feminist retellings"... while having the blandest, most milquetoast version of feminism imaginable. In the year of our common era 2023, I submit it to you that "making a woman the protagonist" is not actually all that much of a feminist statement anymore. "What if it was told from a female perspective, so we can understand her suffering from her point of view?" I'm sorry babes but Ovid got there before you in *checks notes* the first century BCE. And then Euripides before him in the 5th century BCE. It is my genuine, considered opinion that about 75% of the modern feminist retellings do no better in their feminism than was achieved by either The Trojan Women or the Heroides, both of which centre the female experience of, respectively, the Trojan War or "being in any way associated with a hero of Greek or Roman myth", and the suffering that causes. And these are far from the only historical works that do exactly the same thing - wonder what the women felt in these stories that focus on men and their heroism, and dwell on the human cost. It was a common rhetorical training activity to ask students to argue the extent to which Helen was villain or victim in the Trojan War. Seeing these women as people, who lived and thought and felt and suffered... just isn't new. 

And maybe stories don't need to all be new. Maybe sometimes we can reexamine something without having to do a radically different take on it. But given the intense saturation in the market at the moment for these stories... well, sure, it's allowed. But it's rather dull.

And finally, of course, we have the problem of who gets to tell those stories. If we look at the ones that get the big press, all the marketing and the buzz and the social media engagement, they are your Madeline Millers, your Natalie Hayneses. Both are good writers, for whom there is no criticism for their success. But there are notable absences - why are all these big ticket Greek myth retellings from white, anglophone women? Where's the variety?

If you saw any of the discussion around the recently announced Greek myth anthology Fit for the Gods, you will be well aware that there's a repeated issue around lack of Greek storytellers and perspectives being represented in these retellings. Fit for the Gods bills itself as a diverse anthology, and, on some metrics, it very much is, but it is also intensely US-centred in terms of its authors. In the same way, if we look at the truly big names in Greek myth retellings... who among them isn't British or American? Who is getting all that marketing push, except these women from the anglosphere? And far more than in Fit for the Gods, they are overwhelmingly white, cis, and straight. There's a tight noose around who gets to tell these stories, who gets promoted when telling these stories, and it's stifling out a lot of other voices, even the ones from Greece. From actual Greece.

Which feeds into exactly the same problem - we're getting the same stories retold and retold, by people from the same background, with the same perspectives on the same stories... and so we're not really getting anything new. 

How many retellings are there, at the moment, of Hades and Persephone, but make it a love story? It's a lot. I've read (and disliked) several of them. This is not only a take that multiple people have done, but one that is, at its heart, intensely uncomfortable - we take a story of the rape of a young girl and decided, actually, it will be nicer and more fun to read if the dark and broody god is instead a softboi and will protect our beautiful little sheltered heroine from harm and/or her overbearing mother. How... how have we managed to go backwards from the original myth? And then do it to saturation? It's not feminist, it's not new, it's not interesting, most of them aren't good... so what exactly are they bringing to the table?

It's easy money and easy marketing, right? The great thing about these retellings, from a publishing and marketing perspective, is that you're selling people something they have a lot easier job of telling if they're going to like it, and so making them much more likely to buy it. "For fans of Madeline Miller" grand, done. Retell the same love story? If they know they like it, they'll buy more. Make them all occupy the same tone, the same perspectives, the same takes, make them safe and sanitised and bland, and they will be so very widely marketable and unobjectionable, but with a "feminist" tag to hide how truly unrevolutionary the content actually is.

What if we were braver? Or publishing were. What if, and bear with me on this one, we took our direction from elsewhere in fantasy, and looked to The Locked Tomb series for our inspiration. What if we decided we could handle stories full of messy, troubled, violent, scary and problematic people, just... being that. Stories open to interpretation and different readings. I was very lucky, a number of years ago, to read a book called Bright Air Black by David Vann, which does just that. It is a retelling of the story of Medea, and it does something that very few retellings have ever approached, for me - it let a figure from mythology be messy, and complex, and bad, and let her be the protagonist anyway, with not a single apology for her being exactly as she was. There is a great deal of power in that, and a power many of those feminist retellings are lacking, even though this was never marketed as such a thing.

Or what if publishing didn't wait until the market was utterly swamped with all this same old same old before being sufficiently daring to dip a toe outside of its comfort zone. Because there are people writing things that aren't these same five myths or same three perspectives - look at Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing, where we imagine Achilles as a trans woman? Or look at Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel? Or Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie? Or Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola? Or Under my own Shadow by Elena Kotsile?  What if we could have got those types of stories right from the start, getting the buzz and the marketing and the special editions and the bookseller events and the press coverage that a new Madeline Miller book gets? What if we let "diversity", however you want to articulate it, be there right from the start, and let us have genuinely diverse stories, different genres and emotions and responses to different stories, stepping outside of this same little paddling pool of only a fraction of the Greek myths, out into a wider world of so many mythological stories?

I'd be happier. I'd read more of them.

Because this is the thing - I've mostly stopped reading those big marketed myth retellings. I am, in many ways, the targetest of target markets for a Greek myth retelling. I'm a white, anglophone, middle class feminist with a degree in Classics who likes to read. Selling them to me should be the easiest thing in the world. So it's insulting, to think that these books that ought to appeal to me, that clearly are targeted at my demographic, assume that what I want is to read the same three things over and over again, to never be challenged, to never have to think, or learn. To never have to explore what feminism might be outside of the smallest, most isolated and privileged little sphere. To never care about myths that aren't the ones I grew up with. To never be willing to live with a character who engages my sympathy while also being morally... complicated.

Of course, there's always the answer of "why don't we just stop retelling these stories at all and read new stuff", which is a fair point. But there is something in the older stories that clearly pulls us in, and I don't think it's necessarily bad to be swayed by that. Antigone has been staged as a play across 2464 years because there is something in it that appeals to us still. It still tells a story that resonates, in the tension between duty to morality and the state, the debts we owe to family, how authority can become tyranny. These are still relevant themes. And they are made all the more so when someone like Inua Ellams turns it into a commentary on being Muslim in modern Britain. But I believe that those values comes in the reinterpretation, the shift into different perspectives, the examination of the same core themes in different settings, by different voices and people. And we don't get that unless we let those stories be told by those different people. And we miss out on so many of these stories that may be just as compelling if we constrain ourselves to such a limited corpus of sources.

We don't need those bland, limited retellings.

Instead, we should have more retellings where Circe is terrifying, Medea is cruel and vengeful, where Artemis destroys those who wrong her, where Hades is a kidnapper and Persephone has to figure out where she fits in the aftermath, where Athena walks a careful line, avoiding the attentions of e.g. Hephaestus, where Achilles can love Patroclus as cousin, as sword-brother, as lover all in one, but also have a son by a woman and there be no contradictions. Where Hera is both wronged and wrong. Where Clytemnestra is everything she is and needs no justifications. Write them loud and bold and complex, and trust that readers can find the value and the meaning in them, just as they have for the last three millennia. We should have retellings of myths that mean an anglophone audience might have to stop and listen to someone else's thoughts. We should be trusted to go and look things up, to be fascinated to learn more, and willing to not be pandered to on every page. We should live up to that trust. We should have retellings that let everyone have a voice.

They exist. They're just not being marketed. So maybe we should go find and read them, and embrace the wider, wilder world of myth. Maybe then they'll listen.

--

References:

Jenn Northington and S. Zainab Williams (editors), Fit for the Gods: Greek Mythology Reimagined, [Vintage, 2023]

Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing, [William Morrow, 2022]

Vaishnavi Patel, Kaikeyi, [Little Brown Book Group, 2022]

Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, [Bloomsbury, 2017]

Bolu Babalola, Love in Colour, [Headline Publishing Group, 2020]

Elena Kotsile, Under my Own Shadow in Orpheus + Eurydice Unbound, [air and nothingness press, 2022]

David Vann, Bright Air Black, [Cornerstone, 2017]

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

Microreview: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

After robots have learned from humanity to love, can a lone human then learn it from robots?

With the word robot coming from the Czech for "servitude," it seems inevitable that stories about artificial intelligence will continue to deal with questions of control and freedom. The genre has oscillated between the moods of Frankenstein and Pinocchio: one day we dread that a being we can't control will want to control us, and the next day we cheer for a being that has cut its strings. In these periodic oscillations, retreads are inevitable. One day we meet the Terminator; the next we meet Astro Boy. And there's Megatron and there's Baymax. M3GAN and CHAPPIE. Lore and Data.

OK, but what happens when Pinocchio falls in love with the Terminator?

TJ Klune's new novel In the Lives of Puppets retells Pinocchio with the twist that its protagonist is a human boy with an artificial father. Victor, the human, lives in a forest paradise like those of fairy tales. The days go by in a placid bliss of fresh air, fresh food, gentle company and no worries. Giovanni, the robot, has taken care of Victor with selfless devotion since he was a baby. The shelter they've built among the trees is all they need to be happy. Until the killer robots come looking for trouble.

The journey that Victor then begins is a good illustration of the plot device that pairs world discovery with self-discovery. He didn't have a human to learn to be human from, and yet there's something in him that no killer robot can destroy. The love that he's received from his robotic father and his robotic friends is as real as the love that a tall, dark, handsome strangler sparks in him. As he investigates the true history of the world outside the forest, he also learns to assert where he fits in the posthuman order and who he wants to be.

It's a difficult needle that the author threads here. Learning to mature as a person is challenging enough; doing so when everyone you meet in your journey is a static thing incapable of growth raises the difficulty to epic. And yet, in his interactions with robotic culture, Victor manages to gain a clearer perspective of his identity, his hopes, his desires, and his limitations. It's a very indirect way to form a sense of humanity by contrasting it with everything it's not. The robots share with Victor their second-hand impressions of what humans are like, but it's up to Victor to try and guess how accurately those interpretations may reflect real humanity and how much of that information feels right for him.

It's not like Victor is fully disconnected from human culture: robots are, after all, a human product, inevitably shaped by all our biases and weaknesses. Robots also form personal bonds and ask themselves about their future. But without a human heart (and here's where the novel veers into science fantasy territory), none of the answers has meaning. The plot makes much of the importance of a human heart in the development of an authentic self, and your mileage may vary depending on how comfortable you are with the whole notion of genetic memory.

Questions of scientific rigor aside, In the Lives of Puppets does a stellar job of characterization. You watch Victor evolve and acquire a deeper, richer personality with each big moment of his quest. And his companions are a delight to read. Ratched is a cuttingly sarcastic robot nurse who may or may not actually have an empathy protocol, but who clearly does have an alarming predilection for drilling, while Rambo is an adorable refurbished Roomba who is too pure for this world.

And then there's Hap, the mysterious decommissioned robot that Victor finds, repairs, and teaches to love. This romance subplot suffers from monumentally gnarled power dynamics that are never acknowledged or addressed, which, on top of the novel's tendency to make too many lewd jokes at the expense of its asexual protagonist, makes the reading experience a lot less enjoyable than it had the potential to be. In the Lives of Puppets is a rough gem, full of hidden value obscured by uneven facets that needed more aggressive polishing.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Klune, TJ. In the Lives of Puppets [Tor, 2023].

Microreview[Novella]: Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

 An attempt to take the story of Antigone and reinvent it in a dystopian future that fails to understand the core appeal of the original story.

Arch-Conspirator tells the story of Antigone, a play written in the 5th century BCE by Sophocles, an Athenian tragedian, as the third of his Theban plays. It follows on from Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus, in the latter of which Oedipus has died and his daughters are returning to their home in Thebes, only after reassurance from Theseus that their father has received the appropriate burial rites. Which leads us into the key drama of Antigone - her brothers are dead, and she wishes to ensure that Polynices receives a respectable burial, just as Eteocles already has, and against the wishes of the men in power. It is a play about how some duties, some actions, weigh more heavily than simple laws, and the lengths to which we should go, in the face of overwhelming opposition, to do right. But it is also about how two people can have entirely different senses of justice, and for a large portion in the early part of the play, Kreon, Antigone's antagonist, has just as much reason to believe he has right on his side as she does. It is only once a revelation is provided that the gods concur with Antigone that he strays from righteous action (however lacking in mercy or compassion) into tyranny, and everything falls apart. Part of its enduring popularity - it is constantly restaged to this day - is that the themes are ones which really transcend the setting and can be endlessly reapplied to different contexts without losing their impact or emotional resonance.

And so, enter Veronica Roth, who has taken this play, and turned it into a novella set in a dystopian future. It's a world that has been wracked by unspecified horrors that have left much of it an irradiated wasteland. In this world, birth rates are waning, and so women are valued, protected and stifled because of their precious ability to bear children - they are reduced to walking wombs. It is also a harsh autocracy, with Kreon at the top controlling the city, and one in which, at death, everyone's gametes are gathered by a weird gizmo to be stored in an enduring catalogue of genes for... reasons. It's something that happens to all of the dead, regardless of their actions in life, and is a fundamental of their society.

As I imagine you can already see, we have the key ingredients here for a pretty faithful reimagining of the Greek setting - you have a single, oppressed, female figure standing alone in support of a core tenet of their society in the face of a tyrannical leader. Easy peasy, right?

And yet, Roth manages to get it so, so wrong.

Somehow, this manages to be both an incredibly beat for beat retelling of Antigone's story - to the extent that it will bore people who like their myths more... reimagined - and also full of weird little changes that will annoy anyone who just wants this story told as is. But more than that, it gives us nearly all of the plot beats of the original, but without any of the necessary connective tissue to hold it together and to really sell the emotion that is so fundamental to this story.

Some of this is because it is, quite simply, too short. I rarely think books ought to be in a different format than they are, but this absolutely needed to be a novel, not a novella. It feels rushed at every point, and especially at the end, and what has most been gutted out of it is the work that might have gone into developing the characters. Which is sorely needed.

As it stands, the characters have no chemistry, and barely any personality. They are reduced to their simplest iterations, with none of the nuance that could make them so fascinating to watch. Kreon, for example, is simply a man with too much power, using it wrongly. And while this is certainly part of his personality in the original text, it's not nearly all of it. His core problem is that he starts off with a... if not reasonable, then understandable point of view. He's punishing a traitor, in the hope of dissuading future dissent and finally getting some damn peace in his city. His abiding sin is that he cannot turn from his path, even when he is reliably informed that the gods are very much not on his side - he, and by extension, his city and those around him, suffer because of his hubris. I mean, it's a Greek tragedy, after all. But Roth's Kreon has none of this - he is simply a bad man who has power over a lot of people, using it badly. Frankly, you struggle to see how he got into this position at all. The man has no sense, no reason, and a total black hole where charisma might be, especially after his perspective chapter which has some of the dullest prose you may ever see.

Other characters are similarly poor - you get almost nothing of Ismene, except when needed for the plot to counter Antigone, and because she's had none of the buildup, her filling that role makes almost no sense. Likewise, Haemon, Kreon's son and Antigone's betrothed, barely turns up until suddenly, he's incredibly import, and everything just escalates wildly.

Which is another issue with the story - the pacing is all over the place. There never seems to be any buildup to what happens, the story just throws events up here and there, sometimes to the point where I found myself flipping back a few pages to figure out - did that really just happen? Where did that come from? Roth somehow manages to neither show, nor tell, only vaguely reference after the fact.

And so, when you get to some of the critical moments, they lack the emotional weight they ought to bear because we're just not ready for them. Antigone, in her original play, gets an absolutely glorious speech before Kreon and the people of the city, and absolute crowd-pleaser and a joy to listen to... and while she does get a speech in the novella it's somewhat stilted, abbreviated and above all, just not very good. You don't come out of it believing that anyone will have been made to think by it, and it's over before it can really sink its teeth into anything significant. It just feels there because, to be an Antigone retelling, she needs a speech and well, here you go. Tick that off the list.

But that trial is played to be a major pivot point in the plot - as it is in the play - and so you find yourself at odds with the story's own perception of itself as you read it, especially if you're familiar with the plot its harking back to.

And this is possibly the core of my problem with this story. Myth retellings, or reimaginings, necessarily exist in conversation with their original. They have to choose how they present that conversation to the reader - is it a reliable narration or not, is it a distant reimagining, told and retold and changed in the telling? But there's always that kernel of the original at the core, and for me, good retellings preserve a strand of the spirit of the original, or a reflection on what that original could have been or meant, even as they change potentially an enormous amount around it. But Roth... isn't in conversation with Antigone. Or if she is, she's not doing much talking. Instead, we get... essentially the SparkNotes of the story with a bit of SF flavour around the edges.

And maybe that would be fine, or good enough, if the SF flavour had been well-developed or interesting or novel, but it's not. Like much about this story, it could have very much done with some extra fleshing out, not so much in the facts and details, but in the emotionality of it, the context, the grounding of what's going on. We know the facts - we know about gendered oppression and the hardship of the world, the riots and the radiation - but we don't know how this is part of the texture of that world. Everything exists to serve its purpose to the strict centre of the story, and anything that might be flavour or atmosphere or simply there to bed us into things has been stripped out. So, again, it felt far, far too short. It's a rare book that could stand a few more heavy-handed paragraphs of exposition by a side character, but this is perhaps one of them. When this is your core - and nearly your only - point of difference with the myth you're retelling, surely then you need to make this the star of the show? Yes, it's exactly the Antigone you know, but hey, it's in a dystopian wasteland, so let's see how that affects things! And it's not. 

I say "nearly" only - there are a few deviations from the original plot, but they are few, mostly at the end, and seem not to serve anything but muddling any themes the story felt like it had. The tragedic elements are undermined, the pathos cut short, some of the characters robbed of their potential emotive force, and you're left wondering - what did I get out of this?

Or indeed, why was this written at all?

Which is always the problem with retellings - what does this bring to the story that we can't get from the original? Maybe the answer is "it's now a really compelling novel instead of a really compelling play". Maybe the answer is "putting it in space changes EVERYTHING" or "it's being used as a way of highlighting some very modern problems" or "finding a resonance with something that you might not have considered". There are lots of ways retellings can be done that say something fun or interesting or meaningful. At the moment, the one being chosen is mostly "but make it feminist" which is, y'know, fine. But when you take a play like Antigone, which I would argue is about as feminist as many of the modern ones, whose idea of feminism seems to be "give it a female protagonist", already... you need something better than that. It needs to be good, or interesting, or insightful, and Arch-Conspirator is none of those things.

And so it's a disappointment of a book, when it could have been at least moderately interesting. The critical sell of Antigone as a play is that Antigone is a complex figure who gets some absolutely banging speeches and appeals to very fundamental ideas of morality and duty and the debts we owe one another even into death that are more core than law, they're religion and just being human. She may not be likeable, but you have to respect that she is both brave and probably right, as well as being in just a really horrible situation. If you make the fundamental ideas that she's arguing about a bit less graspable, you risk losing the sympathy, and then if you don't develop her personality, you lose the sympathy the audience might give her, and if you then don't give her banging speeches, what even is her point? Roth has made Antigone drab, and denuded it of the meaning it already had, let alone reinvigorate it with any new ones.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 4/10

Bonuses: 

Penalties: -1 for complete absence of gutpunch speeches

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10

Reference: Veronica Roth, Arch-Conspirator [Titan Books Ltd, 2023]

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

Microreview [book]: Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it

No longer the seat of Danish monarchy, Elsinore is now a corporation, a leading manufacturer of human-like robots. The murdered Hamlet senior was the Humanoid Artificial Mind (Learned Emotive Type), a model that represented a huge leap ahead in robotic innovation. Instead of a queen, Gertrude is a CEO, whose hopes for Elsinore's bottom line now depend on the success of her latest creation, the Hamlet v.2. If the company doesn't maintain dominance of the robot market, its (figurative) throne will be snatched by its main competitor, which is aggressively promoting a rival model, the Fortinbras. But one night, a portion of old code from Hamlet v.1 copies itself into the hard drive of Hamlet v.2, and a quest for revenge begins to take shape.

Everything's better with robots, and a retelling of one of the biggest classics in the Western canon is a sure attention grabber. However, throughout the reading of Hamlet, Prince of Robots, one nagging question persists: What's the point of writing a retelling that doesn't change the story? Act by act, scene by scene, the character beats in this novel are exactly the same you remember from high school English. In the scenes near the end, the prose evokes a foreboding aura that to some readers might seem to promise a twist, but that's not what we get. If you know what happens in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, you already know what happens in Hamlet, Prince of Robots. At first sight, the effort of writing this novel (and reading it) can appear redundant, but author M. Darusha Wehm's choice of keeping the plot intact is a clearly deliberate one, so the temptation to accuse them of laziness would be premature. A fair analysis of this retelling requires more than counting the differences. While it's true that the reader who opens this book should not expect surprises, what is instead in offer is something subtler. The point of this book's existence is not so much what happens (because that's a task Shakespeare already undertook), but to whom Wehm proposes it can happen.

As a drama that was already centuries old when Shakespeare reinvented it for the 1600s, Hamlet is unspoilable. The king has died, there's a new king, and the mourning prince receives an otherworldly revelation: actually, the king was murdered—by the new king. From that moment on, our protagonist agonizes under the competing impulses of hatred, piety, honor, loyalty, resentment, grief, propriety, shame, duty, self-hatred, hubris, and a godzillion unresolved mommy issues. He hesitates when he shouldn't, jumps to action when he shouldn't, and causes a cascade of calamity that ends with himself and his whole family dead, his enemy and his whole family dead, and the kingdom conquered by a foreign army. The tragedy of Hamlet has been lauded as a psychological masterpiece, and its protagonist is one of the most mutilayered, profound, and arresting portrayals of the contradictory forces that inhabit the human heart.

What Wehm insinuates by setting Hamlet's story in our near future is that such a typically human cocktail of passions can also take hold of a machine's heart. When writing their version of the Hamlet tale, they didn't need to alter any character choice: just by faithfully repeating the same incidents and putting the same famous dialogues in the voice of an electronic protagonist, Hamlet, Prince of Robots makes the provocative suggestion that the particular blend of emotions that defines our humanity is not exclusive to humans. Of course, finding a human soul in a fabricated body is a well-known literary device since at least Frankenstein. That's what Ben H. Winters did in 2010 when he wrote Android Karenina. But it's one thing to say that machines are capable of human emotions, and it's another to put a machine in the role of who may as well be the most human human known to Western culture.

As one of the great characters of literature, Hamlet has been seen as representative of the most unique traits of humanity, and for long, that process of definition by illustration was one of the functions of literature. If you wanted to know humans, the idea went, you only needed to spend some hours in the company of Anna Karenina, or Don Quixote, or Emma Bovary, or Captain Ahab, or Rodion Raskolnikov, or Orlando. By making the acquaintance of the great characters, you were supposed to gain a clearer understanding of yourself. But Wehm warns us: No, not even those near-perfect dissections of the human soul can tell you what humanity is, because an artificial being is just as capable of the same raptures of feeling. A tacit question necessarily follows: If robot Hamlet can express preoccupations identical to those of human Hamlet, with as much intensity and sincerity, then what, if anything, is the human essence?

Furthermore, if questions concerning humanity are revealed to be applicable to robots, an even more worrying implication can be raised, that questions concerning robots can apply to us. In Act 1 Scene 2, our brooding android reflects on his existence and realizes he doesn't know how much freedom he was designed to have: "He wondered if it would be different if he could be certain that his feelings were his own, that the pain he felt was born from his own personal, individual experiences rather than merely the output of an algorithm." The counterpoint to that thought arrives in Act 3 Scene 1: "He didn't feel like his actions were coerced, but that was the problem with free will, even for humans. They were constrained by biological and chemical imperatives, too." The fact that robot Hamlet struggles with the same mysteries of the human condition as we do opens the way to the almost blasphemous idea that our most intimate anxieties would be true of anything capable of thinking. To say that robots are in any sense like us is to say that we are in some sense like robots.

Without the enormous intertextual weight of having picked one of the canonical classics, a robot retelling like this one wouldn't amount to more than an amusing curiosity, a mere exercise in transformative writing. But that judgment would miss the intent of what Wehm is really trying to do here. Many meanings have been read into the Hamlet tale: it can be about the tragedy of human choice, or about incompatible responsibilities, or waves of self-perpetuating violence, or the depths of betrayal, or the Scandinavian transition from Pagan to Christian notions of morality, or Oedipal neurosis, or cosmic justice, or cosmic indifference. Transplanting the story "as is," without changing any detail, into the subjectivity of an artificial person and letting the exact same events play out as we know they do, without dialing down the strength of the dramatic situation, is a more powerful literary statement than Wehm could have achieved if they had taken the simpler route of introducing variations in the plot. Rather than the literary retellings that show an unsuspected angle on a well-known story, Hamlet, Prince of Robots functions like the theatrical retellings of Shakespeare that still narrate the original story, but in a recontextualized presentation. Directors have set Macbeth in Haiti, Julius Caesar in wartime Germany, Coriolanus in revolutionary France. To set Hamlet in the age of post-industrial capitalism not only creates parallels worth discussing between royal power and corporate power, but also follows in the footsteps of a venerable theatrical tradition that keeps exploring the extent of Shakespeare's timeless versatility.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Wehm, M. Darusha. Hamlet, Prince of Robots [In Potentia Press, 2023].

Microreview [Book]: The Court of Miracles by Kester Grant

An updated Les Misérables with some wonderful sisterhood relationships at its heart... but how do you make a 21st century book less queer than its 19th century source?

Ah, Les Misérables. Decades before Hamilton was making musical revolutionaries cool for middle-class theatregoers, we had the all-singing all-dancing French Revolution June Rebellion of 1932, and quite some time before that we had Victor Hugo's Heckin' Chonker of a meditation on the nature of poverty, love, redemption, and oh my god so many pages about the daily lives of nuns. Now, bursting in to shake up Hugo's rich cast of characters comes debut author Kester Grant, with a book which imagines what the cast of Les Mis (at least, the ones who make it to 1932... sorry Fantine) might be getting up to in an alternate world where the French revolution failed and the "Court of Miracles" - the mythical shadow government said to over Paris' underclasses and which Anglo readers may only recognise from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (hey, also based on a Victor Hugo thing!) - plays a huge role in many people's lives. At the centre of this is Éponine, daughter of Les Misérables' most unpleasant and opportunistic criminal, whose canon position between the two worlds of the narrative makes her perfect for this new imagining.

Alternate history aside, the biggest shift that The Court of Miracles makes is this focus on Éponine (called "Nina" here), and in removing the character of Marius, on whom she wastes most of her adult emotional energy in the original. Instead, the focus is on Nina's relationships with her sisters, and her growing antagonism with Kaplan, "The Tiger", a slaver who has taken over one of the court's Guilds and is now using it to buy women who catch his eye. When Nina's father Thénardier decides to sell his older daughter Azelma, her last act is to buy Nina the protection of the Thieves' guild through her connection to the Court's Messenger, Femi. Passing the test for entry with ease, Nina starts making a name for herself and widening her circle of contacts and influences within the Court's guilds, but she never gives up on rescuing her sister - and, when a botched attempt at doing so leads to her meeting Ettie (i.e. Cosette), she takes the younger girl under her wing as well. Her adventures also take her into the palace, where she meets and captivates the Dauphin; and into the orbit of a group of students led by the exiled Enjolras St Juste.

Aside from the obvious Les Misérables parallels, Grant also points to strong influences from the Jungle Book in the text, particularly when it comes to the history and mythology of the Court. Interspersed within the narrative are tales about the historical conflict between Ysengrim and Reynard - characters who also make an appearance in the book's in-universe swears - and an allegorical story of mice and snakes representing the failed revolution forms a key plot point in Nina's  most notably in The Tiger as well as some of the other characters within the Court. It's the interactions between these two elements, and the new dynamics introduced here, that provide a lot of the novelty in The Court of Miracles, and set it apart from being a straightforward alternate universe fic.

Nina herself benefits hugely from this new framing, which gives her a "home turf" that isn't simply avoiding the worst excesses of her criminal father and offering her at least a couple of connections that she can make on an equal footing, which in turn strengthens how her less equal relationships with the students and the nobility play out. Grant takes Éponine's hopeless devotion and transforms it from a tragic flaw, directed at a boy who never does much to deserve it, into the foundation for a morally complex but ultimately relatable hero, who puts all of her cunning and skill at the disposal of sisters who she can be assured would do the same for her. The other major change is Cosette, who is significantly younger than Nina in this version and becomes just as invested in her adoptive sister's safety and wellbeing, as well as getting some of her own fun quirks and moments of glory.

The strength of the bonds between women in The Court of Miracles are highly welcome (like, they can actually talk to each other without dying or dishing out abuse!), but there are relationship tweaks that I liked a whole lot less. Foremost among them is the removal of huge swathes of canonically queer subtext from male characters in the original story, lea. Over the course of the story, Nina has not one, not two, but three boys swooning over her, including the Dauphin (who kind of replaces Marius by being a lonely thoughtful-but-privileged twit who is far too ready to fall in love with girls after five seconds in their presence), Montparnasse (here a master of the Assassin's Guild and actually kinda cool) and (prepare yourself) Enjolras St Juste. Yes, that's the Enjolras who, in Hugo's canon, is specifically said to not be interested in women and to love nothing but the revolution, while his buddy Grantaire cares about nothing but him.

Instead, in The Court of Miracles there's nothing textual to suggest Grantaire's feelings for St Juste go beyond camaraderie, while St Juste himself is all up in the "YA love interest" tropes with Nina. Does he stand too close to her in order to earnestly express his political ambitions while she gets distracted by his closeness? Yes! Does someone walk in on them sneaking around a party so they have to pretend they snuck away to make out? YEP. To not put too fine a point on it, St Juste's arc here very much reads as straightwashing, and I don't think a reversal in later books is going to change how problematic this is. On top of that, there's also the decision to genderbend Inspector Javert and then heavily hint that she and Valjean were formerly lovers and that her obsession with bringing him to justice is her response to being jilted. Given that the Court of Miracles is allegedly invested in showing a more diverse version of Paris, and Nina herself is a woman of colour, the removal of all queer content - and this is a removal, since there is less here than in a novel from 1862 - is a bizarre and disappointing choice.

And this is a particular shame because The Court of Miracles is otherwise a great experience - intense, action-packed, full of difficult choices and moral grey that still leaves the reader with characters to root for, and above all super engaging. That makes it a hard book to sum up for me - I'm sure for plenty of readers, the straightwashing won't really figure in their experience (it's just a few scenes after all! And the sister relationships are so wonderful!) and, for readers without knowledge of the source work, specifically the novel, the lack of queer content isn't going to be more than a not-unexpected annoyance. At the end of the day, though, I did not plough through hundreds of pages of translated classic literature to see het!Enjolras swoon over Éponine and Javert turned into Valjean's jealous female ex. In 2020. To which I can only conclude: what the heck, Court of Miracles?

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Nina and Ettie and everything that springs from their relationship

Penalties: -3 for the straightwashed, thirsty-for-Nina Enjolras St. Juste that literally nobody asked for

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10 (And yet we could have had it all...)

Posted by: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Grant, Kester, The Court of Miracles [Harper Voyager, 2020]