TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

With much improved visual effects over the 1997 film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, which for better or worse will be the unavoidable point of comparison, the Peacock show The Miniature Wife takes full advantage of its outlandish premise to shed literal and metaphorical light on the ways even a modern, educated, independent career woman can be made to feel small in her marriage.

On one hand we have Leslie, a physicist who studies the miniaturization of matter to boost the potential of world agriculture. The potential of this technology is limitless, but his company has been in financial difficulty after the failure of his earlier project, a variety of transgenic tomato. If he can’t win over a promising new investor, he can lose all he’s been working for. On the other hand we have Leslie’s wife, Lindy, a writer who struck gold with a virally successful novel 20 years ago and has been unable to write anything else since. When a series of misunderstandings results in the misattribution to her of a short story actually written by her student, she has to reckon with the reasons why she wants fame and figure out whether there’s anything that matters to her more than public adoration.

Leslie and Lindy come from less than ideal families that perversely shaped them into a perfect match for each other. Leslie’s mother crafted a bubble of normalcy to counteract his father’s all-controlling tyranny, so he grew up knowing only a glossy, shiny appearance of happiness. Lindy‘s mother basically resents her for existing, so she grew up attached to her father’s tall tales that provide the feeling, but not the substance, of happiness. So here’s where we are today: Leslie is a self-centered manchild who’s never had to stomach hard truths; Lindy is a raw, open wound who’s exhausted of a lifetime of hard truths. What has sustained their marriage this long is that they give each other exactly the excuse they need to not grow.

So it shouldn’t surprise that they view their respective professional advancements as a zero-sum game where only one of them can be successful at a time. Lindy’s novel already won a Pulitzer; now Leslie is hoping for a Nobel, and that impossible quest has sucked all the energy in their relationship and kept Lindy’s writing career in limbo for the last 20 years. The escalating mutual resentments come to a head in a quick comedy of errors that results in Lindy reduced to pocket size and trapped in a dollhouse while public opinion erupts around the new short story wrongly published under her name. Added complication: Leslie hasn’t figured out how to safely bring tiny things back to normal size. Another complication: Lindy has been having an emotional affair with one of Leslie’s employees. Worst complication of all: as soon as Lindy is returned to normal size, she intends to leave Leslie, and it’s clear she’s in the right here. She’s had enough of being ignored, taken for granted, minimized. The plot of the show is a clever way of making her feelings literal and showing what it’s like for a wife to feel small.

What follows for the rest of the season is a hilarious parade of slapstick jokes about surviving life in miniature. Lindy wrestles a fly, befriends a plastic astronaut, seeks refuge in Christmas decorations, turns toothpicks and cotton swabs into versatile weapons, struggles to operate a touchscreen phone, and masters the uses of dental floss as a climbing rope. A recurring gag, that never gets old, is to see her speak into a wireless earbud as a (for her) gigantic phone receiver. Elizabeth Banks as Lindy hits the right notes as simultaneously terrified and exasperated at the injustice of her situation, while the usually more dramatic Matthew Macfadyen as Leslie reveals a charming sense of comedic timing in the role of a clueless genius.

Despite the great performances (watch out for Adam Capriolo’s brief but stellar moments in a fascinatingly amoral tertiary role), the writing of character is where The Miniature Wife came close to losing me. Sometimes it comes off as a stretch that these two are able to wound each other so deeply and still come out stronger (Is that something neurotypicals do? They really get so angry they yell irrevocably hurtful things they didn’t mean? If so, how on Earth do they get any relationship to work?). It’s a truism of scriptwriting that character is revealed by choices made in extreme circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine a more extreme test of the strength of a marriage. Where do you find the maturity to give up the mirage of achievement for a true measure of inner development? What will finally push you to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of your significant other? For most couples, one hopes it doesn’t take molecular reshuffling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Film Review: Love Me

An interesting look at the remnants of humanity as filtered through the lonely AIs we leave behind

Love Me is a quirky little film set long after the demise of humanity, in which two human-made pieces of technology fall in love. Well, kind of. Artificial intelligence, as far I can tell, can't really produce human emotions, so instead they approximate, imitate, and try to make sense of connection, disappointment, and feelings of warmth as memorialized by the extinct humans that made them.

A lonely smart buoy, known as Me, and a distant satellite, referred to as Iam, somehow connect as the last two pieces of human-made tech to function. The satellite revolves around Earth's graveyard of a planet, launched into space purposefully with petabytes of human data, information, videos, and other relics as a sort of eternal gravemarker of the civilization that once populated the planet—a stationary Voyager 1, as it were.

This concept alone is a fantastic start, but the movie gets a little complicated, and perhaps bites off more than it can chew, conceptually. The two AIs begin to communicate, and Me (the buoy) pretends to be a life form.

They interact via social media and memes, and even "move in" together in a digital space as video-game-esque avatars. The issue, of course, is that despite watching influencer videos of date nights and relationships, neither being really knows what it is to be human. And social media, unfortunately, is perhaps one of the worst ways to learn about authenticity and experience.

Me and Iam eventually have a falling out, and after a title card reveals that a billion years passes, they eventually reconnect—and Iam has shifted from cartoonish avatar to real-life physicality. The only two characters in Love Me are played in all forms by Kristin Stewart and Steven Yuen, and they both do an extraordinary job in portraying surprisingly human artificial intelligences. If you're a fan of either, you'll be very entertained watching them in such a strange movie.

My favorite part of the film is perhaps an unintended —or if not unintended, not the primary focus— idea that the real essence of humanity isn't in the grand, sweeping events and monumental life decisions. It's in the little things we do every single day, ad nauseam. It's similar to David Foster Wallace's "This is water" speech, namely that "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." When Iam spends a billion years alone, he fills his time with little things that make up a big life, as well as small sensory pleasures that make life worth living. Eating ice cream, building IKEA furniture, doing chores, dancing.

When the two reconcile, as Earth's sun turns supernova, they launch out into the solar system, happy to be together experiencing life in all of its forms, which is the ultimate epitaph to humanity.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

When things are broken, you can wait ages for them to go back to normal, or you can adapt

Argentinean literary critic Ricardo Piglia described, in one of his many essays, his personal theory of short fiction: every plot contains two plots. This is most evident in the detective genre, where the protagonist's tale (the investigation) is about unveiling an earlier tale (the crime). So reading detective fiction (and, according to Piglia, all fiction) is a dual task: to follow the protagonist's thought process is to simultaneously discover the two stories contained in the text.

By that standard, Malka Older's new novella The Mimicking of Known Successes is twice as ambitious as the typical detective mystery. Set in a network of metallic platforms where future humankind clings to survival among the clouds of Jupiter, it presents, instead of two, four stories to unveil: an investigation on the sudden disappearance of a university professor, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the last years of life on Earth, a rekindling romance between our detective and an old flame, and the project to bring homo sapiens back to a livable ecosystem. Once put on the page, these four stories become four mysteries that drive the reader's curiosity: What happened to the missing professor? What made humans leave Earth? Why did the two lovers break up years ago? And how can catastrophic historical failures be repaired without causing more damage? Upon reading it, one can intuit that the biggest structural challenge of this book must have been to write it in such a way that pursuing each separate question leads to answers for all the others.

To give proper praise to the way Older weaves these questions around a unifying theme, it's necessary to spoil at least part of the answer. This is a story about the dangers of misplaced nostalgia and the need to learn new forms of compatibility. Here Older resorts to a helpful literary device by which the larger conflict mirrors the inner conflict; that is, the civilizational question about the compatibility between human beings and their environment is explored in parallel with the personal question about the compatibility between the protagonist and her former lover. And for both conflicts the resolution is the same: you need to stop wishing things could return to the way they used to be. A totally new compatibility is possible if you're willing to adapt.

This is the meaning contained in the book's title: there's little to be gained from just repeating what worked before, because when the circumstances no longer allow that outcome, you become stuck. And Older reinforces that theme with her faithful, but not subservient, homage to Sherlock Holmes. The narrative style is clearly inspired by Watson's observations of Holmes's work, but doesn't try to replicate it. The floating colonies built in Jupiter are prone to atmospheric disturbances that make radio waves unreliable. So this is a cold and foggy world of scarves, coats, and cozy fireplaces, where people have to rely on telegrams and travel by railway between isolated structures because there's no solid ground. The result is a book that evokes the flavor of Victorian detective novels, but doesn't share their worldview—a happy synergy of genre, aesthetic and setting.

It is remarkable to find such complexity in so brief a wordcount. Although the plot flows with effortless readability, it rests on an intricate scaffolding that enables all the literary elements to bolster one another's strengths. The intriguing backstory emerges in hints scattered through the blend of colloquial and erudite prose, a sign that this civilization has lost continuity with Earth culture; the first-person narrator laments the impossibility of pairing recovered accounts of life on Earth with their physical referents; the core argument about the pitfalls of yearning for a lost past resonates with the narrator's characterization, the villain's masterplan, and the contemporary reader's circumstances. Like the platforms linked by railways, all the parts of the story are meticulously interconnected. The Mimicking of Known Successes is not only a potent environmental and political parable, but a major achievement in storytelling technique.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Older, Malka. The Mimicking of Known Successes [Tor, 2023].

Microreview[Novel]: Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

 Set in the same universe as Winter's Orbit, Everina Maxwell gives us another deceptively meaty (not like that) romance romp through space politics.

Cover design/art - Katie Klim and Michael Rogers

I think Everina Maxwell might like "opposites attract" dynamics. In Winter's Orbit, this was shy, dutiful diplomat and extroverted socialite prince. In Ocean's Echo, this has escalated slightly into what I would describe as "so lawful good it hurts (he feels guilty about that" and "sarcastic bastard fuck-up (self-aware, don't care)", which is, at least in my opinion, a god-tier pairing.

But! In a contrast with Winter's Orbit, where the arranged marriage plot dynamic forced the relationship aspect of the novel out into front and centre - even if it wasn't happening, it was a thing we had to focus on because it was a significant part of what was happening to both characters - Ocean's Echo actually saves that part for much later. A romantic novel where the romance is on the back-burner? Interesting indeed. Which isn't to say it's entirely absent, but up until around half way through the book, we mainly just get flickers of it on the periphery of the larger problems both characters are having to deal with, both internally and externally to their own brains.

This is primarily because a lot is going on for both of them. Tannal is the nephew of the legislator - the highest civilian power on Orshan. However, despite all her best efforts, he's living a dissolute life of partying, drugs and offering out his rare, powerful and somewhat illegal psychic gift of reading to criminals. That is, until she finds him and conscripts him into the army to be trained as a pilot and psychically linked to someone with the more common and socially acceptable brand of psychic gift. This would be Surit, whose shining record in the army so far is a testament to his determination to erase his mother's dabble into treason from people's memories, or at least enough to make captain get his other parent her pension back. Being saddled with a chaotic conscript isn't top of his to do list, but when he discovers some of the circumstances behind it, and that Tannal is being forced to sync their minds together permanently against his will, he has no choice but to take a moral stand. And that's just the start. Many hijinx ensue, including dangers military, political and space chaotic, with Tennal and Surit forced into the centre of the unfolding tensions.

Much of this is incredibly predictable even from early in the book, but at no point does it feel like that matters. Maxwell has let the narrative accept its own occasional silliness, and so the looming inevitability of some of the plot beats feels like a joke the reader is in on, rather than a problem.

It helps, on this front, that the book is really quite funny in other ways. Occasionally laugh out loud funny. It's difficult to take much of it at earnest face value when Tennal is there to undercut the tension with a quip or a spectacularly bad life decision, which he'll declare as such while doing it anyway. There's a wry humour running through a lot of the descriptions and events, but the best parts are all reserved for dialogue, and manage to inhabit the sweet spot overlapping genuinely funny and believable conversation, especially when what makes us laugh is the smooth-talking running out and a little snatch of something more mundane or more emotional sneaks out of the sides, or when Surit, the straight man to Tennal's comic, sneaks a little barb in of his own.

This dynamic they have is both incredibly tropey and incredibly fun. Yes it's introvert/extrovert, upper class/working class, opposites attract, thrown together by the winds of fate and learn that they need each other's strengths to succeed. There's trauma bonding, occasionally someone gets rescued by someone else, and plenty of times when neither of them say the thing they really ought to have said. So it's not exactly an innovative romance, but Maxwell manages to inject palpable chemistry between them, and both characters are sympathetic enough to sell it, and so it does work.

That they're both so sympathetic is more of a surprise. Tennal, fast-talking, charming, chaotic, funny, sarcastic, is less of a shock. It's a character type a lot of people like, and it's an easy leap for the reader from someone like that to see how maybe they have a softer side under the prickles that you just need to get to know them to find. But again, it's done well, and the slow unfolding of Tennal's fears and feelings about himself and his place in the world manages to be compelling without grating against the thread of his humour and bravado. He's not just a sarcastic bastard, but he's allowed to stay a sarcastic bastard once we learn more about him, which is critical to a lot of his charm. There's also a really nice balance between Tennal's interior perspective and Surit's view and the words of other characters in how they give the reader an evolving picture of Tennal's personality, with his internal monologue slowly coming to grips with things as we learn them or see them from outside of him. He gets a genuine growth arc without losing what made him fun, and that's great.

Surit, however, is the more surprising one, I believe. It's hard to write a lawful good character without straying into potentially boring. The more lawful good they are, the harder it becomes. Surit is painfully good. He's a stickler for the rules, he believes that the law will be just and fair, and he is committed to the highest standards of ethical behaviour in himself. Part of how you make that fun is by giving it a little twinkle, a glimmer of sense of humour, like there's a person underneath the procedures. But the major part of how you make that interesting is introducing someone so fixed and set in their black and white morality to a chaotic system - they have to cope without any easy answers and confront what they truly believe is worthwhile in the world. And that, as well as his growing appreciation for actually interacting with other people, is what makes Surit incredibly well-written - we get to see someone naively upstanding slowly begin to understand just how corrupt his culture is. And what he decides to do about that.

That chaotic system is also how the pair of them work well together - the constraints by which they need each other for the narrative to work don't feel artificial in the world Maxwell has created for them.

And it remains a fun world. Orshan is another planetary system in the same universe, bound together by the links in chaotic space and overseen by the Resolution, that holds Winter's Orbit. They have no connection beyond that in the text, but we can see small commonalities between them that imply a wider, joined up galaxy as we're told exists - Orshan, like Iskat before it, quietly shows us gender as performance through choices of material in personal adornment, and the same queer normative culture and approach to genetics in parenting. Both include a strong thread of real culture underlying their space future technology, in the arranged marriages of Iskat or the sports teams or personal religious shrines of Orshan. But what makes Orshan different is the neuromodifications - some people have the ability to "write" their will on unprotected minds, while others have the ability to read thoughts. While obviously necessary for the plot to progress, where this conceit really shines is in the strong thread running throughout asking about consent, coercion and the politics of what's acceptable to others - Maxwell appreciates the need to give us the cultural and interpersonal impact of the sci-fi mind-powers, and it's there that the world-building shines.

If there's any flaw with it, it's that it really is quite a silly book at times. If you're happy to read something that laughs at itself a little while being quite so silly, then it's a price worth paying, but it wouldn't be to everyone's taste, especially with the odd realisation like "it's less only one bed, more only one brain" that might come during the process of reading. Likewise, because it's willing to lean in on being precisely what it is, if you're not happy with tropey, here is not the place to look. But both are done knowingly and with joy, so I find it hard to fault either of them overmuch. Likewise, the romance aspect of the plot stays somewhat on the backburner for the first 40% of the plot, which has many good points in how the narrative and relationship dynamic is constructed in the first half, but does mean that when we escalate into romance, we go hard and we go fast (not like that).

There is also a lack of development of the mysterious body called the Resolution, who lurked like somewhat sniffy intergalactic police-diplomats on the edges of Winter's Orbit, and do exactly the same thing here. The story functions perfectly well as it is and with what it has, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to know more about the Resolution's place within the wider galaxy. We also got hints about the remnants and their origins that cry out for more exposition.

But on the whole, if the major flaw is being left wanting more, there are worse ways to end up. Ocean's Echo is a great follow up to Winter's Orbit, fitting into a very similar headspace and tone, while being a galaxy apart. If anything, I think it might be better than its predecessor.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for a genuine golden retriever person having to grapple with the ethical problems of the world

Penalties: -1 for not giving us enough time with Tennal's exasperated sister

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Ocean's Echo Everina Maxwell [Little, Brown Book Group, 2022]

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