Book Review: No Such Thing As Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly

A blend of the historical and the speculative to linger on the concept of duty in a grim and everchanging world.

The viewpoint character of Lara Elena Donnelly's novella No Such Thing As Duty is William Somerset Maugham. You might have heard of him. An English writer who penned plays, short stories and novels, I certainly had, but knew very little about him beyond that briefest of bios. Nor did I until after I had finished writing my first draft of this review - a deliberate choice, wanting to preserve the experience of the story as a narrative-object, to linger in its tension and ambiguities, without collapsing them down with the intrusion of reality until I had at least captured the rough sense of my feelings in the amber of prose.

Because there are two No Such Thing As Dutys - the first is the one read by someone who knows Maugham's bibliography, the facts of his life and the reality, date and manner of his death. This is a version one must expect of any book which features historical facts, in any form. There is always someone who knows everything, especially when the subject is a famous author. The second is my experience.

At the start of the book, we meet Maugham arriving in a Romania in which he is certain he will die (and glad of it rather than being a Scottish sanatorium). He is suffering from tuberculosis, dizzy with fever and coughing up blood, but seemingly determined to do his duty before succumbing to the inevitable. Already, a branching point of the two experiences of the story. For me, this is tension - does he die in Romania? I don't know. He seems wearily certain of it, a spectre that looms over the story, that intrudes every time he coughs up blood into a handkerchief or a scarf conveniently dark to hide the stain. Arriving as a spy in wartime, he reports in to receive such mission as he might be needed for, following on from his promising activities with less promising outcomes in other fronts of the conflict. But he soon realises his mission, such as it is, seems more of a sop, a bone thrown to make him feel useful rather than something vitally necessary.

And thus, the central conflict of the book. The duty he's doing - to King and Country, as he says - what kind of duty is it, if it is this pity mission? He leaves behind a daughter he cares about and a wife he'd rather avoid, coming to die far away, and if it's not for duty, then what is it for? Are they not also a duty?

But he's there, and the mission is in front of him, and he's dying, so do it he does. And through the course of it, he meets two other key figures. One a man, Walter, seemingly walled off from any sense of duty - seemingly - and another a woman, Mme. Popescu, whose husband died of a duty he didn't even need to do. Three angles on the same problem, though mired firmly in Maugham's. The glimpses of the other two do however serve to colour and explore his, through the lens of his introspection.

And this - his self-critical, thoughtful, writerly narrative voice - is one of the most successful things about a roundly successful novella. I'm not familiar with Maugham's work in reality - another branch point, does his narrative voice sound like actual Maugham's - but I found myself quickly invested in the version of him that exists in Donnelly's. There's an analytical bent to the way he talks about the people around him, a distance that he himself names as he talks to other characters, and a slight rigidity to the prose that does nod back to the time at which the story is set, without overegging the historicity. But it's not just that. He is constantly dwelling on his imminent death (ironic or simply foreshadowing?), the effect that will have on his family, whether being here is the right thing to do, and if he even truly is doing his duty at all. He also dwells on two lost loves and one growing one, because all good things come in threes.

As with the three angles on duties, the three loves all inform one another, shaping how we see Maugham as much as how he sees himself. There's Sue, the woman he wishes he'd married but whom he lost to the man who got her pregnant (and married her out of - yes, there's duty again). There's Gerald, the outgoing soldier he knew in the Pacific, whose strengths shored up Maugham's weaknesses, and whose flaws could be forgiven, and critically who knew, as Maugham knows, when and how to keep hidden from society's eyes what it doesn't want to see. And then the present one, Walter - the man who walls himself off from duty, who refuses to hide himself as Maugham knows he must.

Intersections, wherever you look. Maugham - with his stutter, his orphan status and French early years already an outcast, clinging on to rigid propriety as close as his interpretation of duty. Walter flouting both but charming him in, while also being his mission, a part of his own duty and bound up in the death of Popescu's husband.

All of which leads to wondering about the reality of Maugham's duty - the clue is, indeed, in the title - but whether it's self-imposed too. All around him, people take the rules of society less seriously than he does, whether they be his British handler, the locals, Walter or Mme. Popescu. He dwells on how it was his duty to marry Syrie, the wife he's avoiding, after he got her pregnant. But was it truly? Was it a duty he could have avoided if he wanted to? Did he want to? Will he die in service to this thing that may never even really have been asked of him at all?

That tension and uncertainty about his death is why I resolved not to find out his biographical details until I had settled my thoughts. Because the poignancy of not knowing felt so delicious, and fed in so beautifully to the ethical crisis he was suffering through, that I wanted to treasure it as a lucky gift I chanced to have in reading it.

However, around half to two thirds through the novella, Donnelly introduces a speculative element which complicates things further. Obviously, there were no vampires involved in World War I. And so, however closely the narrative up to this point may (or may not) have married up to the real history and biography, here it diverges. The two experiences of the book briefly coalesce. But only briefly.

In my opinion, vampires are at their best when they are both truly dangerous and also, despite and because of the danger, sexy. In No Such Thing as Duty, the sexiness of the vampirism (and while a little understated, by god is Donnelly's vampire sexy) is corralled in by the physical - blood and bites and hands and tongues - just as the rest of the story is wedded to Maugham's own physicality, of his breath and cough and bleeding, his fever constantly waxing and waning, the scratch of fabric on skin, his enjoyment of food and drink. Donnelly revels in the sensation of drinks particularly, the haze of brandy and heat of coffee, and temperature more broadly - feverish burns and the cool touch of snow. And again, the lingering prophecy of Maugham's death informs this. We read his body in its frailty and potential failure; the vampirism marries that imminent death up with sex but also with the potentiality of death's forestalling.

And so, the two readings once again diverge and split even further. Is the intrusion of the fantastical about to change the facts, and a reader who knows whether Maugham will die about to be surprised by a change, or have their knowledge come to fruition, but its method shifted? And then, again, me, caught up only in the tension of the story itself. Vampires throw a spanner into the works of the greatest inevitability, and so add an extra layer of narrative uncertainty.

Right up to the end, Donnelly preserves that ambiguity. The story ends with implication rather than closure, a situation that made me very glad for my lack of knowledge, but one that, precisely because of the speculative elements, likewise imposes that ambiguity even on a reader who does know, because while the question of "if" might have been settled for them, there still lives a vast expanse of "how" and "why".

And so, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you know the facts or not. The story uses vampirism to crack open the vault of possibility, and ensure that the available endings are uncertain for any reader. I looked up the facts, and learnt that not only did Maugham live into his nineties, far beyond the scope of the life he sees as doomed in the story, but that even the foundation of the story rests on a branch untaken - the Scottish sanatorium the book's Maugham is glad to avoid was the path of reality. A reader who knew his biography was already wrong-footed, because it never cleaved to that reality in the first place. That break from the known path already introduced the potential for change, and the story could become one of the doomed path the real man didn't take.

No Such Thing As Duty wields its ambiguities and potentialities like a scalpel, all the while holding them in delicious contrast to the bitter realities of the physical and the flesh. By using a real historical figure and divorcing him from his reality, Donnelly ties her story to real anchors - there are hints and nods to real, biographical facts seeded throughout - without closing off the opportunities for tension, and the scope of possible endings. The fantastical element is also the most grounding one, the sections in which Maugham is being fed on being some of the most intimately real ones, where much of the rest of the story comes filtered through his particular lens of perception, held at a distance, or made hazy by illness. Only in contact with the unreal does the story fully rear up into feeling quite present. She leaves her questions open - this is not a story with an answer to its moral questions, any more than it is one to set a firm hand on the conclusion of its plot - and the work is all the better for it. It is a beautiful, brilliant book, with exquisitely understated prose and a skilfully managed viewpoint, and one that exemplifies what a good novella can do, or be, by using all its tools, figures and ideas all intersect and coalesce into a gorgeous mess of feeling and thought.

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The Math

Highlights: Sexy but understated but sexy vampirism, triangulating around the concept of duty, well-crafted introspective viewpoint

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Lara Elena Donnelly, No Such Thing As Duty [Neon Hemlock, 2025]. 

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

Review: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red

Holding on and fighting on when your society is falling away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Review: The Electric State

It's almost admirable how completely this film wastes a great concept

In an alternate 1990s, after an almost-successful robot rebellion was crushed with the last-minute help of human-operated telepresence drones, the defeated robots have been exiled to a huge secluded area in the southwestern US, and it's declared illegal for robots to be anywhere else. For some unexplained reason, this blatant act of forced displacement is called a peace treaty. Anyway, the plot proper begins when a runaway robot sneaks into a teenage girl's house and claims to be remotely operated by the little brother she thought had died years before. So she runs away with the robot, since she doesn't like her foster family anyway, and teams up with a smuggler who can get her into the zone where the surviving robots are confined, because that's where her brother's body is being kept. During this rescue mission, they uncover the evil secrets of the company that provides the world with telepresence drones, and create a new state of affairs where robots have a better chance of being free.

This rather average-sounding summary doesn't do justice to how aggressively generic the new Netflix film The Electric State is. Its cardboard characterizations, absolutely predictable beats, self-sabotaging style of humor, uninspired action sequences, unforgivably misjudged casting, overwritten dialogues, and toothless politics would suffice to render it just another forgettably mediocre Netflix production. What sets this disappointing exhibit of laziness apart is the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of the far more interesting illustrated novel of the same title published in 2018 by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. While the Netflix version goes out of its way to sand down its own themes and confine itself to family-friendly palatability, the source material was a scathing portrait of American modern vices: ubiquitous advertisements, irrational consumerism, and self-absorbed numbness. None of that commentary survives the adaptation process, because God forbid a Russo brothers character feel a true emotion or express a controversial viewpoint. The version of The Electric State they deliver is an empty carcass painted over with a cartoon smile.

Instead of its paint-by-numbers attempts at comedy or pathos, what actually reaches into the viewer's soul about this film is the unbelievably expert degree to which it avoids sparking any interest or empathy. Its happy scenes feel bland, its sad scenes come off as glib, its surprises are derivative, its scary bits are more deserving of embarrassment, and its appeal to righteous indignation doesn't know which value to care about. It's as if the Russo brothers had deliberately designed an experiment to craft a film that leaves every human emotion untouched. It doesn't even manage to provoke a memorable negative reaction: it should be boring, but it's too absurd for that; so it should be irritating, but it's too insecure for that; so it should be tiresome, but it's too scattershot for that; so it should be confusing, but it's too preachy for that; so it should be offensive, but it's too insincere for that. This production so fundamentally misunderstands what makes movies work that it may as well have been made by its robot characters.

To mention just one of many missed opportunities: in 2005's The Island, a universally and justly disliked movie, the villain has a henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, until the henchman has a moment of reflection and realizes that he, as a Black man, has a common cause with the targets he's chasing. He rebels against the villain explicitly because he knows what happens when a category of people is treated as less than people. As it happens, The Electric State also has a Black henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, and he also ends up rebelling against the villain, but somehow the movie never makes the obvious connection. The reason given for this plot point is the least imaginative possible. It should be cause for alarm for any movie that The Island has a clearer sense of its own stance than you.

Even with the mangled plot that was used instead of the original, The Electric State could have made urgently relevant points about the evils of inventing separate categories of personhood, the possibilities of resistance under total oppression, the temptation to replace the harshness of real life with a soothing fantasy, or the danger of inputting profit and human life in the same equation. This could have been a strong story, both by its own merits and in relation to our times. But perhaps it's an even more telling reflection of our times that the duo of the most successful directors in the history of cinema have settled for building the appearance, rather than the intention, of having something to say.

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Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: To Turn the Tide by S. M. Stirling

An argument about the Roman Empire that masquerades as a time travel into a alternate history novel.

It’s not often that one finds that the end of the book is what a reader might consider reading first. Usually an afterword of a book is best read in the aftermath of the book, when the reader’s thoughts can gel and coalesce and get a peek behind the curtain. It has happened, though, that said peek behind the curtain feels like it is oddly placed, that it should be in a foreword, or if it was a standalone piece altogether. Or, that the afterward and its arguments is the dog, and the book is the tail. 

In this context I want to talk about S.M. Stirling’s To Turn the Tide. 

But let’s go back to the end of the book before we get into the meat and potatoes of the actual book. The title is “For Nerds like Me: Concerning Technological Innovations and Time Travel”. Stirling begins with what is exactly on the tin, talking about works such as Lest Darkness Fall, The Man who Came Early, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and others. What follows is a long essay on the practicalities of what and how history and technology could be changed. There is a lot of discussion (which winds up in the book by the characters themselves) about the practicalities of providing technological innovation, and what kinds of innovation can be brought. There is also a lengthy discussion of the history of the Roman Empire at the time of the Marcomannic Wars in terms of society and technology and its impending fall. Oh, and for good measure, mentions of the mutability of history in general

But the thing is, this afterward is written in a tone and style as if you hadn’t actually just read the book itself, which I found peculiar. The ending of the essay even says “To find out more, you will have to read To Turn the Tide and its sequels”. And while the essay sets a lot of things up, it remains in terms of characters and plot mostly non-spoilery. It’s an academic argument from a non-academic on a number of levels that the book seems to have been written once the afterword was done, to see what it would look like as a story, rather than an essay.

And so we can now actually turn to the book that seems to put its own afterward into practice. 

To Turn the Tide starts in early 2030’s Vienna, where a scientist has invited several Americans to his house. They all have gotten to Vienna and the House before the world has decided to go to hell. As they learn the professor has built a time machine, a global thermonuclear war of the highest and fullest order breaks out, and a fusion bomb dropped on Vienna activates the machine and sends the professor and the Americans to 165 CE. The Americans are not murdered (although the professor does die) thanks to the intervention of a merchant who decides not to rob and kill the stunned mysterious travelers who seemed to fall from the sky. With the merchant’s help, the Americans get themselves on their feet, find that the Professor had packed a lot of money and gear (it was clear he was going to bring them all back before the bomb forced his hand) and now they have to make a life here. Going back or avoiding changing history (à la the concerns in Island in the Sea of Time) are impossible, given the nuclear war. They have to make the best of it. But they know a bunch of the outlines of history, and know in the next couple of years, a massive German invasion is coming (the Marcomannic Wars). Arthur and his friends decide they need to survive, and to prop up Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire... and keep it from sliding downward (they’ve seen Gladiator, they know who Commodus is). And so a story begins as the Americans try to use the money and goods they have (including a lot of seeds, of things like potatoes, chilies and tomatoes) to introduce positive change for the Empire, starting in Pannonia.  And, Arthur knows the formula for gunpowder.

The book is very heavy on its historical and technological arguments, and of course the nuts and bolts of trying to bootstrap technological changes from the wheelbarrow to gunpowder. This means the characterization of the characters is a bit lacking. Arthur Vanderberg, who soon becomes Artorius, gets the most of the book. He’s the veteran, and as the book goes more and more oriented toward the war with the Germanic tribes headed into Pannonia, he gets more and more screen time, he is the hub that the other Americans run around. It’s no surprise that when the Americans’ place in the world goes up, he’s the one that’s considered the leader and rises the farthest and highest. We really understand his deal, but we get lesser and varying degrees of motivation and drive from the others. One of them, Filiipa Chang, gets a same sex relationship that looks like a deliberate inversion of a relationship in another Stirling castaway in time novel, Island in the Sea of Time. Two of the other Americans not very convincingly and later in the book pair off with each other, leaving one unattached completely.  Given that intimate relationships are the major way the book drives character development, the book falls down significantly on that score.

There is a lot of playfulness, though, with the characters even given that thinness here with the Americans making lots of movie and book references and having a mentality that readers can identify with. Unlike a lot of previous time travel castaway novels, this is a novel where the characters come to terms with it immediately, and they have done the reading and viewing, as it were (the aforementioned Lest Darkness Fall gets explicitly talked about by the characters). There are other fun bits too, as when the Americans, now that they have tomatoes and chilies, decide to introduce the Romans to Texas pit style barbecue...and the Romans go gangbusters for it. There is even a cameo by a character from another time travel novel that is set in the same time and place that I will allow the reader to find and discover. I didn’t recognize her at first, but later, when I re-read the section, it's obvious who it is. 

Marcus Aurelius himself becomes a character in the book, with a point of view. The book has, as many people interested in him do, a bit of a crush on the man, as he is clearly more intelligent and clever than many of those around him, and he comes to accept the strangers with their newfangled ideas far more readily than perhaps reason would allow. I get the feeling that out of the “Good Emperors”, Marcus is clearly Stirling’s favorite. And Verus, his co-emperor, is definitely depicted as a slacker nobody remembers (to be fair, even today, most people who know Marcus Aurelius don’t even remember Verus was co-emperor with him until he died of the plague). 

The action sequences, and they get bigger and more prominent as the book goes along, are a draw for readers who like that sort of thing. Are you the kind of person who saw the battle at the beginning of Gladiator (a movie the characters have seen!) and thought “adding a primitive gun barrage to this fight would make it even cooler?” If that is the case, then there is a lot for you to love. There are long stretches of the book that are ticking over technological changes and development, and then there is the sharp shock of war, described in bloody and serious detail. War is definitely hell. Even as Arthur tries to develop primitive gunpowder weapons, he can’t get the Romans to Napoleonic level technology where gunpowder weapons are everything in a battle (the book is heavy on how much things can change and how much materiel can actually be produced; it does a great job in showing the gunpowder weapons as a force multiplier but not the be all of warfare, but Stirling has a great admiration for Romans, and has the characters point out how easily the Romans borrowed technological ideas from rivals and neighbors, and so they take up the gunpowder weapons similarly).

But is the book worth reading? Who is this book for? I think this book is for the kind of people who would read that afterword first, and would be excited to see it in action. It’s a book that, with its afterword in the lead, is making historical arguments about the Roman empire, technology and history, with the fates or even development of the characters as somewhat of a secondary concern. In some ways it is a definite evolution of some of Stirling’s thought given his previous time travel, alternate history books, showing development of his thinking on how things could be changed, but in other ways, there is a bit of a regression on the character front. Arthur and his friends don’t quite stand up to, say, Captain Alston and the islanders of Nantucket in terms of memorability, save for Arthur. 

I personally enjoyed the book, given its focus on alternate history, history, and thinking about a subgenre and the practicalities of time travel, changing history and a reconsideration of the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire. It’s not a book for those who are deeply invested in the characters and their lives and growth and development as much, I am afraid. 

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The Math

Highlights:

• Intensely interesting worldbuilding and piece of life in Pannonia 165 CE as the Americans are dropped into it.

• Deep consideration of the problems of technological change and development and theories of history

• A Baen cover that doesn’t hurt the eyes

• Notably weak on characters, even the lead. 

My rating? That's tough. For me as a writer, it hits a solid 8 out of 10. If the characters had more depth to them, it would be an easy nine. But the characters really drag down the final score a whole point. And if you aren't interested in time travel, the problems of the Roman Empire, et cetera, that 8 score is generous and this book is probably Not For You. (See what I mean?)

Reference: Stirling, S. M.,  To Turn the Tide  [Baen, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Glory of the Empire

Contingency springs eternal

One of the things that consistently provides me with a mild degree of amusement as an alternate history fan is how writers from other genres, and especially outside the speculative fiction scene, and especially outside of genre fiction, accidentally reinvent alternate history. Mystery and thriller writers doing it is one thing, as alternate histories can provide interesting new settings for such plots (some of the best writing in the genre is from authors from those traditions trying their hand at it; I can name The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, Fatherland by Robert Harris, and Dominion by C. J. Sansom as good examples thereof), but ‘literary’ types doing it is something else. Part of me finds it funny that writers from a tradition that derides science fiction and fantasy as focusing on setting to the detriment of character find their way to a subgenre whose setting is perhaps the defining feature. Of course, that doesn’t mean they always do it well—I found Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to have an ending that would never be taken seriously in a genre space (although the HBO miniseries improved on that substantially), and I found Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham to not have a clear idea of what to do with the premise. It is with all this baggage I encountered Jean d’Ormesson’s 1971 novel The Glory of the Empire, originally published by Éditions Gallimard, with its English translation released in 2016 and published by the New York Review of Books.

Earlier than most, d’Ormesson invents textbook-style alternate history (a subgenre with pre-d’Ormesson antecedents in works such as H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come), almost contemporaneously with Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail, a book by an economist which set the stage for much of alternate history, professional and amateur, that followed it; you can feel its echoes still felt today if one knows where to look. Indeed, I kept thinking of Sobel as I read d’Ormesson, so similar are they in their conceits and yet so different in terms of subject matter. Sobel’s book is known for its commitment to paralleling, some would argue satirizing, academia with its in-universe scholarly debates and its pages upon pages of nonexistent sources in its bibliography. d’Ormesson does all of that, to my great surprise, but in some ways he goes further than Sobel.

On its face, The Glory of the Empire is simply a cipher, where history goes mostly the same as ours with one historical element replaced with a fictional element. Here, the Roman Empire never rises, and in its place rises a Mediterranean colossus that is only ever referred to as the Empire, which is governed from a capital only ever referred to as the City. d’Ormesson deliberately leaves the details vague, which in modern alternate history circles would either be tarred as lazy writing or understood as a sign that the work has another focus (it’s not alternate history, but see the hand wringing over the implausible politics of Alex Garland’s film Civil War vis-à-vis its narrative focus on the actual human experience of civil wars to get an idea). As my dear friend Gary Oswald has argued, if you don’t have a traditional narrative, your history has to be good to make up for it, but d’Ormesson, not confined by the arcane discussions of hobbyists, has taken a third option: a meditation on the meaning of history itself.

The book is written like a textbook, and one of a style that feels like something out of 1971 if not before; indeed, the earlier parts of the book read almost like an old chronicle. The text is awash in references to nonexistent historians that d’Ormesson’s alter ego has consulted; there are even footnotes! These historians are squabbling, deeply funny to history nerds like myself, but I wonder if it may come off as obtuse to general readers. He also invokes many real historians and other historical figures, such as Walt Whitman and Vladimir Lenin, to enliven the commentary, and provides cartons of Easter eggs to aforementioned history nerds.

The broad contours of the Empire’s history are essentially Roman history from the mythical foundation by Romulus and Remus to the fall of Constantinople put in a blender and made into a peculiar but surprisingly tasty nutrient shake. You have the ancient creation myths, the squabbling of cities and the eventual consolidation of the heartland, the conquest of the surrounding areas, the succession disputes and civil wars, the barbarians, and all that jazz. Admittedly, the religious aspect can be a bit confusing, and I’m not entirely sure where Christianity fits in. In any case, it’s something of a funhouse mirror of European history, and it gets stranger as you move East. The Empire, after a certain point in the book, begins to resemble the Mongols more than anything else, marching ever eastward, becoming the greatest power the world had ever known.

There are a number of figures that take center stage during the course of the book, fitting for a work whose scope spans several centuries. Some are clearly mythical, with a generous description of latter-day mythmaking served alongside the historiography. But the most compelling of these characters is by far Emperor Alexis, who would be given the mantle of ‘main character’ if one absolutely had to be chosen. His life seems mythical, and d’Ormesson deliberately doesn’t let you know what, exactly, is ‘real’ about him. He has a properly epic story, from a life of mind-dulling hedonism in Alexandria, to wandering ancient Asia learning and dispensing wisdom, to returning to the Empire as its savior à la King Arthur in the hour of its greatest need. Through Alexis, who in this world seems to be all the virtues said to be held by a constellation of Classical-age luminaries rolled into one, d’Ormesson is asking a rather big question: what is heroism without the scaffolding of circumstance behind it? What does that mean for a civilization which, through its great men, inspires civilizations beyond its own fall?

The decision to never name the Empire or its capital city, or even to provide a proper location of its heartland (although it is definitely along the Mediterranean somewhere, and I got the impression that it was at some undisclosed point on the Italian peninsula), reminded me of the Race, the invading aliens in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series (incidentally, the series that got me into alternate history). The Race has homogenized itself to the point that it needs no other signifiers for itself, nor for its government; before meeting humanity, there’s no ‘other’ to define themselves by. In d’Ormesson’s novel, the namelessness of the Empire is in in-universe terms murkier than in Turtledove’s work, but in a Doylist sense it is very clear: it is the Empire, and nobody would bother thinking of any other upon hearing that word. The West likes to define itself as the successor to Rome and Greece, as does Russia to the Kievan Rus (to Ukraine’s great chagrin), and China to the Qin, among many other examples. Even as history grinds all things beautiful and sordid into dust with the passage of time, people like to define themselves as the clear successors to some historical entity, not acknowledging that change renders a complete continuity of essence laughable, something like how the human body replaces almost all of its cells every seven years or so.

This all becomes more clever at the ending (spoilers for a fifty-year-old book incoming), where, through what is admittedly more than a little jerry-rigged, history returns to something we would recognize. So much of the alternate history genre is committed to questions of contingency and of inevitability, be it the course of wars or the course of empires. Doing enough of this sort of thinking, I found the truth in what Buddhists call ‘anatta,’ or ‘non-self,’ the idea that nothing has a fixed essence, as its constituent parts can be recombined in myriad ways. In other words, nothing is inevitable. Most alternate history does this by changing the past and seeing what other presents could happen; d’Ormesson does something I would have thought to be impossible to do in a compelling manner until I read this book: change the past that leads to our exact present. It’s a deeply weird way of going about things, but it throws the contingency of everything into stark relief.

I am mildly appalled that it took me wandering around my local library to learn of The Glory of the Empire. It’s the sort of book that alternate historians like me should love; indeed I love it for what it has done, although it confused me at times (but many great books do). History as a discipline is about asking ‘why?’ The speculative genres are about asking ‘what if?’ d’Ormesson has blended the two here in a way I’ve never seen before, and the end result feels very new, despite it being half a century old! It’s a book that hammered into me the point that everything could have been different. It is an unmooring experience in the best way possible.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: d'Ormesson, Jean. The Glory of the Empire [Éditions Gallimard, 1971].

First Contact: Porco Rosso

It turns out, Alex would watch anime when pigs fly

I feel, at odd moments, that the fact that I haven’t watched all that much anime should get me my nerd card revoked, doubly so for only having watched so much of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved films, and most of that as a child (similarly, I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings or seen any of the movies, nor have I watched all that much Star Trek, or any Doctor Who). I did watch The Boy and the Heron in theaters and enjoyed it. However, it took some time, and only by wrangling with a television that decided to have a tantrum that night after getting home from a long drive back from New York, did I eventually get around to watching Porco Rosso, which I finally did after being recommended it by my internet friend Nathan Goldwag, whose Journal on Civilization you should read.

In so many ways, Porco Rosso is precisely the sort of media that I lap up in droves. It has outlandish technology, roguish characters, and perhaps most importantly, the lushly rendered setting that ties itself directly into a real historical period. All this is combined with the beautiful artwork and that je ne sais quoi that even I can detect in Miyazaki’s oeuvre, an ethereality I associate, perhaps unfairly, with the Japanese.

The delicate dance between reality and unreality in this film is demonstrated most clearly by the namesake character, a daredevil pilot who fights pirates in the Adriatic Sea in an odd and distorted version of the 1930s. Italy is a real country here, in the throes of Mussolini’s reign of terror, but Porco himself resides in a fictional country that seems to replace, at least in part, our world’s Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He served in the Italian air force in World War I, but has fled his homeland out of opposition to fascism. Perhaps most notably, and definitely most obviously, he is an anthropomorphic pig, who had at one point been a human male. This change is never explained, but one can detect there an undertone of the man’s general disgust with humanity in perhaps ‘choosing,’ if that is even an accurate description thereof, to become an animal reviled by so many people as a riposte to our species’ vaunted pretensions and sordid realities.

During the film, I couldn’t help but regret that I didn’t watch it as a child; I had watched Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, and it was released before I was born, so it would have been possible. I would have loved the gorgeously rendered aircraft of all types, even if I didn’t have the knowledge of aviation history that Miyazaki and company clearly did. This film activated the part of my brain, long dormant in most cases, that loved construction vehicles and tanks and sixteen-wheelers and helicopters as a child. It would have been a film I would watch again and again and again on a VCR whose basics I had memorized by three years old.

It’s a theme that comes to me as I write this, as the film clearly dwells on nostalgia, on the glorification and glamorization of pasts that in some ways were the greatest ever and in other ways never existed at all. From the way the film presents its setting, we are seeing a decline of a freewheeling, high-flying age of aviation that is being overtaken ever more by the industrialization of human slaughter. The Adriatic here is a chaotic place, a violent place, certainly, one where cruise liners are also aircraft carriers (a choice that delighted and confused me in equal measure—it implies so much). Here, it is the Italians who are threatening to clamp down on this age of romance, and the domestic politics of this country are doing their share, as there are fascists marching in the streets. I do not know if Miyazaki was aware of this, but knowing him he may well have been, but it is so fitting that it is Italy doing this, as it is the country that first used airplanes as a weapon of war, in 1911 as it wrested Libya from the Ottoman Empire. More obviously, it is the Italians who, after all, invented fascism. As the aerial zomia of the Adriatic fades, we are left with characters, Porco himself most of all, who don’t know what to do with themselves, or their place in this world more generally. To quote Matthew Stover’s novelization of The Revenge of the Sith (which, incidentally, is a beautifully written novel which is in some ways even better than the film it’s based on): it’s the end of an age of heroes, and it has saved its best for last.

This is a beautiful film, and much of that is in the portrayal of the environments, man-made and natural. The natural scenes are so lush, like those in all of the works of Miyazaki’s I’ve seen. Who wouldn’t want a secluded beach to oneself like Porco does here? I would, if only to read there. The architecture, too, is the stuff of the fantasies and dreams of those who do not live there, with cobblestone streets and houses that look almost otherworldly to an American like myself (of course, I suspect the effect isn’t nearly as strong for those who have lived there their whole lives). It’s just pretty all around, and it makes me want to visit Italy and Croatia and the countries of the Adriatic more broadly.

This is a film about what has been, what we wanted to have been, and what never could have been. It is a film about yearning, in all its myriad forms, and yet how temporary all of our desires and hopes necessarily are. It feels very Buddhist, in some way, about how nothing of this world will ever truly satisfy you. But all the same, it professes love for this world, for experience, for joy. To quote the philosopher Amod Lele, himself quoting a commenter on his blog (which I also encourage you to read), “we don’t cease to enjoy a song because it has an ending.” It’s ultimately an ambiguous message for a film with an ambiguous ending, and in some ways the only appropriate message for such a film. Life is short, and it is better to be a pig than a fascist, is it not?

Now if only he had finished his planned sequel set in the Spanish Civil War…

--

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

Review: The Book of Clarence

A unique, irreverent, genre-mixing dark comedy wrapped around deep messages on race and class

The theatrical trailer for The Book of Clarence left me feeling confused and a little uneasy about seeing the film. Was it an alternate history, a comedy, a parody, a tragic epic drama? Was it an allegorical Black social commentary, fantasy/sci-fi, religious, anti-religious? After seeing the film, the answer to all of these questions is: yes. There was so much going on in this story. The quirky presentation style is so unique that it’s hard to know who the target audience is. But sometimes weird is good.

The story is set during the last year of the life of Jesus. Yes, the Jesus. Jesus is a popular local celebrity in the area (due to his legendary miracles) but initially he remains mostly offscreen and is barricaded by an entourage of disciples. Clarence is a local hustler, but with a good heart. He gambles, sells drugs, drag-races chariots, and takes care of his ailing/aging mother. When his ill-gotten debts catch up to him and the local mobster threatens to kill him, Clarence hatches a scheme to make money by taking advantage of Jesus’s popularity as the Messiah. At first he tries to join the disciples but is immediately rejected by them, including his twin brother Thomas (yes, the famous doubting Thomas) so Clarence is prevented from any access to Jesus. Then he gets a better idea. He decides to con people into believing he is a miracle worker to get money.  Clarence enlists his best friend Elijah and recently freed fighter Barabbas to help with the scheme. But things take a turn when the occupying Roman military catches up with Clarence leading to an unexpected encounter with the real Jesus. The additional twist in this film is that, other than the occupying Romans, every character is Black.

The film is initially a parody of classic Bible epics such as Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments, using ironically epic background music, dramatic chariot races, and even 1960s-style gold-framed title pages in between the major acts of the story. On the other hand, it is also fantastical. The drugs Clarence smokes with his friends cause them to temporarily float in the air with their bodies turning and spinning, gravity-free. When Clarence gets an idea, it materializes as an actual light above his head. The fantastical special effects are a surreal juxtaposition against the retro epic vibe.

At first, the feel of the film is epic and historical but also slightly comical/absurd. However, the film eventually dives into the true nature of belief, loyalty, and morality. Although the people in his community have a range of spiritual beliefs, particularly as it relates to the Messiah, Clarence seems to be the only one who doesn’t believe in any form of God or spirituality. However, he is willing to use the existing belief systems to achieve his goals by being a con artist and pretending to be an alternate Messiah. In a dual role, LaKeith Stanfield plays both Clarence and Clarence’s twin brother, Thomas the apostle, who has abandoned everything, including their ailing mother, to follow Jesus. Thomas despises Clarence’s petty criminal behavior, even as Clarence has devoted himself to caring for their mother. Thus we have the set-up of religious piety versus cynical pragmatism that permeates the film.

The best character in the film is Clarence’s best friend/sidekick Elijah. Elijah is open-minded about his beliefs, but also comfortable running scams and being loyal to Clarence and their bestie, chariot racer Mary Magdalene. In a pivotal scene, Mary Magdalene has been accused of adultery and chained to a wall to be brutally stoned to death. Elijah intervenes to protect her, risking his own death, but he cannot free her from the chain. Clarence is nowhere around and death seems imminent for Mary and Elijah until the real-deal Messiah shows up in a quietly jaw-dropping, Marvel-worthy scene.

The set design and costumes of the film are outstanding, making you feel transported to the ancient Jerusalem setting that has been reimagined for the story. The film also benefits from a strong cast reinterpreting classic characters, including Mary, the Mother of Jesus (hilariously played by Alfre Woodard), John the Baptist (David Oyelowo), and an irritable Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy). We also get quirky new characters played by Babs Olusanmokun from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things, and an almost unrecognizable Benedict Cumberbatch who takes the film to new irreverence as an accidentally mistaken version of Jesus.

All these strange, quirky characters revolve around Clarence as he tries to make a better life for himself and prove himself worthy of his ill-fated love interest Varinia (Anna Diop). LaKeith Stanfield leans into the cynical, skeptical, onscreen personality he has used effectively in prior fantastical films like Sorry to Bother You, Haunted Mansion, and even Get Out. Despite his cynicism, Clarence has enough cliched character growth to make some positive societal choices for others, even as he still scams those around him. Clarence continues to pursue his fake Messiah miracles with growing success until he finds out the true cost of the path he has chosen. Then the film takes a serious and dramatic turn into a violent exploration of racism and classism. We think we know what is going to happen, but the final crucifixion scenes subvert both traditional narratives and cynical new viewer expectations.

The Book of Clarence throws many important social justice themes and philosophical questions at viewers who may ultimately feel overwhelmed and disoriented by the irreverent and quirky delivery style. The trope of the lovable rascal with the heart of gold is quickly subverted into an ultimate theme of “mess around and find out.” It’s been a long time since a film completely bewildered me in such a good way. This movie is not for everyone. But, if you have an appetite for quirkiness and a tolerance for explorations of hard truths wrapped in an allegory, The Book of Clarence will give you a great deal to think about.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Weird and provocative. Not for everyone.
• Quirky subversive messaging.
• Strong performances by the lead actors.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Poor Things: on eating life with a big spoon

When an unstoppable id meets an immovable world

A brain extirpated from an unborn fetus and transplanted onto a dead adult's head sounds like the farthest thing from comedy. And yet Poor Things finds a way to turn this gruesome premise into an unapologetic exploration of the bodily experience, mishaps and all. Deliberately oblivious to the constraints of "polite society" (it's no coincidence that in her former life she had the same name as the famously horny Queen Victoria), this newly formed creature meets the world with inexhaustible wonder. Every sensation is new, every place is a delight, every new friend is interesting. Not only is it uncommon to see a Bildungsroman about a female protagonist; this protagonist is, in a twisted way, already a grown-up whose brutal honesty makes up for the maturity she supposedly lacks. The milestone life experiences that usually crush a part of us, leaving us slightly more jaded each time, only make her open up even more. She has nothing to disguise, so she can't be humiliated, and the unwise few who try to manipulate her with fear or shame end up swallowed, digested and excreted by her continuous hunger for more life, more learning, more freedom. The story places her in the well-trodden plot of finding herself, except she's never been lost. She's already comfortable in her own being; the only thing she's missing is a taste of everything.

There are, however, problematic sides to this characterization that aren't acknowledged in the story. With a baby's mind and an adult's appearance, she quickly falls into the trope of Born Sexy Yesterday, which is exactly what Victorian patriarchs want her to be: available, pliant, undemanding. This is what moves them to prey on her in the first place, although it's the same trait that allows her to more easily get rid of possessive lovers, because her sexual needs aren't tied to one specific person. She's happy to be taken, but not owned. The problem is the alteration to her humanity that it took to get her to that carefree state. It's hard to cheer for her erotic experimentation when one remembers that she's mentally a child who doesn't know she's a child. Poor Things wants to answer the question of what a woman's life could be if men's attempts to control her bounced off her without effect, but the device it chooses to employ for approaching that question results from extensive, violent male manipulation of a female body. A woman shouldn't have to literally lose her mind and identity in order to become her own person.

I'm not a woman, so I'm unqualified to declare whether Poor Things is feminist. Women who have reviewed this film have already delved into that topic, both mildly approvingly and very much not, and it's probably a good sign that varying answers are possible. Liberation shouldn't take only one form, and some flavors of liberation will be more appealing to some people, and others more to others. It may be too much to expect this single brain-transplanted creature to fix Victorian inequalities, but in each of her personal interactions, one can notice a growing desire to share her joy for life. The lover who kidnaps her thinks he's using her, he thinks he's a hedonist, he thinks he's free from social conventions, but he's unable to appreciate what she could teach him. She's the real hedonist, the real user, the really free, so of course she leaves him when he refuses to be as free as she is. The friend who teaches her about the pains of the world thinks he's breaking her, he thinks she needs a dose of reality, but she's the one who lives in reality. It doesn't even occur to him to do what he can to alleviate the suffering around him. She does try, and it doesn't matter that others predictably take advantage of her good intentions. This is not a character at whom you can yell "you ought to know better." She exists in a broken world, but the story is not about that broken world. The function of this plot point is to mirror Buddha's path toward enlightenment, which started when he left his pampered palace life and saw suffering for the first time.

You may have valid reasons to criticize this hypernarrow focus on one individual's personal progress, but it's a choice the film does consciously. Several shots are filmed literally with this extreme focus: the protagonist's singular perception dominates the angle from which you're allowed to see the story. We're shown a world with multicolor skies and air railways and impossibly tall towers, and it's an open question whether that's what the world is like or that's how it appears to her. Meeting the outside world for the first time is such a surreal experience for her that even the background landscape shines to the point of warping around her.

The structure of the film is similarly affected by the way she inhabits life. The plot is interrupted by big digressions that she takes to with natural ease, existing purely in the moment. She makes impulsive yet significant choices with no care for narrative momentum, sometimes forcing a scene to snap into an unrelated trajectory. What she wants and what she does is not interested in our expectations of how life should proceed, so it can be jarring to have to adjust to her journey's irregular pace, and that's the point. When we feel like Poor Things is failing to follow the established rules of filmmaking, it's the character seizing her fate in her hands and playing with it.

For all that she discovers and grows and moves past, she's still a child at heart, still motivated primarily by fun, still untainted by learned cruelty. And when she deals with a broken world by exposing her entire, unbreakable self, we may react with shock, or amusement, or pity, or concern, but in the end, we can't help harboring a little nagging bit of envy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Betrayals, by Bridget Collins

An intimate exploration of weak, flawed people doing small, right things

Cover design by Micaela Alcaino

We are all familiar with those moments of self-doubt that plague us in the dark of night. Degrees of triviality vary, from Did I have parsley in my teeth all through dinner? to Will the planet be safe for my children? The nature of our worries is as varied as our characters. But for those who have held an academic position—or indeed spent too much time sequestered in the studies of esoterica at college—the moments of self-doubt tend to take a more common form: Does my life mission matter? Does anything I do really matter?

Such concerns are the central theme of Bridget Collins’s novel The Betrayals. It focuses on a school, Montverre, a school whose sole concern is the study, creation, and development of the grand jeu, the national game of an ambiguously French-flavored European country. All the best government officials have a Montverre education; an acceptance at Montverre—either through demonstrated achievement at the grand jeu or family influence—is a ticket to future success. Montverre is a big deal. The grand jeu is a symbol of the nation, and Montverre is the heart of the grand jeu.

Yet the precise nature of the grand jeu is left as vague as the nation’s identity. We don’t learn how to play it, and, indeed, as one Magister at Montverre explains, the first place one goes wrong in playing the grand jeu is in playing it as if it were a game. The truly enlightened know that it is so much more than that. It combines principles of literary analysis, mathematics, and music, in wildly esoteric complexity, such that the Magisters of the school swear oaths of celibacy and dedicate their entire lives to exploring this discipline.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, the nation is turning fascist. Léo Martin is a minister for culture in the government, a loyal Party member, until one day he isn’t—not quite, not enough. A bit too lukewarm in support of Party efforts to maintain cultural purity, it seems, and a bit too zealous in writing memos against them. In short order he is told that he is going to resign his post, effective immediately, and retire to Montverre, to devote himself to the study of the grand jeu, his true passion in life, which he had set aside in a desire to serve his country,¹  but to which he now welcomes the opportunity to return. Such are his instructions. Oh, and Léo, while you’re there, would you be willing to keep in touch with us? Send us letters, let us know how you’re getting on, what’s happening inside Montverre, be a good chap.

Within the walls of the school is Claire Dryden, the Magister Ludi, unique in being the only woman who has been hired as a Magister for the school, due to a short-lived experiment with blind hiring. Everyone is a bit weird about it, not least Léo, who has spent 32 years being a full-throated good old boy. Oddly, she has in her possession Léo’s school diary, which relates the sequence of events in his boyhood that led him to win a gold medal for his second-year game assignment. As we learn, her interest in Léo is not a coincidence: Léo became quite close to a fellow student, Carfax, during this period, and Carfax was her brother. This makes things quite awkward between them, because the year Léo won his gold prize, Carfax committed suicide, under circumstances that have led Claire to blame him. And, indeed, Léo to blame himself.

The Betrayals alternates the past and present, showing us through Léo’s diary the past events that led up to the gold medal and Carfax’s suicide, while tracking the present political developments as the country descends further into fascism. Everything is filtered, remote, because the school is so withdrawn, but it’s impossible to miss the signs. Léo’s girlfriend goes missing, and it’s not clear whether she was disappeared or simply fled because she was Christian. Surely he must have known about her religion, a friend says. Wasn’t her name Christina? (No, Léo says, Chryseïs. As if that matters.) The one Christian boy at the school—the one who has to wear a star on his robes--is summoned by the police, ‘just to check some paperwork’.

There are trains.

Through all this, Léo writes letters to his former colleagues at the Ministry for Culture, just to keep his hand in the game, in case it’s possible for him to return from banishment. Although he tries hard not to say too much about the Magister Ludi (whom he feels quite drawn to, given his past history with her brother), he does give an awful lot of details about the entertaining disputes among the other Magisters. Disputes in which they discuss, for example, politics and government policy. As he eventually learns (to no surprise to the reader), the school’s remote isolation from worldly concerns is not enough to protect it from the political developments of the nation. You can’t hide from fascism.

The particular brilliance of this book is the way it avoids easy moral decisions. Yes, it would be a rousing tale of good against evil if Léo stood up to the government, took a stand, joined a resistance, recruiting from the Magisters and students to turn the grand jeu, that noble national game of this country, into a symbol of all that is good and right. We are not fascism; our game represents FREEDOM. And so on.

But this isn’t that book. The alternate history is only very slightly offset from our own, not enough to make it possible for one brave gang of rebels to defeat the not-quite-Nazis on the rise. This timeline is going to follow the same path our own Europe did. Fascists gonna fash.

And even if it were possible for a plucky gang of rebels to turn the tide of history, the people in this book are not those people. Léo is not a strong or a brave man. As a student he willingly took part in some brutal bullying of Carfax, and only changed his ways when forced, grudgingly, to work with him. Their last interaction before Carfax’s suicide can be read as an act of friendship, but it can equally well be read as a betrayal (see title), which more or less directly led to the tragic outcome.

As an adult, Léo is similarly slow and hesitant to do the right thing. Yes, he stands up to the Prime Minister, but only by writing a memo that he didn’t really believe would spell the end of his career. If he had, he would not have written it. When he has the opportunity to shield a Christian boy from being put on a train, he does it in the smallest, easiest way, that inconveniences him the least. When he writes his letters about the internal workings of Montverre, he shields the Magister Ludi, but he doesn’t even consider what his other statements might do. He always wants to keep his options open. He’s eager to return to government, even having seen from the inside the direction it’s going. (He’s also rather a misogynistic dick.)

So, no, this is not a book about heroes. This is a book about flawed, small people because righteous moral heroes are in short supply. We make compromises to survive, since stiff-necked rigidity can deprive us of friends and allies and comrades. We build connections with the people who are there, because in a growing hellscape, we need those to survive.

Heroes do The Right Thing. But in some circumstances there isn’t The Right Thing to do. There is only a lesser, smaller right thing. And sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes it isn’t. You can’t hide from fascism, and the people in The Betrayals are not the sort of people who can beat it. But by doing enough small right things, maybe they can survive it. 

——

1 Readers of Herman Hesse will recognize a heavy influence of The Glass Bead Game in this novel's conceit.^↩

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention.

Highlights:

• Academics being insufferable

• Rising fascism

• Ivory tower angst

References 

Collins, Bridget. The Betrayals. [The Borough Press, 2020].

——

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

Review: The Book of Rain by Thomas Wharton

A symphony made of successive voices, some as elegy, some as warning

A little Canadian town surrounded by forest, some distance off from the beaten path, sits on the world's biggest deposit of the world's most potent hydrocarbon fuel. A volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean matches Plato's description of Atlantis, and might sink for real any day now. A thirsty world builds nanobot clouds to bring rain back, but the clouds reject human control and fly away to make rain where they please. A wounded biosphere shouts its pain in a language no one remembers. A rip in the stitches that keep reality in one piece leaves wrinkles in people's memories, and each time the anomaly seems to calm down, they can't be sure that they're still in the same world. A random family that was just passing by is pulled into the center of the anomalies by one too many bad rolls of fate's dice. All over the world, species are disappearing. Life is still so plentiful in its beauty that it takes deliberate attention to notice how quickly it's fading. There are no heroes, but that doesn't mean ordinary people have no effect. Rescuing even one endangered egg may not only ensure there will be a future, but earn enough goodwill to make a place in it for us.

What I'm describing is one of those precious instances when literary and speculative fiction hold hands and trace a passionate tango on the page. Such embrace between narrative forms that needn't be rivals is not a novelty in Thomas Wharton's writing career, but in the larger publishing ecosystem it's still infrequent enough to merit celebrating each occurrence of it. The Book of Rain not only draws from both traditions, but integrates their respective techniques to create an outstanding consonance of theme and form.

Like many of its animal characters, who make repeated attempts to communicate with humans and can only be understood in tragic hindsight, the fragmented, nonlinear text of The Book of Rain abounds in scattered clues that may not click together the first time, but neatly cohere once the full story is apprehended. This novel is a generous rewarder of rereading. Fittingly for a work of climate fiction, the experience of reading it and failing to catch all the little interconnected facts brings to mind the accumulated negligence of a civilization that chose to ignore the little signs of coming disaster until they piled up into an undeniable colossus. Fittingly for a novel so concerned with what birds think of human actions, its meaning can't be perceived in the details, only from a bird's-eye view. This is a book that asks you to trust it with your continued curiosity. It won't impart the answers to you; you have to reconstruct them from the multiple accounts contained in it.

There's the perpetual wild child who feels more at home in a paranormal disaster zone with a propensity for reality-warping accidents than among the mundane motions of small-town life; there's the globe-trotting secret agent who smuggles rare animals out of ruined habitats while pretending to write tourist guidebooks and is one day visited by a miracle; there's the exhausted game designer who dreams of impossible worlds where he wishes he could hide from the terror of living; there's the doomsday cult that waits for a divine sign about the end times while guarding their sacred place with hunting rifles; there's the underground geothermal laboratory that looks for a way to replace the universe with a marginally less unfavorable one; there's the assembly of birds unexpectedly burdened with deciding whether there's anything worth preserving of humankind; there are the nameless scholars who patiently compile the ancient tale of how the world was saved from final silence. There are the places where lifepaths briefly meet before diverging in irreversible directions. There are the unsuspected consequences that cascade from those chance encounters and are dragged downstream to a realm that from here looks like eternity. There are myriad novels within this novel, their stories incomplete memories that emerge and vanish in endless iterations, their characters a mass of lonely souls facing the blurry, foggy outline of posterity and stumbling confusedly toward it.

Maybe I'm not making much sense. One is supposed to provide an appetizer, a truncated plot summary, in a book review. Trying to do so for The Book of Rain would be beside the point. Each of the main narrators is introduced to the reader in the middle of a search for something crucially valuable, but this is not the story of how they find it. Although the conventions of the novel as a mode of writing were developed in tandem with the cultural shifts that led to the rise of the individual as a psychological and moral fact, here the form of the novel is stretched to encompass the long course of time, a torrent that can be diverted but not stopped, one where the pressing worries of individual lives don't amount to a drop. The Book of Rain is a story about the place that ordinary people occupy amid events that overpower and exceed them. It's a lament for the world we're killing, but its fatalist prediction of inevitable catastrophe doesn't lead to nihilism. This world will end, but another can be built after we pay for our mistakes. That opportunity is not a given: we won't deserve the grace to try again without accepting a position of equality with our fellow creatures. Their voices carry no less weight than ours; their needs are no less urgent. After this world is forgotten, those of our descendants who remain will still have a chance, if they learn the required humility, to share with the rest of nature a common memory. And if they attain such fortune, maybe one of them will read The Book of Rain to the birds.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Wharton, Thomas. The Book of Rain [Penguin Random House, 2023].