Book Review: Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era

An unexpectedly enjoyable deep dive into the storytelling of Star Trek in the twenty-first century

Adam Kotsko’s Late Star Trek is an unexpectedly enjoyable deep dive into the storytelling of Star Trek in the twenty-first century. I’ve watched Star Trek for decades and my significant attachment to the earlier television shows influenced my world view. Later in life, I discovered that my love for the show—the characters and the stories—paled in comparison to hard core fans. Late Star Trek does a good job of meeting the needs of superfans while still discussing the storytelling intentions of the various series through a more general literary and social lens. Even if you don’t agree with the ultimate conclusion regarding a particular show, film, or novel, the analyses provide useful context and theories for why some shows resonate with viewers and why some leave them feeling disappointed. In our current era of franchise saturation from brands like Marvel, Star Wars, and D.C., Star Trek stands out as a forerunner of the trend to launch multiple television shows, films, and novels to feed the desires of both old and new fans. Star Trek also stands out in terms of its core values and high fan expectations. Late Star Trek reminds viewers of what we loved about the earlier shows—particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation (optimism, diversity, curiosity, adventure, moral questions) and how those ingrained expectations shape our appreciation of newer iterations of the story, even as the real world changes around us.

Late Star Trek is a focused analysis of what went wrong and what went right with Star Trek in the post Voyager Era. After providing brief background comments on the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, the primary analysis shifts to Enterprise and the content thereafter, including the novels, the Chris Pine/Kelvin timeline reboot films, Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and brief discussions of Lower Decks and Prodigy. The most thorough discussion is the chapter on Enterprise which provides an interesting analysis of that show’s struggles to create a prequel backstory for the Star Trek universe we know so well. Kosko discusses Enterprise in the context of a post 9-11 world, particularly in terms of the perceived need to shift from the relative optimism of The Next Generation era shows, to instead adopt a tone that felt more gritty, more negative, and closer to the stress of our (then) real-life world. The chapter posits that the societal shifts influenced the plotting of the series but that the attempts to align to societal changes were ultimately alienating for fans who wanted the Star Trek they knew and loved. The analysis is fascinating and intensely readable with plenty of specific citations to episodes. Surprisingly, the analysis does not discuss other science fiction shows at the time for a comparison of how other series, such as Battlestar Galactica, utilized grittier storytelling in their reboot, and how the comparative fan expectations may have affected the success or failure of such tonal shifts.

In discussing the Star Trek reboot films starring Chris Pine, the book takes a more superfan and mostly negative analysis of the plots and execution of the films Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness. This analysis is apparently not meant to be a general one but a specific voicing of superfan opinions that generally ignore the substantial commercial success of the two films. This is both the advantage and the potential shortcoming of the text: the way it discusses Star Trek from a general artistic or academic point of view but also from the point of view of superfans specifically.

Just as the shows and novels vary greatly in terms of tone, theme, and appeal, the analysis presented in Late Star Trek adjusts depending on the topic. The discussion of Discovery does a nice job of providing an overall analysis of the initial strengths of the series and the ways it diverged from fan expectations in ways that were both positive and negative. The discussion of Strange New Worlds is shorter but still captures the essence of why that series has met with particular success by embracing the traditional Star Trek ethos and staying true to the existing cannon while still allowing the characters to develop in much more intriguing ways than their original versions.

Late Star Trek is enjoyable for Star Trek fans but also provides a solid overall analysis for storytellers in an established universe who must balance fan expectations and creative freedom. The framing of Star Trek in stages or eras rather than an unending continuum is helpful. Although the through-line of connection remains, the ability to discuss the series, films, and novels in terms of eras allows for a more helpful analysis of what resonates and what disappoints in a universe in which many of us are, for better or for worse, deeply invested. And most of all, it’s a reminder of why, after so many decades and variations, we still love Star Trek.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• A broad range of Star Trek content with helpful citations
• Superfan focus sometimes outweighs larger storytelling analysis
• Engaging exploration of strengths and weaknesses in Star Trek

Reference: Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, [University of Minnesota Press 2025]

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

Book Review Transmentation | Transience by Darkly Lem

A rich, wide-angle look at a multiversal society and those who would seek to support, change, and undermine it

Multiverses. Multiverses are cool. I’ve always thought so. Be it the Eternal Champion of Michael Moorcock, the endless Shadows of the Amberverse of Roger Zelazny or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, multiverses are the biggest canvas a story can possibly take place on. But even so, we usually see the multiverse one universe at a time. If we are lucky, we get an Amber-like hellride (or think of the scene in Multiverse of Madness where Strange and Chavez go through a rapid succession of weird worlds, including the “paint” one). Or we get a multiverse novel with a few worlds, and only an implication of a wider multiverse. A sustained look at a full, widescreen multiverse seems elusive, in print and otherwise. What ends up being delivered is more often the idea of a multiverse than actually coming to grips with the breadth of one.

However, in Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds, Darkly Lem, a consortium of five authors, tackles their multiversal story using a rather wider focus, a wide-angle lens, showing us what life in a multiversal society, several of them in fact, mean in practice. It’s quite the ambition on their part to even give this a go.

Given the very complicated, high-level plot, describing and dissecting it could easily take the entirety of this review and then some. I will be brief, then, and move on to other matters. The novel is a story of conflict and contact between a large, dominant, multiversal society and a couple of smaller, almost satellite, multiversal societies, who seek to push advantage and destabilize Burel Hird, or at least slow its capacity and potential to annex other universes. As the long title indicates, the plot revolves around an assassination attempt to change the makeup of the People’s Council as a way to engineer social change, all coming out of a seemingly innocuous and accidental conflict at the beginning of the story.

There is much subtext and implication within the worldbuilding of the novel in terms of the dominant culture of Burel Hird, and that is where I want to begin. This is ultimately a novel about philosophies and theories of governance. At the center of it, we have Burel Hird, the titular Nine Thousand Worlds polity. We learn through the lenses of the wide range of characters (more on them anon) that Burel Hird runs on the power of bureaucracy. It is literally “government by committee,” in fact a whole lot of committees from the bottom all the way to the titular People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds.

Burel Hird is refreshingly depicted in its bureaucratic nature. The tendency toward monarchical or oligarchic structures is near total in fantasy, and is rather strong in science fiction even to this day. The lure of empire or imperium in science fiction, especially when one is dealing with polities that rule multiple worlds, is very strong indeed. The reasons why monarchies and empires are so often thusly used is a whole topic in itself, and perhaps for another time.

In any event, Burel Hird may be a hegemon, but they are not run by one person. Burel Hird is a polity that makes paperwork and procedure and form and function out of everything, and its sometimes ponderous approach has, in fact, gotten them a lot of political power... and a lot of dread from other, smaller multiversal societies, such as Withered Stem, Firmare, Of Tala, and Arcalumis. And we get a sense that there are others as well. And these smaller multiversal societies have their own unique social structures as well. This gives a fresh, multidimensional feel to the political setup of this multiverse: a hegemon with other significant players at (or sometimes crossing into) iits borders. Therein lies the potential for conflict, which kicks off the plot of the novel.

Speaking of borders, I want to examine the method of travel in this multiverse, since it is a rather uncommon one. To travel from one world to another is an interesting and complex process. You can’t just pick any world; it usually has to be one which is in alignment with the world you are in. Some people can transport themselves; some people, usually called movers, can transport others (and so have a lucrative job). In a bit of science fantasy, every person who can transport themselves or others has a particular way to “unlock” that power. For example, one of our point of view characters, Meryl, can transport themselves to another world by sustained singing. Others have odder requirements still. It makes me think of the Charles Stross Merchant Princes novels, where those with the ability to travel between worlds do so by seeing a particular unique pattern shape. I could totally see someone in this ’verse having that exact requirement. This mode of multiversal travel does allow for both “chokepoints” (the people who can traverse the multiverse for themselves and others) as well as more porous borders. Someone who can transport themselves on their own can in theory slip into another universe past any normal “customs” control.

The other half of this system is that people don’t precisely slip across worlds in their own bodies. Instead, they inhabit a body already existing in that universe (if you’ve been there before, or else it is created de novo for you). And when you go to another universe, the body you leave behind (called by a number of terms: proxies, hides, and others) more or less goes into a shuffling, base survival mode that is not precisely explained completely in the novel (although it does become a plot point). I think, from a 30,000 foot level, this is to prevent some potential hazards of this setup; finding, for instance, upon jumping into a body in a world that said body is a half a world away, or even a star system away, from where you expected or wanted to be, because your body in the meantime decided to take a trip to Mars. I am reminded of the movie The Thirteenth Floor, where the protagonists could enter the virtual reality sim, but those virtual reality people had had lives of their own they were living before you intruded in (in one case, for example, the protagonist finds he is in the middle of a dance competition that he has to get out of so he can do what he wants). There are some philosophical questions here, too, that are explored, and a point of plot and character revolves around this dichotomy that the authors set up.

In fact, philosophy and theory are a big part of this book. Yes, we have the main throughline of the assassination attempt (and who and why this is happening as a mystery). And there is even a multi-universe chase scene like nothing I’ve seen in multiverse fiction except for the late Iain Banks’s standalone multiverse novel, Transition. But the book is also very concerned with theories of government, responsibility, and action. And history. One of the very unusual aspects of this work is the framing device. At the beginning, the book you are reading is presented as a work of “speculative history,” that is to say, historical fiction. The framing speaks of the “transmutation” of Burel Hird, and the “Formation Saga,” and the limitations of their knowledge of the period they are doing their speculative history about. The framers themselves are of a academic bent, which explains the somewhat unwieldly full title. And yet, even in that, the title gives away a bit of what the book is doing.

In the meantime, I should mention the worlds themselves. We get a wide variety of worlds in this multiverse, some sketched in, and some in immersive detail. The worlds’ immersive details are nicely handled with all the senses, from a wide variety of cuisines and ways of eating, family and social groups, architecture and landscape, and also technology (one world has space travel in addition to multiverse travel, and so we get some time aboard starships as well). In keeping with that, the proxies can vary from world to world. While we mainly see humanoids, gender appears to vary from world to world, and although we don’t see it on screen, we are told of even wilder types of proxies out there.

And so we come back to the beginning of this review to look at this book again. It’s clearly not a complete work, it's the first a series, a part of a collective, and intended to be part of a spectrum of works, and in some ways, given its multiversal canvas, given the fact that this is a look backward to a history before the formation of a new multiversal state, one might even call this something of a creation myth for that multiversal society out of a number of prior ones in conflict.

So I come to a question that you might be asking at this point, and it is something that I thought as I read the book: Who is the audience for this book? It may be slightly controversial to express an opinion that a book is not for all readers, but when it comes to a book like this, I think that opinion is worth being expressed. The recent turn for a slice of SFF fandom to be enthused with books that run more on vibes than more explicit plots has shown that in spades—the reactions to cottagecore, and coffee shop AUs, and the work of authors in the mode of Tamsyn Muir are all expressions of this.

So who is the target audience for Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds? It’s a fair question. It’s a book for people who love multiversal stories, that much is obvious, but the target audience is somewhat narrower. People who like the idea of societies, civilizations in conflict, with heaps of worldbuilding in doses small and large alike.

And does it work for that audience? Since I consider myself part of that audience, I can speak to this. I think that the book works for that audience, and it is so sui generis that others might be interested in picking it up, but it may be a book you bounce off of. The book that I think of here that really compares is Laurent Binet’s Sidewise Award-winning alternate history book Civilizations. That book is a high-concept mixture of first-person accounts, poetry (including a Viking saga!), fragments of text and more. It's not for everyone. I know people who adore it, and people who bounced hard off of it. Transmentation | Transience is exactly like that. If you want a high-concept, ambitious multiverse novel at the highest of scales, and don’t mind an as-yet incomplete narrative, then, like me, you will enjoy the book, but if that doesn’t sound like your jam, this book is most certainly not for you. Like the aforementioned Binet, the book doesn’t *transcend* its subgenre and lane, but within that lane, it speeds along quite nicely indeed.

Highlights:

• This is what you get when you want Multiverses with a capital M
• Ideas, theme and societal conflicts aplenty
• Strong cover art
• Excellent in its lane rather than the general SFF audience

Reference: Lem, Darkly. Transmentation | Transience : Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds [Blackstone Publishing, 2025].

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

Book Review: Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming

A novella that effortlessly slides from science fiction to elements of fantasy and mythology and allegory to tell a moderate near future story set off the coast of Nigeria.

Yekini has a problem. She is a midder, working and living on the middle levels of the Pinnacle, the last of the Fingers, the last of an ark/arcology built off of the Nigerian coast. She has by luck and dint of effort escaped her lower class origins. Or so she has thought, until an assignment sends her with the higher class administrator Ngozi down undersea, to the levels of the Pinnacle underneath the waves. There Ngozi and Yekini will confront a threat to the Pinnacle itself, a threat from outside the tower, in the deep waters that surround this last bastion of humanity. Something called the Children...

So one finds the narrative in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming.

Let me start, atypically, with a place I don’t normally focus first, but for this novella, I will. Let’s look at the language and the writing. The story is a mixture of three points of view from our main characters, interspersed with other material, including pieces that are clearly myth and allegory as well as “press releases” and news showing, in flashes a bit of the world before the world of the Pinnacle. Not only are the allegorical pieces well written and evocative, the entire novella rests on the strength of the line by line writing of the author, especially in these sections, short and sharp. Okungbowa is particularly good at making us feel, be it the apprehension of investigating the undersea levels, the conflicts and relationships between our protagonists, divided and yet united by being an Upper, a Midder and a Lower Level denizen. The novella’s voices and its shifting of tense and mood from section to section, from point of view to point of view to the interludes, is as smooth as a well honed manual transmission in an automobile.

I am no stranger to his work, and like the previous efforts I’ve read, reading the first two novels of the Nameless Republic [review here at Skiffy and Fanty]. Those two novels were very definitely a critique of imperial power and the structures of power, blending in myth and magic along with that criticism. So it is here, too. The author is very much criticizing unjust power structures, and the structures that maintain that power and what that does to people and to society as a whole.

Here, however, the author is starting with a arcology/ark science fictional setting rather than high epic fantasy, but the themes and resonances are familiar. The result of starting with a science fictional setting and weaving in allegory, myth and magic, is that the novella has a feel similar to books like Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (which is also set in the same region), or for those who like their science fiction in a cinema mode, Snowpiercer.

Snowpiercer works particularly well, because of the stratification. Like Snowpiercer, we have a constricted, and restricted space for, seemingly, the last of humanity. To wit, there is not even the hint of anyone existing outside of the ark, if they do, they’re not reachable and they are not coming. Plus the “second deluge” maps to the great freeze in Snowpiercer being a grand disaster, isolating the remnants of humanity to one structure. In addition, the world of the Pinnacle is literally stratified. The higher you live and work in the tower, the better off you invariably are. Those who live at the top rule and control everything. Those who live in the submerged levels, live in a world where they never see the sun or the sky. In between are the midders, the ones like Yekini who actually keep the Pinnacle functioning and working. Even the midders are under a lot of restrictions and problems. The opening of the novel is Yekini rushing to work hoping she will not be late, and later in the novel, we get notes about the midders not being really allowed to wander outside of commuting to work. So the political and social allegory is definitely strong and resonant, and part of the point of the novel.

Like Snowpiercer, the setting is evocative and memorable even if it probably does not hold up to strong “hard science fiction” scrutiny as a viable and complete ecosystem. A remnant of humanity stuck in a single building poking out of the ocean? The logistical problems of keeping this population alive are as insurmountable as the ones in Snowpiercer, but the novella successfully manages to deflect the reader thinking about that until well after the novella is done. And, honestly, a rigorous setting would be in the end be beside the point. This is not a novella about the realpolitik logistics of how an ark like this would work, it is about story, and people in that arcology and the story of these three characters and their pivotal roles in that story.

The author keeps the novella ticking along with a variety of the aforementioned interludes interspersed with the action of Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo (a lower level head of safety that joins the two and thus gives us a point of view character from each section of the Pinnacle). Some of these interludes are press releases from the time before the Deluges, describing the dreams and ambitions of the constructors, and their callousness in their construction of the Fingers. Other interludes show us some more items from the archives show an upper-level point of view of the history of episodes of the Pinnacle.

And then there’s something else, and here we fully go into allegory and myth. The pieces are written like fragments of story, or sometimes poetry, or song. Who and where they are coming from, and how they are being transmitted to the reader is something that is not completely clear, but it’s a parallel conversation that the text is having with the reader.

Ultimately, this is where the novella comes to its full flower. The story of Yekini,Tuoyo and Ngozi is in the end a conversation with the other residents of the tower, a conversation with the reader, an engagement and an offer of engagement with the reader. It’s a novella about *communication* and the power of communication between the human and the...well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? There is a lot to the plotting that I would dare not spoil and it does forestall discussing some details of the novella in specific without giving them away. But there is definite intimacy to this story, like if a grandparent were telling you this story as a legend or a myth. It is a novella that again and again reinforces the power and centrality of story as something that helps define who and what you are.

In a real way, then, treading very carefully so as not to spoil the revelation for a reader, Lost Ark Dreaming is the story of how the Pinnacle learned to incorporate new stories within itself, to help change and redefine what it is. The ending is very open ended and unclear, it is best imagined rather than set down explicitly. The author gives you the world and the story, and it is for the reader to ultimately decide what it means and what will become of this new story. It’s an intimate and powerful trust that the author places in the reader, here, in the novella.

In the end, Lost Ark Dreaming is a potent and heady mixture of science fiction, myth, allegory and the power of story and communication, in a short and intense novella format.

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Highlights:

• Strong and evocative use of language

• Powerful allegory and use of myth and story 

• Well evoked setting

Reference: Okungbowa, Suyi Davies  Lost Ark Dreaming  [Tordotcom, 2024]

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

Microreview [book]: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars drills into the social critique of the industrial prison system and crime in the U.S. through the battle royal genre in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel.

Content Warning: This novel contains graphic depictions of violence as well as content about rape, suicide, and more. Please reference a service like StoryGraph for a more complete list.

Set in the near future, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah follows a cast of characters experiencing or viewing the world of “hard action-sports,” a euphemism for gladiatorial matches between people who are incarcerated. While the deathmatch violence of the arena is bad enough, the “Links” are also reality TV show participants as drone cameras follow them on marches between cities (and deathmatches) where new alliances could form or “blackouts” make for easy killings. 

While written in omniscient point of view and often sliding between different characters’ thoughts, the novel centers several people. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are two of the top Links. Thurwar is close to “earning” her freedom after three years of fighting, and Staxxx is her lover and an equally strong fighter. Thankfully, they are on the same chain gang, so they can’t fight each other. While they are at the center of the novel, chapters also focus on other members of the chain; viewers like Emily who slowly becomes obsessed with Chain-Gang after her “alpha” husband Will takes her to a live show; and activists fighting to outlaw hard action-sports. 

Even with a large cast of characters, Thurwar shines through as the heart of the novel as well as what keeps the chain together. She only survived her first fight because her opponent allowed her to win. Thurwar continues this act by helping others and using her fame to try to keep those she cares about alive even as she deals with the ramifications of daily violence on her own mind and body. With only a few matches to go before her freedom, she not only wants to survive but make sure those she loves, like Staxxx, have a chance to survive afterward. Unfortunately, her last match will take place in a new season, and with new seasons come rule changes.

While the novel is set in future, it feels uncannily prescient. In this near future, viewing culture in the U.S. has advanced beyond Ray Bradbury’s television walls to screens on every surface, even inside the refrigerator. Immersive viewing brings the violence of hard action-sports literally into the viewer’s living room, but rather than make the “sport” controversial, it only grows in popularity over the seasons—the ultimate reality TV show.

With the return of The Hunger Games to popularity, it’s hard not to compare this book, but Adjei-Brenyah has a more pointed twist. For example, the reality-show announcer, Micky Wright, feels like a truer version of Caesar Flickerman. Thanks to the omniscient point of view of the novel, the reader glimpses his thoughts and feelings. His internal monologue demonstrates how his job’s reliance on systemic racism, dehumanization, and capitalism shapes a person’s thoughts and actions. Micky recognizes the power he holds over the people forced to kill each other, and he revels in that power, touching, prodding, insulting, the Links. He’s not played for laughs—he’s sinister. 

What separates this novel from other battle royal novels is the social critique. While this subgenre often criticizes aspects of society through the violence, Adjei-Brenyah goes a step further through the use of footnotes. The novel isn’t as far removed from reality as Battle Royal by Koushun Takami for instance, and the uncanny use of reality TV brings to mind shows like the controversial Jailbirds. Because of the near future aspect, Adjei-Brenyah can utilize footnotes throughout—some real facts and some focused on the science-fictional worldbuilding. These footnotes introduce crime and incarceration statistics easily verifiable online but just as shocking when paired with the novel’s violent intensity. Other footnotes provide backstory to people otherwise voiceless in the story. Still others explain the technology used to control people, such as a reimagining of the Auburn System, an actual system of punishment in the 1800s that did not allow incarcerated people to speak, but recreated through technology surgically inserted beneath the skin to administer a shock. Through the footnotes, the reader cannot fully engage in the “entertaining” aspects of the story without also acknowledging the dehumanization of mass incarceration in the U.S.

Yet, the novel does not read like a polemic. Much like Emily, the viewer slowly becoming obsessed with hard action-sports, the novel is so engaging it’s difficult to put down. Each character has such a unique voice, that Adjei-Brenyah’s ability at the prose level shines without distraction. The moments of violence are intense and horrific, but they are balanced with moments of care and love for each other, especially as Thurwar does more than try to survive but to make things better for those she will leave behind. Even so, one of the brilliant aspects of this book is the reader can never get comfortable, partially due to the footnotes. Adjei-Brenyah never lets the reader forget that much of the violence described in this near future has already happened or is currently happening.

This book is ideal for people looking for more commentary in a post-Hunger Games world. Overall, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an amazing debut that balances story with social critique.

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

Review: Preset by Sarina Dahlan

An attempt to top its ambitious predecessor Reset by not providing a sequel, but rather a prequel showing how the world of the four cities came to be.

Second acts are hard. The “Sophomore Slump” is real. And yet there is a real pressure in the book industry to follow up with a sequel, with a series, with a shared universe. A very less trod path, though, is to try and do a prequel to the wildly ambitious book you have just had published, showing the underpinnings of how the strange post-apocalyptic, haunting utopian(?) society of your first book got that way in the first place.

This is Sarina Dahlan’s Preset.

Dahlan’s Reset was an ambitious, and to my view, extremely effective novel that posed central and important questions about identity, memory, personality and what it takes to build and nurture a new kind of society after an apocalypse. And what happens when a personal relationship, or dare I say, a love, proves stronger and more long lasting than any technology or artifice to reset memories and thoughts. It was moving, elegiac, and powerful.

Preset shows us the foundation of that society, in a pair of time frames with the same set of characters. In the earliest time frame, we met the founder of the Four Cities, Eli, and his wife Eleanor. The world is falling apart, but both Eli and Eleanor are driven to find a place of their own, a place of their own. But there are cracks in the foundation of this power couple relationship. And one of those is the other person who has a lien on Eleanor’s heart, John

By contrast, in the second time frame of the novel, things have changed. The bombs have fallen, and the fate of the rest of the world is increasingly uncertain. But the strains of trying to hold a society together in the wake of the apocalypse has driven a permanent fracture between Eli and Eleanor, and Eleanor flees the autocracy of Eli over the cities to the Resistance...and, well, John. But becoming part of the Resistance, a Resistance that justifiably does not trust the wife of Eli. And of course, the Resistance has a Plan. As does Eleanor. And so does Eli.

And so this is a story of the early days of the Four Cities. The hallmarks of the utopian world of Reset are not here. In the first timeline, there is hope and promise that this can be a new life, a new start, a new future. It is very much showing how the ambition and relentless vision of Eli, and the strivings of Eleanor, shape what will come. It is a world, though, with the Sword hanging overhead, of the footsteps of an approaching doom, or wyrd, all the same. The second timeline is the early days of the Four Cities on their own. Eli has attempted to maintain control, to work toward his perfect society. But there are those who would topple the order he had made, who would resist what they see as his tyranny.

But there is much more going on than just these plot lines. Relationships, romantic and otherwise are a hallmark of Dahlan’s first novel, and overcoming the 4 year cycle of imposed forgetting is a major thread of that novel, in finding where the heart will take someone who only slowly learns to open her heart. This novel, by comparison, takes a different set of romantic relationship issues--the issues of staying with someone who is more addicted to their vision and their ideas than you and what you want, and then the costs of leaving such a relationship, only to find that the person whom your heart is settling on, now, has, in fact, moved on.

In many ways, this is a much more painful book. That is not to say that the first novel. Reset, lacks that poignancy, especially as Aris, and the reader, get a true sense of what is lost and the costs of the “four year memory wipe” that is at the center. That is seen as the rhythms of that world overthrown as the characters struggle to break a cycle that they are seemingly trapped in by the designs of their world.

Preset is not concerned with cycles, this is two time frames at the beginning of the story of the Four Cities. Preset is concerned with genesis and creation. (In point of fact, there is a “Project Genesis” within the novel, showing that the author was definitely putting a spotlight on this). There are concerns, in the second timeline, about the genesis, the creation of a world for the remnants of humanity to try and survive in. This is a prequel that is in many ways a much more traditional SF novel than Reset. Reset is like reading a recurring, waking dream, as the characters struggle to escape its cycle. Preset is concerned with the building of a new society, a new path, a new way forward, and how it is just the sacrifice of a relationship, in the end, that makes that society possible.

But this gets to the issue that I really want to dig into here, and that is the idea and issues around prequels themselves.

Prequels: What ARE they good for?

There is a school in writing that suggests that knowing when the story starts is an important factor in writing a story or a novel. Where is the important place for the story to start? Starting a story or a novel in the wrong place wrong-foots the writer, and ultimately the reader. The problem with many prequels is that a prequel, in effect, catapults the reader backward and decides that the story did not begin where the writer originally thought it did. And that foreknowledge of what will happen can weaken the narrative within the prequel itself. Either the prequel or the original book can then wind up being a pale imitation of the other, and thus in the end both books together are weaker than the original novel. This also works in movies as well, if one considers how the elf-dwarf romance (Tauriel-Kili) in the Hobbit movies absolutely cheapens the hard won friendship that Gimli and Legolas have to build, between two cultures that do not trust each other, in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Also there is a problem of overlapping a character with its prequel. It can for me as a reader feel stagnant to read the prequel to the novel I just read, just to have the character I enjoyed in the first novel, to have been pretty much who they are in the prequel, or a convoluted and jury rigged sequences of events is needed to mold a character into the character we see in the original novel. It feels more like a crossword puzzle than a novel, an attempt by the author to “get the character” to who they are in the original book. This frustrates me, too.

A prequel such as Preset, though, does avoid some of this blowback. By avoiding having such a wide gulf between the time frame of the first novel and the second novel, we get to see a very different sort of world. The utopia of the Four Cities, for all of its faults as seen in Reset, is a hard won thing, and in the two time frames are so removed from the first that the overlap of characters is just about not there. The characters of Eli and Eleanor are present in Reset, but in such a changed form (and so relatively briefly) that they really are new characters, tabula rasa for the author, to explore here in these pages.. But in Reset, the poignancy and tragedy of those two characters is established as a fact, and in Preset, we see just how that tragedy came out, in the creation of the Four Cities as its running concept in the original book.

In many ways, then, Preset depends on that last chapter of Reset in which we pull the camera back a bit, but that is somewhat unfair to readers and to the author. Preset creates the world of Reset and while there are hints and strains and the building blocks of the world of Reset are shown, it is in fact a very different story.

I do have a radical proposal for the reader who has not read either of these novels and is considering doing so. Upon reflection and thought (and a review of Reset), I think that these novels should be read in order of their internal chronology and not publication order. The story of Preset, is a tragedy of relationships and pain as the world breaks and the sacrifice of that relationship and how that relationship’s breaking ultimately creates the utopia that we then see in Reset. I am thinking especially here of the chapter in Reset which, in reading these two novels in “reverse order”, ultimately ties the original novel to its prequel second, and makes it a united whole.

But does this ultimately work? I am still uncertain and I have considered and reconsidered this question. For all of the underpinnings of character, romance and relationship that the novels share, depicting a utopia (however so very flawed) and depicting the creation of that utopia are completely different kinds of stories. I admire that sort of ambition in a writer. It shows range and a willingness to take a big risk.

But the question that comes back to me--is this book *necessary*? Is this a story ultimately that needed to be told. Eli and Eleanor and the fruit of the tragedy of their relationship, as seen in Reset - was it necessary to show and map out the contours of a story that is, in Reset, so very sketched out enough for the reader to fill in the gaps. I think the writer definitely wanted to explore this story and make it work. There is something rather mythic about these characters as seen in Reset (to the point of using mythic language in fact). The characters in Preset are all so very human, by comparison. Very flawed. Very prone to making mistakes. And that is part of the point.

Does this mean that this book is a story of apotheosis, in a sense, how these two flawed individuals together, despite themselves, create the world of Reset? A utopia that they themselves cannot really share, a world and future of their collaborative creation that they stand apart from and are by the needs and structures of their roles, can NEVER be a part of? Perhaps.

"Stories never live alone, they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward".

Roberto Calasso wrote that in the first pages of his fantastic look at Greek mythology, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. I know he might counsel you to read these in publication order, and trace the story backward. I still maintain that you, reader might want to follow my advice, and read them forward.

But in the end the point is that these novels are worth reading, and while Preset in many ways can be more pedestrian and less philosophical and reflective than Reset, it is a story worth having been told, and for you to read.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• The painful building of utopia, at the cost of a relationship
• Strong character beats and arcs spread across two timelines
• But is it a necessary book compared to it’s first?

Dahlan, Sarina, Preset [Blackstone Publishing, 2023]

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

Review: Death by Silver by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold

Death by Silver is a classic murder mystery that brings gay romance and a fascinating magic system to Edwardian England.

Cover by Matthew Bright

In 2013, Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott self-published Death by Silver, going on to win a Lambda Award the following year. Now in time for the tenth anniversary, the book is being republished by Queen of Swords Press.

In this historical fantasy, magic can be learned by anyone with the right education. Ned Mathey is a metaphysician who trained at Oxford and who is finding money a bit tight after establishing his business as a practitioner. When he is approached by the father of his childhood bully to check the family's silver for a curse, he is reluctant to take the job. However, the money is decent and it is a straightforward job... up until his client turns up dead days later. To help clear his name, he seeks help from Julian Lynes, boyhood friend and lover, now a private detective.

Death by Silver deftly weaves fantasy, romance and mystery together into a seamless whole. The natural comparisons here are with KJ Charles's series A Charm of Magpies and with Jordan Hawk's Whybourne and Griffin. However, it is worth noting that the romance is different in a few key elements. Death by Silver opens with an existing relationship between the protagonists. Having met at school and become lovers, Ned and Julian drifted apart when they went to university, though never entirely lost touch. Having recently reconnected, their relationship is best characterised as friends with benefits. Each wants something more, but are uncertain of the other and unwilling to make the first move. This relies on a reluctance to communicate which may annoy some readers, even if the reasons for this reluctance are somewhat understandable on both sides.

Another difference from the comp titles is the treatment of sex. While it unequivocally takes place, the action fades to black rather than features explicitly on the page, which may suit readers of historical fantasy and mystery rather more than dedicated readers of romance and erotica.

However, even though the story features no explicit sex, it is by no means without landmines. I would give content warnings for bullying, as well as physical and sexual abuse. Most of this occurs in flashback scenes detailing Ned and Julian's time at boarding school together.

The main characters are a study in contrasts, tending to fall into the sunshine/storm-cloud trope but with a little more nuance than usual. Ned is almost universally beloved, a sportsman who also has a talent for magic. While he may not be exactly cheery all the time, he nevertheless has a relatively sanguine outlook on life.

Julian, on the other hand, tends to be the sharper of the two. He has an ongoing war with his landlady and a tendency to use magic in the place of drugs, to energise or calm himself down. He has more of an affinity for literature and art, though he detests the opera, and is from a lower class background than Ned.

Unsurprisingly for a mystery, there is a strong theme of justice throughout the book. This is one of the more subtle areas of difference between the main characters. Julian, of course, is the more extreme of the two. Even as a boy, he had a well developed sense of injustice and is inclined to speak out, paired with a willingness to take matters into his own hands where society turns a blind eye. Ned tended to go along with the conventionally accepted, even if it isn't really fair. He tempered Julian's more extreme impulses. As they grow and mature, these attitudes shift closer together.

As is often the case in m/m romance, the female characters are rather less detailed than their male counterparts and tended to serve as plot functions. However, I recognise that it is hard to flesh out every character and still have a plausibly long suspect list for a murder mystery. One of the best realised female characters was Ned's secretary, Miss Frost, who was a charming during her somewhat rare appearances. Keen to study magic, she is hampered by society's attitudes regarding what is appropriate for women. Nevertheless, she is able to offer some important insights that further the investigation.

Which brings me to the magic system. This was for me one of the most fascinating elements of the book. Death by Silver is the first in the Lynes and Mathey series, a punny name that, in addition to referring to the title characters, is also an allusion to the magic system. Magic or planetary squares form the basis for this system, and are an element that has been part of occult practice for hundreds of years. Much like sudoku, planetary squares are a grid of numbers where each line and column adds up to the same number—generally one significant to the planet associated with the particular grid. This is then paired with alphabets so that sigils can be generated by tracing a path between the numbers that correspond to the letters of any given word. Hence lines and math.

The story at times lacks a bit of clarity around how a given spell is cast, perhaps relying on knowledge of the historical process to fill in the gaps or simply allowing space for readers to use their imaginations. However, where it excels is in the worldbuilding tied to the magic. Planetary squares lend themselves well to the kind of institutionalised learning that's featured in Death by Silver; they become just another thing to be learned alongside multiplication tables and Latin vocabulary. This is reinforced by adding a kind of grammar system to the construction of spells—get the word order wrong and you could have quite the mess on your hands.

There's also an interesting intersection with the time period. While I'm a little hazy on the exact year, the technology and fashion suggest the Edwardian Era. Certainly, we're post Industrial Revolution, with its ability to mass produce items. This includes magic kits; trace the sigils as they are laid out for you and you too can trap a burglar or banish your acne. Or, more likely, you could lose your money and end up needing to call in a trained metaphysician to clean up the result. Such details show the consideration that has been given to the worldbuilding and provide a wonderful richness to the setting.

The plot is a classic mystery format. I found the ultimate villain perhaps a touch predictable, but not overly so.

All in all, I found it a delight to read and can easily see how it earned a Lammy. The sequel is due to be released in December and I am already looking forward to it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for excellent magic world building, +1 for deft balancing of fantasy, romance and mystery elements

Penalties: -1 for flat female characters, -1 for the lack of communication between characters

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz@ wandering.shop

References

Death by Silver. Griswold, Amy, and Scott, Melissa (Queen of Swords Press, 2023)

The Magpie Lord. Charles, K.J. (KJC Books, 2013)

Widdershins. Hawk, Jordan L. (Widdershins Press LLC, 2012)

Microreview [book]: Wolfpack by Rem Wigmore

 Wolfpack is a spiky solarpunk that wrestles with questions of leadership and belonging.

Cover by Layla Rose Mutton-Rogers

Wolfpack is the second book in the Foxhunt series, so spoilers ahoy! Also, please be aware that this review (and the book being reviewed) contains passing references to suicide. While this series has many traits of solarpunk in its worldbuilding and its focus is on healing, the inclusion of material relating to trauma, violence, mental health and disaster (both natural and manmade) makes it a little spikier than other examples of the subgenre.

For those new to the series, it is set in a version of our world in which humanity has managed to step back from the brink of ecological disaster. It has done so by instituting some strict rules about the reasonable use of resources and enshrining the laws of hospitality. When someone breaks those laws, the Order of the Vengeful Wild is called. While the Order's mission may be noble, they have a well-earned reputation for bloodshed and violence.

The story picks up two months after the previous book. The previous Leader of the Order, Luga, committed suicide in a way that framed Orfeus, making her Leader. Orfeus went along with it because it put her in a position to implement changes to the Order, such as a no-kill policy.

Her relationship with Faolan remains uneasy. He's still very much in love with her, but resents her for having killed his surrogate father figure. He also feels the changes she has implemented come from weakness. While the story is mostly focused on Orfeus, one thread shows Faolan coming to terms with the fact Luga was not a good father to her and had no intention of handing over leadership to her. She also wrestles with the nature of leadership: can it be done without the self-destructive sacrifice Luga believed was necessary? Can it instead be done like a pack, a family?

As a side note, if the pronouns in the previous paragraph just did your head in, an important element of this series is its representation of gender. Faolan's pronouns tend to alternate between he and she. There are also a variety of other pronouns used throughout the story. A number of the characters are transgender, including Orfeus. And if there's a straight, cis-gender character anywhere in the book, I must have overlooked them. (As a straight, cis-gender woman, I'm fine with that).

The Order has undergone some membership turnover since the previous book. One or two members left, unwilling to tolerate Orfeus' leadership. A new member was also gained and is finding eir feet with Orfeus' support. The relationship that develops between Velvet Worm and Orfeus is rather sweet and a good counterpoint to some of Orfeus' other relationships.

Speaking of which, Orfeus too has finally found a place she belongs, though she is slow to realise that. Being used to thinking of herself as an outsider makes it difficult for her, as does the baggage that comes with some of her relationships, particularly Faol and Tai. She is quick to protect others, but can get prickly around them wanting to protect her.

There's a lot in this story about belonging. Another thread of this book focuses on Jean, a runaway from a cult. Jean's path soon crosses with Arcon, an AI programmed to protect a DNA bank Orfeus damaged in one of her ill-conceived adventures. Jean's upbringing with the Truest Church of the Most Ancient God (which is most definitely Christian inspired) leads him to conceive of Arcon as an angel, so when Arcon asks for the use of Jean's body (being damaged and needing somewhere to store his nanites), Jean agrees.  Jean has been looked down on by the cult he grew up in and Arcon has been lonely without company for decades, perhaps gone a little mad and suffering from errors in his programming. They don't always see eye-to-eye, but they do find belonging together.

But going back to Orfeus' ill-conceived adventures, I found the story a little frustrating in places because it is one of those stories where the characters just need to sit down and have an honest conversation. Orfeus is aware of this need, but works to avoid it, instead opting for grand gestures which tend to leave destruction in her wake (sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally). Her tendency towards keeping her intentions hidden and actively lying about them damages her relationships. While the honest conversations do happen eventually, it's still pretty annoying, especially since I'm not sure Orfeus really learns from her mistakes. I certainly appreciate a flawed character, but there needs to be a sense that they can learn and grow; Orfeus' tendency to make the same or similar mistakes makes it difficult to trust she has changed.

Although Wolfpack makes a reasonable entry point for the series, with the history behind ongoing relationships being either explained or easily inferred, I'd recommend starting the series from the beginning. Returning readers will enjoy cameos from characters from the previous book, such as Orfeus' neighbour Linden and Rivasoa, the Archivist of Eldergrove.

The book offers a reasonably satisfying conclusion while leaving the way wide open for more. There's a looming threat left as a loose end and while some of Orfeus' relationships are left in a good place, others are in need of repair.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for the sheer diversity of queer representation, +1 for mature handling of themes of family and belonging

Penalties -1 for Orfeus' dubious personal growth

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz@ wandering.shop

References

Wolfpack. Wigmore, Rem (Queen of Swords Press, 2023)

Microreview [book]: Daughters of the Storm by Kim Wilkins

Daughters of the Storm is an epic fantasy that centres women and allows them the space to be flawed.

Australia has a long history of female authors of fantasy; we've been known to look confused when claims are made that there hasn't been women writing fantasy until recently. One of the reasons for this is Sara Douglass. A pioneer of Australian fantasy, she beat George R.R. Martin to the punch, with her debut novel Battleaxe released a year before A Song of Ice and Fire. Her epic fantasies were an international success at a time when breaking into the US market was all but unheard of. To quote the Aurealis Awards:

Sara Douglass was the flagship author of the HarperVoyager Australian line, which launched the careers of many of our most popular writers, and paved the way for the vibrant and diverse speculative fiction scene Australia has today. Sara’s contribution to the state of speculative fiction in Australia cannot be underestimated...

After she died in 2011, and with permission from her estate, the Sara Douglass Book Series Award was established in conjunction with the Aurealis Awards. The inaugural award was presented in 2016 and is given only once every three years.

The 2021 award was presented earlier this year to Kim Wilkins for the Blood and Gold series. The first book in the series is Daughters of the Storm, and is a fitting successor to Sara Douglass.

When the king of Thyrsland falls into a coma, his five daughters gather at his side to investigate the cause and determine the fate of the kingdom. This is a character-driven epic fantasy told in close third person. I actually tripped over the perspective in the prologue because at first it seemed to me to be coming from the king. It turned out to actually be coming from his wife, the step-mother of the five princesses. This seemed to me to be pretty appropriate for the book, which centres women in a traditionally male-dominated genre.

It's a story that tends somewhat towards the grimdark. Each of the daughters has a very distinct character with definite flaws. While I tend to prefer my characters to be more likeable, I appreciated that they were given the space to be unlikeable and in a variety of ways. With so many female characters present, there's no danger of them needing to be the sole representative (or one of very few) of their gender; they get to be well-rounded people.

Bluebell is the eldest daughter and heir apparent. She's the sister most likely to be voted the Strong Female Protagonist: a fearsome warrior and commander, rumoured to be unkillable, and deeply devoted to her father. However, she's not much of a people person (even if she has her moments), coming across as a bit of a bully, and not always the brightest of sparks.

I admit it took me a bit to adjust to Bluebell as a warrior's name. In addition to undermining expected masculine norms, I suspect there's an aspect of playing with the Victorian language of flowers. According to Jessica Roux in Floriography, bluebells represent humility and faithfulness. While Bluebell is very faithful to her father (at least so far), humility is not exactly one of her key traits.

Likewise, rose represents love. As the second of the sisters, and perhaps the most beautiful, Rose was married off to the ruler of the neighbouring kingdom. Her affair with the king's nephew threatens to jeopardise an already fragile peace. While her desire to follow her heart is most certainly sympathetic to a modern audience -- along with her desire to be treated as more than just a womb -- her tendency to want what she can't have casts a shadow over her love.

I found Ash to be perhaps the most sympathetic of the sisters. In training as a counsellor of the common faith, she finds her gifts of magic and precognisence stronger than the order finds acceptable... and growing stronger daily. When she receives a mental message from Bluebell regarding the state of their father, she flees for home, haunted by a premonition of her own death. Even as she slowly embraces her powers, her priorities remain muddled, torn between loyalties.

The twins Ivy and Willow are rather younger than their siblings. Ivy is thoroughly spoiled and boy-crazy, quickly developing a crush on Heath, Rose's secret paramour. Willow has much more backbone, tending to take after her sister Bluebell. However, she's a convert to the foreign Trimartyr religion and views her sisters as heathens, encouraged by the voices of the angels she apparently hears. This analogue of Christianity is not portrayed in a particularly flattering light... but perhaps no worse than any of the other religions at play in the world.

For the most part, the story alternates between the perspectives of the sisters. However, we do get a token male perspective from Wylm, their step-brother. This perspective is necessary because he functions as an antagonist, and one who is often deceitful and acting alone. Thus we are able to see the true extent of his cowardice.

With so many threads to juggle, the pacing can be a bit slow in places. This is particularly the case towards the middle.

The setting seems heavily inspired by Viking-age England. There are small, feuding kingdoms plagued by raiders from the sea. A new, patriarchal religion is rising up against the old, more nature-focused warrior gods. Magic is part of the world view, which accepts (to varying degrees) the existence of elemental spirits and that a brain fever may instead be the effects of elf-shot. It even manifests in the language, where there are no bedrooms, only bowers.

As might be expected, given the genre, the story comes with some content warnings, including violence, sexual assault, and human and animal death.

While it's most definitely not my cup of tea, I nevertheless felt it was doing some interesting things and well deserving of the award it received.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for the variety of female characters, +1 for balancing flaws with understandable motivations

Penalties: -1 for occasional slow pacing

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz@wandering.shop

References

Wilkins, Kim. Daughters of the Storm [MIRA, 2014]

Roux, Jessica. Floriography [Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2020]

Microreview [book]: Ghost Bird by Lisa Fuller

Ghost Bird is a uniquely Australian young adult novel that examines the intersection between Indigenous and Western perspectives.

Ghost Bird belongs most comfortably in the genre of the YA thriller. A certain subsection of this genre likes to play coy about the presence of supernatural elements. Examples include Black by Fleur Ferris, Small Spaces by Sarah Epstein and Flight of the Fantail by Steph Matuku. By the end, each of these books definitively answers whether the speculative elements played with are considered real within the story’s world. Ghost Bird also has definitive answers, making it very at home in this subgenre. However, its identity as an Indigenous Australian Own Voices narrative makes it difficult to call the story a speculative one. After all, referring to what may be a part of a living Indigenous tradition as fantasy or speculative seems neither respectful nor accurate.

Cleverly, this tension between Western and Indigenous thought is one of the central themes of Ghost Bird. The story is written in first person present tense from the perspective of Stacey. She is intelligent, rational and takes her education very seriously -- too seriously, according to some of her family, who feel she should be paying more heed to traditional ways. However, the death of her grandmother left Stacey disillusioned with those teachings, and so at first she brushes off her dreams about her missing twin, Laney. After all, they’re probably just a product of her worried subconscious, right? And the secrecy with which her elders treat certain important information hinders Laney’s rescue, adding to Stacey’s frustration (and is much in keeping with the trope of useless adults in YA). It is up to her to do the research, interview the people and put together the clues. Thus, the dichotomy between Western rationalism and Indigenous teachings is not shown as a clear-cut matter, with both ways having their advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, Stacey needs both to succeed.

Clearer cut are the lines of race that divide the town. The book is set in a small Queensland town with a long history of conflict between the Indigenous population and the white settlers. This conflict is shown in a number of ways throughout the story. Most obviously, certain extremely racist members of the township serve as the manifest villains of the piece. Laney goes missing after she and her boyfriend make a raid on their property and it’s not immediately clear whether this was due to the farmers or to something sinister living in the taboo caves on the corner of their property. These characters also represent a physical threat to Stacey and her friends as they go to investigate. However, racism is also present in less direct ways. The readers are shown the contrast in how the police handle missing persons cases based on race. We’re also told about the effective segregation in place at the local pub and even to some extent the town as a whole.

In addition to the conflict around race, we also get to witness the divisions in the Indigenous population of the town. Stacey’s family had been feuding with the Miller family since time out of memory. Which becomes a problem when Stacey suspects Mad May Miller has some understanding of what’s going on.

All of this conflict is balanced out with a large and affectionate family. Certainly, Stacey has her issues with both her sister and her mother, but they stem from a deep and genuine love and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do to protect them. We also get to see her relationship with her grandparents, full of small gestures that speak of love. And her cousin Rhiannon provides some much-needed company on Stacey’s adventures. In many ways, Rhiannon serves as a stand-in for the absent Laney, being close in both age and affection to Stacey. She also provides a boldness that Stacey lacks, inciting her to break the rules in ways Stacey might not otherwise have considered, thus moving the plot along.

There is the suggestion of romance present in the narrative, barely there by the standards of most YA. This light touch worked well, given the story’s strong focus on family. Other relationships took priority.

Since its publication, Ghost Bird has received some critical acclaim, winning the Norma K. Hemming Award for Long Work (alongside From Here On, Monsters by Elizabeth Bryer), the Queensland Literary Award’s Young Adult Book Award, the Readings Young Adult Book Prize, and receiving Honours from the Children’s Book Council of Australia. However, there are a few things that may mean some readers struggle to find it accessible.

Foremost among these is the time in which it’s set. This is not a contemporary story, but occurs back in 1999. This is a curious choice, but may have been made to circumvent the advent of mobile phones, making it more difficult for Stacey’s often absent mother to check up on her. It also relieves the need for the author to update the pop culture references made. While it may be very nostalgic for readers of a certain age to moon over Tupac or bop along to TLC’s Waterfall, it may also make it a little harder for a contemporary teenager to relate.

There’s a further stumbling block for non-Australian readers in the use of Australian dialect. Most of it is fairly easy to intuit, but there are one or two instances that may prove more arcane for some readers. Relatedly, a stylistic choice has been made to skip using apostrophes to denote abbreviations related to dialect, for example “Ya could always go and help im.” I found this lack a mercy, since their inclusion often makes for cluttered lines. However, I once again acknowledge it may make things more difficult for some readers.

This is not a book that tiptoes around delicate sensibilities. There’s plenty of swearing, a bit of violence, an attempted sexual assault on screen and the implication of domestic violence off it.

Despite all that, my final criticism of the story is that it is just a shade slow-paced in the middle. Stacey spends just a little too long waiting for news and not putting pieces together.

However, on the whole, it is a thoughtful and engaging work -- an excellent debut novel that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +2 for a nuanced view of Indigenous and Western perspectives, +1 for strong but complex family relationships, 

Penalties: -1 a bit slow paced in the middle

Nerd Co-efficient:  9/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz

References

Fuller, Lisa. Ghost Bird [Queensland University Press, 2019]

Ferris, Fleur. Black [Random House Australia, 2016]

Epstein, Sarah. Small Spaces [Walker Books Australia, 2018]

Matuku, Steph. Flight of the Fantail [Huia Publishers, 2018]

Microreview [book]: Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

A fun and food-focused comfort read.

As Roseanna mentioned last month, cosy fantasy is becoming increasingly prevalent. Legends and Lattes is a perfect demonstration of the subgenre's popularity. First self-published in February 2022, it was so successful that Tor quickly picked it up and is rereleasing it this month -- a fast turnaround for a notoriously slow industry.

The story focuses on Viv, an orc adventurer ready for retirement. Her injuries are racking up (her lower back has particularly been playing up), she's tired of her coworkers (or one of them, anyway), and she has a new dream: to open a coffee shop. So, she comes to Thune, finds a decrepit hostelry just off the main street and gets to work. But renovating and running a coffee shop is a big job, and Viv can't do it on her own.

Unsurprisingly then (it's a cosy fantasy, after all), this is a book about found family. Viv slowly collects the people she needs to see her dream become a reality. She starts with Cal, a builder and craftsman who Viv recruits to help with the renovations. Being a hob, he's not exactly overrun with work, but he is well established and good at what he does. His surprised response to Viv's trust in him was a little bittersweet. In return, he provides Viv with a good foundation and her first friend in Thune.

Next is Tandri, a succubus who answers Viv's advertisement for an assistant on the very day it is posted. Practical, enthusiastic and whip-smart, Tandri gives the café her all from the get-go, constantly coming up with new ideas to bring in customers and help things run more smoothly. In Tandri, Viv finds not only an assistant but a business partner and maybe something more.

 The rattkin Thimble is already a regular at the café when Viv starts looking for a baker. Like Cal, he's not much of a talker, but is keen to come on board if part of his wages include a steady supply of coffee. His delectable creations put Viv's café on the map... and will have you drooling as you read.

As may be obvious, this is very much a book centred around its characters. That said, we're not offered much in the way of backstory for them. It is enough to know that they are outsiders, for the most part. Because this is also a book about defying the expectations of society. As an orc, Viv is used to people watching her with distrust and expecting her to cause trouble or respond with violence. They don't expect her to become a neighbour or to serve food. Likewise, only fans of Ratatouille expect a ratkin to be a genius baker. Succubi like Tandri are supposed to exude sexuality, not to have a head for thaumaturgy.

Speaking of which, we get a modicum more backstory from Tandri to set the stage for a plotline involving a stalker. On the whole, I found this thread was pretty well handled. It was tame enough on the page not to interfere with the cosy vibe, but persistent enough for it to feel like a threat.

Balancing this characterisation of Tandri as not being defined by her sexuality with her romantic interest in Viv was also well handled. While it was a shade understated for my taste, it suited the story being told and is unlikely to send the romance adverse screaming in the other direction.

However, this general inversion of expectations doesn't always work. One place it felt a bit squishy was regarding the identity of the city's crime boss. I won't spoil that here; the reveal was fun and I rather enjoyed it. However, Viv's eventual arrangement with the Madrigal handwaves the fact that they remain a crime boss and by inference are causing harm to other parts of the community -- the same community that so heartwarmingly rallies around Viv when disaster does eventually strike.

The ending is perhaps a bit cliché, being very "the real treasure is the friends we made along the way," but that's to be expected of a cosy fantasy and works well in this context. Similarly, the beginning is a bit slow, being filled with details about the renovations and how to make coffee. That's not going to work for everyone, but does help set up a slice-of-life vibe that is part and parcel of the subgenre. 

This is billed as a high fantasy with low stakes. While it is unquestionably high fantasy, I'm not entirely sure I can agree that it's low stakes. It's true that the world or even the city isn't facing peril, but what can be higher stakes than the death of someone's dream?

So, if  you're looking for a fun and somewhat food-focused comfort read (and who isn't, these days?) Legends and Lattes may be just the treat you need.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for the excellent cosy vibes, +1 for Thimble's delicious Midnight Crescents

Penalties: - 1 for the Madrigal's cognitive dissonance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz

References

Baldree, Travis. Legends and Lattes [Tor Books, 2022]

Microreview: The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham

 Space Nazis set loose a plague of zombies and well-worn tropes in this epic military sci-fi.

Tomorrow marks the start of Conflux, Canberra’s convention for speculative fiction writers. For 2022 it is doing double duty as the Australian national speculative fiction convention. It has become my tradition to review something by a Guest of Honour wherever possible. This year that’s John Birmingham.

The Cruel Stars is the first in an anticipated trilogy of military sci-fi. It follows the perspectives of five survivors of an attack by the Sturm. The Sturm are explicitly described as space Nazis, obsessed with keeping humanity pure of the neural nets and other in-body technology that has become so pervasive. Having been defeated once many years ago, they return following a necrophagic virus they’ve engineered to turn anyone with implants into zombies, wiping out most of civilisation. It’s up to our survivors to defeat them once again.

While The Cruel Stars is a solid read, it’s not exactly breaking new ground. Rather, it weaves together a bunch of well-worn sci-fi elements into a complex pattern. Most people live several lifetimes, downloading their consciousness into new bodies when their current ones wear out. Skills are frequently downloaded rather than learned, like in the Matrix.

Lucinda Hardy is the commander of the only surviving warship in the Royal Armadalen Navy and a warrior who has worked hard to acquire her abilities in combat. Her scenes are the most traditionally military sci-fi, reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica and, later, anything with space marines. Having grown up in poverty, she feels out of place among the officers on her ship. Her Imposter Syndrome and the class issues her story touches upon give her some interesting dimensions, but not much time and space are devoted to exploring these issues in depth due to the sheer number of elements in play.

The characters of Sephina L’trel and Booker3 lean into different aspects of cyberpunk. Sephina is the head of an outlaw band who are in the middle of a gunfight when the virus takes hold around them. These characters play more into the sassy, criminal, Japanese-influenced aspects of cyberpunk. In contrast, Booker3 is on death row for his heretical belief that the soul is code that can be transferred between bodies and machines. He has much more of a Ghost in the Shell vibe, with faint echoes of Murderbot. Some of the forms into which he is downloaded prove rather amusing.

A very young princess of a corporation and a very crusty retired admiral round out the point-of-view characters, along with the admiral of the Sturm. The number of POV characters with their very different situations gives a good sense of the epic scale of the attack. However, cycling through all the different storylines makes the pace slow, at least until they begin to converge.

I am not a big fan of zombie stories (with a few notable exceptions), but found their use in The Cruel Stars drew me in. After the initial, very gruesome shock of them, the zombie presence in the story remained relatively light, mostly remaining as an obstacle to the use of technology so prevalent in this world.

The cast is reasonably diverse, but not without problems. Using a character’s phenotype as a shortcut description seems a curious choice in a book about space Nazis — even if those space Nazis are less concerned with race than technology. Also, did we really need to fridge the gays?

Disability continues to be a weak point of the cyberpunk genre. It seems assumed that disabilities have been largely engineered away, except in the case of Admiral McLennan, whose refusal to have a predisposition to cancer engineered away and whose reluctance to relife has him facing disaster in 54-year-old body — traits which are framed more as eccentricities than solid representation of disability.

It managed to weave in some distinctly Australasian elements, which I appreciated. These elements mostly tied into the setting. This is a far-future story, but still based in our world. The Royal Armadalen Navy that Lucinda serves is the military arm of the Commonwealth of Armadale. For context, Armadale is a suburb in the city of Perth in Western Australia which originally started life as a small colonial garrison. Lucinda is also mentioned as earning the Star of Valour in the Javan War. One of the most powerful corporations-cum-noble-houses is the Yulin-Irrawaddy Combine (though, as they are also one of the least ethical and most ruthless, perhaps not the most well-considered inclusion) and a number of characters are described as having South-east Asian phenotypes.

The writing style was noticeably clunky early on and particularly in the first chapter. I found this surprising from someone I would have considered a reasonably experienced writer. Fortunately, it improved as the book went on, finding its strength more in action sequences and big moments. 

That said, I did find the ending somewhat unsatisfying, with a deus ex machina that was more literal than most.

All in all, The Cruel Stars didn’t blow me away, but may appeal to more devoted readers of epic science fiction.

Review [Book]: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

Wrath Goddess Sing is exactly what a myth retelling ought to be, twisting the original narrative to make it into something new and fascinating.

Cover art by Marcela Bolivar

A note on pronouns: in this book, Achilles is a trans woman. I use female pronouns for her when referring to the Achilles of the story, but occasionally refer to myth-Achilles as “he”, as is the case in original texts. I do my best to differentiate these so as not to misgender the Achilles of the book.

This is possibly one of the best Greek myth retellings I have encountered in the last five years. It works well on so many levels, but critically, it succeeds on two main criteria. First, it reinvests Greek myth with a sense of wonder, mystery and mysticism. Greek myth has become slightly prosaic to a lot of readers, just stories, familiar ones that we learn as children, so well-trodden as to be unremarkable, and by making the war among the gods cryptic and inhuman, Deane has reinvigorated the mythical atmosphere the stories must originally have had, and which is sometimes palpable but just out of reach when reading the original texts as a modern reader.

Secondly, she has taken something about the myth we know and twisted it, to show us the story same but different. What if? She asks. What then?

Her story centres around Achilles, but not always the Achilles we know already – her Achilles is a trans woman. In some of the original stories, myth-Achilles disguises himself as a woman and hides on Skyros, in an attempt to escape his fate, as it has been foretold that if he fights in the Trojan War, he’ll die young but live on in glory forever, but if he avoids the fight, he will live a long, undistinguished, but happy life. In these stories, he is found out of his disguise by Odysseus, fights in the war, and we all know how it ends. However, Deane’s what if is simply this – what if Achilles wasn’t “disguised” as a woman? What if, on Skyros, she was simply being allowed to live as the woman she always had been, but had been denied the opportunity to embrace? And obviously this has some effect on the character of Achilles as we see her, in contrast to myth-Achilles. She has the arrogance, the rage, the impulsive emotionality, but she also a different view on some aspects of the world, a cautious, sometimes regretful empathy, that when sparked can burn with the same passion as anything myth- or book-Achilles ever cares about. This additional lens on her life also gives an extra layer of explanation to an aspect that has always been part of Achilles’ character – an almost resentful attitude to the world, a fuck-you to it all, a determination to take whatever she can get out of it and the rest be damned – because book-Achilles lives in a world that, originally, refused to accept the person she knew herself to be, and now that they have, she’s not going to let any of them forget it.

Because the book is so centred on Achilles, as so many retellings of the Iliad are, it somewhat lives or dies on how well you get on with her character. In my opinion, this is one of the best interpretations of Achilles as a real, flawed and complicated human that I’ve seen in literature. Her Achilles is raging, arrogant and glorious, god-blessed and fate-touched (whether blessing or curse), just as the Achilles of myth. She is an untouchable demon with the spear, and spares no enemy in the heat of battle. She’s conflicted, self-contradictory, violent, a pain in the arse, vibrant, passionate, deeply caring and full of a rage that will bend the world before her. She’s not a nice person. She’d be a terrible person if she weren’t also incredibly charismatic. You can see, almost immediately, why people hate her and love her in equal measure.

And we get to see the people who love her show us, in detail, why they do so. And in these, there are a great many changes from the stories we know, too, but all the changes feel so thoughtful and deliberate, and they each bring something new to the table. Some people are lovers who we might not expect to see in that regard. Some aren’t who we might have thought to see. And Deane has done something which I find really valuable to see in reinterpretations of Achilles’ story – she’s made her Achilles… I’m going to say bisexual for ease of reference, but perhaps it would be more apt to say that the Achilles of the book has a sexuality more reflective of the different sexual landscape of the ancient world, which is something I really appreciate seeing.

Aside from the characters (and there are plenty of characters who are either entirely new or existing mythological ones who’ve been taken a quarter turn away from our expectations, and all are wonderful), Deane has put an immense amount of work into building her setting. She has drawn on a world that is not Ancient Greece alone, but a Mediterranean connected, by marriage and trade and custom and treaty, linking Greece and its islands with Egypt, the Hittites, the Amazons and more. They speak some of each others’ languages, bear old bonds of friendship, and critically, travel. Troy/Wilusa isn’t just a singular, far off place to go for war and nothing more - it’s a nexus on a complex map, whose alliances and enmities and neutralities matter to the story. The Egypt of the book is a land of rituals and magic - Egypt as seen through the eyes of the ancient Greeks.

That being said, there are anachronisms; an Egyptian princess describes herself as an ethnographer. But they are cheerful, breezy ones, knowing and deliberate, and offhandedly modern statements like Patroclus declaring the Achaians “shit linguists” go hand in hand with the authentically batshit, like trying to decipher and learn the language of dolphins. I can totally see that coming up as an aside in a bit Herodotus. It feels historically very real.

I’m not talking about strict “accuracy”, which is a complex beast in many ways, but instead creating a coherent historical context in which to set the book. While I do value accuracy in historical novels, as soon as you start writing about myth, that accuracy becomes an impossible dream. And so instead, what I value in what Deane has done is the use of historical details – drawing on texts outside of the Iliad like the Milawata letter – to give us a sense of a real place and a real time in which the events might have happened, and to give us lines between characters and historical figures that might be drawn, and might be interesting. It doesn’t have to be true, or accurate, but it has to be plausible and coherent, and at that, Deane has succeeded admirably. Do I think, in a historical sense, that Tyndareus of myth and the Hittite Tudhaliya IV were the same person? No, probably not. But it is neat. It is interesting. In the same way, Deane has changed orthography or implied language-background of some of the names, in ways that might not be strictly true, but they are interesting, and they feed into the feeling she’s giving us for the setting. It works, for the story as we are given it, for the thesis of this interconnected, mythically linked world. And when we’re operating in a mythological, rather than historical, space, it gives us something cool to play with, that serves the story in a way that feels authentic enough. Because there are no truly right answers, in mythology, just the ones that work, the ones that feel like they sing to the facts and stories we know, and catch the same tune, or harmonise, in a way that makes something beautiful.

When we step away from the more “historical” aspects, and look into the divine in her book, Deane has strayed much further from the beaten path. For all the characters’ names aren’t the norm we might be expecting, a groundedly bronze age Trojan War is at least roughly familiar. The gods and their world are less so, though still linking back at times to what we do know. On the one hand, there’s a thread of the sort of mythical thinking that is familiar to anyone who has read the stories of Ancient Greece. Dreams are full of portents, the gods act directly upon the world but their actions are cryptic and strange, sometimes decisive action that affects mortals, sometimes more in the way of omen to be interpreted. Sometimes both. When a ship founders at sea in a storm, is this the gods making their displeasure known, or simply an accident mortals seek to explain? This is known, though Deane does choose to play it up a little harder than is the choice of some retellings.

However, she also tinkers with the hierarchical arrangement of the gods, which brings in some real change, and makes things both simpler and more complex. There are fewer factions with fewer interests brought to bear on the conflict, but they’re not the ones we expect, or where we expect to find them, so we’re left wrong-footed. Achilles is no longer the child of Thetis, a sea goddess who helps throughout the story. Instead, she is the daughter of a mortal woman, Thetis, wife of Peleus, who died in childbirth, and also the daughter of Athena, the Silent One, whose power touches her life and her dreams. Deane conflates the patroness Athena, the Athena who grabs Achilles’ hair in myth to prevent an outburst that would anger Agamemnon, with the more directly patronly and motherly Thetis - again, simpler, but leaving some mystery for us to puzzle at as the story progresses. The story gives us not just Achilles’ life, but also insights into the birth, genealogy, history and very nature of the gods in Deane’s universe, all of which is increasingly strange as the plot progresses. If a reader comes in expecting a faithful reworking of the familiar, this will be a disappointment, but in terms of how it affects the telling of the story, the way the world of the gods is connected up, and how Achilles’ arc progresses, I think all of the choices we see are clearly thoughtful ones, and ones which work together to sell that intensely mystical quality to her divine world. It’s a divine world which evokes the same feelings as Orphic cults – bone-deep strange and deeply numinous.

The divine also draws on the mundane and the historical, in a way I found deeply pleasing – her gods, in her grounded, Bronze Age setting, are weak to “star-metal”, meteoric iron, in a way that seems to signal the shift from a heroic age towards the historic, from a world where gods act on the lives of men and women, to the age we know as verifiable.

And then there’s Helen – character and myth all in one. Helen is… a problem, in Trojan War retellings. How do we balance acknowledging her agency or lack of it with her culpability, or lack of it. Is she victim or perpetrator? Is she the architect of her fate, does she want a war, does she love Paris in truth, or is she merely a prize in a competition over an apple thrown by Strife? For every retelling, all the way back to the Greeks themselves, there is a difference answer to this problem. Deane has solved it by superseding it - Helen does not become a prize because of an apple thrown by Strife… Helen is the apple, and the prize, and strife, all together. She is complicit and she is a pawn. Like much in the book, she is not tied down to one single definition, and her story and fate are just as much in flux as Achilles’, and everything else divine in the tale.

Which is not to say that the story doesn’t touch base with the one we know – the threads wander back and forth, but the key nexus points - Briseis gone to Agamemnon, Achilles’ refusal to fight, Patroclus in Achilles’ armour fighting in her place - happen, but the paths to and from then range away into the mists, becoming strange shadows of themselves. The myth is always present – it is a retelling after all – but it is a retelling in the truest sense, because the story has been reshaped in the telling to suit its needs and purposes.

In short – in a review which has been anything but – Deane has gone into the incredibly crowded field of current mythological retellings, and blown them all out of the water by doing something ambitious, powerful, meaningful and different. Her story not only recasts Achilles, but imagines a Bronze Age Mediterranean with a community of trans women – her kallai, “the beautiful ones” – and some trans men who exist in a grounded, connected and intensely mythical world that delights and enchants at every turn. While reading, you can feel the love and the research that has gone into the authenticity, while at the same time the creativity and ambition that has gone into the divergences, all of which come together to form a beautiful, coherent whole.

 --

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10 

Bonuses: +1 for the occasionally hilarious anachronistic turn of phrase, including describing Achilles’ slightly murderous warhorses as “divine horses, gods among the horse race, destroyers of their enemies, brave horses of abnormal pride and dread, good boys”

Penalties: none that I could find

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference:  Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing [HarperCollins, 2022]

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