Book Review: Mortedant's Peril by R. J. Barker

 Grimy murder mystery in gaslamp Minas Tirith

R J Barker has established a fine career writing consistently very good to excellent fantasy that is just a little bit weird. Not so much the particular frame of the New Weird(TM), more that it reads like it was shot predominantly from a Dutch angle: you’re reading what appears at first glance to be (top quality) but reasonably down the middle fantasy and then you realise everything is just a little quirky, unsettling, or both. In Mortedant’s Peril, Barker deploys that lens to great effect to not one but two of my favourite fantasy building blocks: the book is a murder mystery set in a well-drawn secondary world city.

After a brief prologue from the perspective of the murderer, the book opens with our protagonist, Irody Hasp, arriving at the scene of a death in a down-at-heel neighbourhood. Hasp is a Mortedant, a quasi-religious order which reads and passes on the last thoughts of the dead (This is one of the three great orders of the city of Elbay, the others being the magic engineers the Spurriers and the more familiarly clerical Worshipful, who revere the Howling God allegedly trapped beneath the city). Although he reads nothing unusual in the deceased’s thoughts, someone obviously thinks he might have, and shortly afterwards Hasp is caught up in a murder. In the rather brutal criminal law of the setting, absent any other evidence the last person seen with the deceased will be fingered as their murderer, and so Hasp has only a few days to find said evidence before his scheduled execution. The mystery plot which unfolds from this is well-crafted and surprising: the end result makes sense in a way that doesn't betray the reader or the setting, but neither is it quickly obvious what the details of the (in the end quite convoluted) plot surrounding the murder are.

Perhaps the obvious comparison (and, indeed, it is one of the comps the publisher user in the blurb) with “death priest secondary world city murder mystery” is Katherine Addision’s Witness for the Dead. And at one level, sure, the similarities are obvious. Both Addision’s Celehar and Barker’s Hasp are ultimately gentle men who have been ill-used by people who are not, both are death priests investigating murders. But the sensibility of Elbay is very different from that of Amalo, and Irody Hasp is a very, very different character to Celehar. Celehar is a quiet, lonely man with little understanding of his own worth & endless empathy for his clients. Hasp, meanwhile, is a quiet, lonely man (though he'd not realise the latter) who is, at the start of the novel, a prim snob with a significant collection of prejudices about pretty much anyone and anything and a perhaps inflated sense of his own worth. He has a general contempt for pretty much all other people and institutions he comes across. He finds fault with the behaviour of both people higher and lower in social status to him, is dismissive of religious belief and, when we see him encounter the Sea People – another species of sapient which exists in the setting – somewhat racist as well.

What Barker does and does well is, over time and with exposure, show us that Hasp’s bigotry is more due to ignorance than deep character law and is not particularly closely held; he slowly realises that perhaps his prejudices are not universally justified. This is achieved in large part by making Hasp do something he has not been able to do for quite some: rely on other people. The key supporting cast who achieve this are Whisper – a Sea Person mercenary forced upon him as a guard after the murder – and Mirial, the sister of the murder victim who essentially swindles Hasp into taking her on as an apprentice. These characters are well-drawn, with enough detail coming through to get a sense of personality while also making it clear that Hasp very much does not have a complete picture of his (initially unwanted) companions. 

The setting itself, the city of Elbay, is a remarkably evocative thing. It resembles M John Harrison’s Viriconium superimposed on Minas Tirith with a side of Dickensian London (Given that Harrison’s city is in part a response to what he saw as the fussy nerdism of Tolkien and his successors, this is a provocative choice of setting). I do not think the Minas Tirith reference can be accidental. Like Tolkien’s city, Elbay has seven tiers, with the top being a castle within which a possibly absent ruler allegedly resides. Like Minas Tirith, Elbay was designed from the ground up to resist invasion, and with that imminent threat now centuries in the past, the city’s defensive orientation makes little sense and is in some ways a net negative to its residents, as I imagine is the case in Minas Tirith after the fall of Sauron. The Viriconium aspect comes from the gothic skewering of the more romantic side of fantasy, the grime and the steam and the old technology which the residents still use but do not wholly understand (and is no longer wholly reliable). This obviously overlaps with the Dickensian aspect of the worldbuilding, but the Dickens influence goes wider than just the cityscape. The wonderfully evocative names, the well-judged aspects of caricature in some of the characterisation, and the ongoing touch of genuinely funny humour throughout all point in that direction as well, and the labyrinthine bureaucracy and legal system are certainly reminiscent of Bleak House.

The worldbuilding is widescreen in its approach, which works for the book's pace. By this I mean it flits from set piece to set piece of the murder investigation with an impressionistic view of the city in between rather than a detailed one. Points of detail and specificity (I particularly like the communal plumbing whereby the further down the city you go the more second and third and fifth hand the water is) do contribute to the worldbuilding, but a lot is left in soft focus. This doesn't bother me,  but if you're a worldbuilding nerd this may frustrate. 

As with the slow evolution of Hasp’s character, this approach is reflective of the fact that is both Book One of a series and that it has its own distinct (and complete) plot and character arcs and the reader is expected to have patience with both. As noted above, aside from the prologue, the narration is in the first person and thus tightly. At one point a fair way through the novel, Mirial takes Hasp off the main streets to avoid attention. As he goes through these back alleys and byways, he sees “quiet neighbourhoods... [he] had never seen before, places where the houses rose up in great steps and grew on top of each other in teetering piles that almost met just above our heads”. Until the events of the novel, his small life – and his bigotry – have constrained his experience of his city and its people and it is the later opening up of his character which opens up some of the world as well. Hooks for the sequels and further character dives (Hasp and Whisper both have very interesting pasts which are very much not fully explored in this book) similarly remain, and we can expect further unspooling across the rest of the series. This is entirely deliberate and brilliantly done, to my reading, but I can see it irritating readers who expect things to be more clearly and fully laid out from the get-go and want an immediately likeable narrator. 

Like the characters, Mortedant's Peril's thematic concerns resist simplistic analysis. In the opening chapters of the book, reading Hasp’s repeated sneers about religion, I thought I was seeing the voice of the author. And there is some of that in here, sure, fanaticism for religious or personal reasons is clearly not something the book has much time for. But the stuff at the start I nodded along with sympathetically as Hasp sneered about the Worshipful is shown later on to be just another emanation of the Little England bigotry (Little Elbay?) he'd built for himself; a wider exposure to a wider range of believers showed that view impoverished. It could be read as a condemnation of the way class and capital eat up and spit out those at the bottom of the heap (here, in the towering hill-city of Elbay, literally the bottom). And yet even that understanding is at least complicated by the raw utilitarian views of one of the supporting characters one might be tempted to class as 'good'.

Ultimately, this is a riotous, seething romp of a book with a city and a cast that are both weird and fantastical and also viscerally, plausibly human. Another very impressive series starter from an author who has an unblemished record of producing them.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Well crafted fantasy mystery in a wonderfully realised setting
• Both demands and rewards patience from the reader
• Asshole protagonist (complimentary)

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 

Reference:  R. J. Barker, Mortedant's Peril [Tor, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social

Book Review: The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Philip A. Suggars

 An impressive multiversal picaresque that has maybe a few too many meanders

I’m not typically one to start a review with comps, but I think that might be the best way to situate the very interesting, quite deliberate mashup of influences that is The Lighthouse at the End of the World. 

Our main character, Oyster, is a smalltime gang member running cons in London who discovers an undercurrent of magic in London and stumbles into a tangle of alternate worlds, including an alternate London. With that setup, there are very definite nods to the British portal fantasy tradition here; you can see the dialogue to Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. But those nods, while affectionate, are also critical. Forgive a wretched colonial for perhaps not quite getting the class nuance, but the protagonists of those classics are all, to a greater or lesser extent, posh. Oyster and his associates are very much not that, and neither are essentially any of the people he meets during his adventures. And none of these books really feature cities, indeed, some are visibly hostile to them. Perhaps the layered Londons of V E Schwab’s Shades of Magic series are closer cousins, but even there the vibe is different, the crime more gentleperson thief than street kid tough. The Lighthouse at the End of the World is grimily, borderline threateningly, defiantly urban, and it is also, in an engaging, accessible way, really quite weird.

At heart this is a picaresque novel, with a likeable, flawed rogue (Oyster) falling into scrapes, travelling to strange places, and having adventures which poke obliquely at issues of contemporary relevance (climate change; ecofascism; capitalist excess). But it’s a multiversal, biohacked version thereof. The worlds oyster travels to range from unfamilar to bizarre – a beach packed with the lost detritus of urban development (dead tube trains, bicycles, office chairs) was particularly striking. And the creatures and people he meet are similarly so, from slightly insectoid fairies (?) to semi-biological flying machines to adorable beetle pets which nest against your rib cage (this last being an example of a light but effective thread of body horror throughout).

The nature of this sort of novel is the plot tumbles along and to some extent just happens to the protagonist. There is still enough action, contrasted with points of calm, to keep things interesting, but I could have wished a little bit more focus. I saw when looking up some details online for this review that the book is listed as “Book 1 of the Cities of the Drift,” and its status as Book 1 of a series (not something clearly advertised in the ARC copy I read) might explain the slightly unsatisfying conclusion, and even somewhat excuse it; it is a good setup for more books set in this world. But in my view the book isn’t quite, in its own terms, a wholly satisfactory conclusion to a wholly satisfying plot arc in and of itself.

Suggars’ character work is effective but thinly sketched, with the exception of a compelling, complete central character in Oyster. Fantasy fronted by firmly working class characters is rarer than it should be, and he is an excellent portrayal of such. Flawed, prickly, a bit lost, but with a basic decency at his core. He’s also never patronised by the narrative, again something that is rarer than ideal in this space. The rest of the cast, though, is closer to Dickensian caricature than realist portrait, though I do think this is deliberate, and effective in creating the appropriate atmosphere if not quite the depth I might ideally prefer. On the other hand, I’d give bonus points to Suggars for the lively and well-realised sometimes very odd non-human characters that populate the novel.  

One particular narrative choice which grated was the attempts to render dialect and accent in the text. It’s clearly deliberate and part of the project – working class, street-level urban fantasy – but doesn’t quite work for me. Not, as far as I can tell, an inaccurate representation of vocabulary and accent (Suggars is from South London), but it’s just hard to do that in a way that reads well and I don’t think it quite succeeds. And this isn’t only true of Oyster’s South London cant, the (hugely entertaining) Marya Petrovna who doesn’t speak English as her first language also comes across just a little unnaturally. This may not bother others, but for me pulled me – significantly, at times – out of the otherwise really well crafted, slightly hallucinatory fever dream setting of the novel.

Ultimately, The Lighthouse at the End of the World reads very much like a first novel (Suggars already has a number of very good short stories in print), but a good first novel. Not everything entirely lands. There’s the occasional (metaphorical) missed dot on an i or cross on a t. But the creativity and eye for imagery lingers more than the flaws for me. A good read in its own right, and an even better signal for what might come next.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Unapologetically working class, street level fantasy
• A well-developed taste for the bizarre
• Flashes of brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Philip A. Suggars, The Lighthouse at the End of the World [Titan, 2025].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Book Review: China Mountain Zhang

 A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written. 

We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.

McHugh is one of the consistently best science fiction writers of my lifetime, and it's a scandal that most of her work is not reliably in print in the 2020s. On this positive side, China Mountain Zhang probably is her best work (though both her short story collections and the very out of print Mission Child are also truly excellent), and it is available to us. China Mountain Zhang is a modern classic of Science Fiction. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and won the Otherwise and Lambda awards in 1993. It is currently in print both in North America (in a Tor Essentials edition) and outside it (in a Gateway SF Masterworks edition). Despite this, it isn’t really part of the conversation on the history of the genre in the way books from the fifties through seventies still do. There is probably a broader conversation to be had about how static and old the canon of SF is and how we could do with looping in some books from the 90s and 2000s which are now 25-35 years old (China Mountain Zhang is as old now as Starship Troopers was when CMZ was released). For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll focus on why this early 90s classic deserves a place in the pantheon.

This is a mosaic novel, a collection of nine vignettes ranging from short story to novelette length which tell the story of a China-dominated 22nd century. Five of these focus on our main character, Zhong Shan/Rafael Luis Zhang, a gay, biracial (Chinese/Latin) construction tech living – at least at the start of the novel – in New York. These are interleaved with four stories of people whose lives intersect with his, to a greater or lesser degree. Zhang is very much the focus, but the vignettes work well in adding depth and breadth to the society in which he lives, giving perspective on people, events, and places he has no access to (or is not in a position to understand). This is a very difficult structure to pull off; too much overlap and it’s just a poorly edited novel, too little and it’s simply a collection of disconnected shorts in a shared setting. But McHugh gets the balance right, and the result is a fascinating collage of a man and his world, vividly drawn.

Unlike much decades-old science fiction, it really is remarkable how much of McHugh’s 22nd seems plausible today. In the first half of the 21st century, the US economy goes down, bringing most of the world with it due to wide exposure to the US bond market. In the wake of this depression, the US government collapses, unable to provide basic services. China, less exposed than some of the other big players, is better placed to bounce back and becomes the leading technological, economic, and political power in the world. This leads to a proletariat revolution supported by China in the US, a civil war, and the eventual establishment of a socialist state. Living standards as between the two countries are inverted from what prevailed in the early 90s when McHugh was writing; a generally prosperous, advanced economy in China while the US in a backwater; not a terrible place to live but definitely a place Chinese citizens in good standing would look down their noses at. When the novel opens, the US has just come out of the ‘Great Cleansing Winds’ cultural revolution-style reactionary purge; things are only completely back to something approaching the pre-campaign normal about a year beforehand. Looking at the changes in geopolitics over the past 30 years, with the notable exception of a genuine proletariat revolution in the US, this medium term future is if anything a more likely path for the next century to follow than it was when the book was published.

In addition to the political speculation, it’s got a number of pieces of scientific speculation pretty nailed down as well (actually reasonably uncommon for books in a genre with “science” in the name). Climate change of ~4 degrees C has ravaged the planet, extreme drought making large swathes of territory –a wide corridor of the US just east of the Rockies, both sides of the Mediterranean, Northern China – close to uninhabitable. Mitigation efforts and decarbonisation are underway in the novel’s present, but after decades of work the climate curve is only just starting to even out, and bending it down further decades away. It also has widespread medical treatment based on RNA (which was just at the start of its development in the late 80s, certainly not in the deployable mRNA vaccine form we saw during Covid). And if the Martian colony two of the vignettes are set in is implausible on current scientific understanding, the fact that it’s marginally viable and exists only for ideological reasons (‘brave socialist workers conquer the frontier on another planet!’) is pretty consistent with the Mars-based fantasies of current tech bro oligarchs.

All of this well-judged speculation, impressive as it is, is not why you should read China Mountain Zhang in the year 2026, though. McHugh is writing a novel here, not prophecy (and she’d be somewhat lacking as a prophet; she missed the fall of the USSR by a year or two & it remains incongruously present in her worldbuilding). And the novel she wrote is a spectacularly good piece of fiction, written in a realist mode, that just happens to be set a couple of hundred years in the future. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Camus’ The Plague: “a simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.” This is exactly what McHugh sets out to do in the vignettes which follow.

Zhang loses his job, goes on assignment to the arctic, studies in China, loves and loses, and returns home. Two Martian settlers meet & carve out a precarious life. A ‘kite’ (biomechanical hang glider) pilot races. A young woman finds her dreams aren’t quite what she thought. None of these people have any agency whatsoever to change the world the low-key crappy world they live in. Early in the novel, Zhang bitterly observes “I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.” To the extent that change is achieved in the novel it is in our characters learning how to take sincere comfort in this observation. Pushing the cracks a little wider, realising that the “we” rather than an “I” can make that a bit easier. Each of the characters we follow succeed and fail at this to varying degrees, but even the most successful remains someone who is unable to meaningfully influencethe world outside the cracks. They just work in it, and not as starship captains or space cops or politicians. They have blue collar and office jobs, and McHugh does great work in showing the lived in reality of their working lives. As Jo Walton has noted, this serious focus on labour is an unusual thing in SFF writing. I would also add that a lot of attention – particularly in the sections focusing on Zhang and his gay friends – is paid to fashion, again in a way that most science fiction doesn’t. Not all of this is completely convincing (apparently the future will have a lot of stylish sweaters with mirrors or capes or various other bits stuck on) but it still serves as another rich source of pointillist world-building, building up a convincing picture of this future society via specks of authentic detail. 

This sort of low stakes storytelling in a speculative fiction space that typically expects power fantasies – or at least agency – is high risk. The failure state of this sort of writing, particularly for the audience it is marketed to, is dull and claustrophobic. And, look, go into this expecting high action or even drastic change you will be disappointed. But taken on its own terms China Mountain Zhang is a spectacular success. That is down to McHugh’s precise and unfussily excellent writing. She is not a flashy prose stylist, but the voices of each point of view character – the whole novel is first person narration – are brilliantly realised. 

To focus on the main character first, Zhang is a remarkably well drawn gay man, again as Walton notes sketched remarkably unromantically. He's been cruising for sex since he was fifteen, he has a wide but shallow circle of friends, for most of the novel having only one person he truly feels comfortable relying on. His ironic sense of humour and self-deprecation are a thread throughout each of his sections (sample internal monologue, drooling over cute blond guys in a bar: “Chinese always think westerners’ eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share.”), but within his relative lack of agency he has there is also growth. He’s an immature 26 at the start and a grown up almost 31 at the end. And McHugh makes it clear to the reader why his life up to the start of the novel made him immature and emotionally unavailable – it really isn’t uncommon amongst gay men in homophobic societies – and what it is about his experiences during it that helped him grow up. Other characters are similarly well-observed. Martine, a divorced retired soldier now homesteading on Mars, wryly observes of herself “I thought I’d start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went I’d still be there.” A page’s worth of character conveyed effortlessly in a sentence.

The effect of all of this – the plausible social and scientific speculation, the well-chosen background details, the superb character work, the overlapping vignettes of a world yet to exist – is to me incredibly moving in quite a specific way. The skill and humanity with which McHugh draws a line from her sitting at her desk in the early 90s, through to today to the vividly realised 22nd century of the novel is striking. The superpower of literature has always been to connect people separated by time and distance. Making it clear that while they’re not the same – and the differences do matter – people are people. Their hopes, their failures, their successes. The messy stuff of building a life. Feeling that continued struggle, sitting in the kinda shit present looking at Zhang’s life in his differently kinda shit future, is in many ways a feat of worldbuilding more impressive than the flashiest space opera or most lore-drenched secondary world fantasy could ever hope to be.  

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Highlights:

• A masterwork of mosaic storytelling.
• Compellingly mundane picture of people living their lives in the future.
• A surprisingly good hit rate of speculation for a novel from the 90s.  

Reference: Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang, [Tor, 1992]. In print in both Tor Essentials and Gateway SF Masterworks editions. 

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Book Review: The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman

Second person present tense is the sexiest way to tell a story.

If you've not come across it before, Bisclavret is a 12th century poem, one of the Lais of Marie de France, which tells the story of a knight who suffers from frequent transformation into a wolf, a secret which is later discovered and exploited against him. Indeed, the word "bisclavret" is a middle Breton term equivalent to the Norman French "garwolf"... whose English equivalent I think we might be able to guess. It draws on the pool of shared early medieval mythology, with similar reflexes found in the Lay of Melion and in the story of Sir Marrok in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman is a retelling of this werewolf story, playing on its status as a romance in the historic and the modern senses, to explore courtly love, kingship, fealty and living with a secret dangerous to oneself and others.

But before we get into the story, I actually want to start by discussing the historical note provided at the front of the book, which is one of the best I have ever encountered at setting out the stall for exactly what the author wants the story to be:

That last sentence is key to how Longman handles the historicity of their story - they promise not strict accuracy, but an authenticity of approach that aims to situate the story in the thematic space of its inspirations, if not the details and facts. And that intention absolutely is borne out in the story itself; there is an internal consistency that holds the whole thing together, but which also strikingly evokes medieval works in feel, in way often distinctly absent from modern retellings, even of Arthuriana. And I love this. Honestly, I feel like this approach is probably more difficult to pull off than literal accuracy, but all the better for the effort. What I want out of historical stories isn't the replication of minutiae - if that style of hood only came into fashion ten years later, who really cares - but in the evocation of atmosphere, used to a purpose. If a story is situating itself in a medieval mythical world, what matters far more in my view is how it turns its tools to supporting the feeling it engenders in the reader. Longman's decision to mess with the details how the medievals would have done is exactly the sort of choice that I think works for this.

And there are other tools they turn to this end with precision and skill - prose for one. The story is set in 12th century France, so obviously there's not going to be any kind of realistic language usage (I don't know about you but my middle Breton is pretty poor). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to feed into the atmosphere with the linguistic choices they deploy. There's a consistent formality to the word choices - even the interior ones - that helps establish the court setting and the courtly manners of the people involved, even in moments of stress. They speak in the pattern of a knight from a story, even if their behaviour is more naturalistically drawn. Sentences are long and carefully structured, even speech full of delicately threaded subclauses and patterned back and forth. And the narration echoes this, seeming to speak itself in the voice of the storyteller, consistently determined to inspire wonder and magic, even at mundane details like travel-stained clothes. At no point does Longman let up: this is a myth, and so it must sound like one, in order that the spell never be broken.

It helps that Longman's prose is also just rather lovely:

The hunt is continuity: youth, exile, kingship, all of them joined by this bright thread of the horse beneath you and the call of the horns and the fierce joy of the hounds as they run, chasing down the boar as it crashes through the undergrowth.

Hear the alliteration and the rhythm to it. The story of Bisclavret is originally a poem, and Longman never lets that stray too far from memory either. There are three perspectives the story is written in, chapter by chapter, and one of those (labelled "other") is consistently in blank verse, its flow even closer to the poetic than even this crafted language.

For the other two, Bisclavret's chapters (labelled "him") are in close third, watching him from outside even though we know his thoughts, and the unnamed king's in second. This shifting gives a clear distinction to the different character perspectives, feeding into how they are in fact characterised, and what Longman wants to focus on in how they tell the story. Bisclavret feels at odds with himself, distracted and distant, and so we cannot be a part of his authentic thought process. The king meanwhile is the opposite, buried deep under his anxieties, his depression (never named as such but clearly described), his sadness and loneliness, his care and determination to be a better king than his father. And by giving us his sections in the second person, and the present tense, there's an immediacy to him, an intimacy to the experience of inhabiting his headspace because Longman puts us right there, thinking those thoughts through alongside.

Which pairs even more beautifully with those poetry sections of the Other. There... person is eschewed as much as possible. The Other is the wolf who overtakes Bisclavret and steals his skin and his self, and is divorced from humanity. There is no person, only scattered, ungrammared feeling and action, interspersed with italic moments of Bisclavret's humanity breaking through in the first person.

And Longman knows what they're doing with this, naming it on the page in one of these sections:

The mind of a man is difficult to lose: 

it whispers human, whispers I,

first person, self-absorbed, tangled up

with the gut instinct that pinpoints revenge 

The prose has us thinking about the how of the story just as much as the story itself.

But where this is all high romance and abstract, the text also provides details to ground the story in the physical where needed. One of the recurring themes that arises in Bisclavret's sections is his intense focus on his hands. It is the loss of his hands that he mourns when he loses himself to the wolf, and it is those same hands he finds himself touching, welcoming, when he returns to human form. They become totemic of his humanity as a whole, and his focus on them recurs at critical moments to focus the story's attention on his mental state and sense of self.

There are also many moments just of physical action - it's a story full of knights so there's a fair bit of sparring, but also the clasping of hands, kisses given in loyalty, skin touched to skin in passion. It's a hard thing, I think, to entwine the formalised world of the medieval and the mythic with a more naturalistic approach to human interaction, but Longman does it well, never breaking one for the sake of the other.

To linger on that clasping of hands, one of the central themes of the story is to do with medieval kingship, and the duties, fealties, powers and relationships that run in both directions from the person of the king. The unnamed "you" of the story is coming into kingship unready, learning the ropes, and is intended as a deeply thoughtful character besides, so there's a lot of wondering on exactly how his performance of kingship and his development and use of relationships with his retainers and knights is working. The king has relationships of a loving or sexual kind with several people during the story, too, and those factor into his wondering. It is a very modern concern to be preoccupied with the abuse of power differentials, but the way the king thinks it through never slips out of that medieval atmosphere, breaking immersion by this modern concern, because the king frames it in terms that feel in place for the time, predominantly duty and fealty. He is aware that he can but ask, and his subjects will give. He highlights that a lord could be asked to sleep in the royal bed chamber and this intimacy (named as such) would be considered a mark of high favour, rather than a one-sided wielding of power in counter to desire. This is a story conscious of contemporary medieval mores, rather than imposing modern ones, for the most part, and that allows Longman to think through this concern without feeling inauthentic. It becomes more part of the king's character - and Bisclavret's, though in different ways - to be overthinkers, doubters and worriers. To the point that the knight in green, a friend to both, comments on it to each in turn. 

I suppose that is the uniting feature - Longman likes to name things on the page that they are doing, the things that might be contrasts or awkwardnesses or disjoints, and by naming them in text smooth their path, just as they do right at the beginning with that historical note. It is an incredibly knowing story, the sense of Longman's knowledge of the period - they have a PhD in medieval literature - suffusing the whole without the need for the sometime-problem of historical stories where the author feels they must demonstrate the research on the page no matter what. In The Wolf and His King, that knowledge is in every word, and so crowbarring it in would be redundant.

But it isn't a perfect story, though very accomplished. In the original poem, Bisclavret is betrayed by his wife, who steals the thing that allows him to return to human form, and marries another knight in his absence, when all think him dead. Longman cleaves close to the facts of the original, and while it works in all other places, when it comes to the wife, it feels a little of a let down. When first we meet her, she is sweet, kind, loving, understanding. It is very clear why Bisclavret falls in love with her - she sees the man and only the man, he thinks, not the wolf within - and why she with him, and their courtly romance does feel perfect and lovely, even up to their fumbling but passionate marriage bed consummation. But once it switches, once the story requires that she betray him, she (and the other knight, who in this telling is Bisclavret's cousin, who knows his nature and has helped him until they fall out) becomes suddenly unknowable to the story. Her motives become opaque to us, and any sympathy the story had for her - which, in the beginning, it did aplenty - is absent. Her suffering as the wife of a man who keeps disappearing for days and won't tell her why is not explored, and she is granted no grace. For a book so strong on the interiority and humanity of its other characters, this feels like a failing.

It doesn't fit the schema set up that she might have chapters in her perspective, but I almost wish she did, or the cousin. But we get to see their betrayal only through the eyes of the king (who doesn't know until it is revealed) or through the experience of the wolf, who cannot provide emotional depth and understanding the way Bisclavret as a man can. The wolf only wants revenge.

And so the bloody culmination and revelation feels... a little undermined. Thankfully, the story has as its climax not that but the aftermath, ensuring that there is a genuine emotional payoff waiting in the final chapter and epilogue, but it does mean that all rings a little hollow in contrast. The king, and Bisclavret, have both been characterised by their gentleness, their courtesy, their dedication to peace or understanding of things which many would not. That it does not hold here, for those they have loved, however understandable that might be, seems like a betrayal, almost, in order to remain true to the shape of the original narrative.

But for all that, I could not help but love it nonetheless. As well as this repeated theme of what a medieval king was and could be, there is another thread about love and perception. Bisclavret falls in love with his wife because she sees him only as a man. When he meets the king, and continually afterwards, he notes that the man seems to see through him. His gaze pierces him, flays him, unmasks him. He fears he sees the wolf inside. And, in the end, that knowing gaze is the one he needs, not the one that only sees the surface. It's a little corny, but well... it is an Arthurian-inspired romance. We have to have some high ideals in there, right?

The Knight and His King is, in the main, an incredibly accomplished novel, full of linguistic control, beautiful atmosphere, vivid prose and a fully realised impression of a mythic medieval court. Longman does a difficult thing of managing to wed the right quantity of realism with the stylisation and formality of a courtly romance, in the old sense, resulting in something that feels distinctive and emotionally authentic, even as it holds true to tropes that have been around for nearly a millennium. It is also, for all its formality, an incredibly intimate, personal and passionate book, as only something with such a committed interiority could be. Longman understands, and I emphasise, that duty, honour and fealty are just incredibly sexy things when done right. And here, they absolutely are.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, two deeply feeling main characters, a world drawn straight from medieval myth

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Finn Longman, The Wolf and His King, [Gollancz 2025]

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

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.

--

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.

--  

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)