Book Review: A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

Meat is murder

This is a book about murder and forced labour as well as the cost of beef. And the last is quite probably the most important.

A Trade of Blood is the third book in Robert Jackson’s Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series of fantasy mysteries. The books follow the duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol as they investigate politically sensitive crimes across a biohacked secondary world empire which is constantly threatened by attacks from massive, amphibious Titans from the sea (think Pacific Rim-esque kaiju). Both Ana and Din have had significant biological enhancements. Ana struggles greatly with external stimuli but is able to stitch together astonishing chains of logic when provided with appropriate information. Din, meanwhile, has been altered to have perfect, photographic memory. He investigates, observes, and reports back to Ana, who reaches conclusions with alarming rapidity.

In A Trade of Blood, Ana and Din travel away from the sharp end of the Titan threat for the first time in the series (the first two books having been set right near the sea where the Titans come ashore). They travel to the agricultural heartland of the empire to investigate the killing of the daughter of one of two key families in the beef industry by the son of the other key family. Any disruption of food supplies would seriously upset the stability of the Empire, and thus Ana and Din, specialist Imperial Iudex (the judicial/police/investigative branch of government), are sent to try to resolve the matter with a minimum of fuss. The facts of the killing seem largely indisputable, but the victim doesn’t remain the only dead body for long, and things get a little bit more complicated than they first appear, leading into a well-crafted, engaging mystery. I picked the culprit a bit earlier in this book than in the earlier ones, but it all still, in my view, worked very well.

As with previous books in the series, Ana and Din are very much our core cast, and their dynamic is fantastic. Ana is salty and waspish, and has absolutely no filter. Din, in contrast, is the straight man, sighing along, but also giving his own deadpan ripostes. This is established from the very start of the book, which opens thus:

“IT IS AN INARGUABLE TRUTH, you know,” said Ana, “that most people are absolutely enthralled by dead girls.”
I cracked my eyes and gazed at the carriage ceiling, certain I’d misheard this comment. I waited, listening to the rumble of the wheels and the crackling of the horses’ hooves on the gravel road.
Perhaps she would stop now, I thought. Perhaps there would be no more of it.
I shut my eyes and sought my way back to sleep.
“In fact, did you know, Din …” said Ana.
I opened them again.

It’s a genuinely funny dynamic, but it’s also great character work; the general banter and occasional seriousness and sincerity make it clear that these two, three books and a year or so into their working relationship, like and respect each other. Both also have ongoing, though low-key, plot threads that carry through from earlier books, Ana relating to what exactly her modifications are and Din to a quite difficult family history (these do mean that the book doesn’t entirely stand alone—though you can certainly enjoy a significant majority of what’s going on in the book without having read the first two, you would be missing enjoyable context if you did so).

The interchanging support cast is also (as it was in the first two books) very well done. This ranges from various family members of the victim and the accused to local law enforcement and, most prominently, the leader of the local Orbiis corps—essentially agricultural bioengineering specialists. Din also has a family connection pop up in a quite unexpected fashion. I also enjoyed very much that Bennett continues to present Din as that exceptionally rare beast in SFF, the bisexual man who generally prefers men, and the use of that aspect of his character (and his eidetic memory) to play with the “love interest of the week” dynamic one often gets in noir fiction is well judged.

This is the point at which mystery reviewing gets a touch difficult, at least for me. I find it quite difficult reviewing in this genre—at least before release—because you can't go into that many plot- or character-specific specifics without spoiling the whole thing. In most cases spoilers aren’t something I care about, but they really do matter for most mysteries, and that that is indeed the case here. However, the fact that it is a fantasy mystery means that isn’t all there is to talk about—the worldbuilding and thematic concerns hanging off the mystery plot also reward attention. RJB is very clear that what he's doing with this series (aside from writing deeply entertaining Nero Wolfe pastiches) is examining the different institutions of a society designed and tuned to address an ongoing, existential environmental threat. In Ana & Din's world this is the annual march of the Titans inland from the sea (as noted above, these are major presences in the first two books, absent in all but the use of their body parts and excretions as essential elements of Imperial biohacking here). But the story is also very clearly holding a mirror up to our world and the ongoing, existential threat of environmental degradation, particularly climate change.

As I've written elsewhere, there is a distinct genius to the nature of the role Bennett gives Ana and Din as specialist Imperial Iudex. They're not private detectives. They're not CSI technicians. They're not even really cops. They are Ombudsmen (in the European sense of the term of an organisation to investigate and ensure integrity in government). It's not a perfect analogy—there's rather more violence and crime scenes than Ombuds in the real world typically deal with—but at heart the crimes and puzzles Ana and Din investigate go to the proper functioning of the Empire's government. That proper functioning, it is made very clear, is maintaining social stability and directing that stable society at the eternal problem of staying alive with a decent standard of living in the face of centuries of rampaging kaiju. This setup allows our main characters—and Bennett—to poke around in all of the key institutions that make society tick. The Tainted Cup was engineering/civil works. A Drop of Corruption was basic forms of government and international relations. And A Trade of Blood is agriculture and food production.

It might seem weird to say this is part of government, but there's an Imperial bureaucracy responsible for agriculture too, complete with genetic enhancements: the aforementioned Orbiis. And food production is of course critically important to social stability; there’s a reason Juvenal sneered about “bread and circuses” as a mechanism for keeping the plebs happy almost 2,000 years ago. That sneer is particularly true of raising beef, which ultimately is an unnecessary luxury in land use and nutritional terms. But it's delicious, people want it, it keeps them happy, and happy people are easier to direct at the existential problem. But raising beef in this world is also wildly, weirdly artificial: biohacked giant tottering cattle with tonnes of meat on each limb, pre-sapient cat-monkey things pressed into service as field hands, and perfectly tuned magic fertilizer. We also see the waste: enormous piles of bones and hides. In reality that would very likely be used for something, but Bennett is clearly going for a 'slaughter of the buffalo' style image here, and it's an effective one. If he isn't going full militant vegan (and I think the book's take on the role of food as a social stabiliser is too pragmatic for it to go that far), he's clearly interested in showing the desensitisation to death that the factory beef farming methods cause.

The point Bennett is making, of course, is that this is all pretty much all true of how agriculture works in our world too, at least on a mass scale as it is practiced in most developed countries to a greater or lesser extent. Exploring these ideas in a secondary world gets the familiar context out of the way so we can see the strangeness in what we accept as quite normal in our own society. As Bennett states in his author's note, despite agriculture being framed in much of our current political discourse as a “natural” sphere set against the unnatural cities, there is little we do that is more profoundly “unnatural” than industrial farming. In this shock of recognition amidst the alienating oddity of Ana and Din's biohacked world, Bennett asks us how far we will have to hack ourselves and our society to survive what's coming from our planet and what the costs might be. Having these questions consistently in the background throughout a well crafted, taut mystery, excellent character work, and engaging worldbuilding really is impressive. It's rare that a novel this much sheer fun is also so thought-provoking. Another excellent entry in a series of remarkably consistent and remarkably high quality.

Highlights:

• Engaging fantasy mystery
• A hugely compelling core duo
• Asks compelling questions while entertaining

Nerd coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson. A Trade of Blood [Del Rey, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Feywild Job by C. L. Polk

 A solid piece of D&D tie-in fiction; a missed chance for more

After the heights of 2nd- through 4th-edition Forgotten Realms tie-in fiction, where we got dozens of books across a quarter century, Wizards of the Coast seems to have gone into a bit of a lull in the setting over the decade since 5e bedded in (at least as far as characters not named Drizzt are concerned). That ‘90s TSR fiction is what I cut my fantasy nerd teeth on as a pre-teen and younger teenager; I have very fond memories of it. So I was pleased to see Wizards of the Coast return to tie-in fiction and return to a book set (at least partially) in the Realms. I was equally pleased to see they’ve tapped C. L. Polk, a writer with a great backlist, to write The Feywild Job.

The premise is that two pairs of adventurers are essentially blackmailed by a “client” into a reverse heist: steal a MacGuffin back from someone and return it to its proper place before anyone notices it’s gone. Each pair is led by half of an old duo of thieves—the warlock Saeldian and the bard Kell. That partnership fell apart a decade before the book started, when feelings started to develop between them. This was a problem for Saeldian’s warlock pact (the deal with an Archfey which gives him his powers), which requires him to never fall in love, so he walks out, and the next time he sees Kell is at the start of this heist. The two tagalongs are Kell’s orc druic companion Lorzok and Saeldian’s rogue companion Jubilee. This leads into a heist plot, a potential second-chance romance, and some very of-the-moment cozy-adjacent vibes.

A shift to cozy-adjacent romantasy might seem an odd choice for D&D tie-in fiction, but in a lot of ways I think it actually honours the tradition of the field. The heist-quest plot thread is absolutely classic TSR tie-in stuff. The point of tie-in fiction is at least in part to attract new audiences to the TTRPG product, and romantasy—and its audience—is a potential untapped market for WotC. And to dive into some deep lore, in fact one of the earliest examples of D&D tie-in was what we’d now call romantasy. A spinoff of the early ‘80s Endless Quest Choose Your Own Adventure books was 6 HeartQuest books. Before Drizzt, before the Dragonlance Chronicles, we had CYOA romantasy aimed at teenagers. So the choice of genre seems both perfectly judged for the current moment and a well judged nod to tradition.

And it all works quite well without being a total triumph. If I’d read this as a 13-year-old just realising he was queer at the height of TSR Forgotten Realms fiction, I’d have loved it. And it is a solid, largely well executed example of both a cozy romantasy and a piece of RPG tie-in fiction, but it isn’t more than that, either. I’d certainly put it in the top quartile of D&D fiction ever released, but with the greatest of respect, that isn’t the world’s most searching standard, and I don’t think it quite matches the absolute best of the old 2nd- to 4th-edition tie-ins (notably the best work of Erin Evans and Elaine Cunningham, for example). For the rest of the review I want to talk about why it reaches that upper quartile and why it also doesn’t, in my eyes, extend beyond solidly pretty good.

Polk is a technically excellent writer, and the prose in the book is very well done. A nice eye for imagery, a bit of personality to the narrative voice. One of the risks of D&D fiction is you can sometimes hear the dice rattling in the background, but the integration of spells, combat, and shared world elements is done seamlessly here—this may seem like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. It’s a key element of RPG tie-ins, and it is not often done as smoothly as Polk does it here. A number of the action set pieces are done very well, and the lick of horror imagery in the back half of the narrative is well judged and effective. Our non-binary lead in Saeldian is also written sympathetically and subtly. In a lot of ways The Feywild Job is a really good piece of writing in this genre.

But some of the bigger picture elements are not quite at the level of the sentence-by-sentence work. The major forward plot drive for the book is the heist element, and I really just wanted more of it: the planning, the traps, the complications. The first quarter of the book provides a bit of that, but for a book whose title creates an expectation for heist-heavy narrative, it was a little underdone. If you create the expectation, the reader (or I, at least), wants it to be fulfilled. What fills the narrative space not taken up by the heist is the second-chance romance plot between Saeldian and Kell, and unfortunately it doesn’t really compensate. For a romance of this type, understanding the nature of the first breakup, getting a good grasp on motivations and pining and missed opportunity is in my view essential to the whole thing working. And given the nature of that romance plot, the backstory is a little too thinly sketched to get the full effect. There are also a few misplaced details that just leave the break, and the level of bitterness being carried by both parties, feels a little contrived. Finally, for a book with four main cast members, the two leads’ companions are done a little dirty; both Lorzok and Jubilee have glimmers of real interest and very obvious possibility for more in Polk’s capable hands, but just don’t get the time or page space to be fully developed. The unrealised potential really does frustrate.

There is a place for 3-star fiction that doesn’t push—particularly when I was younger, I read a lot of it, I enjoyed a lot of it, and to a lesser degree I still do now. And The Feywild Job is firmly in that bracket. Perhaps because of the nature of tie-in fiction, perhaps because of the reasonably tropey cozy and romance elements, perhaps because of the combination between all of those and a moderately undercooked heist, it just doesn’t rise above it. It’s not a page count issue—it’s a reasonably typical length for this sort of book—but somehow it does seem to be trying to do a bit too much a bit too briefly.

Ultimately, if this is the quality of D&D tie-in we're going to get in the future, we should all be happy: it sets an enjoyable, highly competent standard. The Feywild Job is exactly what it needs to be. I just found myself the slightest bit disappointed it wasn’t more.

Highlights:

• Well crafted prose and engaging imagery
• Tie-in fiction which speaks to both tradition and the current moment
• Just a whiff of missed opportunity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Reference:  Polk, C. L. The Feywild Job [Random House Worlds, 2026].

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

Book Microreview: Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue

A contemporary horror/dark fantasy novella with a strong grounding in its setting

Riley is a Jersey Girl. She lives near the Shore, and has a season badge at Asbury Park. She has been drifting since before she graduated from high school, because her best friend Tara disappeared months ago. The last place she was seen was Thrill Park, a family-owned amusement park. And Riley is determined to find out what happened to her. Even if she has to become part of the staff of Thrill Park to do it.

This is Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue.

One of the book’s strongest points is the voice. We get a first-person point of view from Riley, full of her opinions, determinations, fears and doubts. She has been devastated by losing Tara, and trying to find her is what keeps her going. Even as strange things happen to her at the park, she keeps that drive, that internal voice, that forward momentum going. Riley feels authentic, and we get to understand her deal in a short space thanks to the author’s writing. It shows just how broken a person Riley has become since Tara’s disappearance.

Another strength is the grounded worldbuilding. The book is set in coastal New Jersey and expertly captures the feel of a place I didn’t grow up in, but visited often enough to find the sense of place to be in accord with my memories. There are a couple of comparisons and allusions to an infamous amusement park, Action Park. Having been to Action Park several times growing up in the area, this was an excellent reference point for me to really get a sense of how Thrill Park compares, or doesn’t. The horror and real life dangers of Action Park are different from the more supernatural ones of Thrill Park, although there is an attraction in the fictional Thrill Park that definitively evoked its Action Park counterpart.

That handling of the mundane elements is strong, perhaps almost too dominant a flavor in the novella. I think I would have liked more of the supernatural elements, which were applied with a lighter touch than most of the fantasy fiction I read. But perhaps that is part of the point this story. The mundanity of Riley coming to terms with Tara’s fate and processing her feelings about it has more narrative weight.

That said, I was darkly amused by what was for me the central supernatural element, that the penumbra of mundane space coincidentally leans into a hot topic in horror and fantasy: liminal spaces. And of course, the recent movie Backrooms. The worker and employee spaces in an amusement park are a backrooms-like liminal space if someone not of that public (or someone new to it, like Riley) should stumble into it. It’s a space that we don’t normally see, but logically they exist.¹

And that brings me to the title of the book and what the author focuses on, and what I focused on. The title of the book is Amusement Park Arcana, and there is a tarot reading as a centerpiece and a station on the Riley’s path to find out what happened to Tara. At the point it happens we’ve already had a weird/fantastic note. And the tarot reading leads Riley to get into the liminal space where she finds out what really happened to Tara. That reading, given the title, is a big sign.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of real knowledge of the tarot that I didn’t focus on the details when I was reading it, but looking back now, my focus on the liminal space, dictated by recent media, led me to not realizing that the tarot reading is the real focus of this story. Riley’s reading has her embody the card she represents: the Knight of Swords. This card, I am given to understand, is an energetic, driven figure, who wants to accomplish their goals at any and all costs. That certainly is Riley, who has responded to her best friend disappearing at an amusement park by charging in and signing up to be hired by the park so that she can investigate it herself. Rushing in where angels fear to tread is this archetype.

That, indeed, is Riley. Rushing and determined. Sort of like the story itself, come to think of it.

Thus, Amusement Park Arcana rushes by, in a similar manner, quickly. I am not sure about the ending; it felt a little underwhelming to me. But the story up to that part, for its relative balance of mundane versus supernatural, is solid. It flows well and quickly, and as I think about it in retrospect a week later, especially as noted above with the tarot implications, my initial hard feelings about the ending have softened. It’s not as much of a resolution as I might have liked, but for other readers, it might be enough.

Highlights:

• Great sense of place in New Jersey
• Good use of tarot as magic and central theme
• Strong first-person POV protagonist

Reference: Donohue, Jennifer R. Amusement Park Arcana [self-published, 2026].

¹ Now thinking back to my days of working in a supermarket, and not really realizing at the time how I was often in spaces that we would now consider liminal. I know the backrooms of Pathmark (rest in peace) and can walk them in my mind to this day. But a stranger thrust into that space would be at sea.

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

Book Review: Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead

The latest novel by K.J. Parker set in his Parkerland ‘verse

K.J. Parker has settled into doing novels set in his Parkerland ‘verse. For lack of a better term for the setting, since it involves a variety of locations, timelines, characters, and inconsistencies, it is a medieval world that isn’t our own, but rhymes and plays with that rhyme in a whole bunch of different ways. Be it the Siege (Sixteen Ways to Defend a City) Trilogy about the not-quite-fall of Byzantium to Saevus Corax, battlefield salvager who winds up trying to head off international conflicts, to various novellas involving the ubiquitous Salonicus, who is a con artist, inventor, playwright, and possibly also the most brilliant person in the entire timeline. The novellas and novels aren’t in any sort of sensical order, the very idea of a map is scoffed at, and just when things actually took place is not clear.

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead is the latest in these. This novel feels, from internal evidence, to be late in the timeline of events compared to the others. The church has been going along for quite a while and doesn’t have any competition anymore, and seems ready to have a schism of some size. The eternal threat of the Sashan Empire seems muted. Once again we have people lamenting lost manuscripts, writings and whole technologies.¹

And an impious monk and a female assassin/nun are dispatched to a synod where they have been tasked with killing a troublesome princess. But things get hot and hairy before they can even get there, and when they get to the synod itself, trouble erupts not of their own making, but definitely because they are there.

Despite the title, our viewpoint character is not the assassin/nun Sister Svangerd herself, but rather a more typical Parker point-of-view character: Brother Desiderius. He is a well worn and familiar archetype to readers of Parker’s work. A cynical, knowledgeable, brains-driven protagonist. He’s also an out-and-out atheist, even given that he’s a monk. He also has some other useful skills, and the classic Parker game of “I reveal this about the character and that changes what you just read” runs riot through his story. Sister Svangerd, for all that she is in the title, doesn’t hold a candle to our real protagonist, and that is a shame and a missed opportunity.

This novel’s theological debates about The Invincible Sun and the minutiae of its dogma are interesting if you want a debate over a religion in a fantasy novel. Parker, and to various extents his characters, are engaged with it. And there is a veneer of the idea that maybe there are supernatural forces using human agents here—or are the human agents simply thinking they are working for those supernatural elements—or is it all lies, delusions and half truths?

Take the Not-Quite-Dead from the title. Yes, this novel has a type of zombie in it. Or at least an undead. But there is a real fascination with Parker with the idea of people thinking they are supernatural, and regarding their presence as prima facie evidence for the truth of evil, versus the alternative. Our protagonist is from a country where this happens in families: naturally, there are families where, when people die, they come back as these undead. He’s an atheist and has a materialistic view of the entire affair, even if nearly nobody else does. It’s like this novel is having arguments with the more fantastical novellas such as Inside Man about whether the supernatural elements of Parkerland are actually real or not. Are they? Unclear!

And that is the thing about this novel, for better or worse. This novel is very much, absolutely meant as inside baseball catnip for people who have read a bunch of these novels and stories already and want to keep burrowing into this world and try to figure it out and see if there is a consistent design behind everything. Is there? Some days I think Parker is deliberately inconsistent just to mess with his longtime deep readers, and half the time I think he is just winging it and doesn’t have a consistent theory of worldbuilding. As I have read a number of books and reviewed them, here. Making History, for example, seems like a serious contemplation on the nature of history and its transmission. The Saevus Corax series, which this book resembles in some ways, does a lot of what this novel does, although with a somewhat different focus and at a different point in the timeline. I do think, especially given his academic focused stories, that it is all a game to Parker.

And that’s fine, but, and here’s the but. I might enjoy trying to figure out things here, trying to tease out where and when in Parkerland these events are happening and what it all means for the history and development of the world. I might enjoy the reading references, the aforementioned familiar archetype of a character. There is a well worn groove here in these novels.

The problem, the but, as it were, is that there is no way I would recommend this book to someone absolutely new to Parker. I am glad Parker is not writing solely for the inside baseball (the aforementioned Making History works pretty well for readers who haven’t read much or any of Parker). But a novel like this, although it is first in a series, really isn’t the first in a series at all. It’s a novel for a limited audience—deep fans of Parkerland.

I can hope, based on prior experience, that the next two novels will tie things together and get me to reconsider this novel and its merits. But then again, that’s once again something for the deep Parkerland reader, not for the casual fantasy reader picking up Parker for the first time. And so we come back to the original problem.

So in a real way what this review boils down to is: If you like and read lots of Parkerland novels, you get more of the same here. Other readers probably won’t derive as much enjoyment out of the novel as you’d hope. I think it’s not worth your time, frankly. I enjoy Parker’s tone and world, and his knowledgable protagonist, but this is down deep in that, and starting here won’t land well at all. There are better places to start, I think (e.g. Sixteen Ways to Defend a City).

Highlights:

• A novel set late in the Parkerland timeline
• A familiar protagonist despite the book title
• Too well worn a groove for a limited audience

Reference: Parker, K.J. Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead [Orbit, 2026].

¹ Inside baseball here. One of the things that make it hard to date and come up with a chronology of the Parkerland ‘verse is that technology and knowledge keeps getting lost. This world seems to be continually in a trap where no sustained technological development can take place without a war or other disaster knocking the sandcastle down all over again and regressing to an equilibrium. Even for a world with multiple organizations trying to preserve and extend knowledge, in Parkerland, it never *lasts*.

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

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

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

Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

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

Book Review: The Palace of Eros, by Caro de Robertis

On making Mount Olympus' foundations shake

I first discovered the work of Caro de Robertis (they/them) with their novel The Gods of Tango, which follows an immigrant from Italy’s new life in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century, embracing that quintessential Argentinean dance and music, and transitioning gender in the process; I was interested because I am an amateur ballroom dancer and can dance the American bastardization of Tango reasonably well, but know vanishingly little of the original. Since then, I have read some of their other books, including Cantoras, a spellbinding, heartbreaking saga of lesbian life under the dictatorship in Uruguay, and The President and the Frog, an odd little novel that dips into the supernatural. But in their most recent novel they take the speculative plunge: The Palace of Eros could be considered another entry in the recent subgenre of feminist retellings of ancient myth (as my esteemed colleague on this blog Roseanna Pendlebury has deftly discussed the failings of said subgenre).

Unlike Pendlebury, I will admit to you that I am not the ideal audience for this novel, and in all likelihood not the ideal audience for de Robertis’ oeuvre in general. I am heterosexual, cisgender, and male, ethnically mixed between a smorgasbord of western Europe on the one hand and the Philippines on the other. I am autistic, with no romantic relationships in my life thus far. I have no cultural link with Latin America, but I speak Spanish reasonably well if not fluently. Nor am I particularly fluent in classical mythology. A more narrow-minded person may ask why I would read this book to begin with. I would first retort with the well-trod benefits of reading widely, of learning other perspectives, of opening your mind. I would then provide this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

“Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.”

The novel is a queer reinterpretation of the story of Psyche and Eros. In this novel, the former is the youngest of three daughters of a farmer. She is said to be the most beautiful, and her father is intent on using that fact to marry her off to a man that could benefit him. She and her sisters are made to sit quietly in their living room as her father socializes with the men of her town. Later, she is displayed as a sculpture would be at an auction, gawked at, leered at, but never actually engaged with in any substantive form. She is objectified in the sense that she is reduced to the status of an object to be traded away, as something to be hopefully received by the suitors, and to be traded away for benefit by her father.

It is at this juncture that Aphrodite, goddess of love, takes note, and is disgusted that men find Psyche more beautiful than her. She sends her child, Eros, to make her fall in love with a monster. Note how I said ‘child,’ and not ‘son,’ as Eros is traditionally male in mythology. Here, Eros presents femme in most contexts but can shapeshift across the gender binary (including sex organs). Though a character whose gender expression is quite fluid, Eros is referred to with she/her pronouns throughout the novel, and that is what I will use here. She is an embodiment of sexual desire, as in classical mythology, but a more expansive, more liberatory, queerer form; she loves both men and women (expressing confusion when contemplating why her mother has only ever had sex with men). More piercingly, she asks why her crossing of the gender binary is so rankling to the other gods, as they change species with regularity. If a man can become a god, and a god can become a swan, surely a man can become a woman, and a woman become a man, so the logic goes, and it is a hard logic to argue with.

Much as in the original myths, Eros arranges to whisk Psyche away to a pleasant valley with an opulent palace filled with luxuries. There are sumptuous meals that are refilled every day, and supplies for art, and baths, and a very big bed. Every night, when Psyche goes to sleep, she is joined in the dark by a person she at first calls, for lack of a better term, her ‘husband,’ who makes her swear to never bring light into the room, leaving ‘him’ anonymous, and to never ask who ‘he’ is. The ‘husband’ is of course Eros, hiding her transgressions against the Olympian patriarchal order by roof and by anonymity. The two will only meet in the marriage bed, in pitch black. This raises two significant themes in the book.

Firstly: if the word ‘Eros’ appearing in the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, there is a lot of sex in this book. The lovemaking sessions between Eros and Psyche are emotionally tense and psychologically deep. Consider that Psyche’s sole exposure to any form of human sexuality beyond rumors of the mechanics involved in heterosexual intercourse is to be leered at as essentially a trophy, to later become the second-class partner in an unequal arrangement as she is ripped away from everything and everyone she loves (her sisters and her mother in particular) to be part of a man’s status game (there is very much a dynamic of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ evident in the way the menfolk of her town behave). It is here that she gets to experience sex as a joyful thing, as something that she can take pleasure in. Eros clearly cares for her needs, and knows how to keep things exciting (the ability to change between male and female forms is used to great effect here). This is a very strongly embodied liberation: liberation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that exists physically, on the skin and in the nervous system. At first, this appears to be eroticism without the shackles of patriarchy, without the weight of societal expectations, without the status-jockeying and the need to marry a man simply to have basic human needs met. At first.

If all of the above raises some thorny issues of consent in your mind, you have struck on the second theme I was mentioning. Eros has effectively kidnapped Psyche and, without explanation, given her everything she could ever want. Eros resolutely refuses to give any actual identifying information about herself to Psyche, and has made it clear that this cornucopia of gifts will only continue if Psyche agrees to her demands. At first, Psyche is happy to accede due to the novelty of the whole thing, but as time goes on she begins to grow bored with not having any company, and insulted by a lack of explanation. Psyche eventually begins to probe the boundaries of what Eros has allowed and finds answers, to Eros’ great displeasure.

This is the sort of thing that, if left unexamined, would be disturbing, but de Robertis is brave enough to tackle this issue head on. Eros has designed this arrangement to accomplish a number of things: to rescue Psyche from Aphrodite’s wrath, to explore the erotic opportunities of freely transcending the gender binary, and to hide this threat to the Olympian patriarchal order from the eyes of Zeus. Eros is herself deeply traumatized from the way her gender non-conformity has been persecuted, and empathizes deeply with Psyche. But as those with relative privilege so often do to those with less privilege, Eros treats Psyche not as an equal, but as a charity case, to be manipulated and prodded in the service of the former’s sense of self-preservation. In this arrangement, what little agency Psyche has is at Eros’ allowance (and there is some agency; Psyche is thrilled by the ability to engage in artistic expression in the palace, as she takes up painting with gusto). She is not treated as deserving the dignity of a clear answer to what’s going on, the dignity of real consent. What becomes so crushingly clear is that, in her attempt to escape patriarchal norms, she has recreated them in this palace, in this valley, allegedly away from it all. The great tragedy of the bulk of the book is seeing this logic play out; Eros and Psyche both are getting a crash-course education in breaking patriarchal norms, but, as Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood,’” and that in face of education that is not liberatory, the oppressed will only seek to become the oppressor.

It is at this point I am going to spoil the ending because it is too rich in thematic content to leave unremarked upon. Those interested in the story should exercise caution.

Psyche ultimately storms out of the palace and tries to find her way home. Eros, distraught, is found out by the other Olympians and is now in deep trouble with them for breaking their rigid gender norms. More gods get involved, some of whom are on Psyche’s side, and eventually Psyche and Eros come to see each other again, Psyche having reclaimed a sense of dignity and Eros having reckoned fully with the implications of what she had done to Psyche. Eros asks Psyche if she wants to stay in the relationship, and after thinking about it, she says yes. Eros says she will find a way to marry Psyche, and turn her into a demigoddess. One way or another, she says, the Olympians will accept her, and this arrangement. The novel ends not long after.

This is an ending that feels narratively satisfying, but has implications that some may object to. One objection I consider is that this is an abuse victim choosing her abuser, and I was more than a little worried at first. But, thinking about it more thoroughly, I came around to the ending. The novel has made clear the nature of why Eros did what she did, not out of malice, but out of a limited imagination. I can see how Psyche herself could have come to that conclusion in regards to Eros, her mind being opened by her positive experiences within the palace - experiences which would lead her, later, to seeing the issues of the palace arrangement itself. She comes to understand how Eros came from a situation not unlike her own. She understands, then, how Eros came to act the way she did, and she can forgive. That’s what makes the most sense to me, anyway.

This ending, again, is narratively satisfying, but thinking about it more, I find that it has a lot of potentialities that are simply left alone. The idea of the Olympian gods having to recognize a same-sex marriage and a god/dess who jumps across the gender binary at will implies a titanic (no pun intended, but appreciated) shift in the cosmology of this version of Greece, and will doubtlessly resonate in the mortal realm. As an SFF reader and writer, and especially as an alternate history aficionado, I find that this is where de Robertis is most obviously a writer of literary fiction. I quote from a piece in Strange Horizons by Ada Palmer, which is my framework for this particular issue:

 “But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.”

The story of Psyche and Eros as presented by de Robertis matches this conception of literary fiction, albeit in a slanted form. Psyche, clearly, has no way of changing the brutal patriarchal order she had the misfortune of being born in. Eros, though, is a bit trickier - she has divine power, but she is presented for most of the novel as being incapable of changing the gendered order of Olympus. This is why this ending was a bit unsatisfying as a work of speculative fiction, whereas for a literary novel it is just fine. The part of me that loves SFF that depicts societies undergoing great change, whether sprawling (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 - a book that was pivotal in my political development - or The Ministry for the Future, what Henry Farrell called the ‘apocalyptic systems thriller’) or smaller-scale, localized books like Sim Kern’s The Free People’s Village, found this to be a very abrupt sense of what the narrative’s sense of possibility - we’ve spent almost three hundred pages in a situation where the world must be endured, not changed, but now we have a way to potentially change it! That left me wanting more. Looking at this novel from an SFF perspective, Eros and Psyche are two characters who exemplify very well K. S. Villoso’s point about how worldbuilding and good characterization reinforce each other when writing speculative literature. De Robertis saw fit to let setting mold character, but not character to mold setting. I know literary authors aren’t usually in the habit of writing sequels in the way that SFF writers are, but I really, really wanted a sequel to this book where Eros and Psyche rip the ideological floorboards out from under Olympus and from classical Greece at large, and see what new world emerges.

I finished this book empathizing with Psyche’s desire for dignity, for personhood, as an autistic person of color aware that his government is targeting people like him. I do so, though, with the understanding that as a cisgender heterosexual man I am very much not the target audience, and that there are nuances to this story, and the way it is told, that I have simply missed. My privilege doubtlessly blinds me to things here. I wondered for a while if I were the right person to review this book, being so far removed from the people it’s really about. I can say that it is an engaging, intelligent novel that I enjoyed a lot. I came to the conclusion that I, as someone with the privilege of having a platform like Nerds of a Feather, should use it to amplify good books that wouldn’t get coverage elsewhere in the SFF ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that if this review brings this book to someone who will benefit from it on a level much deeper than I would, it is worth it.

--  

Reference: de Robertis, Caro. The Palace of Eros [Primero Sueño Press, 2024]

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

Book Review: The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles

A potent anti-colonialist novel that sets its stakes on not just the fate of a planet and a species, but more importantly, the heart and soul of its main character

Ada Quintrall is the heiress to the Dukedom of Corbridge. Her grandfather the Duke has managed the aforementioned dukedom, which is actually on the planet Corbridge, in a future where humans have gone to the stars. The terraforming of the planet has been a harsh affair, and the native life has resisted. But when Ada finds out the long connection between her family and that native life, she is forced to confront what her grandfather and her family have done, and her complicity in it. And what is to be done about it.

This is the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh plays with a number of genres in order to explore its overall themes, which are, unapologetically, anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian in nature. Let’s begin with the most unexpected, and that is portal fantasy. In the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, Ada learns that her ancestor wrote a bestselling fantasy series (The Chronicles of Yeneh, hence the book title). As the novel proceeds in its opening phases, Ada realizes that the native inhabitants of the planet are not mindless “plants,” but rather are the fantasy species from her ancestor’s book. Just how and why this is true, and what it means, puts a portal fantasy frame front and center in the book.

As this is a science fiction novel, the nature of the world, combined with the portal fantasy already alluded to, gives the setting and the story a significant layer of science fantasy. It retains this even as the novel progresses; the novel isn’t as interested in hard SF as it is in the sociological, political and personal stories. You don’t get any sense of what the interstellar drive is or how it works, for example. That’s not the kind of novel this is.

And then we get into the worldbuilding and some more genre-bending. In this future, a portion of a diasporic humanity has decided to reinstitute aristocracy as a social system. It is explained that in a world where some people turn away from merciless post-Capitalism, the appeal of personal rule by means of hereditary aristocracy for some planets was strong. It’s not a new idea¹ to have an aristocratic “feudal” future.² Miles, however, does it a bit differently. Aristocratic nobles like Ada’s family are not the only social system out there; it’s made clear that there are still capitalistic systems, and aristocratic ones, and even socialistic ones. There is a plurality of social systems in Miles’ universe, and while we are under an aristocratic one in this book, a main character, Zamora, is from Luna, which is mainly a socialist state, This does set up some cultural distrust at first between Ada (as an aristocratic heiress) and Zamora, and in general between Zamora and the population of Corbridge.

And then there is the straight-up science fiction as a genre. Ada (and Zamora) understand that the natives of the planet are more than just “plants” (as Zamora already argued); moreover, there is an entire civilization in the toxic and dangerous zones beyond what has been colonized and terraformed by the humans. So we switch up into the novel’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial and pro-ecological themes. With the previous layers to this, this makes The Final Chronicle of Yeneh a science fiction novel with interesting and intriguing underpinnings, providing a fresh story in the process.³

But beyond all that genre-mixing and worldbuilding, this is a very personal story, focused on Ada, who as heiress to her grandfather, is confronted with the ecological, sociological and personal costs of imperialism, colonialism and the rapacious nature of her family and her family’s legacy. It’s a painful story for her in some ways, especially as it puts her on the other side of her grandfather and her legacy once she completely learns those costs and takes a stand. The novel is about those costs, and the difficulty of that change. And as importantly as coming to terms with that legacy, the novel is about taking action, making recompense and taking active steps to do better.

Yes, while Ada herself is in a position of privilege (at least at the outset), the novel’s message is that people can and do make a difference—and indeed must do so in order to effect change. Change is hard and is scary, but it is possible, with action. That is a message that the novel hits home, and it is a very necessary message in this day and age.

In sum, what The Final Chronicle of Yeneh does, brilliantly, is to channel Miles’ excellence in character depth and make the very soul of the main character, Ada, to be as important as the fate of the native Yeheneh and of the planet Corbridge. It stirs a swirl of portal fantasy and a hint of science fantasy into a far-future story that examines and criticizes colonialism, imperialism and exploitative social systems. Miles’ focus remains tight and sympathetic, having us join Ada on her own journey to recognizing, confronting and acting on working on systemic problems on Corbridge and beyond.

Highlights:

• Strong character focus and background
• Interesting space future sketched in and intriguing
• Bold anti-colonial, anti-imperial message, told well

Reference: Miles, Jo. The Final Chronicle of Yeneh [Horned Lark Press, 2026].

¹ Melinda Snodgrass’s Imperials Saga has capitalism evolve into a Spanish-focused monarchy and aristocracy, in space. And of course, there is always The Mote In God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

² Obligatory note that feudalism, as you might think of it, really didn’t exist as you might think of it. The huge variety of local political systems in Western Europe really put paid to that notion. Read the works of David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, among others, to learn more. (e.g. The Bright Ages).

³ The worldbuilding about the local inhabitants of the planet has resonances to many previous works of science fiction. You can certainly look at The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. I also see touchstones to the work of Adrian Tchaikovsky and James Cameron’s Avatar universe.

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

Review: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

 Ctrl C, Ctrl V: The novella

And Side by Side They Wander is a novella absolutely brimming with interesting ideas delivered in accomplished prose, but one of the most interesting things about it is that as a single coherent work it just doesn’t quite, well, work.

The premise for this slim book is that aliens called the Celerians arrive on Earth a few years from now and promise to give us the technology to solve all our problems—social, economic, environmental—with their advanced technology. All we would have to give them in return is all our most important art, but don’t worry: they’ll give us perfect, indistinguishable replicas in return. The art is taken to a perfect, safe, secure museum on the Celerian homeworld, and they promise to give it back when the Earth solves all those problems and the art is no longer at risk of destruction. 300 years later, problems solved, Earth something of a paradise thanks to the (bio)technology given by the Celerians, and it turns out they aren’t so keen to give it back. Enter our narrator and her companions, about to start an interstellar heist to steal the art back.

If this sounds very much like the situation the Greek government has been in at the very least since the completion of the Acropolis Museum in 2009 in relation to the Elgin Marbles still firmly, smugly ensconced at the British Museum, Tanzer’s author’s note makes it clear the reference is deliberate. And so you would expect the novella to be a sort of reverse reclamation heist (à la Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon), and that plot is absolutely there—we get its key details, slightly out of chronological order, from planning to execution—but that really isn’t what the book is about. Tanzer’s jumping off point for And Side by Side They Wander is in fact a proposed techbro “solution” to the Elgin Marbles problem: what if they did a high-res scan of the marbles, then laser-cut precise replicas out of virtually identical marble? Very obviously, this would satisfy neither Greek nor British government, but Tanzer is interested in the why of this: what is it about a copy that makes us instinctively think it is inferior to the original?

So the book is absolutely fixated on the nature and effect of copying, not just art but people. An Elon Musk-esque billionaire ascendant just before the Celerians arrived preserved his legacy by creating a series of clones and androids who looked like him. He was also involved in the development of a fungal nuclear cleanup device, which was released after insufficient testing, and turns out when it ate a bit too much radiation, it became sentient and started producing fungal simulacra of animals, plants, landscapes… and people. These elements are all used to ask questions about what it means to make or to be a copy. These are very interesting ideas to explore from these different angles, and by and large Tanzer does so with real insight and in a lovely written voice. Throw another alien race which has a very different understanding of “self” and “other” into the mix, and these concerns about similarity, difference, self and authenticity become all-consuming.

But this does mean that ultimately the heist plot, too, is largely consumed. It isn’t even really the primary vehicle for all that exploration of copying; that comes in the backstory, explaining how our narrator, Fennel Tycho, ended up part of the gang. Starting with her grief at the death of her brother, and her hiring by Earth’s lone megacorp (run by the descendants and clones of this dead billionaire), this runs through her time as a minder of sorts to one of the billionaire copy androids, Jack Kirby (the androids were all named after artists). That professional relationship evolved into a romantic one—at least on Fennel’s side; we’re never given access to Jack’s feelings on the matter, and are again invited to think about the extent to which a copy of a human has access to the emotions and motivations of the original.

This time spent with them means that the dynamic between Fennel and Jack is nicely done, effectively if briefly sketched. But the rest of the cast and much of the plot is shaded in perhaps too lightly. The sheer overstuffed quantity of ideas and plot points simply do not fit easily into the page count. And there are darlings that really should have been killed in editing. Walter Benjamin is clearly influential; he is discussed reasonably extensively in the author’s note. But that doesn’t mean it entirely works to have Jack quote him verbatim in-story: like the Elgin Marbles nod, it is perhaps just a little too on the nose. The insertion of a twist and brief action plot that begins and ends in under 5 pages at the end is also very odd. Grief, love, copying, heists, colonialism, sentient fungus, clones, androids, interstellar war, a nominal core cast of five needing attention: it’s a lot to cover in a double-digit page count (front and back matter take the printed page count above 100, but the substantive story is less).

This all leads me to the conclusion that a novella just isn’t quite the right venue for the stories Tanzer wants to tell here. The firehose of ideas and multiple, slightly attenuated storylines are asking for either the space of a novel or the discipline of being split into a series of short stories in conversation with each other. Either would work well, and I think could have been a genuine triumph. As it is, the book feels somehow both overstuffed and underdone. It feels an odd conclusion to come to when I like so much of what Tanzer put in here, but this is an occasion where the whole doesn’t quite measure up to the sum of its parts. Others may have a different impression—I can imagine being sufficiently charmed by the ideas and aesthetic exploration such that the tangled wisps of plot and character don’t matter to you—but for me, the fine work Tanzer has done here is undercut by a story fighting against its form.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Overstuffed with great ideas.
• Exquisitely crafted prose.
• It really is overstuffed, though.

Reference:  Tanzer, Molly. And Side by Side They Wander [tordotcom, 2026].

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

Book Review: Breath and Bone by K. V. Johansen

Johansen’s penchant for epic fantasy distilled instead into a twisty sword and sorcery tale

Cover art by Laura Galli

It starts off simply, or seems to. Arrany, a young woman, is trying to get her twin brother free of the possessive control of a witch. She travels far to find a pair of godlings that have the power to free him. Or at least kill the witch. But the godlings are not who they appear to be, and neither is Arrany. And neither is the witch. What seems to be a simple quest across the landscape turns out to be a much more complicated affair than anyone anticipated.

Thus begins Johansen’s standalone sword and sorcery novel Breath and Bone.

In this review I want to discuss the form and nature of the book, its characters and its world more than a recitation of the plot points. And also posit an idea of theorycraft for genre.

Johansen has written a number of fantasies on a variety of levels, but is probably best known for her epic fantasy series The Caravan Road (starting with The Blackdog and ending with The Last Road). She has written a number of fantasies for children as well. But sword and sorcery is a stratum that she has not written to before. In her interview for this blog, she mentions that:

“… the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.”

And I do like this idea and want to explore it further. Pony and Hedge have DONE the epic fantasy thing, and Breath and Bone makes lots of deep references, allusions and connections to their past. In many ways, this novel is their past coming to impinge on their present. Their present was a quiet one, living in “retirement,” with the boundaries of their life much smaller. And the novel supports this by Arrany’s journey and the initial steps of their adventure to free her brother to be entirely within the sword and sorcery mold. It’s a low stakes and seemingly straightforward story.

It doesn’t quite stay that way, but it puts me in the mind of a D&D campaign starting at level 1. Low-level D&D characters are basically in a sword and sorcery story. They don’t have control of epic powers as yet (or if they are associated with one, they can’t handle it). Their foes are low level. The stakes are low. There is a wider, wilder world out there that the PCs will get connected to, one way or another, over time, but they start small. Over time, as characters rise in level, the GM provides larger and more world-spanning challenges and opportunities. Player characters’ abilities rise. Clerics can raise the dead. Wizards can cast fireballs, and then things like plane shift. Rogues and fighters grow epic in their combat abilities. In other words, the campaigns shift from sword and sorcery to epic.

So there can be a progression in fantasy characters, going from the sword and sorcery of a low-stakes and small adventure, all the way up to epic conflicts and grand fates. You don’t have to have this progression; you can dunk characters into the deep end, but generally the inciting incident or two can be of small enough stakes to feel like one is touching the base of sword and sorcery before launching toward more epic realms. The Wheel of Time television adaptation shows this tactic in particular.

In Breath and Bone, we have two characters, Hedge and Pony, who have gone all the way to the epic phase and to the other side, to retirement. They became movers and shakers, capable and willing to topple an emperor and his empire. They have left legacies and legends and their names across the landscape. But now they are retired, living in the aftermath, in a cottage in a nowhere village keeping waterfowl.

The call to adventure in Breath and Bone for Hedge and Pony, as they get wrapped up in Arrany’s plight, is like a “second childhood” for them. Although they have done the epic thing, the initial steps are pure sword and sorcery, low stakes. They meet bandits. They run into a stray old god. Arrany gets kidnapped, and her story begins to unravel as we find out there is much more she did not say, and that matters are larger than Hedge and Pony realized. The scope widens as this rebalancing of the narrative continues, as we reach the lair of the witch. It’s a slow and gradual widening, and the true abilities and powers of Hedge and Pony become terrifyingly clear.

I’ve seen the rise to epic power many times before, but this “second childhood” of retired heroes slowly getting back into it by means of a return to epic fantasy via sword and sorcery is somewhat less common in fantasy. There have been a spate of retired hero books, but generally, given how much fantasy as a genre is a “young person’s game,” having a retired hero return to the fold happens, but less commonly than you’d think.¹ So in Breath and Bone, the shape of a graph of time and stakes and scale proves to be a curve with two humps, with the first hump in the past, but as the story progresses in the new storyline, we get a new rise.

The backstory is key to all this. At first it seems like a simple story: Arrany is trying to rescue her twin brother from a witch, so she seeks out a legendary hero to help. But what the story slowly reveals is that “first hump” and just how dangerous Hedge and Pony were as renowned movers and shakers. We slowly learn just what deeds they are responsible for, and as the novel progresses, I felt trepidation that Arrany had awakened from retirement two very powerful individuals… and worse, has not been entirely truthful with them. Arrany asks two retired and extremely dangerous individuals on a seemingly simple quest but withholds key knowledge about herself and what is really going on. It’s a logline that is ripe for drama, action and adventure as we head across the landscape.

And the landscape supports this sword and sorcery narrative. Arrany travels across relatively mundane locations to reach Hedge and Pony, and as they travel toward the witch, their surroundings become somewhat more fantastic, particularly the inhabitants. By the time we get to the glaciated area of Under Ice, we have definitely abandoned the quiet and peaceful cottage for a wilder and more dangerous place. All through it, the lush landforms are wonderfully described. If the Caravan Road was based on the Silk Road, from the Caucasus all the way to China, this is much more of a glaciated Western Europe, with fells, lakes, swamps, mountains and eventually the border of the Ice.² Landscapes are important to sword and sorcery. Even if the range of possible locations is massive, from teeming cities to bloody frontiers, a sword and story story must give the reader a good sense of the landscape to be effective. Breath and Bone succeeds on this level. This world feels a bit like her epic fantasy The Wolf and the Wild King (with a sequel forthcoming), with the cold landscape and a huge lake as a central figure that a bunch of the action occurs in and around. But in all cases, the landscape continually invites the reader to step into it and imagine what the characters will run into around the bend.

The novel is a one and done, completing the story in one volume (a relatively compact book by Johansen’s standards but more in keeping with a sword and sorcery length). In the course of this book, Johansen unfolds a world, a set of characters, and a set of premises that invite the reader’s imagination. And, perhaps, it will spark the author to write more in this ‘verse. Find out more about Breath and Bone in the interview I did with Johansen here at Nerds of a Feather.

Highlights:

• Sword and sorcery from an epic fantasy writer
• Excellent characters
• A world that invites going around the next corner

Reference: Johansen, K.V. Breath and Bone [Candlemark and Gleam, 2026].

¹ The reference and tie-in I want to go with here is Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver. The inciting incident is that a military force decides to decimate a small town. It just so happens that this town is the retirement home of general Cobalt Zosia. Zosia does not take this well, not well at all, and goes on a carefully constructed campaign of revenge and retribution. It is suggested at points that the attacking force was directed to make an example of Zosia’s village by someone who knew she was there, and how she would respond. Zosia had already had her epic adventure and was in retirement. She gets pulled out of that retirement and ramps up her revenge, and by books two and three in the series, we are firmly in epic fantasy territory once more.

² Sort of like a Western European answer to Michael Scott Rohan’s The Winter of the World. Also, the Doggerland books of Stephen Baxter, or the colder world of Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic series.

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

Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

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

Book Review: The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern

On freeing the human spirit from a late-stage-capitalist cell

My first experience with the work of Sim Kern (they/them) was with their nonfiction book Genocide Bad. Kern is Jewish and nonbinary, lives in Houston, and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace (a group of Jewish people who oppose Israeli state policies towards Palestinians). That book is a reckoning for them, as a member of an oppressed group which shares an ethnicity with a state that is actively engaging in genocide. They work through a whole raft of thorny issues, with great empathy for all involved, and I finished Genocide Bad with a sense of admiration for them. Sim Kern is a moral human being in a world where the human capacity for reason is used in a motivated manner in the service of the worst parts of our nature, and that is hard and brave to be.

It is with that sense of awe and admiration that I turn to their 2023 novel The Free People’s Village. This novel is several things at once: alternate history, political fiction, a deep character study, an exploration of trauma, and an exhortation to hope. And, deep below all of those things that nerds on the internet could write blog posts about, it is a moral book by a moral person.

The alternate history here is built into the background, not advertised, and I didn’t know this book counted as alternate history until I was well invested in the story. The story has a politically salient point of divergence that feels calculated to cause good trouble: this is a world where Al Gore wins Florida in the 2000 election, and from there the presidency. A liberal may think that this would have been the turning point of all America’s ills; not so, writes Kern, for this world is still miserably dystopian albeit technologically advanced. This is an America that has made Gore’s war against global warming a national priority. This takes the form of climate credits that restrict the ability of poor Americans to buy the occasional nice thing while rich people game it, a ready-made excuse to bulldoze Black neighborhoods for not being “eco-friendly” enough, and a shiny new justification for invading Brazil. This America has flying drones with sonic weapons, as well as dog-like drones along the lines of those made by Boston Dynamics. Both of these terrifying weapons are at the disposal of the Houston police department, the city where the novel is set.

Your protagonist is Maddie Ryan, a young white woman, a teacher, who ends up living in a dilapidated apartment building in a poor Black part of Houston because she is infatuated with the man who is its landlord, who wants to turn the building into an anarcho-communist commune. This building rapidly becomes a haven for artists and political activists, and Maddie joins a band that holds regular concerts there. The whole thing is bohemian/utopian while being relatively politically unaware, until the fateful day the City of Houston informs them that the building is being seized to build a monorail line. Maddie, and everyone she knows in the Lab, as they call it, find themselves in alliance with the local Black community, as well as radicals from all over Houston. The Lab becomes an encampment, like Occupy Wall Street but bigger, a symbol to America and to the world that another way of living is possible.

There is something very salient about the fact this story is set not in New York or California or Illinois, but in Texas. These grotty near-future SF stories are usually set in the more famous cities, which incidentally are in Democratic states, states which like to think of themselves as being somewhat insulated from the worst of late-stage capitalism. In Texas, the velvet glove of liberal democracy has been removed from the iron fist. The Texas of our world is a bastion of contemporary American fascism whose authoritarian peculiarities are being exported (the Texas Department of Education has a massive influence on the nation’s textbooks, for one example). In the novel this is all topsy-turvy, with Republicans lukewarmly following Democrats in their War on Climate Change, and much like the other party, are weaponizing it to persecute America’s weakest. On the one hand, this is a rebuke to liberals who think that everything can be solved via institutions, and on the other hand, reminds us that there are plenty of good people, active people, in red states. It is Houston that is the epicenter of a quake that shakes the world.

As so many of Kern’s characters are from minorities, queer or ethnic or in a great many cases both, they have been shackled by the trauma of American bigotry. That’s a theme that runs through this novel, where they are abused by the people that allegedly love them, as well as by a society that allegedly cares for them. The novel brings interpersonal abuse and societal oppression into parallel, and then demonstrates how hard they are to disentangle from one another. For example, Maddie is from a fundamentalist Christian background and rushed into marriage with an abusive man, before divorcing him and winding up with Fish, the aforementioned landlord. But Fish is not blameless, either, nor is he entirely untraumatized. Another such example is a Black character who is under house arrest and is monitored by an implant in his skin, blurring the line, again, between the societal and the domestic.

It’s telling that this novel has plenty of hope, but none of it comes from institutions. There’s very little about what constitutes “legitimate” resistance, or which organizations are truly worthy of your support, and more on what bluntly works. There’s civil disobedience in this novel, and there’s direct action, and both are implicitly stated to be worthy of support if they get the state to back off. On the other hand, the institutions of both local and national government are all basically oppressive forces that only ever make the lives of the Lab’s dwellers worse. Much is made about how Democrats are just as complicit in the national order as Republicans, and there is an argument over this timeline’s 2024 presidential election that will sound familiar to those of us who paid attention to discourse over the one in our own world. When contextualized with Kern’s own discussion of their worldview in Genocide Bad, I feel comfortable describing the philosophy of this novel as anarchist. It is a philosophy where only the people will save themselves, which brings to mind this verse from Charles Hope Kerr’s rendition of The Internationale:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

Kern is not afraid to show the flaws of their characters, as socially disadvantaged as they are. You get an unflinching depiction of poverty, with the addictions and the compromises that it entails. Some people die, and die because of these compromises, but they are never abstracted into statistics. Each act of hurt is an indictment of the systems that made them possible, each moment of suffering another intrusion. Many of these characters are viewed from Maddie’s first-person perspective, as previously stated a white woman, which in theory sounds potentially unpleasant, but Kern is more skillful than that. Maddie is called to account several times, and she has to reckon with her privilege and her ignorance about the lives of those who lack it. Through Maddie you see how a privileged person can become a true ally of the oppressed, and that will be a useful demonstration for a lot of people.

There is a part of me, as I read this book, that wished I were there in the Lab, helping build utopia. Kern depicts a new society being born in great detail—not the detail of dreary transcripts of debates and rules and resource allocations, but rather in the way people act, people behave, people live. It reminded me of a version of the Occupy Wall Street movement as depicted in David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, but rougher around the edges. A whole little society was built there, based on better moral principles than our own. There are big personalities, of course, and people who have not really reckoned with the facts of their privilege, and act in that ignorant way. It’s not perfect, but it feels real, like something that could actually happen if enough of us could just snap out of it, and that is ultimately its glory.

The ending of this novel is not happy, exactly, but nor is it sad, exactly. The grand experiment of the novel ends, as we suspected and indeed dreaded it might, but such grand experiments achieve their grandeur by the fact they inspire further experiments. The denouement feels, again, like something real, plausible, almost inevitable. But even so, this novel inspired a certain swelling in my heart, an uplifting of my soul, that saw that better things are possible. As Cory Doctorow said in Walkaway (a novel with many thematic overlaps with this one, and one that fans of Kern’s may enjoy), “it’s not the fight you win, but the fight you fight.” This novel is, ultimately, honest about the stakes at play when dealing with utopia, about the fact that the fight will continue to be fought long past the point we may hope it is over, but it’s worth fighting anyway, because it’s just. But still, I dream of what people could do, if we woke up like the characters in Kern’s novel.

Reference: Kern, Sim. The Free People's Village [Levine Querido, 2024]

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