Deja Boo: Event Horizon

An eye-gouging good time!

It’s an odd thing, watching elements of your childhood, particularly ones that you didn’t even know were remarkable, fade into legend. Ask [extremely old guy voice] kids these days, and they will be incredulous at what us ‘90s kids did, and were allowed to do. What do you mean, you just… went out? How did your parents know when to pick you up? How did they know you were safe? How did they even know where you were? (We just did, friends’ parents or a quick collect call message*, they didn’t until we got home, they didn’t). We roamed all over the small, country town I grew up outside of with just bikes and the confidence that none of the (disturbingly high number of) serial killers known to be active in Western Washington were targeting teenage boys. Probably. As far as we knew.

My neighbor growing up either contributed to this vagrancy or helped protect us from it. He was an ideal neighbor, his kids were grown, he had way more money than us, and used it to collect classic cars, for which he build a massive garage/shop, in which he put a home theater—doing so in the ‘90s was no small accomplishment. He was obsessed with movies, buying literally every single movie that came out every single week. His DVD* collection was enormous. Best of all, he allowed us to go in there whenever we wanted, provided we didn't make a mess or steal too much of his beer.

All this is to say, I had unfettered access to a lot of R-rated movies at a young age. Combined with my love of scifi, I was very excited to watch this very grown-up scifi movie called Event Horizon. I’ve written all this without having seen it since that day, because ~12-year-old-me was traumatized. I wanted to do this part of the writeup because I honestly don’t know if it’s a good movie or not, or if it’s scary or not, or if my younger, squeamish self was just too shocked by someone ripping their own eyeballs out. It seems to have enjoyed a resurgence lately, with comics explaining backstory, Sam Neil passing and his brilliance getting the appreciation it has always deserved, and the idea of it being a Warhammer 40k prequel all having brought it back into at least some level of public consciousness.

So now it’s time to face my fears and rewatch it. Hang tight, read a magazine in the lobby or something.

Still here? Good. Before we get to the (literal) gory details, I have to say that, for a mid-‘90s movie, Event Horizon holds up remarkably well. Some of the effects, mostly those related to zero gravity, look somewhat dated, but not terribly so. The opening and closing credits have some very ‘90s electronic music which Trent Reznor would have improved upon, but that’s not present in the film itself.

This movie provided the epiphany that apparently my favorite genre is lost in space** or at sea. I read way too many books about shipwrecks, I love Alien, I will defend Sunshine until my dying breath, so this is right up my adult alley. Did it scare me out of my mind, like when I was a kid? Of course not; I’m old and jaded now. However, it was brilliantly tense and did an amazing job of building suspense all throughout. Despite a brief text intro, it immediately gives us the feeling that something isn’t right. One of the very clever ways this is done is by transitions. They’re never slow fades, or wipes, but smash cuts that seem to occur right as something is about to happen. It creates these mini-jumpscares that create a sense of unease. When the action happens later, and there are really scary things happening, we are primed for not knowing what is around the corner—especially since a key component of the characters’ horror is their deteriorating mental state, as they hallucinate and can’t be sure what is real or not—in a way, neither can we.

At the center of all this uncertainty is Dr. Weir, played brilliantly by Sam Neil. When we meet him, he is ostensibly there to help a rescue crew, as he tries to humbly ingratiate himself to them. The film doesn’t tell us when, exactly, his descent into madness happens (more on this in a sec), but it clearly happens earlier, and more willingly, than his shipmates. His actions become more unnerving as the film progresses, and his motives are more and more in question, and he clearly knows more than he initially let on. Neil plays this part so perfectly, his voice always level and sinister—but somehow disarming.

The recent comics that are a prequel that follows the journey of the Event Horizon spell out his motives—which we do see in the movie, having essentially driven his wife to suicide with his obsession with his work—as well as going into what happened in the seven-year period the ship was missing. While I enjoy this, and it adds to the mythos, one of the strengths of the film is that it doesn’t show us all this. There’s a fair amount of gore (not as much as I remember!), but their trip into the Chaos Realm/hell is only shown in brief flashes. Just like Weir’s embrace of Chaos is not pinpointed, this contributes to the overall unease of the setting, instead of just splashing gore all over the walls (although that does literally happen).

Grounding the whole affair is Lawrence Fishburne’s Captain Miller, who is delightfully hard-assed, and really just wants to do his job and go home—even when that job turns out to be trying to stop a literal portal to hell from opening in Neptune. His stories and interactions with the rest of the crew actually make me think that the “normal,” lived-in part of the Event Horizon universe would make for more interesting story fodder than the prequel/sequel comics that explore, ya know, literal hell. Or maybe all of that is what ultimately leads to humanity as we know it in the Warhammer 40k universe? I stand by that fan theory, because it’s awesome.

In conclusion—if you haven’t seen Event Horizon, I highly recommend it. If you watched it at way too young of an age like me, I recommend it even more.

—DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

* I have to explain this too, don’t I?

**Ironically, it is apparently impossible to make a decent modern version of Lost in Space.

Game Review: Saros by House Marque

 Who is the King in Yellow?

Artist: Simone Silverstri

Saros, directed by Greg Louden and written by Alex Meer is Housemarque's spiritual successor to Returnal, the 2021 bullet hell first entry from the developer. Returnal was about grief, about guilt and took the form of a journey through a science fiction version of Hades as the main character, Selene wrestled with her own memories and her culpability in the death of her child. This combining of intense third person action with a story that really plumbs the depth of personal despair is repeated here although the narrative is very, very different.  

Saros, like Returnal, is a third person action RPG with roguelite elements that has you dying repeatedly and dodging endless streams of incoming fire. Returnal’s reference points were the Ancient Greek underworld, small town European grief and the concept of how we navigate such terrors. 

 

Saros takes its reference points from The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a forerunner of modern cosmic horror who has influenced everything from Lovecraft to True Detective. Interestingly I think Saros has a deeper reference point which is less Chambers than Chambers’ own inspiration – the 1886 story, "A Man in Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce. 

 

As with Beirce’s story, the main character in Saros, Arjun Devram, played brilliantly by Rahul Kohli, wakes from sleep to find himself lost in a strange and uncanny wilderness. Saros transposes Carcosa from an ancient ruin on Earth to a futuristic planet far from home being exploited by a callous corporation called Soltari. Arjun is security for a small team sent to discover what has happened to previous expeditions to this planet. One of those expeditions included Arjun’s partner, Nitya and that, really, is why he’s here – to find her and to save her. 

 

Right from the start Arjun’s main drive is that of a man who thinks he has to save those around him but despite his best efforts he cannot save even those closest to him, let alone find his lover. This drive, this solipsism, rooted as it is in a strange toxic form of masculinity is not left unquestioned and unchallenged and what Arjun discovers about his relationship and himself is devastating but subtlely foreshadowed right from his first conversations.

 

The story unfolds as you progress through items you can collect – logs, recordings, memories and the like. You also meet the occasional NPC who each have their own agendas and have very little interest in Arjun’s goals. 

 

What’s brilliant about this manner of storytelling is that you can engage with it as much or as little as you like – the gameplay is thrilling – solid weapons, tough levels, fantastic design and plenty of secrets. If you wanted you could ignore every element of the story and simply blast your way through the game. 

 

That’s not for me and I’m glad because the story is masterfully delivered. I won’t spoil it here except to say that what you learn about both Carcosa and Arjun is brilliantly layered – the story of Carcosa itself, a ruin by the time Arjun arrives, its once majestic world slowly being revealed as a place riven by war and slavery and hubris.

Alongside Carcosa is Arjun’s journey of self-discovery, the kind that only someone who wakes with no sense of looking back and no questions about his past can uncover and it’s suitably grim and unhappy. 

 

Finishing this game then comes with the deep satisfaction of beating that final boss together with shock and ambivalence about who you learn the characters are and what they’ve done to reach this point. This contrast is well structured and the writing adds to that. Kohli gives a great performance as a man who doesn’t look back, who can only travel forwards but who neverthless, slowly, comes to realise that these drives aren’t noble at all, but are really acts of self-preservation whose impetus is obscuring and erasing his own flaws. 

 

Arjun is the kind of man who, having done something bad, doubles down at each opportunity until he becomes something truly monstrous. Equally as interesting is Saros’ view of whether, having made that journey, you can step away from the edge. There’s a scene right at the end where he’s facing everything about himself and he’s stood there, defeated, accepting and vulnerable and all of this is captured in Kohli’s face without any words, the kind of shot you expect to see in the cinema.

 

All of this only works as a story if the game does too – it’s heavy material and not one many action RPG players might gravitate towards if it was handled too obviously. Fortunately Saros’s play is, as already mentioned, great but on top of that, the cinematography, the camera and the world building are phenomenal with a colour palette and design aesthetic that feels ancient, vibrant and distinct all at once whether you’re in wild mountains, fetid swamps or angelic cathedrals.

 

Leading you through the game is Sam Slater’s incredible soundtrack. Intense, grinding, piercing and very, very heavy, it propels you through fights, holds you tight during cut scenes and memories and never lets up. Slater’s better known as a Drone Metal artist but that sensibility works perfectly here where internal conflict is externalised in blasting away at dozens of different enemies each with their own unique patterns and strategies.

 

The soulslike elements work well and difficulty is what you might expect with such a game although there are some really neat mechanisms that allow you to tailor the gameplay to your own preferences (at least to an extent). 

 

It’s rare for me to just keep playing a game, to keep exploring, to keep shooting when the credits are done, but Saros is an experience so smooth with so many little spots to explore and story elements to uncover that I’m still thinking about it now a month after I properly finished it and got the ‘true’ ending hidden from those who stop after the initial credits roll.

 

Saros is gaming done right and I look forward to whatever Housemarque do next.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Incredible action
• A remarkable story about culpability and self-knowledge
• A non-western viewpoint

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, visceral, brutal combat combined with gorgeous visuals and a great story. Highly recommended.

Reference: Housemarque, Saros [Sony Entertainment, 2026].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Review: w0rldtr33, collected volume 1 by Fernando Blanco and James Tynion IV

This is not your internet

I picked up w0rldtr33 because of the cover, the creators behind it (Tynion is always a draw for me) and because I was in the mood for something contemporary with tech and guns and people with phones.

The story can best be introduced along the following lines: Gabriel and his friends were teenage tech geeks in the early days of the internet. As they built their own networks, hacked newly emerging systems and generally fucked around, they discovered the Undernet, a hidden architecture to the internet and possibly something more, something deeper. They charted their explorations on a message board called W0RLDTR33. Then it all went wrong. 20 years ago, Gabriel and the others sealed the Undernet away for good. Or so they thought. They were wrong.

Told both in the past and now, this is full-blown horror. This first collected volume hints at some deeply “other” stuff. This isn’t the internet of conspiracies or monsters from myth; this is something different. Tynion and Blanco are in full horror territory here and it’s of the cosmic variety. Honestly I wasn’t quite ready—the opening pages are in technothriller territory with a sense that the secret architecture could be a government agency/conspiracy theory landscape, but, a little like it does for the characters, then it all goes wrong.

I mean that in a good way and there’ll be no more about the actual story here except to say it sits comfortably in the Event Horizon/Hellblazer space (at least in vibes), is gruesome, nasty and very, very bloody.

The story is well executed, and wrong-footed me on a couple of crucial occasions in a good way. w0rldtr33 is clearly looking to do something different with its tropes and its themes, and I welcome that commitment to telling the story slightly differently.

For me horror thrives when, like any genre, it’s in conversation with themes and topics that can be hard to discuss without metaphor. w0rldtr33 is absolutely talking about the deleterious impact of algorithms on human culture and individual cognition, but if that sounds a little tiresome, I think this is a good example executed well and using the setting to great effect.

Visually this feels akin to recent horror It Follows (2014) and Dark City (1998) or Talk to Me (2022), perhaps even Unfriended (2014), although this is superior to those. This combination of visuals together with the techno-cosmic-horror theme works really well, even in this first volume where there’s only really enough space to establish the stakes and give hints at where this is going.

The sense that the internet is a bad place is nuanced here—the internet itself, especially given the initial timeframe, is seen as a place of huge potential for good, for communication and community. It’s the Undernet that is the bad place, although what it is and why it’s bad are unclear so far. It’s enough that this is a story in which communication has two sides to it, one which does untold good and one which can do untold evil.

As with any great horror like this, the evil at work is not simply immoral; it is deeply amoral in the sense that it has no morality we can recognise except that its wants and needs are cruel and destructive in execution. Why? Yet to be revealed, and given how adjacent it is to cosmic horror in this tone, it might be simply that whatever lurks in the Undernet is what it is. We’re not going to get a tragic backstory to the supernatural monster(s) waiting for the world here.

The main characters around Gabriel are strongly drawn so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go—they are scarred by their history, the world has changed since they initially locked away the Undernet, and they aren’t ready for what’s unfolding around them. Like Stephen King’s IT, this group of young friends have gone their separate ways since the original events, and that’s largely because of the trauma of what happened. As they come back together now, it is with trepidation, rancour and suspicion—these do not make for good outcomes when faced with a threat no single person can handle alone.

w0rldtr33 is great horror, and highly recommended for anyone who likes the thriller/cosmic horror genre with lashings of gore and people who aren’t ready for what they’re facing.

I do have one criticism, and it’s potentially transient. There is one character who spends all her time nude, and is drawn in a way that you’d not be surprised to see as the ideal feminine form for a particular type of cis het male. I cannot see why, at this stage in the story, she’s appearing like this, and it is uncomfortable for reasons that have nothing to do with horror. However, volume 1 is just that, the first 5 issues of the monthly comic, so it’s possible this will have a narrative reason, so I raise it, but caveat that concern with an admission that I don’t know where the story is going. Given that this is about the horror of the internet, a naked woman appearing for the sake of it isn’t really out of place. Yet.

Highlights:

• Great art and colouring
• Cosmic horror!
• Lots of blood and gore

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a great story so far, lots of unexpected horror and plot, good characters and compelling visuals.

Reference: Tynion, James (writer) and Blanco, Fernando (artist). w0rldtr33 [Image Comics, 2024 - current].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Comic Book Review: Absolute Martian Manhunter

Lean, green and cosmic in a way you've not seen before

Illustration: Javier Rodriguez

I’ve not been a reader of comics featuring superheroes for the longest time, and certainly not DC or Marvel, but then my friend dropped a copy of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow on me, and the rest was, as they say, history.

Call it my own snobbishness at the idea of superheroes, my weariness of superheroes fighting for the status quo, or just a fear of how to get started with a medium that has more options than grains of sand on the beach. Anyway, I arrived at DC Comics only recently, and a friend recommended I start with the first collected volume of Absolute Martian Manhunter, written by Deniz Camp and illustrated by Javier Rodriguez. This volume covers issues 1-6. There’s a second coming in August 2026, which will take the story to the end of issue 12.

I’m delighted to say it was nothing like what I thought I was going to get. The artwork is really trippy, colourful, unexpected and full of emotion. The Martian Manhunter here isn’t the one you know from the Justice League, but a cosmic entity travelling by consciousness and protecting the emotions of the vulnerable from the physical disasters that unfold when we lose ourselves in fear or hate or despair.

This was interesting to me in a number of ways—by making this something that wasn’t about people in capes but about one of those same heroes appearing in an unexpected (to me) way, it gave me both a way back into these characters but also provided something novel, surprising and with a lot of room to do more than focus on a superhero to the exclusion of everyone else.

Absolute Martian Manhunter has the eponymous character inhabiting people to make themselves present on Earth, and they’re here investigating an imbalance in people’s psyches. This manifests itself as radicalisation—the kind that leads to riots and violence and hatred and death.

Yeah, it’s a little on the nose, but as a metaphor for examining what divides us and how you might overcome that, it’s a lovely little story.

This first volume is a complete arc, which felt great because it does a great job introducing this unusual take on the character, laying out his concerns but also introducing the human characters through whom MM is intervening in human affairs.

The main character, John Jones, is an FBI agent (one assumes pre-Kash Patel, given the Bureau’s competence in this comic) who starts to investigate how 24 people died in the same way but were killed by 24 different and unrelated perpetrators on the same night. Each attack appears carried out by a lone wolf—except, of course, they’re all done in the same way at the same time.

These baffling crimes are heinous and devastating, but also have an uncanny element to them which Jones can’t get his head around. That is until MM arrives in his head and turns his head upside down. Having a cosmic entity invade your consciousness will ruin your day, and Jones spends as much time trying to survive the arrival of MM in his psyche as he does investigating the how and why of these crimes.

This creates a tension in the story between Jones and MM that feels, if not quite a battle, then certainly a fraught journey of acceptance and challenge—especially around trauma and what we do with it even when we do want to talk about/process it.

Alongside this is the series antagonist, a White Martian who MM explains not as an actual White alien from Mars but as another cosmic power who seeks to destroy because that’s its fundamental nature. The White Martian is built of hate and corruption and violence, and to the extent it wants something rather than being a force of nature, these are the things it wants.

I found the political underpinnings of this interesting, suggesting that hate and violence and extremism are as much a viral meme (in the worst sense of “virus”) that eats its host alive regardless of the cost. In this sense there’s a peak transmission rate and infection rate that, ultimately, results in complete eradication, but this end point is of no concern, only the journey of violence and destruction.

AMM supposes that sometimes those who want to destroy have no other goal than destruction. In a world in which we constantly hear idiots telling everyone they’re “disrupters,” it’s hard not to see how such an approach finds so little resistance—because most of us are built to assume that people want something longer term—stability, peace, calm, predictability. When something comes along that wants none of these things and actively doesn’t care about negotiating, the future or how this all ends, well, our defences are pretty weak to that. AMM suggests there are ways of defeating such radicalisation and attacks, but they aren’t easy, and they’re not momentary ripostes but ways of being that require practice and vigilance.

Highlights:

• Incredible colouring
• Neatly done psychological story
• Cosmic horrors

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a really great take on a classic DC character.

Reference: Camp, Deniz, and Rodriguez, Javier. Absolute Martian Manhunter [DC Comics, 2026].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist, he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Cult Film Review: In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

Cosmic horror without the Lovecraft

 

This month, just in time for Halloween, the Criterion Channel launched a John Carpenter retrospective. I took the opportunity to revisit 1994's In the Mouth of Madness, one of the strangest John Carpenter films... and I feel like that's saying something.

Fresh off of Jurassic Park in 1993, Sam Neill went to work for John Carpenter, playing insurance investigator John Trent. We meet Trent ranting and raving as orderlies at an insane asylum drag him into a padded room. The next morning, when asylum psychiatrist Dr. Wrenn visits Trent to get his story, he opens the door to find Trent has drawn symbols all over his room, clothes, and face, and he begins to unfold his tale of madness.

John Trent was not always the raving maniac Dr. Wrenn sees before him. No, indeed. Trent was once a successful, can't-bullshit-a-bullshitter insurance investigator. The popular horror author Sutter Cane, Arcane Publishing's biggest literary star, has disappeared, and Arcane wants Trent to find him. Trent reluctantly accepts the assistance of Cane's editor, Linda Styles, but believes from the start that this whole thing is a fakeout—an elaborate publicity stunt designed to generate headlines for Cane's new novel, In the Mouth of Madness. Trent tries to do his research, grabbing copies of all of Cane's novels, but they're too scary. They wind up getting inside his dreams, and maybe even into his waking reality. Maybe everybody's waking realities. A spike in violent crime seems to be tied to people who read Cane's books. And it comes home for Trent while he sits at a restaurant and a man wielding an axe smashes through a plate glass window, coming for Trent before the police shoot the attacker. It turns out this madman was Cane's agent, and right before he raised the axe over Trent's head, he asked a question everyone seems to be asking:

"Do you read Sutter Cane?"

In the same way that Stephen King sets much of his work in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, in the film Sutter Cane sets his work in the idyllic New England town of Hobb's End. Trent realizes that design elements consistent across Cane's various novel covers fit together and form a map to the fictional town. So he and Styles set off to follow the map and see where it takes them. After trading off behind the wheel, Trent falls asleep in the passenger seat, and while Styles drives, things get weird. A figure looms up out of the darkness, the road seems to vanish, the figure returns, but different, then again, then there's a crash, or is there? The radio distorts, goes out, the night seems to bend around Styles, and then... poof. It's daytime and they're in Hobb's End.

That's all the plot summary you get, because after that, the film begins playing with reality in very interesting and increasingly labyrinthine ways. If you haven't seen the film, I don't want to take any of the fun out of it. But extremely telling is the exchange about Cane's books that Trent and Styles have on the road right before he hands over the wheel:

Trent: What's to get scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.

Styles: Well, it's not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane's work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.

Trent: Whoa, we're not talking about reality here. We're talking about fiction. It's different, you know?

Styles: But reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority.

I have to be honest: that line hit a little closer to home these days than it probably did in 1994. I do remember renting this movie (on VHS!) when it came out, and when it ended, I felt so perplexed, so surprised by the final moments of the film, thinking that I must have missed something, that I rewound it back to their arrival in Hobb's End and watched it again. Watching it this time, having vaguely remembered that experience from 30 years ago, I was a little more prepared to simply go on the journey that Carpenter and writer Michael De Luca wanted to take me on.

If you are a fan of Carpenter and/or Stephen King, this movie is a ton of fun. Carpenter throws in a number of signature visuals that are reminiscent of The Thing, and the movie really nails the Stephen King vibe, not only with the setting but down to the author font on the paperbacks. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is the way it manages to give the viewer a full-on cosmic horror experience without H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, there are a ton of homages to Lovecraft, but it's not his mythos, not his settings, and not his baggage.

Like many people, I can no longer enjoy the work of Lovecraft—certainly not the way I could at maybe 13 years old, reading paperbacks with evocative titles full of odd, elliptical stories that hinted at a hostile cosmos and latent dangers outside of the realms of our perception. But Lovecraft's racism and eugenicist views, which revealed themselves in tropes I wasn't equipped to fully understand at that age, make the experience of reading him one I can no longer find much joy in. And while there are a couple of good ones, Lovecraft film adaptations tend toward the schlocky and cheap, as name-recognizable IP in the public domain might lead you to believe.

So I'm grateful to John Carpenter for In the Mouth of Madness. It scratches the cosmic horror itch in a satisfying way, and wraps it in something of a puzzle box narrative that's akin to a film like Mulholland Dr. but very much in the horror genre. I'm happy to recommend this without having to caveat it.

In the Mouth of Madness is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel (October 2025), and Tubi with commercials.

Review: Underland by Maxime J. Durand

A cosmic horror setting without cosmic horror characters is a brilliant combination

You may remember that in 2007, Brandon Sanderson wrote that magic in fantasy stories should have logical rules that make sense, and later, in 2012, N. K. Jemisin wrote that the whole point of fantasy stories is that magic exists beyond all logic and sense. With all due respect to the inimitable quadruple-Hugo-and-quadruple-Locus winner, on this specific topic of fantasy literature the esteemed Ms. Jemisin is totally wrong and Mr. Sanderson is totally right. Magic is more interesting (rather, it's only interesting) when it has rules. And one demonstration of the wonders that can result from a strictly systematic magic system is Maxime J. Durand's dark fantasy novel Underland.

Originally posted as a web serial, Underland follows the quest of multiclass summoner/necromancer Valdemar to find a new world for humankind. Centuries ago, an evil moon blocked out the sun, dooming the world to the terrors of the night. Suddenly overwhelmed by unimaginable monstrosities, civilization quickly collapsed, and humans migrated to underground caverns where they'd be safe from the cold and the ghosts that roam the dead surface. Once resettled, humans discovered the magical potential in their own blood, and used it to rebuild a semblance of the stability they had before. Today the human territories are under the absolute rule of Dark Lords, immensely powerful mages with debatably compatible agendas. But other creatures already lived in the Underland before humans arrived, and some aren't willing to be nice neighbors. To be fair, too often humans haven't shown the noblest behavior toward other sentient creatures. What looks like peace conceals numerous tensions that may snap at any time.

But the worries don't stop at the mundane. In their study of magic, some have unwisely contacted extraplanar powers that can't be trusted, much less controlled. Such spells have been declared illegal, but that hasn't stopped the proliferation of clandestine cults that seek an escape from life underground. One cult in particular involved an entire family, the Verneys, who were exterminated by an order of knights dedicated to keeping those mysterious entities from invading the living world. The only survivor from the Verney family was Valdemar, back then a child, who now secretly experiments with planar travel to find a more inhabitable place for humankind to move to. Suspected of trying to continue his criminal family's loathsome rituals, he's been put under arrest, but one of the Dark Lords has taken an interest in his abnormally strong magical skills and has offered him the tools to finish his research... at an unspecified price.

Web serials are usually friendly bedfellows with fanfiction, and Underland unapologetically bears the marks of its self-published origins. The novel is evidently shaped by Dungeons and Dragons: its setting brings to mind the classic Underdark expansions; it is populated by the usual suspects—dark elves, dark dwarves, troglodytes, golems, and liches; some of the extraplanar locations namedropped in the text resemble those used in the game; and the plot is punctuated by quests, side quests, and downtime training. The rest of the worldbuilding samples liberally from Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the Lovecraftian corpus to depict a setting precariously enveloped by unsuspected powers that are just one wrong incantation away from crossing into material reality.

The prose in Underland is effective at setting a macabre tone. Consider this chapter opening:

He dreamed of rats that night. They crawled in a grotesque pit dug in black oily stone, squeaking and gnawing on the flesh of the innocent.

The author knew to keep the alluring aesthetic of cosmic horror without the worst ingredient of cosmic horror, which is its attitude. This is a world of gory witchcraft, unnatural transformations, painful rituals, obscene ruins, threatening dreams, widespread pestilence, boiling blood, imprisoned demons, moldy tunnels, abhorrent experiments, and costly secrets. And yet, the author is deliberate in his selection of focus characters. Even though the book's setting has all the recognizable signs of cosmic horror, its characters are very emphatically not cosmic horror characters. Even though nothing more than a thin veil separates visible reality from tenebrous chaos, the mages we meet in this novel don't adopt the attitude of helpless desperation that is so annoying in traditional cosmic horror. They don't believe that the hidden forces that control the universe are beyond human comprehension; they don't accept the eternal superiority of the ancient gods; they don't fear the mysterious; they don't tremble in awe at the unearthly. It's like walking through the tired grimness of Black Mirror and finding Ted Lasso living there. With a beautiful, admirable ethos of humanism, these characters approach the unknown and make it known. Instead of submitting to the supernatural, they study it, find its practical applications, deduce its laws. These mages may be gifted with fantastical powers, but their sharpest tool is human reason.

And here we arrive at the greatest pleasure of reading Underland: watching our protagonist use creatively the rules of magic to make up combinations of spells that are wholly surprising yet follow logically from the established facts. It's an irresistible type of nerdy catnip to inhabit the inner thoughts of a smart hero as he reasons his way out of impossible plights. Either with inventive solutions born from a desperate moment of improvisation, or with procedures coldly planned with meticulous care, Valdemar is an inspiring hero who understands the unlimited power of lifelong learning.

His impressive talents notwithstanding, Valdemar is far from a perfect person. The execution of his entire family has stunted his ability to form connections to other people, and in some scenes his unconventional moral intuitions come off as appallingly heartless. At the same time that he makes progress in the challenging techniques of advanced sorcery, he undergoes an equally strenous education in interpersonal contact. It has a moving effect to watch this formidable spellcaster, who is no stranger to commanding demons and transmuting his blood into an interdimensional portal, discover for the first time the simple joy of making true friends who support his dreams without judgment.

Although the text always highlights the moral questions where Valdemar's position has defects, it's worth noting that, as a whole, the society of Underland rests on some surprising assumptions that go against the grain of what fantasy literature has usually considered acceptable. In Underland, to seek immortality is not viewed as inherently evil. Multiple methods exist to cheat death, including soul receptacles, mechanical bodies, youth potions, and even undeath, which causes no scandal. It's actually taken for granted that everyone who can afford it will resort to one of these methods, and that it would be inexcusably foolish not to. This is another manifestation of the novel's underlying humanism: just as mystery is the enemy, and thus shall be overcome, death is the enemy, and shall likewise be overcome.

Underland is the first part of a duology that continues in Underland 2. The reader must be warned that this novel ends in a cliffhanger, but what a howling hell of a cliffhanger it is. Now, it may be argued against this choice of ending, and against the novel in its entirety, that the author relies too much on the fact that Lovecraft's œuvre has become public domain, and such an accusation wouldn't be without merit. The reader may also feel distracted by the repeated appearance of narrative conventions inherited from Dungeons and Dragons, which carry unwelcome baggage in the form of bioessentialism, territorial expansionism, and unquestioned monarchism.

Once these missteps are admitted, there remains plenty to enjoy in Underland. Its unusual treatment of the aesthetic of cosmic horror is a refreshing change of direction from the undue reverence that puny mortals are typically expected to profess for the darkness. Even in the deepest bowels of the earth, the undying flame of human reason lights the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Durand, Maxime J. Underland [Podium Publishing, 2022].

Review: Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The epic quest to defeat the enigmatic Architects now extends beyond this reality

Confession time: I hate cosmic horror. I detest it with a fervent passion. I find its conceptual foundations intrinsically repulsive on a visceral level. The notion that the underlying truths of the universe are impossible to grasp and dangerous to glimpse by mortal minds strikes me as a ridiculous underestimation of human capabilities. The suggestion that the vastness of the starry expanse reduces all human desires to insignificance goes against every humanist principle I hold. The unquestioned assumption that human beings ought to fear the unknown is one I oppose on principle, as the ultimate insult to human reason. The intended aesthetic effect of awe before the immeasurable might of ancient transdimensional overlords offends me as contrary to human dignity.

Which is why I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest novel Lords of Uncreation, which concludes the story told in the monumental masterpieces Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void. Finally, we have a novel that understands that, when you meet an eldritch abomination from the unfathomable nothingness between universes, the correct human response is to laugh in its face.

The story so far: the galaxy is in panic because of the return of the Architects, gigantic alien beings who destroyed Earth and doomed humankind to a nomadic life between the stars. Our protagonist Idris Telemmier has been gathering experts in xenoarchaeology to refurbish incompletely understood ancient machinery. The plan is to launch a counteroffensive that would hit the Architects in their home turf. Only two problems: (1) said ancient machinery is irresistibly attractive to every military power in the galaxy, and (2) the home of the Architects is located in the negative space where both physical things and the human mind lose their link to reality.

This third novel in the series jumps right into action and never releases its grip on the reader as our heroes get caught in an unrelenting chase to stay in control of their superweapon as every faction tries to get their hands on it, and stay in control of their sanity as they visit the hostile realm of the unreal. Yet Idris hopes to convince his colleagues that ending the war shouldn't require paying back genocide for genocide. And here one of the strengths of the novel becomes evident. It's great when you can notice how deeply an author loves his characters. Lords of Uncreation takes care to portray Idris with all his convoluted interiority, achieving the unlikely feat of making an ageless telepathic unsleeping cyborg with the power to save the universe and the self-esteem of a termite feel close and relatable. As a war survivor who was brutally weaponized and is now wanted as an asset, Idris is barely functional. The scars of his trauma and the anxiety of having only a temporary freedom were already a difficult burden to carry before his mind opened to the revelations of unspace and contracted an obsession with exploring the forbidden regions of that not-place.

Drawing from a profound empathy for human suffering, and with the extreme care of a master wordsmith, Tchaikovsky proposes a more mature way to look at characters who have gone through painful events and then have to face new, comparable hardships. Not only Idris, but his companions the duelist lawyer Kris and the clone warrior Solace demonstrate an inner strength earned in fire. I refer to extreme care because it would have been too easy to romanticize their trauma and treat it as an advantage in their subsequent adventures. Tchaikovsky knows to steer away from that simplistic recourse. While his characters do gain strength from the hard lessons of their past, at no point does he pretend that they're better off for having suffered. What their bad experiences give them is not a thicker skin, but a broader perspective. These are not the kind of heroes who learn to shrug off blows, but heroes who go on to ensure others don't have to receive them.

The moral stance of Lords of Creation is grounded on an unwavering affirmation of the value of human life even in a universe that is infinitely bigger. As an illustration of what might be called optimistic nihilism, our heroes come face to face with uncaring monstrosities older than the universe and, instead of losing their minds from the despair of realizing their smallness, they stand their ground and refuse to kneel. It's not that they've become strong enough to punch Cthulhu; it's that they feel at home in the universe and wish to deal with its other inhabitants as fellow creatures. The fate of humankind is not to serve, but to thrive.

However, the competing factions of humankind have their own ideas of what that thriving looks like. Through this novel, our heroes have to defeat not one but two separate eugenic conspiracies that threaten to derail the course of future history. This theme of refusing to grant some lives more worth than others is reaffirmed in the climactic confrontation with the titular Lords of Uncreation, who for the previous two novels have been sending the Architects to reshape the universe into a perfect work of art, mere mortals be damned. And here the central theme of humanism vs. fascism finds its clearest expression.

Walter Benjamin's description of fascism as the insertion of aesthetics into politics can be rephrased in this way: fascism is the desire to politically enforce an aesthetic. If you pay attention to far-right discourse, its obsession with "disorderly" society and "disgusting" sexualities and "unclean" literature and "impure" blood is always described in the language of aesthetic preferences. Fascism doesn't want good citizens, just good-looking ones. In Lords of Uncreation, upon hearing the final antagonists describe their grandiose plans for the universe and their inflated sense of superiority, one senses an echo of every tyrant who appointed himself as society's curator.

The winning strategy for our heroes turns out to be, refreshingly, community. The universe is saved by the joint effort of all who give up factional divisions and choose instead cooperation. The cosmic abandonment that the human mind feels in unspace is made more bearable in company. The terrors of the transdimensional void don't hold a candle to the nightmares that lurk inside us, and if we've been able to survive those, we can survive whatever the universe throws in our direction.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Lords of Uncreation [Tor, 2023].

Review: Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to Shards of Earth brings bigger revelations, deeper questions, and riskier adventures

In the first book of the Final Architecture series (which I reviewed with high praise last year), the fearsome Architects, alien megastructures capable of destroying planets and responsible for humankind's current state of cosmic homelessness, had suddenly returned, and the only countermeasure that was useful against their uncaring advance—the mysterious ruins of a long-gone civilization—appeared to have lost their repellent effect. The only hope that remained was the telepathic power of the Intermediaries, surgically altered humans with the ability to perceive the layer of unreality beneath the fabric of spacetime. But the surviving Intermediaries are now aging war veterans, and the Architects will not listen to newly-made Intermediaries who have undergone the cerebral torture against their will.

So our revered hero Idris Telemmier, member of the original slate of Intermediaries, twice savior of the known civilizations and very much tired of it all, is the most prized weapon in the galaxy. And everyone wants to get their hands on him. The early chapters of the novel consist of a relentless pursuit, full of spy games and secret agendas, because each faction calculates that gaining control over Idris will give them the key advantage against the Architects and, ultimately, against the rest of intelligent species. The balance of power in the galaxy is precariously volatile, the return of the Architects has put every major government on maximum alert, and Idris just wants to be left alone. As soon as he's done training a new group of Intermediaries (who, he emphatically insists, must be free volunteers or else their powers will be useless), he's ready to retire and forget about wars and politics and the fate of the universe.

Alas, the universe is not done with him. True, most factions want to steal him as a weapon, but he's also useful as a seer, an irreplaceable channel of communication with whatever dark purpose the Architects are working for. As the plot takes our crew of protagonists aboard the salvage ship Vulture God through more and more elaborate ruin sites, Idris gradually begins to sense the true relationship between the material universe and the void of nonexistence where the Architects live. And the answers are irresistible catnip to his altered brain (and, to be frank, to the reader).

Whereas the first novel in the series, Shards of Earth, felt like it was inspired by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in that it explored the tango of attempted negations inherent to any contact between two conscious entities, this new entry appears to take after Sartre's Being and Nothingness and its exploration of how important conscious thought is as the condition of possibility for negation. In other words, the concept of "not" only makes sense to a mind that can reflect on being. Once you start classifying the world according to categories, you notice negative space around each being: the attributes that make a cup a cup are the same that make it not a penguin. To be something is to not be everything else. But it is only through a thinking mind that this abundance of nonexistence is even possible. The world doesn't get filled with negations until it gets defined. Without a mind to impose categories, one arrangement of atoms would be as good as any other. It wouldn't matter if Earth were a livable place or a twisted wreck of magma. That is why, in the first novel, the world-warping Architects only retreat when they realize that we do care about arrangements of atoms. It is our consciousness which bestows the universe with meaning. It is our consciousness which distinguishes between things, and within that distinction lies our most terrifying creation: the "not." To even begin to make sense of the world, to apprehend it, requires us, in a way, to surpass the realm of the real and reach into the nonexistent. This is what Hegel terms, and Sartre quotes, as the role of an Intermediary.

In the setting of Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series, FTL travel is performed by Intermediaries who guide the jump from the real universe into an empty nothingness folded into routes. (Here we have to come back to Sartre, who defines physical distance as a negation of contact, and the destination as a negation of further movement.) In stunningly poetic passages, the novel describes the negative void between things as the very fabric that links them and holds them in place.

In the unspace postulated by Tchaikovsky, intelligent minds intuit a lurking presence, contact with whom would be absolutely intolerable. To put it in Sartre's words, "nothingness haunts being." But conversely, conscious thought is the only thing that has an effect on unspace. If, following Sartre, nonexistence is incapable of sustaining itself, it's even possible that Tchaikovsky's unspace didn't begin to exist until intelligent species emerged in the universe (we'll have to wait until the conclusion of the trilogy to find out whether this speculation holds).

Here we may find a clue to decipher why Tchaikovsky's characters suffer an intense state of anguish while in unspace. According to Sartre, the human attribute that brings the "not" into the world is freedom, the possibility of making a choice (because each choice comes at the cost of negating other possibilities). And it is precisely the infinity of all the negated possibilities that makes us feel anguish upon being aware of our freedom (this is Sartre quoting Kierkegaard) or, indeed, anguish upon being aware of the nothingness (this is Sartre quoting Heidegger). The human mind collapses under the weight of everything it could be and is not.

The arc that Idris follows in this sequel is a fascinating one: he yearns to retain his freedom, both legally and morally speaking, from any of the various governments that are making unabashedly obvious plans for war and would love to acquire his services, but the lure of the truth about unspace keeps dragging him back to the wrong places, where he's wanted by all kinds of the wrong company. For all parties involved, this is a basic fetch quest: to get Idris by whatever means, rinse and repeat. But Tchaikovsky never lets it get boring. A clandestine auction of stolen government data quickly erupts into a shooting match plus murder mystery; a routine pilgrimage to a holy site is interrupted by cataclysmic weapons that laugh at the laws of physics; a simple interview at a university ends with a nail-bitingly tense chase and a ritual duel; a search-and-rescue operation leads to a four-way starship standoff over an ancient planet with lethally resplendent flora. Each of these scenes is built with an almost cinematic eye for the combination of intense pacing, truly alien setting, and meaningful stakes that makes every piece of the puzzle matter.

And I still haven't mentioned the rest of the cast: the robot archeologist Trine makes a return, with their unmistakable snark; the clone soldier Solace is as torn as ever between her patriotism and her personal sympathies; the sharp-tongued Kris gets much welcome development; the alien arthropod Kit continues to provide the pragmatic viewpoint with exactly as few words as necessary; and the foulmouthed Olli is still the best representation of a disabled badass I've seen in ages.

Eyes of the Void is all the best things about space opera: political machinations, unlikely alliances, shady cultists, body augmentation, literal world-shaking enigmas, extradimensional shenanigans, deep philosophy, and lots and lots of pew-pew. It provides more than enough answers to reward the extensive journey, but keeps the best ones carefully hidden for the upcoming conclusion.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +1 for expertly holding the narrative rhythm like a music conductor.

Penalties: −1 because the political machinations in the early chapters are a bit too hard to follow at first.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Eyes of the Void [Tor, 2022].

'Doctor Strange 2' is visually delightful and narratively bland

The MCU is looking less and less like a continuous story, and more and more like a subscription plan you can never opt out of

Despite the refreshing shift in visual style brought into the MCU by director Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is far from the milestone it was expected to be. The ongoing saga of the Avengers was supposed to expand into a wealth of possibilities with the addition of alternate realities, character variants, and reclaimed franchises just acquired by Disney from Fox. But what this movie delivers is smaller than the sum of its parts.

Early announcements for Multiverse of Madness appeared to promise that the story would center on the character of Stephen Strange and the consequences of his reality-breaking spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Indeed, this seemed like the right moment to bring back the lingering threat of Mordo, the wizard-turned-wizard-hunter we met in the first Doctor Strange movie. This was turned into an even more enticing prospect by the limited series What If, which gave us a taste of what damage an unhinged Doctor Strange might do to the world if he succumbed to thirst for power. Instead, Multiverse of Madness can barely be called a Doctor Strange movie. The script and the camera treat him as if he were the protagonist, but he is never properly given an arc. With América Chávez as the only hero with a pivotal moment of choice to define her character, and Wanda Maximoff as the self-offing villain who learns the lesson of the day, Stephen may as well not have been in this movie. This is actually an origin story for the character of América Chávez, clumsily inserted in an overly long epilogue for WandaVision.

It's not really worth it to analyze this movie from the character of Stephen, who is only here to stand with a worried face while other characters recite exposition. Even the repeated question about his happiness is left unresolved, because it really doesn't matter. Even a half-hour of What If had more to say on the topic, and it pretty much exhausted its possibilities. So let's look at Wanda.

Since WandaVision aired, opinions on Wanda's character have been extremely divided: one side is ready to empathize and forgive, and the other side points out that her grief, while valid, does not give her a pass for hurting others. I'm in the second camp, as I detailed in my review last year: Wanda's traumatic past gives an explanation, but never a justification, for her actions. She is undeniably the villain of Westview, and now she's become the enemy to defeat. Contrary to the protestations of many on the internet, this is a natural evolution from where we left Wanda last time we saw her, and it is to the credit of Multiverse of Madness that it doesn't buy WandaVision's attempt to pretend that Wanda has learned and grown from her experience. So it might be argued that this movie is about the cost of pursuing an unreachable fantasy, but that was already done in WandaVision, or maybe it is about the cost of meddling with forces beyond human grasp, but that was already done in No Way Home. Both in theme and in actual things happening in the plot, this movie is a redundant and fully skippable entry in the MCU.

Spider-Man: No Way Home proposed the question of what is a responsible use of world-altering magic, but Multiverse of Madness is quick to throw that question at the feet of Wanda, not Stephen. Even when she offers to send him to a universe where he's reunited with his old lover, there's never a sense that he's susceptible to that temptation. This should have been the movie where Stephen has to reflect on his hubris, but what we get is vignettes from other versions of Stephen who have already gone down the path of dark magic and are only there to scare Stephen into staying on the good side. There's no real growth for him. There's no hard choice. He fulfills a role less important than that of a secondary character, and we're meant to believe this story is about him.

This hollowness at the core of the story makes the rest of the flaws more noticeable. There's no thematic statement in this movie that wasn't already clear from WandaVision, and whatever little gesture of maturity Wanda shows here shouldn't have needed an entire movie to develop. The actual function of this movie is to establish América Chávez as a key figure for some upcoming project where she will turn out to save the multiverse. This movie is not its own story. It's a two-hour-long teaser for Phase 4.

This habit of producing movies whose sole function is to promise future movies is becoming a vice in the MCU. The middle portion of Multiverse of Madness is bloated with alternate characters who only show up to earn five seconds of cheers and then die with no consequence to the story. To bring Patrick Stewart back as Charles Xavier, only to kill him in the most unceremonious manner, is already disappointing enough after Logan gave that character the perfect farewell, but on top of that misstep, the casting of John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic is a transparent play to mass appeal. This movie is not conceived as a story with a statement to make about its characters or its themes. It is simply calculated to please.

In the people-pleasing department, it's at least commendable that Sam Raimi was allowed to dial up the colors of the otherwise boring look of the MCU. His use of fade transitions and close-ups between character beats adds a much-needed touch of uniqueness to the narrative. This feels like a movie that has a director behind it instead of an impersonal corporate machinery.

However, the visual inventiveness of Multiverse of Madness is not used to its full potential. We quickly jump through a dozen universes made of paint, made of comic book ink, made of flesh cubes, but for the most part we stick to only a couple universes that have a walkable New York and a recognizable set of characters. Again, these decisions follow the preestablished needs of Phase 4. Each of these movies has only so much space where they can expand before they risk deviating from whatever big narrative is being prepared behind the scenes. There's only a tiny chance to experiment, to ask hard questions, to challenge the audience. Multiverse of Madness had infinite places to go, but it's too afraid to wander off on its own way.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +3 for giving Raimi the creative freedom to leave his personal mark on the film.

Penalties: −1 for inconsequential cameos motivated purely by fan service, −1 for choosing the wrong protagonist to focus on, −1 for not taking the risk of sending the heroes to more visually bizarre universes, −1 for refusing to have an interesting point to make.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

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

'Eternals' wants to save the superhero genre from itself

It's doubtful that Marvel Studios will appreciate, or even understand, what Eternals has to say about the horror of living in a superhero franchise

It's a revelation to see how much Eternals is unlike the rest of the MCU. It feels strangely like a normal movie, which shouldn't be noteworthy, because we really shouldn't be this accustomed to expecting characters to smash each other in the head in every scene, but to follow the discussion around Eternals is to realize how severely the MCU has warped our way of watching. It is the first MCU movie to get a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes (48% at the time of writing this review), which makes it, completely undeservedly, the worst-rated entry of the MCU (not counting television). Upon closer look, the criticisms thrown at Eternals reveal a particular type of anger, which stems from a particularly twisted set of expectations. Supposedly, Eternals believes too seriously in its themes, has too much talking, is too abstract, leans too far into substance, is not violent enough, has too many feelings.

Let it sink in that this is the rare superhero movie directed by a woman, and reread those complaints.

In fact, those are exactly the qualities that make Eternals one of the most important entries, and I'm not exaggerating, in the history of the superhero genre. It wasn't until I watched Eternals that I noticed how tired I was of Marvel's trademark ironic detachment. It's refreshing to have characters who don't hide behind a barrier of quippy banter, who aren't afraid to own their emotions, who care about what their battles say about who they are.

Solid characterization was always going to be difficult. Eternals had to fulfill the mammoth task of being simultaneously the origin story, the teamup blockbuster, the team breakup tragedy, and the world-ending epic for an entire new crop of ten almost unknown superheroes, in a cinematic universe that pretends every obscure character needs A-lister treatment. But there was no alternative; it wasn't viable to introduce these characters in their respective solo movies, because their place in the fictional world makes no sense outside of this team. Perhaps Eternals would have achieved better pacing as a Disney Plus series, but as one single movie, it's remarkable that it manages to make almost all of its heroes feel like full persons. And it does so via relevant moral disagreements.

As a rule, the MCU has very badly dropped the ball when trying to grapple with the ethics of superheroism, opting for a juvenile power fantasy every time it has played with hard dilemmas that called for a more thoughtful approach. Eternals sees the oversimplistic moral calculation of Avengers: Infinity War and raises a more pointed set of questions: if heroes have a responsibility toward living beings, does that extend to future lives? And should their concern for those potential future lives outweigh the importance of present ones? And does it matter in the decision if the future lives are thousands of times more numerous than the present ones that may have to be sacrificed? These are not the speculations of fantasy. The problem of the potential value of future lives is an extremely delicate point of contention that has been debated by philosophers for decades, and that has had, still has today, and will continue to have real consequences for real people.

It will be argued that these are unnecessarily heavy interests for a movie where a character is called Sprite and another has pew pew fingers. But Eternals doesn't fool itself. It knows that the MCU is a ridiculous place to ask the big questions. In fact, the conscious mismatch between its themes and its setting is a central part of how Eternals is made, and it shows precisely in the characters of Sprite and Mr. Pew Pew Fingers.

On one hand, Sprite is an illusionist. Over the centuries of the Eternals' mission on Earth, she has been feeding the human hunger for inspiration via stories. If the Eternals are behind all our ancient myths, Sprite has been behind the telling of the myths. On the other hand, Kingo is a movie actor and director. He used to live in hiding with Sprite, but became tired of hanging in the limbo between truth and deception. So he opted for full-time deception: he's been pretending to be a dynasty of Bollywood stars for roughly a century. Indeed, both are beings of legend: Sprite cannot have the normal human experience, while Kingo doesn't even try. They exist in the world of stories.

This matters because, in Eternals, what threatens to invade the physical world is the world of stories. Our heroes yearn for normality, but beasts that belong to primal nightmare keep interrupting their dates, their family meetings, their careers. This occurs more explicitly with Kingo's sudden interest in filming his friends. The Eternals' lives become a threatened home, not unlike the fortress Phastos has built in his house: a shelter of domesticity besieged by conventions of cinematic spectacle that are emphatically unwelcome. These characters are trying to go through their lives, but their boss Arishem needs them to stick to their predefined roles, while Kingo keeps annoyingly insisting that their lives be made into a movie. When the obligatory faceless monsters show up during a family discussion in the Amazon jungle, they don't feel like an adventure, but like an inconvenience. Eternals is a movie, and it has superheroes, but it resents having to be a superhero movie.

Now why would a Marvel production want to do that?

Because Eternals, you see, is actually about the horror of being a Marvel character.

Most hero stories are about the search for purpose, but few dare address this openly the despair of having your purpose written in a script. The surprise reveal of this movie is that the titular Eternals don't exist to be full persons, but to be action figures in a war with a preordained result. They're not meant to have lives; they're just meant to make it to the end of the world and then be refurbished and repainted for the next end of the world, with nothing left of their previous personalities. Much like the tragic heroines of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they're created to be pieces of cosmic machinery in a plan guided by the most ruthless of utilitarian calculations. The awkward excuse for their absence from every other Avengers-level crisis refers back to the same metanarrative directive: those other conflicts were not about them. They were not their story.

If you've ever wondered why Tony Stark went back to superheroing after burning all his suits in Iron Man 3, as if he had forgotten his entire personal growth in that movie, here's the explanation: as a Marvel character, he's not allowed to have an inner life. He just has to make it to the end of the movie and go back to the makeup department to get ready for the next movie. It's only in Eternals that this curse is shown in its full monstrosity: Marvel characters are doomed to repeat the end of the world again and again, and all the lives they're supposedly saving only have value as food for the cosmic machine that controls their fates.

Marvel fans complain that not enough stuff blows up in Eternals. Yes, that's the whole point. Stuff blowing up would just be another repetition of the endless cycle that makes the MCU a Gnostic hell, its characters trapped by a heartless creator who only cares that the rules of the game be obeyed. Ajak and Ikaris constantly refer to Arishem's Grand Design. Well, the Grand Design is the MCU and its voracious need to keep growing by recycling its heroes, throwing them at one cataclysm after another, because that's the only way it can feed itself. This movie is so informed by the obligations of franchise that its new slate of heroes drop onto the world from a literal floating slate. The Eternals' rebellion against the Grand Design (as well as their repeated destruction of Kingo's cameras) symbolizes Eternals' resistance to being a Marvel movie. These characters don't want to be action figures. Fans who complain that the Eternals always want to discuss their feelings miss the point: that's what characters in a story are supposed to do. It's not that the movie lacks a villain; the established rules of MCU storytelling are the villain that gets in the way of these heroes' happiness. It's nice that Ajak decides that Earth is worth saving, but it's depressing that the reason why she decides it's worth saving is that it produced superheroes.

This symbolic framing of Eternals as a war waged by Marvel characters against Marvel Studios helps decipher what otherwise are incomprehensible character choices. Kingo's puzzling exit from the final fight is actually in consonance with the rules of his assigned role: as the character who is most aware of the conventions of superhero fiction (it's no coincidence that his superpower is making literal pew pew fingers), he chooses the right moment to leave the movie and repackage himself for the next one. He survives by following the game. Sprite goes the opposite way: her victory is that she's no longer a Marvel character. She was stuck as an unchanging piece in a game she didn't ask to play. So she wins by refusing to play any longer.

Give some thought to the fact that what saves Sprite, and the world, is the power of transformation. The message couldn't be clearer: the MCU needs to change, because the alternative is the existential abomination (and the narrative laziness) of treating people as instruments. It's a horrifying twist that Arishem, the ultimate producer of the show, gets to literally take these characters out of the movie and dress them up again for their assigned roles in the next one.

Coming to terms with that absurdity is the breaking point that drives Ikaris to kill himself after his defeat: the people of Earth were never people to him, just instruments. Accordingly, he saw his own life as a mere instrument of the Grand Design. Once the mission was frustrated, he couldn't accept that he was responsible for choosing his own purpose; he needed to have it scripted for him. So he followed the plot of his own myth, and flied toward the sun. (Director Chloé Zhao knew exactly what she was doing when she took inspiration from Zack Snyder's Man of Steel when designing her nihilistic and ultimately self-negating version of Ikaris, because that is the logical consequence of a Snyder-style Superman.)

This is the kind of shaking up that the MCU desperately needs. This is the kind of outsider perspective that can save superhero movies from endless self-cannibalization. But in all likelihood, Marvel executives (and fans) will bemoan the lack of explosions, fail to get the intended warning, and go back to the regularly scheduled show. They don't want to miss the end of the world—again.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Second Look: The City We Became by N K Jemisin

 A second look at N.K, Jemisin’s 2020 Hugo Finalist novel, THE CITY WE BECAME

In 2020, Adri Joy reviewed N K Jemisin’s The City We Became, available here at Nerds of a Feather.

With the novel now a Hugo Finalist, and me, as the author, as a native New Yorker having re-read the book recently in audio, I thought a second look  at the book was in order to explore other facets of the novel, and the audiobook in particular. Do read Adri’s excellent review first, as I will be covering somewhat different ground here. 

While I had highly enjoyed reading the book in ebook last year, my choice of re-reading it audio, first a way to fill some loose hours in my listening schedule and a way to tag back into the book in order to rank it as a Hugo Finalist on my ballot. I was, however, riveted from the beginning for a number of reasons.

The choice of narrator, Robin Miles, is an excellent choice. Miles has worked with Jemisin before (notably on the Broken Earth trilogy) and has a very good voice for Jemisin’s word choice and sentence style. It’s a wonderfully immersive performance on her part, and her voice kept me listening, to the point of NPR style “Driveway moments” throughout the production. This is a book I could have done even better listening to it on a long driving trip.

The use of sound in the audiobook was inspired. While this is not a full cast production, and just has the aforementioned Miles as narrator, the production is not content to just use her considerable vocal talents. The audiobook employs some sound effects and tricks to help immerse the reader into, particularly, the cosmic horror of the novel in a way that the print novel doesn’t quite manage. (To be fair, the print novel has the map, which the audiobook does lack, but I think that with the choice of that map or the audio tricks and use of sound, it really is a dead heat as to which is better). 

Immersion of the city and its characters  is carried by both the sound design and the narrator. Take each of the incarnated boroughs. In each, Miles brings the voice to life, almost painfully so in the personage of Staten Island for reasons I will explain below, but they are not only distinct in overall diction, but also accent. Staten Island’s accent, Brooklyn’s accent, Bronx’s accent are all three different flavors of the diction of New York that really come through. It isn’t so surprising that, given their origins, that Queens and Manhattan don’t show this distinction in diction, but the “native” New Yorkers of the boroughs showcase the variety of accents in New York. I am glad that Jemisin made the choice of having Queens be an immigrant, so that she, and her subsequently voiced accent, is not the nasal Queens accent that viewers of The Nanny mistakenly seem to think is the dominant or only one in New York.

One of the joys of re-reading a book is to come across the favorite bits, the set pieces, the small moments, the character bits, the tapestry of words that stick with you. The audiobook of The City We Became delivered that re-immersion into the world of the novel in spades. From Manny’s awkward introduction to the city (which reminded me, now a bit of The Freshman) to the confrontation on the FDR Drive, to the “Ding Ho”, to the utter out of NYC place beauty that is the abandoned City Hall Station, the novel and all of its goodness came back to vivid life. It made me homesick all over again. And I realize to my horror and shame something I didn’t realize when I read the book--I’ve never been to Inwood Park and seen Shorakkopoch Rock for myself. I need to correct this the next time I am in NYC. The novel, especially in its audio production, loves and adores New York City and its fractally complex multi-faceted nature. New York really does contain multitudes and the novel gets that. Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn each feels like itself, and also New York, and it is joyous.

And then there is Staten Island. Disclaimer: I AM from Staten Island, it is my home borough and in deep ways, that borough still is deep in my DNA, the good and the bad. The darker sides of Staten Island, its proud self reliant standoffish independence, its wanting to be walled off from NYC, if not the rest of America, really came through in this audio edition and hit me in a way that the print book did not. At first it was nostalgia and memory, with Aislyn in the Ferry Terminal, and then into the less charitable sides of what Staten Island is like. I grew up next to very many people like Aislyn and her family, particularly her father. One might even more uncharitably say that if I had had a sister, she could have been a lot like Aislyn, for good and for bad. The City We Became in audiobook gets that Staten Island experience, that Staten Island mentality, mindset and feel in a way that was a bit of a punch to the face. And yet, the fate of Staten Island, however a reader might think is somewhat deserved, is a tragedy to me that pains me, and I am very curious how it carries forward into subsequent books.

Overall, then, listening to the audiobook has had the salutary effect of raising my high opinion of the novel even further. I daresay that the novel is better and more effective in audio than its already impressive result in print, and I will be looking to get the subsequent volumes of the trilogy in audio as well as ebook. Even more than the text, the audiobook of The City We Became brought me fully and irretrievably to the city that I may have left bodily years ago, but has never, and will never leave me. In the acknowledgements, Jemisin says that this novel is an homage to the city and she hopes she got it right. 

This ex-pat New Yorker, this ex-pat Staten Islander, thinks that she certainly did.

---

Reference: Jemisin, N.K. The City We Became ,[Daw, 2020]

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

Microreview [book]: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

An intricately layered and intriguing story about the encounter between our limited intellect and an incomprehensible otherworldly menace

Imagine you're an ant, living your tiny ant life in a nameless anthill. Then workers for a landscaping company suddenly show up and start digging up your home, forcing you and all of your kin to run for their lives. The mysterious newcomers use the sand to make cement and leave a pretty-shaped, well-proportioned statue with pleasing angles and nice colors in the place where your home used to be. When you visit neighboring anthills, you discover the same catastrophe has been happening for quite a while. No one knows why the gigantic creatures do that, but it's clear there's nothing ants can do to oppose them.

Now imagine that anthill is our planet, and you'll have an idea of the lives of the characters of Adrian Tchaikovsky's new space opera novel Shards of Earth.

Arthropod analogies are usually crude oversimplifications, but I'm sure Tchaikovsky would appreciate this one. His fiction is a vehicle for his longstanding obsession with invertebrate anatomies and societies, and the crowded Shards of Earth devotes plenty of space for creatures of this type. But this is not just a space opera about humans and lobsters exploring the galaxy and running away from mad cultists (although that's one part of it). It is a psychological journey through the process of reclaiming one's autonomy as a free, thinking and feeling entity, a journey made harder by the inescapable fact that such recognition of the self is dependent on the consciousness of a separate self. This may take the form of robot emancipation from human control or (more terrifyingly) humanity asserting its presence before an uncaring force.

In the universe of Shards of Earth, humankind lives spread across several worlds of varying inhabitability, a condition known as the Polyaspora, just over a century after Earth and our first colonies were turned into ruins by a wave of colossal alien megastructures made of an indestructible material, equipped with gravity-manipulating technology, and capable of rearranging matter at the atomic level to transform everything that comes near them into a perfect but dead work of art. They don't vaporize or crush or flatten: they beautify. Entire planets, with their cities and biospheres, are warped and twisted to make these curious-looking spiral flowers of devastation, monuments to their inhabitants' helpless fragility. In the human tongues, the unstoppable makers of these sculptures are called the Architects.

What ended the war with the Architects was the near-sacrifice of the Intermediaries, a select group of artificially-enhanced telepaths capable of penetrating the invaders' minds and make the simple case, We are here. Please see us. This experience is deeply traumatizing and often fatal for those who undergo it, no less because any spaceship that dares to come close enough to an Architect for an Intermediary to be able to make their mental plea is also close enough to be unmade and remade as an exquisite piece of abstract debris. When one Intermediary finally made contact and forced the Architects to notice the thinking nature of humanity, the Architects, after eighty-four years of horror, simply left.

The novel takes place thirty-nine years after this costly victory. And it seems like the Architects are back.

Although this is a universe that has telepaths and FTL travel (and where only the former can safely do the latter), its rules lean toward the hard end of the science fiction spectrum. So it came as an interesting surprise to me when I recognized which philosophical underpinnings supported the base of the fictional building. I must confess I never expected a space opera so rich with solid biological and geological detail to draw inspiration from Hegelian absolute idealism of all things, but here we are. Beneath the political machinations and successive backstabbings (and some literal stabbings) provoked in the panic over the Architects' return, Shards of Earth is also doing something more ambitious: it's making a statement about the nature of freedom and the conditions required for it to be an effective reality. Numerous factions in this universe are confronted with decisions regarding their freedom or the surrender thereof; there are the robots that gain independence from humans, but there are also the new generations of telepath pilots working under slavery contracts, and a clone army of female soldiers loyal only to their genetic lineage, and a strange religion that promises safety from the Architects in exchange for political submission to a regime of alien bivalves. There is a recurring theme of master/slave dynamics throughout the text. If my reading of the novel is correct, freedom in this universe is understood as requiring a gesture of mutual acknowledgment.

But, as it turns out, mutual acknowledgment is the most dangerous thing that exists.

In chapter 4 of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spoke of what he called a "master/slave" dialectic, the process whereby consciousness becomes self-consciousness via the interaction with another like itself. According to Hegel, self-consciousness exists inasmuch as it is recognized, but the process of recognition needs to be mutual. Two interacting self-consciousnesses can only recognize themselves when they recognize each other. While the category of other is initially defined in negative terms, as the things that are not-myself, this interaction of minds calls for letting this other make a claim to selfhood, that is, to admit that a thing that is not-myself is legitimately another self. This process necessarily looks unequal to each of the participants, because each can only fully perceive itself. Hegel describes this mutual proving of worth as a life-and-death struggle, an assertion of existence that is only prevented from resulting in the negation of the other's existence by that other's own assertion. Therefore, achieving full recognition requires exposing one's life, risking for a moment its negation by the other. He called this a "master/slave" dialectic because each participant in the interaction of minds exerts power over the other, both seeking to negate and exposed to being negated. Crucially, each participant plays the role of mediator in the interaction, or, depending on who is translating Hegel, an Intermediary.

Likewise, Tchaikovsky's novel describes the mental contact between the Intermediaries and the Architects in terms of an exposure of the self, an almost-annihilation that lays bare every truth about human life. The protagonist, a veteran telepath of the first Architect war, experiences this mental communication as a battle where he faces unblinkingly the fullness of his fear of death and where the prize to be conquered is a tiny instant of being seen. That's all it would take to save the galaxy's billions of souls, but each attempt taxes him to the last drop of his willpower. It takes all that he is, all that he has, all that he can, to go the long and treacherous way to hello.

In Shards of Earth, it is rare to be seen as one truly is. Factions with evocative names, whose poetry alone makes the reader want to know more about them (Broken Harvest, Mordant House, the Parthenon, the Betrayed), routinely spread lies and propaganda about one another, misrepresenting their respective roles in the war to gain an advantage before the next one. As inconvenient as it is to be seen inaccurately, it pales to the horror of being fully seen by an unseen other, which in this novel's universe is what intelligent creatures experience during FTL travel. In the realm beyond ordinary space called unspace, objects do not physically exist, but minds perceive a hidden presence watching them at all times. Over time, this sensation is beyond the mental strength of all but Intermediaries. If the Architects represent an aberrant form of the Hegelian other which cannot be negated but can indisputably negate you, the presence lurking in unspace represents a Hegelian other which is already denied, for it is not there, yet you fear what it may mean for your realness if that nonexistent other were to acknowledge you.

Because robots, too, are vulnerable to unspace, they are declared to be intelligent and ultimately granted independence from humans, nominally as a reward for having participated in the war. To put it in Hegelian terms, they cease to be things because something else, no matter its hiddenness, perceives them as not-things. The moment of recognition is the moment of freedom. This noteworthy reversal of the master/slave relationship is, however, in agreement with the Hegelian philosophy of identity, and is mirrored in our protagonist's refusal to be bound to any one faction after years of fighting the Architects. As Hegel explains, "The individual who has not risked their life may well be recognized as a person, but they have not attained to the truth of this recognition as a self-sufficient self-consciousness." In the Hegelian system, as well as, apparently, in Shards of Earth, risking your life is necessary and sufficient to earn you your autonomy.

You don't need to have read German idealism to enjoy Shards of Earth. It remains an endlessly entertaining adventure about the struggle for human survival. It has amazing alien landscapes, and fortunately for us, it pauses for long enough to give each of them enough description for you to get a complete picture before jumping to the next world. It has complex alien societies, most of them inspired, in classic Tchaikovsky fashion, after Earth invertebrates, but made believable and relatable by the power of wordcraft. It has plenty of political intrigue to give you your fill of spy mystery. But behind it all, it has copious food for thought. It explores what it means to truly reach another being and not lose yourself in the process. Feel free to lose yourself in this wonderful book. But be sure to come back.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for meticulous worldbuilding, +1 for not once losing its firm hold on the reader's interest.

Penalties: −2 for just throwing the reader into an incredibly complicated galaxy of opposed factions and species with little warning. There is a detailed chronology at the end of the book, which finally lays out who is angry at whom and why, but it would have been a lot more welcome at the start.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Shards of Earth [Tor, 2021].