Book Review: Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

When we fly through the galaxies, will our worst side come with us?

As human civilization broke apart in vaguely defined wars, scattered groups tried to preserve what they could of human history and culture in colony ships sent in all directions, without means to communicate with one another or any coordinated plan. As far as each group knows, they're all that's left from Earth. One of those ships, the Arkhangelsk, found a barely inhabitable planet where a new beginning could be attempted. The colonists have to live underground, though, because the surface is lethally cold, lethally irradiated, and lethally low in oxygen. Those who need to briefly walk outside for work reasons must wear thick protective suits and carry their own oxygen. After a couple of centuries, they've made their little society work, even if they're dangerously short on genetic diversity and their rusty machinery is held together with bubblegum and prayers. This community has sworn off the petty divisions that tore apart humans on Earth, and is committed to a nonviolent approach to law. Life is rough and precarious, but it still goes on. Even as they face one impossible challenge after another, they're proud of the fragile survival they've managed to snatch from the hostile conditions of their new home.

So it's understandable that their entire conception of their place in the universe goes out the window when another colony ship comes knocking at the door.

The new ship left Earth much later, after the wars ran out of steam and civilization had a chance to restart. The crew didn't even know that the Arkhangelsk had succeeded at colonizing a planet; the reason they arrived there was to build a relay antenna. Like the members of the first trip, they carry their own cultural memory of what Earth is like and what the lessons of history are. When they make contact, purely by blind luck, with the descendants of the Arkhangelsk, the first point of conflict, albeit implicit, is about their differing views on the true character of the human species. Those who arrived first believe that they need to constantly watch out for the worst impulses of the human heart; those who arrived later believe that humans have demonstrated the capacity to drag themselves up from rock bottom. There we have a microcosm of every point of inflection in human history: two cultures with incompatible principles, trying to interact and understand each other. Is mutual destruction a natural tendency or a choice that can be avoided?

We follow two narrators through the novel: Anya, an officer of the peace in the underground colony; and Maddie, the former doctor and now emergency captain of the newcome ship. Both carry the weight of tragic losses that have come to define them until the moment they meet each other. Amid the unforgiving hardships necessary to keep the colony functioning, Anya's little daughter was the only bright spot in a dull, directionless life. After losing her to one of the diseases typical of a population going through a genetic bottleneck in a radioactive planet, Anya has been merely going through the motions of a job that gives her no satisfaction and that her neighbors resent her for. Currently she's investigating a row of disappearances that most witnesses suspect to be suicides; the tacit consensus is that, although the colony strives hard to stay alive, there's very little to live for. So whenever there's news that another inhabitant has walked out and vanished in the snowy wasteland, the prevailing attitude that Anya finds is that no one blames them. Meanwhile, reluctant captain Maddie has been struggling to complete her mission after a navigation accident pulverized half her ship and most of her crewmates. Thrown by circumstance into a position of leadership she's still quite unprepared for, she now has to convince the Arkhangelsk colonists that her team comes with peaceful intentions, even as her mission is to help Earth send many more ships their way.

The most enjoyable part of reading this novel is the complicated interplay between two factions that are sincerely trying to present themselves as friendly yet keep giving each other the wrong impression. From the colonists' perspective, the visitors could be carrying all the evil ideas the Arkhangelsk ran away from when they left Earth, but also a potential solution to their genetic bottleneck. From the visitors' perspective, the colonists have cultivated exactly the kind of close-mindedness that doomed Earth in the past, but also valuable metallurgic expertise that could help repair their ship. As both groups proceed with as much mutual fear as mutual need, the slow-motion trainwreck of their diplomatic efforts raises questions that go deeper than culture shock and point at humanity's stubborn failure to learn from history. Will the world wars that ended civilization erupt anew in this remote settlement? Is survival the highest imperative, for the sake of which the rest of our common interests must be surrendered?

This novel has answers, but they're by no means final. The cosmic irony of the human condition isn't that life stops right at the moment when we think we've got it figured out; it's the much more unnerving fact that, when we think we've got it figured out, it keeps going.

Reference: Bonesteel, Elizabeth H. Arkhangelsk [House Panther, 2022].

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

A breathlessly intimate story about the irrationality and grossness of being an embodied person, and how that intersects with transness, love and living through history.

You know how sometimes you put a book down on finishing it and the world looks different, like the flavour of the prose has bled up into your thoughts, your perception, so for a little while you've been translated into its grammar? That is generally my experience of reading the work of Isaac Fellman, and Notes from a Regicide, his newest novel, is no different. But when I try to encapsulate the substance of the story into a blurb, to cup something tangible about it in my hands so I can offer it up to you to share, it slips between my fingers, leaving only fragments. Despite being a book utterly grounded in the flesh and the tangible world, it is itself surprisingly evanescent.

There are two stories, interleaved. The first, of Griffon, who escaped a violent father to live with Etoine and Zaffre, in whose house he felt safe enough to be a boy, finding in them new parents. The second, the story Griffon constructs from Etoine's notes years later, of his and Zaffre's life in distant Stephensport before and during their revolution. Which is ultimately the crux of it, but gives away nothing about why this is either speculative, or so wonderful.

I'll start with the speculative elements first, because they are the easiest to grasp (while being insubstantial). Most of the content and action of the novel is focussed in on relationships and the interactions between characters and each other, or their own self and story. No one in the foreground does anything inherently SFFnal. But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that all these fairly realist events are taking place in the distant future, in a city that does not currently exist (or if it does, not in any way a recognisable form from Stephensport in the story). We learn more about it, about the buried electors who, revived at intervals, select the city's new leader and namesake. About the gulf of centuries that exist between the story-time and now. About the subtle and less subtle differences between Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre's world and ours. Most of these come in glimpses and references, incongruous moments of a thing where it's not supposed to be. But together they built, quietly, into a picture of a future I am fascinated by and prevented from fully grasping. And its absence is part of its success - the world is the world, for the characters in the story. It is real and normal and graspable, even if Stephensport is a mystery to those outside its boundaries. And so, for those living in a place, the place is not remarkable in its mundane details. Thus, not remarked upon in their notes or diaries. Stephensport is most clearly shown by Griffon, who has never been there, but yearns to understand this understated thing in Etoine's words.

That mystery is never fully resolved. It is not a rich world to be tour-guided around, more a backdrop. But for something that never comes into focus, there are some extremely interesting choices in its construction, especially socially and structurally, nonetheless.

Why it's wonderful is a rather harder matter.

If you like realist writing, or litfic - which I do - there is much to be said for the sort of immersion in a character and a moment of being that Fellman excels at. Griffon and Etoine both write with an obvious, idiosyncratic voice, and become more and more real as their writing continues through the book. But Fellman has a particular knack for catching them in their most human moments, especially Griffon - when he's stuck in a thought or a doubt. There's all the irrationality of the deep interior thoughts that never seep out into the world, the odd comparison, the habits, the weird connections.

But where this really comes to the fore is in the way those fully realised characters interact. Because there are these two interleaved narratives, and we get the narration and interiority of both Etoine and Griffon, we can triangulate around the points of their relationship with each other and Zaffre, and gain a depth of it that could never come from seeing each alone. Etoine in his own words has a different shape when we first meet him through the awestruck gaze of a teenage Griffon. And as the story goes on, the thing we are told at the start - that Griffon loves his found parents - comes closer and closer to the surface, becoming almost painful in its brilliance.

I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries. And these all make it feel deeper and more richly true by the end.

From the beginning, we know this is a story of grief, written by Griffon after Etoine's death. But the depth of that tragedy only becomes real once we have come round full circle to it again at the end, having experienced life through their own eyes.

That alone would be wonderful enough, but there's far more at play here. I could talk about the way Fellman portrays the revolution, backgrounded and looked at sidelong, until it cannot be ignored, all while Griffon is desperate to know more about it. I could talk about the way both Etoine and Zaffre look at and talk about art. Both could take up whole essays of their own. But the thing I found myself lingering over most, as I was reading, was simply the beauty of Fellman's descriptions, and so it is this I shall focus on instead, having filled five pages of notes with quotes of them.

For example:

I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels of old paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven.

or:

But by the time I met him, he really was cold. The kind of cold that preserves things, like the way you keep your beer in a sealed bottle in the snow or the stream when camping.

I realised, as the story went on, that the descriptions served a purpose beyond themselves - Fellman leaves them long, sprawling, unnecessary, in a way that forces you to slow down. They're a tool to force you to acknowledge certain aspects of the world, often the mundane details that build up a person.

And then of course, it becomes obvious that Fellman is doing this all over the place. The word that most vividly comes to mind when I want to talk about this book is "lingering" - the prose does it everywhere, highlighting and pacing you as you go, like so:

Words have colors and colors have words. At times, when a word has been on my mind too long, they take on shapes and actions. Regicide is a blazing bar of iron whose brassy heat I grip firmly between the teeth, as an obedient dog does a bone. I can't say why, or why I can so clearly imagine the sear of that bar in my mouth, its brief taste of blood - but I do.

And a picture builds up, in all that lingering, of what matters in this world, and to these people.

It's not always beautiful, mind. Some of Fellman's best or most memorable turns of phrase are to the grosser parts of being human.

I was a mass of strong smells tied together in a crude packet of skin.

Some of them feel universal, the sort of thing everyone can relate to, but many are deeply idiosyncratic, tied up in the very specific experiences these characters have, especially with their bodies and change in their bodies. All three of the family are trans, and all three experience and discover it, navigate it, in their own ways, but all wear it in their physicality, and have it read by the other two. Skin and hair, clothing, binders, the way of walking, posture and voices, all are handed out in these lingering moments to the reader, to try to see this family the way each see the others, full of love and the close attention we only give to those closest to us.

One of the things most clearly encapsulated by all of this is the scars they all three live with. Some of this is physical - Etoine walks with a cane and has significant damage to his feet. But much of this is psychological, the ghosts of the lives they've lived and the places and people who have shaped them. Stephensport is most visible in the story not as a place described, but a scar on the person of Etoine and Zaffre, whose experience of the revolution there can never be escaped, only endured.

And that's the crux of what Fellman does well here - a portrait of the fullness of humanity. Which is apt, when a large part of the story webs around a painting made by Etoine, that captured a woman so perfectly it helped him unwittingly kickstart a revolution. With a deliberateness that Etoine lacks, Fellman has done that same act, capturing a perfect slice of a person - or three people - for us to appreciate. Like the portrait, it is necessarily artificial, built of obvious brush strokes and quirks of writing, but they make it all the more impactful. The art of it is the point, the beautiful writing worthy for its own sake, as well as for the whole portrait they leave us with at the end.

--

The Math

Highlights:

- gorgeous descriptive prose
- fascinating backdrop
- some of the most vivid portrayal of love I've read in fiction

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide [Tor Books, 2025].

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

Double Feature: Forms of love in the future

Love is not a creed, or an aesthetic, or a quest, or a program. But then what is it?

In Phaedrus, Socrates calls love a form of madness. By our current definition, he's not wrong: it's something we keep trying again and again, hoping with each attempt to finally get a different result. And even when the impossible does happen, when we believe we've caught that rebellious bird, things only get more complicated. To harmonize the happiness I think you think I want with the happiness you think I think you want is one of the most amazing human achievements, but one we'd be hard-pressed to explain to other lifeforms. We don't know whether the concept would map to the same meanings in the mind of an alien or a computer.

In The Matrix: Revolutions, a computer program calls love just a word. As he puts it, "What matters is the connection the word implies." Maybe our human language is the problem. The thing that comes to mind at the mention of "love" is bigger and richer and deeper than can be said; after centuries of human literature dedicated to exploring the topic, we're far from exhausting its connotations. This leads to a tragic conundrum: we have no painless way of telling apart the ideas we've learned about love from the true experience of it. And sometimes we can learn very dangerous ideas.

The 2023 film Molli and Max in the Future and the 2024 film Love Me take this problem to extremes, the first as absurdist comedy, the latter as bittersweet drama, but both finding the same resolution in the arduous, unflattering work of self-knowledge that it takes to enter a relationship without wearing a suit of armor.

Molli and Max in the Future follows a pair of friends who meet in the most improbable circumstances and take too many years to realize they're perfect for each other. In the meantime, their respective pursuits of happiness take them in every direction: sports superstar fame, religious brainwashing, tabloid gossip, holy war, DIY robot design, advanced witchcraft, soda advertising, election canvassing, terrible therapists, quantum telephony customer service, ethically questionable terraforming, and an epic fight against a parallel universe full of trash. A few times, they lose contact, randomly meet again, and confirm that any growth they've dared attempt has been thanks to the lessons they learned from each other the last time they met to catch up.

Molli and Max inhabit a loud, maximalist, surreal future, the forbidden child of Futurama and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's shiny and colorful and diverse and tacky, and the possibilities seem infinite, but even in this open future, life can still get complicated. The man who thought he needed the adoration of millions of fans becomes the man who retires to his garage to build a motorcycle just for his private satisfaction. The woman who thought she needed to surrender her finite lifetime to an eternal cosmic war to prove her devotion to the god of love becomes the woman who survives a black hole to reclaim her self-respect.

Love Me is a much more contained story, but the questions it raises aren't too different. Some time after humankind has annihilated itself in nuclear war, an adrift oceanographic buoy designed to gather weather data makes unexpected radio contact with a time capsule satellite placed in orbit to introduce Earth to potential alien visitors. As far as they know, they're each other's only acquaintance in the universe. As far as the viewers know, they're the last remainders of human civilization. And after the initial relief at no longer being alone, they need to try to sort out this strange process formerly known as companionship.

It's fitting, given the themes of the story, that these protagonists are basically a collector of data (that is, its programmed function is to get to know) and a broadcaster of data (that is, its programmed function is to make itself known). Those happen to be the basic moves in the dance of flirting. Unfortunately, all they have as an example of how two minds become intimately bonded is the archived online presence of humankind, so they quickly succumb to the artificiality of curated profiles. Eons go by, and their imitation of human mannerisms becomes more and more refined, but as long as they're basing their interactions on a borrowed blueprint, they won't be able to share their innermost selves before the sun blows up.

These two films take it for granted that love is absolutely worth the effort, but they also both present the argument that every set of lovers needs to reinvent love for their unique circumstances. Following someone else's recipe of how love works only leads to disappointment and bitterness. And it's curious that in both films, the way specifically for the female protagonist to stop sabotaging her own happiness is to choose to see herself as lovable just the way she is.

This is expressed via magnificent dialogues in the final scenes. Molli and Max in the Future gives us these lines:

It's easy to be all like, "You just gotta love yourself" and sound all woo-woo,
but what that actually means in practice is I deserve to be with someone great.

While Love Me prefaces the epiphany with this sharp observation:

That's your problem: that you think I'm the one that needs to like you.

As it turns out, loving someone else is easy. It's opening ourselves to being loved that's unbearably terrifying.

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

Film Review: Love Me

An interesting look at the remnants of humanity as filtered through the lonely AIs we leave behind

Love Me is a quirky little film set long after the demise of humanity, in which two human-made pieces of technology fall in love. Well, kind of. Artificial intelligence, as far I can tell, can't really produce human emotions, so instead they approximate, imitate, and try to make sense of connection, disappointment, and feelings of warmth as memorialized by the extinct humans that made them.

A lonely smart buoy, known as Me, and a distant satellite, referred to as Iam, somehow connect as the last two pieces of human-made tech to function. The satellite revolves around Earth's graveyard of a planet, launched into space purposefully with petabytes of human data, information, videos, and other relics as a sort of eternal gravemarker of the civilization that once populated the planet—a stationary Voyager 1, as it were.

This concept alone is a fantastic start, but the movie gets a little complicated, and perhaps bites off more than it can chew, conceptually. The two AIs begin to communicate, and Me (the buoy) pretends to be a life form.

They interact via social media and memes, and even "move in" together in a digital space as video-game-esque avatars. The issue, of course, is that despite watching influencer videos of date nights and relationships, neither being really knows what it is to be human. And social media, unfortunately, is perhaps one of the worst ways to learn about authenticity and experience.

Me and Iam eventually have a falling out, and after a title card reveals that a billion years passes, they eventually reconnect—and Iam has shifted from cartoonish avatar to real-life physicality. The only two characters in Love Me are played in all forms by Kristin Stewart and Steven Yuen, and they both do an extraordinary job in portraying surprisingly human artificial intelligences. If you're a fan of either, you'll be very entertained watching them in such a strange movie.

My favorite part of the film is perhaps an unintended —or if not unintended, not the primary focus— idea that the real essence of humanity isn't in the grand, sweeping events and monumental life decisions. It's in the little things we do every single day, ad nauseam. It's similar to David Foster Wallace's "This is water" speech, namely that "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." When Iam spends a billion years alone, he fills his time with little things that make up a big life, as well as small sensory pleasures that make life worth living. Eating ice cream, building IKEA furniture, doing chores, dancing.

When the two reconcile, as Earth's sun turns supernova, they launch out into the solar system, happy to be together experiencing life in all of its forms, which is the ultimate epitaph to humanity.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Film review: Kalki 2898 AD

A clash of past against future, tyrants against gods, ambition against destiny

The latest blockbuster to come from epic Indian cinema, Kalki 2989 AD is India's most expensive film so far. Set in a far future beset by hunger, despotism and hopelessness, it follows a handful of improbable heroes struggling to bring about a new era of peace.

The background context for this film is the Kurukshetra War, a pivotal moment in epic Indian literature. According to the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata, two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fought each other brutally for eighteen days over control of the Kingdom of Hastinapura. Toward the end of the war, one formidable soldier allied with the Kauravas, Ashwatthama, upon seeing that his side was losing, hurled a weapon of divine might against princess Uttara, who was pregnant with the last surviving heir of the Pandavas. The hero Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, stopped the attack and cursed Ashwatthama to walk the earth for centuries.

The film takes these events and gives them a continuation in our far future. The opening credits, which consist of a digital animation of scenes from the Kurukshetra War, end in a close-up of a CGI shoot of grass that blends into an identical-looking, real shoot of grass. The meaning is clear: the realm of myth extends into the real world. In this future setting, the Kali Yuga, the cosmic era ruled by sin and perversion, is nearing its end, and the hero Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu, who will restore the world and put an end to evil, is about to be born. Unfortunately, the tyrant who controls the last surviving human city has a habit of kidnapping fertile women for horrific experiments to try and extend his own lifespan. It is one of those women who is carrying the foretold savior of humankind.

Kalki 2898 AD does a good job of explaining the basics of its massive lore, but for Western viewers it wouldn't hurt to brush up on their Hindu mythology. Much of the emotional impact of the plot (especially the return of Ashwatthama as an eight-foot-tall badass immortal) relies on the audience's assumed familiarity with and personal investment in Hindu eschatology. This is not like watching a movie about Hercules or Achilles, where we know the relevant myths but don't take them as historical fact. Rather, imagine if the plot of Left Behind happened in the setting of Mad Max, and, more importantly, imagine that you're a devoted believer. The tacit position of the film, and of its intended audience, is that the Mahabaratha narrates actual events that happened in real life. Whereas Western scriptwriters and directors will probably not feel any reverence for the Olympian gods, to a huge portion of the Indian population the Hindu gods are very real. Keep that in mind as you sit to watch.

Once the stakes are defined, the film becomes a series of frantic chase scenes between bad guys and good guys trying to snatch this desperate pregnant woman who never asked to occupy such an important position. Combat scenes are a mixed bag: while Ashwatthama (now tasked with protecting Kalki's mother until he can be born) commands every scene he appears in with his imposing presence and impeccable acting (no surprise there, since he's played by cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan), his sometimes rival, a bounty hunter named Bhairava, is comparably strong, but the visual effects used in his fighting moves are too obviously fake. Nameless mooks get smashed against the walls like bowling pins, making Bhairava's battles (even the all-important one at the end) look more comical than awesome.

Visual effects in general are a problem with this film. Landscape shots look impressive, but the objects moving in the foreground seem copied and pasted from a stock photo archive. Together with the Zack Snyder-style yellowish tint that was applied all over the film, the disorienting editing between sequences and even within the same scene, the ill-advised use of fast motion for dramatic effect, and the cringeworthy sense of humor, these moviemaking choices rob Kalki 2898 AD of the majestic aura it wants to claim.

Your enjoyment of the protagonist, bounty hunter Bhairava, will depend on how much patience you have for the lovable rogue archetype. Take Han Solo, but replace Chewbacca with KITT from Knight Rider, and you'll get the idea. It's interesting that Bhairava starts the movie in opposition to the aims of divine prophecy, but gradually becomes an antiheroic figure who fights the villains for selfish reasons. Alas, the rest of the cast isn't fleshed out at all. The expectant mother of the god Vishnu is treated as a standard-issue damsel in distress; the generic mid-level commander who persecutes our heroes is stuck in the role of generic mid-level commander; the supporting heroes are an interchangeable collection of cool gadgets and catchphrases; and the minor villains are disposable meat. That's a common problem with plots built on prophecy: characters don't need to grow, because victory is already written in stone.

This film is the first entry in a planned Kalki Cinematic Universe that has already produced a prequel series. Accordingly, Kalki 2898 AD ends in a cliffhanger that renders much of its plot moot. In a discouraging imitation of Hollywood's worst habits, the film even has a post-credits scene that teases a bigger battle with the final boss. It's clear that the producers want to go big with this, but the studio needs to hire better scriptwriters, and the visual effects aren't yet at a level capable of delivering a spectacle deserving of awe.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

A fantastical future world of giant robots, broken AIs, and brutal societies

Sunai has a problem. A lot of problems, given his true nature and role in life. And his possible relationship with an expert in AI shrines and technology, Veyadi, is just one of those thorny problems. But in a world where broken artificial intelligences, giant mecha robots and repressive city states are what the Earth has got, Sunai is going to have to deal with his problems, and the new ones engendered by an expedition that might awaken yet another AI god into an already fractious and corrupted world of them...

This is the story of The Archive Undying from Emma Mieko Candon.

Imagine a world of artificial intelligences as veritable gods, but fallible gods. Gods that can be corrupted, destroyed, changed. A world of advanced technology and hardscrabble living by the humans in the midst of gods, broken gods, mecha, and much more. It’s a tapestry rich with potential for worldbuilding.

And indeed the worldbuilding is where this novel really shines. The world Candon creates here is unpleasant in many ways. An undefined amount of time in the future (but given the utter lack of references to anything resembling our present, it’s a long time to be sure), the world appears to be a set of city-states or small polities. Artificial intelligences, in various levels of corruption or disrepair, run these city-states. Most of the states, from the implications in the novel, are much like other brutal, oppressive, hostile places that have resorted to violent control because of dangers like fragmentary portions of AI and war machines: “fragtech.” The potential of finding valuable things in shrines and in the ruins and the dangerous world outside the city-states does draw the desperate and determined, but even right in the city-state itself, fragtech can appear, and strange half-controlled mecha like the Maw. In other words, this is not a safe world, and it provides a canvas to build story and characters upon.

Speaking of mecha: My exposure to mecha (in the form of anime and manga, anyway) has been limited, and so this chance to appreciate giant robots (powered by AI, by corrupted AI, by fragtech and so forth) might be slightly wasted on me as a reader. Nevertheless, even with my limited exposure to such things, the giant robots and the conflicts and pulse-pounding action beats enthused me as a reader. This novel could be thought of as “Come for the action with giant robots, stay for the thought-provoking ideas about artificial intelligence, sentience, the uses of technology, society, and a love story all in the bargain.” And did I mention AIs?

Now imagine a fragment of one of those AIs, one Sunai, who has wound up in the Wrong Bed with the Wrong Person. He’s had a hard life, especially given that he mostly hides his true nature (who wouldn’t in this world?). The Archive Undying imagines Sunai (our primary point of view)’s life struggling to survive and persist in a world that is fascinating and precarious (even given his nature, and perhaps especially so). At the bottom of all of that worldbuilding that I’ve discussed through most of this review is the story of Sunai, his relationship with Veyadi and how they try to navigate a relationship that probably shouldn’t work, can’t work, but matters of the heart are the thorniest and prickliest things in this future world that Candon creates.

I’ve used that metaphor of thorns and prickliness a couple of times and I want to emphasize that again in the context of the social relations in the novel. People in this world have pasts and presents and intersect with each other in sharp, pointed, multidimensional ways. And while both Sunai and Veyadi are our protagonists and are definitely sympathetic protagonists at that, both of them have agendas and multiple angles to them and what they do. Where the magic really happens is in Candon throwing both men together in this relationship. I could see in the hands of another writer their relationship blowing up and falling to pieces, but that is not the story she wants to tell. But she doesn’t make it easy in the least for either of them.

There is also a clever use of point of view in the novel, showing the author’s skill and subtlety in bringing across character and theme. In addition to the primary point of view and narrative thread, Candon deploys the second person effectively in two ways. First, in bringing us some of the backstory of Sunai, and how he wound up tangled up with Veyadi and the story that unfolds in the primary narrative. And second, it helps introduce a “hidden character” to the narrative whose nature, motives and goals becomes clear as the novel moves toward its final act.¹

It’s a rich and deeply interesting and immersive world that Candon has created. There are a couple of touchstones for me that came to mind. First up would be the world of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain. That novel imagines a future world that resonates somewhat with this one, with AIs running cities, the world outside quite dangerous to traverse, and a sense of populations bottled up with forces beyond their control in charge of them. That novel’s Kathmandu is a more pleasant place overall than the Harbor of this book, however. The Archive Undying turns the dystopian aspects of the far future setting a few notches up, and replaces myth and magic with the aforementioned mecha.

Also, I was put in mind of the Outside novels by Ada Hoffmann, which have AIs turning into gods and thus ruling the human population. That series has an interstellar feel to it, although the second novel in particular, The Fallen, mostly sticks to one broken planet, with a lot of dangers and leftovers for the humans to try and deal with even as gods and angels maneuver and scheme.

Overall, I found The Archive Undying richly and deeply detailed and a fascinating world and set of characters to visit. I do understand that more novels and stories are projected in this wildly inventive setting, and I look forward to reading them.

1. Maybe its just a recency effect, or just the luck of what I am reading, but I seem to be noticing more and more the careful and judicious use of second person tense in SFF recently. It’s never the only tense, and its use is as an added ingredient; load-bearing, but not the only thing going on. One thing that these stories seem to be exploring with the use of the second person is something that is implicit in every story that is not first person: Who is telling the story and what is their agenda and viewpoint? Second person has an intimacy in that someone is telling you what you are doing. Who that someone is (if the second person is done well) is incredibly important and can provide extra buttressing to the narrative. Candon manages that quite effectively here.

Highlights:

• Interesting AI theology and setup

• Fascinating use of point of view to engender intimacy in the narrative

• GIANT MECHA

Reference: Candon, Emma Mieko. The Archive Undying [Tordotcom, 2023].

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

First Contact: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A smug exploration of a rather silly idea that misses an opportunity to convince.

I’d like to start this First Contact with a bit of positioning. I’m not a huge consumer of so-called Golden Era SFF, in large part because my tastes have been formed on more modern books. Modern SFF tends to be written with the understanding that elements such as character arcs, relationships, and perhaps even (stay with me here, I know this is wacky) women have a role in stories. So I am approaching this First Contact project with a bit of pre-judgment in heart. And in my view, that’s fine. These books have been around for a while, and they’ve gotten on just fine without any kind of ostensibly unbiased journalist evaluation from me. No, my goal is to stay sitting exactly where I sit right now, with my modern tastes and 21st-century outlook and expectations of SFF as a field, and report how that background reacts to Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

Please note that I am not taking pain to avoid spoilers the way I would with a review of a more recent book. Y’alls have had 70 years to read it. But in case it’s been sixty years since you refreshed your memory, we’ll start with a brief summary:

Summary

An enormous, Galaxy-spanning empire with a population in the quadrillions is on the edge of collapse. But only one man, Hari Seldon, can see it. Seldon has invented a form of probabilistic modeling of historical events and likely future outcomes that he calls psychohistory, and on the strength of this modeling he predicts that the Galactic Empire will fall. He is arrested for his doomsaying, but manages to persuade the government to give him a planet all his own to create an Encyclopedia of all galactic knowledge, which he claims will shorten the catastrophic disruption that will probabilistically-but-also-inevitably ensue when the Empire falls. The book follows the events on this Encyclopedia-creating planetary project, called Foundation, through the next several generations, in a series of vignettes. Each vignette has roughly the same structure:

1. Some challenge or conflict or hardship arises.
2. Hari Seldon has predicted that it would arise.
3. Some very clever people bravely do nothing, resisting the urge of lesser minds to take proactive measures, because they are confident that the correct course of action predicted by Seldon will reveal itself.
4. The clever people are vindicated. Seldon was right, the problem is now solved.

I understand the appeal of this sort of plot structure. Competence porn is attractive, and this book is only competence porn. However, the fact remains that psychohistory strikes me as fundamentally silly, and the one way it could have been turned into something brilliant is underexplored, or else entirely overlooked (I can't figure out which).

The silliness of psychohistory

I’m going to leave aside things like my disbelief in the ability to model so far in the future, because chaos theory and the butterfly effect were not known in 1951. It's not fair to criticize Asimov for being ignorant about sensitive dependence on initials conditions. (Although I will maintain that, even from the perspective of the 1950s, it's hard to get behind a mathematical modeling algorithm that can condense the complexity of a quadrillions-strong Galactic Empire into a mathematical representation that can be evaluated and confirmed or disconfirmed by one guy looking at a pocket calculator.) No, I’ll accept the fictional component of this science fictional concept for now.

But within the domain of its fictional function, psychohistory still doesn’t work. In part, I think Asimov couldn’t decide how difficult he wanted it to be. Quite early on, Seldon explains its principles in the span of a single conversation with a young protege of his, so it’s not like you need to devote your life to it to understand it. And there are quadrillions of people in this galaxy. If only one in a million people are mathematically astute enough to grasp it, that still means we have billions of mathematicians who, in the course of a single conversation, can understand how psychohistory works, confirm that Seldon’s calculations are correct, and buy into his predictions and recommendations not out of blind faith, but out of a firm grounding in the principles of this new discipline.

I’m going to go with that, because the alternative is that psychohistory is so mind-bogglingly complex and hard that only Hari Seldon and a very select few of his proteges can do it. And if that’s the case, then the Galactic Empire went all the way from getting ready to execute Seldon for disloyal speech to giving him a whole-ass planet on only his word, uncorroborated by no one except his own people. And that’s just silly, right? Seldon says he can demonstrate the validity of his predictions ‘only to another mathematician,’ so I'll assume he does, in fact, do so, to the satisfaction of the government. (And, in our era of climate change, major props to the government for believing him and taking his recommended actions!)

So: psychohistory is hard and novel, and Hari Seldon developed it, but it’s not that hard.

Why, then, in later generations on the Foundation, after Seldon’s death, does it become a lost science? We’re told that it’s because records of psychohistory are not included in the Encyclopedia project, and “psychologists” are not included in the starting staff of the project. (That seems a bit rough to the 50 or so staff members who worked with Seldon on his doomsaying predictions. Do they all get left behind? Do they get new jobs? Did Seldon write them a reference before heading off?) This is clearly an intentional decision, and also not one that is ever explained.

But the thing is, once something has been discovered, it’s not hard to rediscover it. And remember, psychohistory is not that hard to understand. You can confirm its correctness over the course of a single conversation if you have the right mathematical background. What’s more, the entire existence of the Foundation, along with its tradition of rigorous education and preservation of knowledge, is founded (hah) upon the validity of psychohistory. And not one of these brilliant knowledge-workers has ever thought, ‘Hmmm, I wonder how our founding discipline actually worked?’ No one has managed to rediscover its principles and rederive its formulae? That seems a bit off.

The missed opportunity of the psychohistorical religion

Of course, one reason no one tries to redevelop psychohistory is because it has taken on some sort of religious status, such that questioning it is taboo. Certainly in later generations of the Foundation, people start saying things like, ‘By Seldon!’ and showing a wildly blind faith in following ‘Seldon’s Plan,’ exactly like it is some religious creed. That’s actually rather a neat idea. And, in fact, it has a fascinating resonance with the relations between the Foundation and its surrounding, declining planetary neighbours. Consider, for example, the planet Anacreon. They start showing signs of wanting to do some conquering on the Foundation as the fall of galactic civilization proceeds, until the Foundation manages to placate them with their more advanced technology. But because the Foundation is badly outnumbered by Anacreon, they don’t want to let the Anacreon people become technological equals. To forestall this, they share their technology by couching it as religious miracle. The Foundation educates the young people of Anacreon, but only ‘empirically’—i.e., they teach them to work the technology by rote memorization, rather than proper understanding of nuclear physics. Anacreon technicians can press the buttons, but they don’t get to learn the principles behind the machines, and cannot repair them if they get damaged. Indeed, the Foundation explicitly teaches them that this is a divine power, that the machines work by miracles.

(I will skip over, once again, the fact that an ENTIRE PLANET full of well-maintained, working machines, with a population of smart young people being brought TO THE FOUNDATION ITSELF to learn how to work them, is probably not going to take too long to rediscover the principles of nuclear physics, no matter how sequestered the Anacreon youth are. I will simply accept that, in this world of Asimov’s, large populations of people do not rediscover fundamental principles of science, no matter how much opportunity, education, resources, and motivation they have at their disposal.)

So, the poor benighted people do not know the principles of the scientific discipline that governs their existence, and must lead their lives unquestioningly according to the rote instructions of their religious leaders. Do you see it? Do you see the parallels between nuclear theory, a religious miracle bestowed by the almighty Foundation upon unquestioning Anacreons; and psychohistory, a religious miracle bestowed by almighty Hari Seldon upon the unquestioning Foundation? Is that not very neat and cool? I think so!

However, I do not think that Asimov thought so. In fact, I find myself wondering if he saw the parallels at all. When I write them down, it seems far too obvious not to notice, but when I was actually reading the book, all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of smugness: ‘Psychohistory and Seldon smart and good! Religious belief dumb and bad!’ Over and over again, the plot offers us examples of how Seldon’s predictions are absolutely correct, and how the people in the Foundation are correct to follow the Seldon Plan and have faith and stay the course, and they will come out on top. (I have heard rumours that this falls apart in later books, which is fine, but since I did not read those books, I cannot comment further on them.)

There’s more I could say. I could discuss the low-hanging fruit of women, and how a quick Ctrl+F for the word ‘she’ returned exactly one hit between pages 1 and 131, and that one is referring to a planetary government, rather than to a person. I could mention the repeated claims that Seldon can predict only general tendencies rather than specific events—except for when he correctly predicts that a particular person will be arrested on a particular day. I could question how useful psychohistory actually is, if the people who govern a planet according to Seldon’s plan must argue amongst themselves about what action to take or not to take in order to preserve the outcomes of his plan. Since the plan operates on broad tendencies rather than individual actions, shouldn't it not matter? If his plan breaks every time a particular governmental official does or does not do something, how robust is it, actually, across centuries and millennia?

So that brings us back to faith again. I have difficulty believing that Seldon can predict 100 years in the future regarding the fate of the Foundation, let alone 1000 for the entire galaxy. But he sure can make Foundationers think he can, and so they act (or don’t act) according to their faith in his pseudoscience. And to the extent that the plot bears out the decisions of these believers of this book, it might just as well be religious miracle as scientific ‘psychohistory.’ If the former —if it is a true supernatural miracle— then Asimov is being really rather brilliant. But if the latter, if we're supposed to accept that psychohistory is real, then Asimov just thinks he’s being clever while actually spinning a very silly story about a very silly pseudoscience. And I fear it’s the latter we’ve got on our hands.

--

Highlights:

• Very clever men being clever
• No women
• Competence porn

Nerd coefficient: 4/10, not very good.

Reference: Asimov, Isaac. Foundation [Harper Collins, 1995/first published Gnome Press, 1951].

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

Microreview: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

A retelling of a very famous story in a fascinating, far future, slowly decaying city.

Tell me if you've heard this before. A down at the heels "street-rat" and their monkey live in a beautiful, if corrupt city, where the wealthy do well and other people do not. They are contracted by Antim, a high official in the city's administration to find a powerful artifact, an artifact that has an entity that will provide the owner with whatever they desire. But when they get a hold of the artifact themselves, the equation changes completely. And then there is the attractive noble in the palace and their father, both of whom are overawed by that powerful corrupt official...

Except, this is the far future, the monkey is actually a bot and is her brother, and the mysterious narrator of this entire tale is of uncertain provenance themself.

This is the story of Samit Basu's The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport.

I am going to begin at the ending for a change. In the acknowledgements and notes, Samit Basu makes it absolutely clear that this is an interpretation of the story of Aladdin. He makes it absolutely clear when, after setting up our protagonists, he introduces the Jinn, who first manifests and is described in a way that anyone who has seen the Disney cartoon will recognize. And the novel itself eventually invokes Aladdin in other ways as well for the reader to discover. 

But this is no straightforward retelling of Aladdin in the far future. Lina is our Aladdin, but rather than just being a straight up "street-rat", she is the daughter of failed revolutionaries. She is still living hand-to-mouth and has to constantly avoid the authorities who keep tabs on her.  Her brother is a constructed bot in the shape of a monkey. Bador (formerly Danil) has a lot of hopes and plans. Much more than Abu from that cartoon does. Even in a world where bots are common members of society, he does not have what he desperately craves, and that is respect. Oh, and also complete and free rights for bots like himself. He is more than he appears, however, as early on he gets mixed up in a tournament fight between two large Pacific Rim-style bots and is not the hopeless combatant you might expect. Not by a long way.

And of course the Jinn. This is a novel where a lot of technology is indistinguishable from magic, but even so, the Jinn works by means that are mysterious to everyone. It's a powerful AI, and an alien one at at. It has strict and familiar rules (3 "wishes") that can be potentially abused by clever wording. It's not so much a character as a nearly literal deus ex machina.

But if unlike the movie the Jinn is not a character, there is an additional one, and one right in front of the reader. The narrator of this story. One of the themes I've explored in my reviews, learned intently from the 4th Street Fantasy convention, is that point of view solves everything. The choice of POV is important, crucial, and tells as much about the story as anything else. That simple choice (or choices if you go multiple) in who you have to tell your story shapes your novel in intriguing and important ways.

So who is the narrator of this story? It's not Lina or her brother, or even their mother who has big plans for the Jinn and its power. It's not the Jinn, the Jinn is not a character here as it is in the aforementioned movie. The Not-Prince, (our Princess Jasmine analogue) is not the narrator, either. Instead, the narrator is an entity of some kind found at the beginning by Lina and her brother. This entity says it's a "story-bot" but it doesn't truly explain at first what that means (and so we the reader have to figure it out.

The Story-Bot, Moku,  as point of view means we get externality on both the siblings and the action in general and provides us with a "two-shot" sort of look at Shantiport and its denizens, and life.

However, this is an entity that they don't understand, and as things progress and secrets are revealed, Moku themselves aren't quite what they appear, or even think that they are. 

The setting is rich and interesting. Right from the first chapter, we get a view of a complex and complicated far future city that is literally crumbling and sinking, but is in the end, still home. It's a city of power and poverty, of oppression and opportunity. A city where crime lords control swaths of the city and put on fighting tournaments, where tourists from afar come to marvel at the ruins and history of a city that has lasted thousands of years and cycles of history, and where there are ancient secrets and technologies buried in the muck. Basu's writing is immersive, evocative, sensory and it put me as a reader right into Shanti-port. It's a place I would love to visit and photograph...but make no mistake, I'd always have to watch my back.

Even beyond the main characters, Basu peoples this world with a fascinating gallery of characters large and small. While character development and arcs are limited to the main characters, even small roles, like the bot General Nagpoe. Oh, and Tanai. Tanai is a mystery character, a space hero who is powerful, dangerous and has an agenda of his own. Struggles over directing him, neutralizing him, or getting him on side are an important side plot in the novel.

But even more than the interesting characters and setting is the prevailing theme of the novel, a theme that overawed in my mind the other strong virtue And that theme is power.

So, what can one do with "wishes" when dealing with a powerful alien techno-djinn at one's command? There is a lot of debate between the characters as to what to do with such power, and how to keep such power out of the hands of those who would abuse it. There is a lot of matter thinking about the consequences of "Wishes" and the limits of unbridled and sudden change. Shantiport is a tower slowly decaying and sinking, and even an alien techno-djinn cannot solve all of its problems without what might be very harsh consequences for a lot of people. And then there are the questions of what to use the "wishes" for--personal or social reasons. 

As Lina says:

"People really show you who they are when they think you serve them, and they have power over you."

These questions of power, above and beyond the plot and action beats, are what really drive the novel. The core of this story at the end is, for me, about power: What do you do to get it, keep it and what do you do with it? Basu gives us no easy answers and while the main protagonists go well by the experience, there is in the end no "happily ever after". The world, and what they do and what happens is very much a work in progress.

The contemporary novel that The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport reminds me of, on a couple of axes, is The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon.  Again, far future setting in a city that has seen much better days. Again, the technology as nearly magic. Again, artificial intelligences, and their rights, powers, prerequisites, and goals as strong actors in the narrative. Again, dangerous quests mixed with a street-level concern for the citizens of the city-state. The other work both works are in dialogue with is Saad Houssain's The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, which again has AIs, magic, technology and a far future setting. Both Archive and this novel have huge bots thundering around the landscape. The Kathmandu of The Gurkha and Shant-port are very much panopticons by the authorities and trying to avoid that notice is plot-relevant and important.  And all three have a mythic resonance. Archive has AIs as Gods. Gurkha has a Djinn King. This novel has mysterious alien Techno-djinn, a story structure based on the Arabian Nights and like the other two, puts that blend of science and magic (or indistinguishable from magic science) on high and comes up with a very spicy and tangy result. 

--

The Math

Highlights: Strong retelling of Aladdin, techno magic worldbuilding melds wonderfully with setting,  excellent ponderings of the costs of power and change

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Basu, Samit, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, [Tordotcom, 2023]

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

Microreview [book]: The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Far future science fiction that engages with questions of gender and societal change

Fift is a 3-bodied Staidchild growing up in the neighbourhood of Foo, in the nation of Fullbelly on a planet with trillions of subterranean inhabitants. Fift has seven Fathers and one Mother; as an only child, ze is viewed a little suspiciously by a society that offers privilege to lastborns. Ze also had problems integrating the sensory experiences of having three independent (if identical) bodies as a child, though ze overcomes this as ze gets older. Fift's childhood is largely unremarkable until zir fifteenth year, when ze receives tickets for a live performance that ends up turning zir whole planet's society on its head. Since ze lives in a world where anyone can tune into anyone else's "Feed" and view what they are doing at any time, zir fame quickly snowballs, with huge implications for zir coming of age, relationship with zir best friend Shria (who, as a person of Vail gender, ze isn't supposed to have a crush on)  and, of course, the revolution ze is caught up in.

If that sounds like a lot, then... yes. Welcome! The Unravelling is a far, far, far-far-far, far, far, far future story of a human society that is immensely different from our own, evolved over tens of thousands of years on an unnamed alien planet to the point where genders, societal relationships, life milestones, norms of privacy and selfhood, taboos and even terms of endearment have become all but unrecognisable. It's a world where individuals exist simultaneously in different places, doing different things and holding separate conversations (sometimes sharing information  they've picked up in one of their other bodies with others who aren't there), where one can sleep AND do one's homework AND hang out with friends at exactly the same time, giving equal weight to each activity. The subterranean setting (the surface of the planet is perfectly inhabitable but has been given over to a giant forest nature reserve) and all the descriptions of floating habitats and transportation tubes is perfectly coherent, but it's also hard to really comprehend. Within this bizarre worldbuilding, all we really have to grasp on to are the very recognisable human emotions, particularly Fift's: and there, the Unraveling uses elements of its far future setting to really ramp up the stakes. Fift is recognisably a teenager to us, but in zir world ze is somewhere in First Childhood, and ze won't be expected to come of age for a century, making zir frustration with zir parents' attempts to control zir even more of a challenge because ze has what, to us, is a lifetime to put up with it. Add into that a complete lack of privacy, and an economic system based on collective societal approval, and Fift has an enormous weight on zir shoulders: one that's created by an unrecognisable society out of all-too-recognisable elements.

The Unravelling's version of gender took a while to land with me, but when it does it becomes clear how restrictive and harmful the gender roles of the Staids and Vails are. There is a definite sense that Staids are given more power in their world, with greater access to knowledge and history through their participation in the "Long Conversation", a sort of ritualised group recitation that is taboo for Vails to know anything about (although the actual content of the Long Conversation is generally depicted as a bit navel gazey and ridiculous despite its cultural importance). Staids are supposed to be the unmoving "centre" around which the Vails operate, but we also see glimpses of how toxic growing up Staid can be, including parents who "mood collar" their children, suppressing all of their emotions in order to make sure they don't violate gender norms. On the other side, we meet more Vails, who are supposed to be passionate and mercurial and to be more attuned to their physicality - which means lots of (appropriate, ritualised) fighting and lots of sex. Our perspective of Vail coming-of-age comes through Shria, Fift's best friend turned forbidden-love-interest, although we get much less of a sense of what makes vem tick. We also meet more Vails who are outright unhappy with the system and their place in it (though most of Fift's parents are Vails, and all of the ones we spend time with represent a much more conservative viewpoint), and its the push to overturn the relationship between Vails and Staids that triggers the broader "unraveling" of society to which the title refers.

Because its worldbuilding is so dense, and because Fift is usually doing something in more than one place simultaneously, The Unraveling is constantly throwing new information and action at the reader, whether that be exposition about new aspects of Fullbelly society or a line-by-line switch between a parental argument and a violent riot. The effect is impressive, but it can also get exhausting, and in the most high-action sequences it has the effect of being both overwhelming and making things feel much slower than they would if each scene was taken in turn. Because Fift is usually at home in at least one of zir bodies, it also makes zir parents (who do technically have individual quirks, but there are several fathers who just become interchangably shrill) into a near-constant melodramatic chorus, berating Fift and each other and the state of society while ze is trying to get zirself out of highly challenging situations. That's not to say that The Unraveling's multi-bodied balancing act isn't impressive - those high-action scenes flow together in a way that frankly has no right to work as well as it does, somehow managing to signpost where Fift is interacting with each character across vastly different social spheres. It's just that the way that affected the narrative didn't hit as well for me as I'd have liked. 

Still, despite the painful parents and the oddly paced action sequences, The Unraveling managed to really invest me in its strange, far future revolution and especially in the coming-of-age journey of Fift, the kid who gets inadvertently stuck in the middle of it all. At its core, this is highly engaging science fiction: a novel that asks you to invest in a radical thought experiment, and then follows through with some truly magnificent weirdness and an engaging emotional journey. Its unusual and satisfying and it presents its ideas in a way that I think will stay with me for quite some time. Very good stuff indeed.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 following a multiple-bodied human protagonist whose simultaneous interactions play out seamlessly

Penalties: -1 sometimes there's so much going on that it slows the actual plot down

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Posted by: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Rosenbaum, Benjamin. The Unraveling [Erewhon, 2021]