Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall

A very specific type of Star Wars fan gets what they always wanted

There’s a segment of fandom communities, and I can vouch that this is particularly strong in alternate history communities, that likes taking a look at a fantastic setting and seeing how it could be made to make some degree of sense. Of course, many of these settings violate the laws of physics, but you can look at them and impose logical consistency. Being a Star Wars fan, I have often thought of how you could make that universe make sense—and, of course, the Expanded Universe, both before and after the Disney buyout, did this in spades. But now, Disney has done something the franchise, to my knowledge, has never done: released a history book about the Star Wars setting: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall.

Reading this book I could not help but feel that us Star Wars fans were given a great gift in that the universe conspired to get Mr. Kempshall to write a book like this; he himself admits that he had been wanting to write this book for most of his life. He is also a professional historian, specializing in World War I, and having done a lot of work on the representation of history in video games. What you get, then, is a book that feels like it was written by a fan, in the sense that sheer enthusiasm drips off of every page, and by a professional, in that there is a structural rigor undergirding the project that gives it greater depth than simple fan works might.

One of the things that really helps the verisimilitude of the book is that Kempshall knows how history as a discipline works. I am familiar with this type of faux-history book style of writing, as I have been involved with online alternate history communities for the better part of twenty years (and that makes me feel very old to say), and one of the things that become very obvious after a certain point of learning history on your own is that many of them have only gotten facts from Wikipedia and other easily accessible sources that nevertheless lack depth. They write in vagaries and treat facts as bits of trivia and not as pieces of information in a much larger panorama. The works are, as my dear friend and colleague Colin Salt once said while interpreting me, trinketized. As I wrote many years ago:

“How can the neophyte alternate historian improve their questions? I think it’s ultimately a matter of mindset. A mistake many newcomers make (and this is a notion encouraged by many online historical discussion fora, not just alternate historical spaces) is assuming that history is simply the aggregation of bits of trivia, whose own complex interrelationships are neglected. This reduces the study of history to a collection of trinkets rather than the system of the world that many academics spend entire lives studying but a tiny portion. This is not something that newcomers should feel overly guilty over; this is how history is taught as in many school systems before the university level.”

What Kempshall’s book reminded me of very strongly was Robert Sobel’s 1971 work of alternate history, For Want of a Nail, a book about the American Revolution failing, much of what in our world became the eastern United States remaining British and thereby becoming a super-Canada of sorts, and the patriots and their descendants moving into what we would call Texas (they call it the state of Jefferson), intervening in a Mexican civil war, and merging their country and that larger country into the United States of Mexico. Sobel’s book discusses the long-standing rivalry between these two countries over a period of centuries. It is a book that goes to great care to not only detail history, but historiography. He has a whole section of totally fictitious sources at the end, and it is as long as the sources in a real history book would be. There are footnotes throughout the text. More crucially, he frames his work within a longstanding historian’s fight between North American and Mexican historians about the intertwined genesis of their two nations, and complies with an in-universe historiographical convention to have a historian from the other country (in respect to the background of the in-universe author) write the conclusion to a book written about the interaction between both. Looking back on Sobel, I see a commitment not just to emulating history, but emulating how people think about their own history.

Kempshall has done both of these in his book. He has a plethora of footnotes, although no lengthy bibliography at the end. Notably, a large chunk of these sources are audio logs, as well as primary source military records and postwar memoirs. This feels different from an actual history book in setting, but not in aim, as this is a universe that does not have a large production of paper books (befitting a space opera). The in-universe author of this book, a clear stand-in for Kempshall, nevertheless is not simply a pastiche. He took up arms to fight the First Order, and that experience colors his entire view of the events of the previous wars (he argues that it may make more sense to view the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and the war against the First Order as one single decades-long war, not unlike the European Civil War thesis, for example).

Your narrator is, likewise, a politically inclined being. There is a point where he is contemplating the racial capitalism that the Galactic Empire practiced, with humans as a dominant caste and nonhumans as a subordinate caste consigned to second-class citizenship and degrading grunt work (the Wookiees, for example, are exported to various worlds to be used as slave labor. Similarly, Geonosians were used as slaves to build the Death Star), and he ruminates on how there is a blind spot in having a human like himself writing the history of the Galactic Empire, a state built on vicious human supremacy. He has great empathy for the victims of the Empire, demanding that the galaxy respect the decision of a species, for whom a refusal to acknowledge someone is the worst insult imaginable, to refuse to mention the Empire at all. Furthermore, he has seen the cost of warfare, and the cost of totalitarianism, within his own life. He has come to the conclusion that an injury to one is an injury to all, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that none of us are free until all of us are free; and that is a lesson he is intent on imparting to us. It is a lesson, not unlike that in Andor, that is quite relevant to us in our own galaxy.

Kempshall, and his in-universe counterpart, are very good at getting the vastness of the Star Wars setting across. I remember once realizing that the part of me that loved reading many Expanded Universe books, and how they interwove little references to each other, was the same part of me that loved reading different history books on broadly the same period and seeing how they interconnected, and Kempshall realizes that too. An alternate historian friend once talked of how online alternate history has an “accent” of sorts, an unspoken assumption that any historical figure or event that is unfamiliar to the reader can simply be googled by said reader, allowing the actual story to not be bogged down in too much detail (I phrased it, in that same conversation, as an assumption that the reader has Wikipedia open in the next tab over). That is how Kempshall treats a variety of Expanded Universe happenings, several of which I recognized, but also a lot that I didn’t. For those wanting a deep dive into the Star Wars universe, you will be pleased, and you will have more to read (he has reminded me that I really need to get around to reading Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy at some point).

But Kempshall is also very good at discussing the individual. He frames the Galactic Empire as a personalist dictatorship under the malevolent rule of Sheev Palpatine, and as such the psychology of the dictator played a massive role in determining how the Empire actually ruled. It is here where I think Kemphall makes his best interpretations of the Star Wars lore, and particularly one tension that has always existed within it: the conflict between the mystical aspect of the setting and the critique of imperialism within the setting. Tony Gilroy, the man who wrote Rogue One and Andor, wrote that he found Darth Vader to be very difficult to write for in the former, and ultimately decided not to include him in the latter as the mystical feeling of the man who used to be Anakin Skywalker clashed with the very on-the-ground, view-from-the-bottom nature of the latter show.

Kempshall resolves this tension well by being very cognizant of what the average denizen of the galaxy far, far away would actually know about the nature of the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force. His in-universe avatar talks of the journey he underwent in the research for this book, which ultimately convinced him that the Force was real. He considers Palpatine not only as a politician, but as a religious extremist following a creed that is shrouded in secrecy. He, like most of the Galaxy, had only a vague idea of who the Jedi actually were before they were destroyed. He takes the fact that both Jedi and Sith believed in their religions seriously and examines how their creeds affected their behavior. He has only the briefest idea of what the Bendu was, and how he affected the Battle of Atollon (this is in the Rebels show). He believes what transpired when Mace Windu confronted Palpatine to be lost in the mists of history. But he is quite correct in realizing that what Darth Sidious and Darth Vader wanted was not necessarily what the Republic and the Empire wanted.

This judicious evaluation of what the average citizen of the galaxy actually knows, or could potentially know, extends to the workings of the Empire at large. Like a real history book, there are insets in the text that are filled with images. Notably, he says that two pictures of the conference room scene in A New Hope, infamous for Darth Vader nearly choking Admiral Conan Antonio Motti to death, are only allegedly from the Death Star and that their actual provenance cannot be demonstrated with certainty as the battle station was nearly destroyed. Likewise, there are major gaps in what can be understood in regards to Imperial doctrine as well as the lives of Sheev Palpatine among others. This, I found, did a lot of work in persuading me for a moment that this was a real, actual history book.

Kempshall, in his own way, is deconstructing the “cool” image that the Galactic Empire has had for the past few decades in popular culture. This state is not a ruthlessly efficient engine of war that made the railspeeders run on time. This state was an incoherent morass of infighting, egos, and pettiness, all bound together by the megalomania of Sheev Palpatine. He was a man who was so arrogant to believe that he would live forever, and was paranoid to a fault. Even in death the man loved to punish for its own sake, most obviously in Operation Cinder as portrayed in the first Alphabet Squadron book and the new Battlefront II (a move that reminds me very much of Sanji Iwabuchi’s order to his IJA troops, upon seeing that Manila would fall to the Americans any day now, to destroy as many buildings as possible and to rape as many women as possible, to give the Americans and the Filipinos nothing worth liberating). This was a man who, for decades, used a younger image of himself to avoid looking feeble, calling to mind Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s discussion of how strongmen think (Palpatine's depiction here reminds me of John Ganz's conception of a “creep loser” form of fascism). Much as Andor showed the coldness and the misery of the Empire on a personal level, Kempshall shows the dysfunction and immaturity underlying the Empire on a political level. The Death Stars are cast as impractical Nazi-like Wunderwaffen, intended to win any civil war through fear, neglecting that you also need doctrine. One bit near the end is telling: Kempshall talks of how, during the New Republic, Imperial reenactment groups proliferated while most of the rest of the galaxy, especially nonhumans, found the very idea offensive. I cannot help but read this as a critique of the real-world 501st Legion, the legion of fans who dress up in stormtrooper costumes and parade around, who on the one hand probably don’t know that the word “stormtrooper” came from World War I German shock troops, but have also gotten love from canon by becoming the namesake of Darth Vader’s personal formation of stormtroopers.

(Incidentally—this book solidified my belief that the closest real-world analogue to Darth Vader is Yevgeny Prigozhin.)

The book is very good in how it handles the fact that the Empire committed myriad atrocities, up to and including genocide. He treats Alderaan as not merely a spectacular explosion on screen, but as the calculated destruction of an entire way of life. He is very clearly horrified that his book cannot capture the wholeness of the death that the Empire meted out, and you can tell, as a veteran of the war against those who wanted to bring it all back, that it haunts him. He makes an interesting case that Order 66 should be considered the first Imperial genocide, which feels odd until you remember that he is treating the Jedi Order as a religious group, a group that was targeted because it stood for hope.

Kempshall succeeds in doing something I would have thought difficult: building out the universe in the sequel era. I have conflicted feelings about the sequel trilogy; I think, ultimately, that they are entertaining films when viewed by themselves, but it is clear that there was no thematic spine uniting them in the way that there was, for all its flaws, in the prequel trilogy. More damningly, in my mind, they failed to really build out the universe in an interesting way. Kempshall finds the thematic core that the sequels should have had, and runs with it: that era is about the consequences of winning the fight against tyranny, and how to build a better society on its ruins. The age of the First Order, he contends, is the age of the fight for the value of democracy, and how it must be fought again and again, inside every heart.

I finished this book wanting more like it, and not just for Star Wars; there’s a part of me that wants this for StarCraft, and Transformers, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Command & Conquer. While I was reading this book on the Indigenous People’s Day holiday, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and bought Kempshall’s newest Star Wars book, on the history of space combat (which, I promise you, dear reader, I shall review for this blog in due course). This is the sort of book a very specific type of nerd has dreamed of for years, and now we are so lucky to have it. It is the type of book that takes worldbuilding seriously as an aspect of storytelling, while never letting worldbuilding overtake storytelling. It is a reminder to us that rebellions are built on hope, a lesson we, in this galaxy, need more than ever.

Reference: Kempshall, Chris. The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire [Dorling Kindersley, 2024].

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

Book Review: Star Wars: Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear, by Alexander Freed

The thunderous applause is gone and democracy is still dead

The best thing Disney has done with the Star Wars franchise by far is the decision to take the moment when democracy died with thunderous applause and use it to to point a mirror at the state of democracy in our own world. This was the entire raison d’être of Andor, and we got some of the best storytelling in the franchise for it. I am, for one, quite happy that their book division has taken the hint and started exploring this in the novels in earnest. As such, we have gotten the first of a trilogy that will be written by multiple authors, namely Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear by Alexander Freed.

Much of this particular novel is concerned with Lenin’s oft-quoted question (which he pilfered from Nikolay Chernyshevsky): “What is to be done?” Part of the novel begins on Coruscant, a world that, for the moment, feels very much like the Republic is still what it was before the Clone Wars. That is perhaps the most troubling thing about it. One of the novel’s major characters is Mon Mothma, by now a veteran of the Senate, who is doing everything in her power to oppose the fascist new order, and has paid a heavy price for it.

Mon Mothma, a minor character in the original trilogy, and then Revenge of the Sith, and then one of the standout characters of Rogue One and especially Andor, has an arc that seems laser-focused on a particular aspect of the (often grating) discourse among the American left: namely, the role of electoralism and elected officials in an organized resistance. A vocal, annoying minority says that voting is pointless and that the Democratic Party is inherently useless. Such a faction even exists within the Democratic Socialists of America, when Zohran Mamdani has proven the use of that strategy. Mon Mothma is far better than the likes of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. For one, she has suffered for her beliefs, and she bears the scars of the struggle. After the new order came, she was imprisoned and tortured simply as a warning, but she returned to the Senate to fight.

She remains a politician, and I don’t mean that as an insult. She is doing her job admirably, building a coalition to put restraints on the Emperor’s power. She is living the spirit of the old activist idea that you need to be working with a broad enough coalition that some of them make you uncomfortable. She cuts backroom deals, makes promises she probably won’t be able to keep, strategically lies, and makes a whole lot of sausage. She deals with criminals and the openly, proudly corrupt. She likes none of this, but she has a higher purpose, and is simply unwilling to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. She is focused on doing something, not being something, as Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò counseled.

At least some discussion of this novel has argued that Mon Mothma’s arc shows that what she did was ultimately for nothing. Having read the novel, I would disagree with that. So much of what her role in her society is, a role of which she is very cognizant, is a form of theater. The power of an opposition politician in a new autocracy (if you want to be pedantic, I think by the time of the novel the Empire counts, at best, as “competitive authoritarianism,” with the descent to complete dictatorship not occurring until the dissolution of the Senate and the empowerment of the regional governors) operates through the fact that she is seen actively opposing the status quo. If someone like Mon Mothma can speak out against Palpatine, she plants the seeds in billions of people throughout the galaxy that they, themselves, can too. To quote Rogue One: rebellions are built on hope.

Mon Mothma has a foil in another character whose stomping ground is between the trilogies: Bail Organa of Alderaan, by now adoptive father of Leia Organa. This novel is probably one the more detailed looks at his psyche that we get in the broader expanded universe (another is Karen Miller’s novel Wild Space, whose cover—which portrays a deployment of clone troopers that never appears for any substantive amount of time—makes the novel feel by-the-numbers but is actually quite a fun romp), and he plays off the Chandrilan senator in an entertaining manner. He is a maverick, someone who quite obviously enjoys the spotlight and the grandstanding and the big dramatic speeches. He is hesitant, at first, to endorse Mon Mothma’s plans, as he feels they are too dangerous, but he comes around. Even people like him, arguably more cynical than the true believers, have a part to play.

But this is not only a novel of resistance in a clean, bloodless way. One of your other major characters is a former Separatist agent, Soujen Vak-Nhalis, implanted with cybernetics and put in stasis behind Republic lines in case the Separatist cause is defeated. That prognosis came true; it did not foresee the coming of the Empire, or the possibility of a man named Saw Gerrera finding him and waking him from his slumber, seeking to enlist him in his own fight. Through Soujen and through Saw, the novel dives into the other side of the coin upon which Mothma and Organa stand: the part fought with guns and bombs, not speeches and coalitions.

As it becomes clear that actual legislative success will hit roadblocks, you see how people like Saw Gerrera came to make the decisions they did. The Empire is violent, as all empires are, and it is willing to kill in massive numbers to secure its rule from any conceivable threat. This proto-Rebel Alliance is not yet the army of goodness that we know from the original trilogy (if it ever truly was that). These are tough, hard people who are willing to kill and destroy for their goals, and for that, they make the Empire wince, if only for a moment. It is in this context that Soujen begins to really shine as a character. His cause is gone, but he was trained for a purpose. He has the opportunity to use his skills in the service of a new cause not entirely like the one that trained him. He is a tool, and he knows it.

You have other characters, too, bound by the central question of how they will respond to the new order. One is an Imperial intelligence officer who has spent her career in Republic service, believing fiercely in her obligations despite looking forward to retirement. She is handling a young person who is dealing with their own issues and ends up joining a fascist paramilitary, a sort of Imperial Proud Boys. Fascism preys on the disaffected, the disillusioned, those who have lost purpose and abandoned principle without even knowing it, while making enemies of those who truly stand for something.

Despite having no illustrations, the book does a very good job of feeling gray. This is a galaxy with all the color drained out of it, all the luxury of the late Republic washed out and replaced with the gray of an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer (and, yes, pedants, I am aware of the red stripe commonly seen on the Venators). You can imagine that if this book were filmed, it would have a blue tint to it, a coldness that has descended upon everyone. The atmosphere is suffocating, with every compromise the characters have to make and every little reminder of the new regime fostering an atmosphere of pure paranoia.

This has rocketed up to being one of my favorite books of the new canon, and I feel that it is worthy of being one of the best books the franchise has ever produced. What makes this book succeed is its thematic work and its character work; it is so timely, so utterly relevant in its content, that it achieves a self-actualization of the potential of the Star Wars universe of which few works in the franchise can boast. There was an anti-authoritarian kernel within the universe ever since George Lucas dreamed up the original film, and now, finally, people are brave enough to use it.

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

Book Review: Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez

Searching for dignity amidst despotism

Had Catherine Hernandez a less deft hand, her novel Crosshairs would simply be generically dystopian. It is set in an authoritarian near-future Canada which has been taken over by fascists and are rounding up ‘others,’ the term they call the indigenous, the immigrant, the poor, the minority, the queer, as is expected from fascists. The novel is told from the point of view of these ‘others’, primarily Kay, a half-Black half-Filipino gay man and drag queen, as the world collapses around him and joins up with those who also want this new regime dead and gone.

Kay is downtrodden, what would once have been called ‘the wretched of the Earth’. He had never met his father, as he was the product of an intense one-night stand that ignited at a karaoke bar. His mother hated his curly hair, inherited from his father. He grew up in a fundamentalist church, abused by his minder, and then expelled from his house for being gay. He finds solace with his friend from school, and from there finds community and belonging (albeit imperfect belonging) in Toronto’s queer community. He really finds himself as a drag queen, and there achieves something approaching self-actualization. And then, of course, the fascists come to power.

The novel jumps back and forth in time, and to a useful effect. This resistance of necessity comes into being and Kay is thrown into it without really asking, and he meets several people who have joined him in the struggle. Starting with Kay himself, you’ll have a bit of the ‘present’ plot, and then a chapter going back in time, explaining the history of any number of characters, such as Bahadur, a trans Iranian immigrant who is riding, laying down to avoid surveillance, in the same van as Kay. This of course is partially to service character development, and also worldbuilding (and is a sterling example of how K. S. Villoso argued that in speculative fiction character and worldbuilding are best when they bolster each other), but I feel there is a deeper, even more salient point: that revolutions are built by people, and people are endlessly complicated and their actions relentlessly contingent. I’m certain that this dictatorship would eventually fall, but it is due to the combined small choices of thousands of people that it fell in this specific way, rather than another way.

In terms of its plot, this novel is a queer novel of self-discovery, a novel of resistance that brings to mind the likes of the maquis, and also the leftist equivalent of a spy novel. Your ‘spies’ here are not government agents, but rather rebels who sometimes have to pretend to work for the fascist government. It’s a mode of writing I haven’t seen much of but is ripe with storytelling; you are left with the potent question of loyalty to an ideology rather than loyalty to a payroll (let us not pretend the likes of James Bond, for example, are supremely ideologically committed, the blunt objects that they are). There’s a particularly potent bit with a pair of pop stars who at first object to the rising tide of fascism, and then are seemingly co-opted. The payoff to that plotline is both deeply hewed and explosively satisfying. On the other hand, there is a former soldier who is putting the skilled he learned as an instrument of oppression to liberatory ends, but in a way that makes the reader wonder how much of that old training has lodged itself in his mind, and how much he thinks like a soldier even now.

Through much of the latter half of the book there is a well-considered depiction of the different types of resistance, and how each is adapted out of necessity or out of privilege. There is a point when Kay and Bahadur are asked to enlist in a violent struggle by a white gay man who had served in the Canadian Army against indigenous land defenders until having a crisis of conscience. He tells them they will have to risk their lives, and their ultimate objection is that their lives are already at risk day in and day out (they had to take a van, lying down so nobody could see them, to get to this place to begin with), and he has to bluntly reckon with his privilege. However, as events go on, and the discussions between them deepen, the two eventually accept the need to learn to use a gun.

You can tell that this whole thing is painful for Kay, and you get a deep dive into his character through the flashbacks into his life. These bits are some of the best in the book, giving an entry into a fully realized Toronto drag culture, with both wonderful moments of joy as well as enough rough edges to still feel real (he has a racist drag name bestowed upon him at one point, and it takes too long to shake it). The loss of his earlier life plays in resonant counterpoint with the joy he finds here. There is pathos here, and it is moving.

One of the things that makes these flashbacks work is that you are treated to the eerily plausible descent into fascism. There’s a small moment, right in the beginning, that really sets the tone of the worldbuilding: a member of the resistance whose duties are clandestine and peaceful, running an underground rail of sorts, is on her phone listening to a regime-produced podcast that is whitewashing what are clearly concentration camps. That tinge of something very current, a podcast, with something all too miserably common, a concentration camp, is just the right sort of juxtaposition that really sets a mood. The rest of the worldbuilding works because of how little extrapolation actually went on; Canada’s history of settler colonialism, of genocide, of anti-immgrant persecution has been exaggerated only a tad, made the most visible elements of the state to white people rather than simply in the background. Fascism, as Aimé Césaire said, is a ‘return shock’ of colonial practices to the metropole, and that is as true here as it is anywhere else.

Crosshairs is about what the Greeks referred to as ‘thymos,’ what could be translated as ‘spiritedness,’ or the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity and agency and rights worth respecting. The new fascist government is based on denying the thymos of the indigenous, the queer, the immigrant, the woman. The basic demand of these groups, indeed the basic demand behind all civil rights movements, all resistance movements, is that of thymos, the right to stand as a human being worthy of that name. There is a very powerful scene near the end of the book that involves these people declaring before the world their personhood; it is a scene that made me wish I were one of them. It feels odd and somewhat appropriative to say that; I am a straight man, a mixed Filipino-American, and autistic - it’s my sexuality that makes me perhaps not the target audience for this book, but on the other hand, it was Hernandez’s Filipino background, combined with the dystopian angle, that made me check it out from my local library. It is my autism, with all the discrimination I have suffered because of it, that makes my psyche seek thymos, and that seeking is what made the ending have such massive catharsis for me (and of course it bears mentioning that one of the men responsible for Applied Behavior Analysis went on to have a hand in creating conversion therapy). Target audience I may not be, but I found it extremely moving all the same.

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Reference: Hernandez, Catherine. Crosshairs [Atria Books, 2020]

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

Book Review: Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade

Come for the lightsabers, stay for the intense analysis of alienation

I knew I was in for an experience with Delilah Dawson’s Star Wars novel Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade when I looked at the first page of the book and found that it contained a trigger warning for the fact that, over the course of the novel, a character commits suicide. I was blindsided a bit - I don’t expect Star Wars to handle such delicate material. Whatever hesitation or trepidation I may have had was assuaged as Dawson’s novel ended up the most emotionally intense novel in the franchise that I have ever read. I was frankly astounded.

The novel is, ultimately, a novel about the process of radicalizing terrorists, but the terrorists are the dark side. Such organizations prey on a very particular type of person: the isolated, the disaffected, the angry, the sort of person who is utterly dissatisfied with their lot in life and is prone to lashing out. Your potential terrorist here is Iskat Akaris, a padawan of the Jedi Order of an unknown species from an unknown planet, with no heritage to look back towards and no approval from the Order to be found. Her master is cold, her peers hate her for an attempt of demonstrating ability with the Force having gone dangerously awry, and her duties frustrate her and bore her in every measure.

But the other side of terrorist radicalization is the side that our media and our governments like to pretend does not exist. It is the society around these disaffected people that makes them disaffected in the first place. For white nationalist terrorists today, their recruiting grounds are angry young white men who haven’t got what they feel they’ve earned (or in many cases, entitled - be that status or prestige or women or money). For Islamist terrorists, their recruiting grounds are majority-Muslim areas of Western countries that are neglected by their governments, never allowed to truly be neighbors by societies that hate them. It is then unsurprising that groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS or al-Shabaab fill the void, offering them a righteous cause and a pacific Jannah for the price of committing murder.

That uncaring, miserable environment in this novel is the Jedi Temple. The Jedi Order has always had this mystical component to it, a sort of space opera version of an Eastern monastic order, with added martial arts and laser swords. Here, that religious element is brought forth, and it is not simply a religion; in this novel, the Jedi Order is a cult. The Masters tell Iskat again and again that the Order cannot fail; the Order can only be failed. That is the message the Order gives her again and again; her feelings are invalid, her problems are irrelevant, and her suffering is a sin. For daring to stand up, to be herself, she is punished.

The way Dawson writes the Jedi Order in this novel reminded me of the writing of people who have left toxic religious organizations; the one I’ve read the most is Chrissy Stroop, an exvangelical writer who has gone into great detail about the toxicity of American evangelical culture; similar writers have talked about the miseries inflicted by the Catholic Church, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), among many others (not all of them Christian). The throughline through all of these groups is that they create a problem and market the solution. A toxic Evangelical church will deny its members the right to consume secular media. The Jehovah’s Witnesses discourage its members to have friends outside the Church. The Catholic Church denies its followers the ability to have a healthy relationship to sexuality (or a sex life at all to queer people). The Mormon Church discourages its followers from reading about Mormon history from outside approved sources. And the Jedi Order denies its younglings any outside attachment, any family, any love. The Jedi Order only offers a laundry list of obligations, a culture of silence, and a demand for utter obedience.

Dawson has created this setting of the Jedi Temple that is just suffocating. The most aggravating thing, for the reader and for Iskat, is that the Order simply does not view a padawan as a being entitled to the dignity of reason. Again and again and again, she is met with thought-terminating cliches that resolve no issues, solve no problems, ease any tensions. Even as she is proven right in the field of battle, they find reasons to demote her and snub her.

She is discontented, but crucially, she is also violent. She feels at her most self-actualized when she is fighting. She is first deployed at the Battle of Geonosis not long after the first shots of the Clone Wars were fired, and she revels in slaughtering Geonosians. She goes against orders on a subsequent mission, creating diplomatic headaches, but even the Order has to admit that she was effective. You would hope that the Order would find a way to channel this aggression in a useful way, if only on the battlefield, but instead they assign her to teach children. Teaching is of course a worthy calling but it is clearly not the best use of her talents.

From there, the plot rolls on with the inevitability of a boulder running down a mountain, crushing everything before it. Iskat is Yoda’s maxim personified: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Yoda was speaking on the individual level, within the confines of a single conscience, but here you see a version that interplays between individual and broader society. The Jedi fear Iskat, and she fears the Order in turn. The Jedi come to rage at Iskat, leading her to rage at the Order in turn. The Jedi, ultimately, inflict much suffering on Iskat, and Iskat takes all the fury that has welled up within her and unleashes it on the galaxy at large.

The tragedy of the whole thing is enhanced by the possibility of another outcome. There is a sequence where Iskat finds her homeworld (discovered, by pure chance, after someone she meets on a mission recognizes her species) and visits it. This is a world that has decided to reject galactic civilization entirely. There are no starports on this planet, as they have only received misery and death from the merchants from the sky. They are the Sentinelese of this universe, or perhaps the Piraha; they have rejected any attempt to be made ‘legible’ by galactic civilization. They are the highland people of Zomia. They are also reminiscent of the residents of Hydros, the planet of seas and of archipelagos from Robert Silverberg’s novel The Face of the Waters (which I had the fortune to read not long before this novel), a planet whose indigenous species rejects space travel, and whose human colonists came with the knowledge they would never leave.

All of that is to say that her homeworld is a place where Iskat could have existed without all the cruelties and, bluntly, bullshit of the Jedi Order. This is a place where Iskat could have chosen to be Iskat, to be her own person among her own kind. You see in the people here someone who Iskat could have been without the cruelty of galactic civilization. The tragedy of it all comes when Iskat decides she has to leave, to be involved in the misery of the universe. She hasn't been corrupted so much as she has been angled into following a logic of decision-making that can lead only to destruction. And that is what is so painful about it - Dawson has persuaded you that this could have ended no other way.

There is something about the way that Dawson has conjured her images that is so striking in this book. There are multiple images in this novel that I can recall very well some time after reading it. The best of these, by far, is the ending, the last shot of the movie in your mind, that has the cinematic, epic, romantic quality of many great works of film, the Star Wars films themselves by no means the only example. It is that last image, that last painful, searing image, that made me wish that Disney would have the chutzpah to adapt this into a visual format.

I remember feeling a very, very slight twinge of offense when I read that Denis Villeneuve described his Dune movies as ‘Star Wars for adults.’ Realistically, of course, I know what he meant, and I know George Lucas made the first film for children in the style of the serials of his own childhood, and I know how it’s marketed, and Villeneuve’s films are astounding. This book, I think, is what Star Wars for adults, if that is a thing that should be brought into existence to begin with, should look like. There are a lot of meaty ideas in here that a child may not be able to digest (but a brainy teenager, on the other hand, I suspect would profit very much from this). I am confident in saying that this is one of the best works the franchise has produced. If Disney is brave they will pay for more like it, and hopefully from Delilah Dawson.

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Reference: Dawson, Delilah Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade [Random House Worlds, 2023]

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

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

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

Looking Back at War Front: Turning Point

What if World War II happened ... this way?

There is a lot to be said about War Front: Turning Point, as I have discovered it after marching through its twenty-two missions. It is a real-time strategy game from 2007, made by the Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Its premise is a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Red Alert and its gameplay is ultimately a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Generals; I kept thinking about the latter during those missions as Generals was my first RTS and as such it has a place in my heart, for all its silliness.

I fear that that beginning paragraph sounds rather harsh. I enjoyed the game, mostly because I enjoy the primal experience of building an army of tanks and artillery and using it to just wreck shit, which this game provides in spades. I will say I really enjoyed the Eurogamer review of the game, from the year of the latter’s release, and it makes a lot of good points.

As I said, this game draws a lot from Generals, gameplay wise; there’s a version of the battle plans available at the American strategy center from the former game in all three factions of the latter. The resource gathering feels like the halfway point between Red Alert 3 and StarCraft. Base defenses feel closer to CNC than StarCraft, being formidable on their own and not so easily mobbed with basic units. The building is a clone of Generals, down to one faction having the builder be an infantry unit rather than a vehicle. That same faction has a black market, like the GLA, but it is involved with stealing units rather than generating cash (buildings can be built to do such a thing). You have CNC-style oil derricks.

What makes the game frustrating, at first, is the realization that most units are glass cannons, especially tanks. This makes any given mission prone to devolving into a war of attrition, based around economy and sheer patience, veering on resilience, on the part of the player. At least, it did for me until I remembered that upgrades exist, which then breaks the stalemate and turns the gameplay into the sort of tank mob I am fond of (I know it is monotonous, sometimes, but it scratches my animal urge to just wreck shit, when I’m in the right mood). Large formations of tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery, with some anti-air thrown in, will win you campaigns. That tendency towards glass cannons also makes artillery far more important than in comparable games in my experience.

All the glass cannon issues are tripled when concerning aircraft. When playing CNC games, I would often make flying units (comanches, helices, hammerheads, venoms, chopper-VXs, twinblades, harbingers, battle angels) and rip apart enemy bases, but was always careful enough to veer away from anti-air guns whenever possible. StarCraft games on the other hand never really had this issue as the base defenses were comparatively weaker; Terran battleships or Protoss carriers never had the issue. This game takes the CNC balancing and tilts it comically in favor of the anti-air guns; this renders plane-based support powers (another thing lifted from Generals) absolutely useless most of the time as one or two emplacements can cut them into paper. Like, I wanted to drop an atomic bomb, but it was cut down so quickly! Imagine if the Japanese had these guns in 1945! If I had to fix this, I would double if not triple the speed of the aircraft, as they are very slow: the EA CNC games did this well and added real uncertainty to air strikes, which this game should have had.

The tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery I mentioned previously tends to be weapons that historically existed in World War II, and it is telling that most missions can be won with only historical units and not the crazy science fictional units available later on. The most useful of these is an Allied tank that projects a large shield for aforementioned tank mobs. The Germans get a sonic tank and a small mecha of sorts (called an exo-skeleton, reminiscent of the human walkers in the Avatar movies, although this game predates them - and is prominently displayed on the cover art), as well as jetpack troopers (who likewise get mauled by anti-air to a comical degree). The Soviets have even bigger tanks than historically, a giant artillery gun that calls to mind the Schwerer Gustav more than anything else, and lots of cold-based weaponry (a bit stereotypical, but can be really annoying in the field).

In all these fancy doohickeys being easily beaten by historical weaponry, the game ends up reproducing a real dynamic of the actual Second World War in a way that cannot have been deliberate. Rather, the wonky balancing serves historical accuracy; what are ice tanks and exoskeletons and sonic tanks more than wunderwaffen, the overengineered monstrosities made by the Germans in our world in a desperate attempt to win the war when it was obviously lost to anyone actually paying attention. Most didn’t work; the war was won by the dependable Sherman in the West and by the equally dependable T-34 in the East. The Americans, in particular, were a massive economic engine that kept out-producing the Germans. Likewise, the zeppelins you can make as the Germans are sitting ducks for anti-air, which is why zeppelins were phased out as weapons of war in reality. In the game, focusing on the economy to mass produce Shermans (as an Allied player) will win you the battle. It’s not to the level of The Campaign for North Africa by any means, and it wasn’t even intentional, but it was a fun thing to notice.

The more interesting and clever things come in terms of the story, subverting a lot of expected plot beats of World War II alternate history, as well as RTS game stories. When looking at the campaigns, there are only two available: the Allies and the Germans. Starting the game, I thought that the Allied campaign would include both the Western Allies and the Soviets, but I turned out to be wrong; the Soviets are the ultimate villains. The two campaigns are ultimately two sides of a coalition defending Europe from a Soviet invasion after a peace agreement, which itself came after German rebels overthrew the Nazis.

In the menu you will see the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign. This appears to encourage the player to go the Allied route, and then the German route, as I did. The Allied route is the more generic of the two, obligatorily fighting Nazis, and then fighting Soviets with German allies. The German campaign, on the other hand, only has you a loyal servant of the Nazi regime for at most two missions, when your commanding officer reveals to you he is trying to overthrow the Chancellor and ropes you in. In an eleven mission campaign, the German player only fights the Western Allies twice. Three of the remaining missions are fighting other Germans (one with Allied support), and the rest are fighting the Soviets. In other words, you are fighting a civil war as much as a world war, to the point of backing a military coup, something I’ve only seen in Tiberian Twilight with the New Adana insurrection. In my opinion more games should have military coups. There is storytelling potential there.

If you play the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign second, you see the former colored by the latter in interesting ways. There are three missions that are played from different perspectives in each campaign, the other army being represented by an AI that is not particularly smart (there is a mission set in Poland where you, the Germans, have to defend an Allied base from the Soviets, and you practically have to babysit them). Unlike Red Alert 3 a year later, which did a multiplayer version of this, each mission told from different perspectives is subtly different in terms of the respective objectives, particularly the penultimate level, which feels like a proper massive battle with different flanks with different objectives. Unfortunately, the final battle, a gruelling siege of Moscow, plays almost identically for each army.

I find the lack of a Soviet campaign both narratively disappointing and somewhat problematic. The Soviets are the most ‘Eastern’ of the nations at play, as Russia and its empire have so often been considered, not entirely unreasonably, as more Asian than points west. This is often racialized unpleasantly; the Nazis considered Slavs to be subhuman and subsequently treated Eastern Europe far more brutally than Western Europe; in the latter, razing a village was a unique atrocity (see Oradour-sur-Glane or Lidice), while in the former it was de rigueur. Perhaps more chillingly, one recalls that Hitler originally wanted to ally with the British and the Americans to destroy the Soviets; in a game and a world where Hitler is killed early on, he ironically gets his wish.

I have complicated thoughts on that last bit. I think it is very telling that the studio that created this game is Hungarian, a country whose government (led by an Admiral without a Navy) allied with the Nazis, engaged in its own territorial irredentism, helped the Germans invade the Soviet Union, and then was invaded in turn by the Soviets who turned it into a puppet state that lasted until 1991. I cannot help but think that 1956, year the Soviet Army violently crushed a reform movement in that country (and grippingly retold in James Michener’s book The Bridge at Andau), hangs heavily over this game’s story. Having been released in 2007, the developers would likely have been born under Communist rule, known people who lived through 1956, and may well have seen the Soviets as the century’s great enemy more so than the Nazis (a not uncommon sentiment among certain segments of Eastern Europe; see the memorials to Nazi collaborators in Canada, put up by Eastern Europeans who hated the Soviets, or see also the neofascist groups in these countries that often feel similar, such as the Ukrainian Azov Battalion).

On the one hand, there’s a part of me that feels like this is whitewashing the Nazis a bit. On the other hand, I don’t want to minimize the very real suffering that the Soviets unleashed in much of Eastern Europe. But more concretely I think the story told, minus the fantastic weapons, is scarily plausible inasmuch I can imagine a world where this particular alignment of forces happened; indeed, after World War II the British had drawn up plans to invade the Soviet Union as a contingency. In this regard, I think the story succeeds the most, by doing what all great alternate history does: making it very obvious to you that the world we live in exists due to a great multiplicity of contingencies, any one of which going differently leading to a totally different result. But on a more visceral level, you are seeing recognizably Nazi tanks and troops and planes participate in what is cast as a somewhat heroic effort - but that dissonance is what makes that sense of contingency really work. It is a truly different world, not beholden to our aesthetic sensibilities, and where a stahlhelm may not conjure images of genocide.

As expected for games of this period set in World War II, the Holocaust and the other Nazi atrocities are not really dwelt upon (one of the only games I can think of in this ecosystem that does is Company of Heroes 2, which puts the player in charge of the liberation of Majdanek). These may be butterflied away by the assassination of Hitler, but the absence does give the plot an eerie quality (using ‘eerie’ as Mark Fisher did, as the absence of something that you feel should be there).

The game’s cutscenes are really, really good. Each campaign focuses on a few commandos and officers, so there is a good degree of character development. They bicker and complain and wish for things they get to do on leave or after the war, and you can get some affection for them. These cutscenes are obviously done in the game’s engine, but they are done with a certain cinematic verve that really escalates it (the crowning glory being the ending cutscene for a certain mission in France). Some of the personal drama, though, is a bit hackneyed, with each side getting a female commando who inevitably falls for a respective male commando. A detail, but a jarring one; the male commandos keep talking about their desire for ‘babes,’ a word that I don’t think had its modern slang meaning back then, and I can’t remember it being used in any period media, or even works from the sixties. I admit to being pulled out of the story by that a bit.

War Front: Turning Point is ultimately a curiosity, never really becoming a classic of its genres. But it is an enjoyable experience that does some interesting things narratively and gives your monkey brain plenty of opportunities to just break things in the way only RTS games can. There was potential, though, for something deeper, something more epic, and part of me is sad we won’t really get that. But, all in all, I enjoyed the experience.

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

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E8

In "Who are you?", the best episode of season two—and a top-tier moment in television generally—, we bear witness to the Ghorman Massacre. 

Content Warning: Discussion of domestic violence, violence against protesters.

As Cassian is preparing for his assassination of Dedra Meero, the plaza is opened and the Ghorman Front immediately starts to rally people. In a surprising moment of clarity, the leader of the Ghorman Front, Carro Rylanz, points out the danger of gathering, but his rebels refuse to listen to him. Meanwhile, Dedra speaks to her supervisor, Major Partagaz about the plan. “The only story that matters is Ghorman aggression,” he says. “The threats, the inexplicable resistance to imperial norms.” He points the success of their propaganda and media, revealed in the board meeting during episode one: “Our struggles with Ghorman are well documented at this point.” 

In a great piece of cinematic storytelling, a few minutes later as Syril walks through the memorial plaza, a news reporter repeats Partagaz’s lines about resistance to imperial norms. The propaganda plans have fully taken over the media, demonstrating there is no help for the Ghor from the story being recorded by traditional media sources. They are fully part of the Imperial machine.

As Syril makes his way to ask Dedra what’s going on, he’s confronted by Carro Rylanz as people file by, chanting: “We are the Ghor! The galaxy is watching.” Rylanz tells Syril about the mining equipment that’s been witnessed on different parts of the plant, which Syril still tries to deny, but at this point, Rylanz knows Syril must have been helping the Empire and says: “What kind of being are you?” Syril has no response, and Rylanz demands to know: “What’s in our ground? What is it you’ve been sent to steal from us?” Like Rylanz, though, Syril has no knowledge of the mining as Dedra has kept it from him. 

He tries to see Dedra, but he’s blocked by other Imperial officers as things become more volatile during the protest. When he is finally brought in to see her, she reveals the plan he has already guessed. In this moment, Syril finally finds his agency, even though it’s through an exertion of power via domestic violence. In true fascist fashion, he can’t express himself except through domination (as opposed to being dominated by the other women in his life who dictated his agency, such as his mother or Dedra). He chokes her while asking about the mining. His shock seems to have two layers—the destruction of the planet and people he’s come to admire to some degree and the fact his girlfriend kept the information from him. He rushes out to join the crowd.

While Syril’s capability of violence has been demonstrated in season one when he tried to find Cassian, this intimate partner violence demonstrates a shift in his character. Throughout season two, Syril has received much of what he’s wanted. His partner is an officer in ISB, his mother is finally respecting him, and he’s on a special mission for the Empire. Importantly, much of these “successes” haven’t happened due to his choices. In a brilliantly acted scene early in the season, Dedra tells his mother, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), that she will control how much Syril sees his mother and that contact will be dictated by if Eedy can behave. Syril trades one domineering relationship for another. While it does seem like Dedra cares for him in her own way—both of their abilities to care dictated by their lack of empathy—Syril is also controllable, which is why he’s the perfect person to infiltrate the Ghor, because Dedra knows she can control him. 

As Syril realizes he’s been used by his partner, he watches the breakdown of the protest in the plaza as the new recruits from the previous episode are sent out to clear a path to the memorial. While their commanding officer says that’s a bad idea, the officer in charge of the operation sends them out anyway.  

In an intensely powerful moment, Lezine starts singing the Ghorman national anthem. The crowd picks it up, and soon the whole plaza is singing, united in this moment of oppositional nationalism. As they sing, the green recruits go out to clear a path to the memorial, and the crowd grows angry, harassing them while stormtroopers blocking off the plaza observe the situation. Above the plaza, a sniper watches while TIE fighters fly over. 

Partagaz orders Dedra to continue the plan: a sniper takes out one of the young recruits, which prompts the imperial forces to open fire, including the stormtroopers. What had been a crowd singing the Ghorman national anthem becomes stormtroopers and imperial officers shooting into a plaza. A few of the Ghorman Front have blasters, but most of them are unarmed civilians. The sniper continues to take out people from the rooftop.

In the panic, Syril watches the stormtroopers kill people he had been working with, murder the citizens he’d walked past every day, and destroy the plaza his office had overlooked. In a series of slow moments, the camera focuses on Syril standing still in all this violence. 

Several commentators have suggested that Syril might have had some sort of awakening in these moments, and Disney’s official episode guide seems to support that reading as the episode summary states: “[Syril] comes to the realization that he’s been a pawn for the Empire’s machinations.” It’s easy to want to look for redemption for Syril. While he’s not a sympathetic character, we do come to know him intimately over the course of two seasons, from seeing the inside of his bedroom and how his mother treats him to the manipulation from his partner, Dedra. But, he’s always been an active part of the Empire. He wasn’t swept up into it out of necessity or drafted into the stormtroopers or even just passively involved. One of the first introductions to Syril is while he attempts to create an even more stringent sense of law and order on Ferrix. It’s his dream to be recruited by Dedra to be a spy, even if the reason for his spying is at first a lie. To me, what makes Syril such a compelling and well-written character is not this moment where he perhaps regrets his actions but because he is as dedicated to the cause as Cassian or Luthen. Cassian also has moments where he questions their tactics, but he still has resolve. So does Syril as his opposite.

Meanwhile, as Syril is having these confrontations, Cassian is quick to recognize the gathering in the plaza is a bad idea and will end in violence. As he hurries to check out of the hotel, the bellhop, Thela, tells Cassian, “Don’t worry, you were never here. Didn’t log you in.” This moment demonstrates some of the brilliance of the storytelling in Andor—and I want to point out a similar moment in the next episode. Gilroy and his team take careful pains to show how one resists. The tools are documented, and this moment is one of them. Thela breaks a small rule in order to make sure Cassian remains undetected. When Cassian responds that he hopes everything works out, Thela says: “Rebellions are built on hope.” By giving this key line to Thela, it emphasizes even more that it’s not the great leaders like Cassian, Bix, Vel, and Luthen who make the rebellion work, it’s the small acts of resistance that create great opportunities. As Nemik from season one says in his manifesto: “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

Cassian joins the Ghorman protest outside, trying to find Wilmon, as they both realize the stormtroopers are prepared to “kettle” the Ghorman, cutting off their escape in a great visualization of tactics currently being used against protestors in L.A. these past few weeks. Much like Thela’s small act of resistance, Gilroy and his team also show the tactics of empire to disrupt protest. The stormtroopers contain the protestors, fly intimidating TIE fighters over the crowds, and, most importantly, they start the violence by killing one of their own people to then pin on the protestors. K2 units are released on the crowd, and their efficient violence and nearly impenetrable armor makes them horrific enemies as they are able to crush people to death. 

In the violent chaos, Cassian still tries to complete his mission of assassinating Dedra, and as he is about to take the shot, Syril finally sees him in the crowd. Syril reacts with an intensity of violence that we nearly saw when he threatened to kill his partner. Now, he turns all that anger onto Cassian, the man he’d hunted and had caused him to lose his job. It’s a brutal fight as they both go for the soft parts—the eyes, mouths—and use whatever weapons are at hand as the Imperial forces continue to massacre the Ghorman. 

Syril is relentless, dragging himself upright after an explosion that Cassian thinks has taken him out. He finds a gun and has Cassian in his sights. With desperation in his voice, Cassian asks: “Who are you?” Cassian’s lack of awareness of Syril’s existence makes Syril hesitate. It’s easy to imagine what might be going through his mind, that the only reason Syril is standing in that plaza, a contributor to a massacre, is because of Cassian, the man he became obsessed with. In that moment of hesitation, Syril is shot through the head by Rylanz.

In interviews, Gilroy and Diego Luna have talked about how they had to fight to keep the line “Who are you?” in the episode, which seems wild. The moment provides so much clarity for Syril’s character—all that hatred for a person who doesn’t even know him. As a piece of anti-fascist media, this moment feels important to the broader message. A necessary tool of fascism is an “other” that can be blamed for the ills of the world. On an interpersonal level, Cassian represents that “other” for Syril (and from a casting perspective, Diego Luna and Kyle Soller replicate the current fascist othering happening in the U.S. right now). This question from Cassian dramatizes how all that hate from Syril is a one-way street and not representative of reality. Rather, Syril was trying to turn something he'd imagined into reality.

After Syril’s death, Cassian and Wilmon escape the plaza. Wilmon chooses to stay on Ghorman to help his girlfriend, a member of the Ghorman Front. In the final shots, Wilmon’s girlfriend Dreena (Ella Pellegrini), attempts to broadcast what happened during the massacre. Wilmon also charges Cassian to spread the story. 

A long shot shows Cassian’s face as he escapes and Dreena's message plays as narration: “We are under siege. We are being slaughtered…” This message contrasts with the news media, which shares the Imperial narrative that the Ghor started the violence and that the dead imperial officers are martyrs (including Syril). 

What makes this episode, and the following episode “Welcome to the Rebellion,” so important is the familiarity of it all. Videos on TikTok juxtapose shots from these episodes with protests actively happening across the country as I write. Someone graffitied an ad for Andor, adding a speech bubble to Luthen’s mouth condemning ICE. Like the best revolutionary media, Andor has captured our current moment. While Gilroy has stated in interviews that this season wasn’t meant to be predictive, the prescience is still uncanny and speaks to Gilroy and his team’s understanding of fascism.

In a recent video post, resistance scholar Dr. Tad Stoermer points out that Andor is “practically an instruction manual” and sums up what he sees as the takeaway: “Resistance, to have any hope of success, requires regular people…to risk, to sacrifice, to lose with no force on their side other than their own will. […] What are you …willing to risk…for a better world you might never live to see?”

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POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

Book Review: City in Chains

A well-executed fantasy story that is fighting yesterday's battles

I am going to be up front with the reader here and now: I cannot ever be fully objective about the oeuvre of Harry Turtledove. When I was an impressionable fourteen year old, I learned of his WorldWar series. For the unaware, that is his eight book series about an alien invasion that happens to land in the particularly eventful year of 1942. I inhaled those books, and then the eleven books of his Southern Victory (also called ‘Timeline-191’ or ‘TL191’ among online alternate history fans due to its point of divergence revolving around special order 191) series beginning with How Few Remain. I have read over forty of his books, as of writing, and he is the writer that gave me my enduring love of the alternate history genre. He is in a sense what I aspire to be as a writer, with several different speculative genres coexisting with a solid historical bedrock under all of them. I would not be the writer or indeed the man I am today without the hours and hours I spent reading his books, getting lost in his worlds. Not for nothing, his books consistently come with the blurb calling him “the master of alternate history.”

In the alternate history circles I frequent, the man’s work has something of a mixed reception. They say he relies too much on historical parallelism, such as his Southern Victory series quite clearly reenacting European history in the first half of the twentieth century in an American setting, or his Atlantis trilogy reenacting the early history of the United States on a landmass that consists of our world’s Nova Scotia to Florida, having drifted off of the mainland in prehistory. The man has had some deeply bizarre sex scenes in his work, some involving real people (although I will argue that Robert Conroy’s sex scenes are leaps and bounds worse). His work at points has had some very repetitive characterization (such as how often Sam Carsten is sunburned), as well as a few stock turns of phrase (“he said it with inevitability, like the sun will rise tomorrow”). As I have grown from an impressionable fourteen year old to a jaded twenty-eight year old, his books from the 2000s come off to me like the Star Wars prequels; with hindsight, I can see all the myriad flaws that others have pointed out, and many things could have been done better, but I still find myself enjoying the experience, and in awe of the worlds they opened up to me.

Much of the weaknesses of his big series are often connected to the fact that he had to pay for the college educations of his three daughters in quick succession, and writing is his sole source of income. He had to churn a lot out, and quickly, to give his children a future, and I can’t be mad at him for that. His work since then has been leaner, less dependent on well-trod periods of history, and with less bizarre weirdness (but plenty of fascinating weirdness). His book Three Miles Down (reviewed on this site by Arturo Serrano) is easily his most personal book, being a look at the Los Angeles the man himself grew up in, with plenty of wistfulness and added aliens. His Alpha and Omega is delightfully weird. Now, dear reader, I shall get to the point: his most recent novel, City in Chains.

This is one of Turtledove’s straight fantasy novels, with no direct textual reference to our history. However, those with familiarity with the periods that he likes to write about will see the inspiration, as the novel is rather clearly a pastiche of occupied Paris during World War II. The city is Lutesse (no relation to certain peculiar characters in the Bioshock series) in the Kingdom of Quimper, a name which it shares with a city in Brittany (mention is also made of a battle at a place called Carentan, which is also real, and I learned from the mission in the original Company of Heroes). This city, and this kingdom, are under the occupation of the villainous Chleuh, and the quotidian cruelties have become part of the fabric of life.

The exact aesthetic of this whole shebang is a little bit confused, or so I thought. There are trains, but the occupying forces are primarily still using crossbows. As such, the novel feels like an odd mishmash of the Middle Ages and the 19th century with some tropes of World War II fiction thrown in. Of the latter, the most obvious of these is a sort of magically-infused crystal that occupies the role of radio in the historical fiction that inspired this novel. Nighttime bombing raids are in this world nighttime dragon raids; there is a brief plotline where a dragon rider, having been shot down, is secreted away in the basement of one of the main characters and later handed off to the organized resistance (a plotline which, sadly, is ultimately underdeveloped). The whole thing is a mishmash, one with a lot going for it, but overall Turtledove neglects to really describe what this city looks like, smells like, sounds like. The entire project feels more than a little threadbare, abstract even, rather than something concrete.

The book does shine, however, in its two main characters. One of them is Malk Malkovici, a junkman of the minority Old Faith sect who is a refugee from persecution in another country now occupied by the Chleuh. The Old Faith is the target of genocidal persecution by the occupiers, who are sending them to vaguely described but clearly ominous camps in the east, territory occupied by the Chleuh and conquered (albeit apparently temporarily) from a strange monarchy that believes that the gods have declared that wealth needs to be shared. It becomes clear quite early on that Malk is a member of the group that is this world’s analogue for Jewish people under Nazi occupation.

What makes life more complicated for Malk is that his services as a collector of junk, including various types of metal, is in high demand by the occupiers who hate him and, on an ideological level, want to kill him. He and his family are complicit in the occupation and from there the mass murder and the genocide. He has rapport with officers who come to buy his wares, as well as a collaborating policeman whose beat is his neighborhood, and tries not to advertise his religious beliefs. He is wracked by the knowledge that he is, however indirectly and however reluctantly, complicit in evil, but he knows there is a huge price to pay if he were to stand up for himself.

The other main character is Guisa Sachry, a rich man, a great actor, the head of his own theater troupe, and the greatest star of the Lutesse theater scene. He has a much younger wife (his third) and had planned to keep his head down throughout the occupation with inoffensive slice-of-life plays until an officer of the Chleuh military came knocking, ‘asking’ him to appear as one of the Lutesse luminaries at a parade honoring the city’s new rulers. Knowing he stands to lose a lot, perhaps even his life, if he says no, he goes along with it. He is then asked by the occupation to write a play glorifying the occupation and demonizing the resistance. He does so, reluctantly (and the solution he devises to this is a very clever one on Turtledove’s part, one that he is capable of creating because he knows how people interact with the historical and cultural context in which they live), and from there is pulled head first down the vortex of collaboration.

Guisa Sachry is not a good man, and the narrative correctly emphasizes that fact again and again. He hires a dancing girl from another company on the condition that she have sex with him. He is deeply and profoundly unpleasant to his wife, with whom it is clear he doesn’t really love, and the feeling is mutual. He is ruthless to his underlings and sycophantic to the men who pay him off. But it is with that sycophancy that the novel really furnishes its theme, that of complicitness.

Both Malk and Guisa are men who are constrained by structural factors from acting free of the occupation. Malk dislikes working with the Chleuh out of his religious beliefs and his own moral principles. Guisa, on the other hand, has no principles whatsoever, and his own naked self-interest is what compels him to comply; even if he is the ethnic majority in Lutesse, the Chleuh would still make an example if he were to fall out of line. Both don’t want to collaborate, but both are forced into collaboration, their distinct characters and distinct paths nevertheless reaching the same destination.

As a longtime reader of Turtledove’s work, Guisa Sachry as a character reminded me strongly of another one of his characters: William Shakespeare, as portrayed in his novel Ruled Britannia. That novel is set in a world where the Spanish Armada succeeds, and England is under the cruel yoke of Philip II. This version of Shakespeare is a covert sympathizer with the English resistance who is coerced by the Spanish to write a play glorifying Philip, while simultaneously writing a play about Boudica, the ancient queen of the Iceni people who lead a failed rebellion against the Romans, and a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Spanish. Shakespeare, as portrayed by Turtledove, is a man with a strong moral conscience who is forced into collaboration, but takes covert action to resist. Guisa Sachry, on the other hand, is a man with no moral conscience at all, and his arc is almost that of a foil to Shakespeare’s in the earlier novel.

At its core, City in Chains is about collaboration. Many Americans in recent months have been beating the drum against collaboration with the new Trump administration, filled to the brim with neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a rogues' gallery of some of the most unpleasant, most boorish, most malevolent, and most stupid people on the planet. We have, rightly, been infuriated with the spinelessness of Democratic Party leaders in not taking a harder line against the wrecking of the federal government or the evisceration of trans rights in this country, to name but two examples (but a part of me thinks that Ta-Nehisi Coates was right in saying that you can’t really expect a party that had no spine to stand up against the genocide in Gaza to have the spine to stand up for democracy). We are in a moment where the moral imperative is not to comply, but to resist. Releasing a book like City in Chains in a time like this is an interesting decision, and one that is revelatory.

Harry Turtledove is an outspoken liberal on his social media; before he decamped from Twitter, his pinned tweet was “I didn’t mean to be topical” repeated several times. He is consistently good and well intentioned, if not radical, on racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and is blisteringly critical of the current administration. I remember that, in his novel Alpha and Omega, a novel set mostly in Israel (and released a few years before the current genocide), he states frankly, but does not dwell on, the the second-class status of Palestinians in that country. I do remember one particular interaction I had with him on Bluesky where told upcoming writers to share their new works, and I shared Broken Olive Branches, the anthology in which I have a story raising money for refugee relief in Gaza (and discussed on this blog here). He liked and boosted the anthology, for which I am grateful to him. In terms of his historical interests, he has been blisteringly critical of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates.

But the man is not without his blind spots. His portrayal of race is very much that of an older white liberal; his novel Guns of the South has been taken to task by multiple critics in recent years, such as by Monroe Templeton on the Sea Lion Press blog (which, for full disclosure, I have written many articles for in previous years). As an Asian-American (half Filipino through my mother), I was more than a little irritated by the fact that his Hot War trilogy, a series about World War III breaking out over Korea, has no Asian viewpoint character; the only Korean character is the plucky sidekick of a white American soldier.

Ultimately, I think the core of the issue is that Turtledove’s view of World War II is very much that of old war movies, where brave soldiers fight for justice, and innocent civilians bear the brunt of the ultimate evil. The conflict becomes a great moral drama between justice and injustice (in fairness to him, Turtledove has always been frank about American racism both in that period and in other periods). In that regard, he glorifies the resistance fighter and denounces the opportunist, but fundamentally casts the thing that they are resisting as a foreign force, an invader.

This is a view of fascism that has been superseded in the historical literature by a view that situates fascist regimes in the broader context of the imperial world of nineteenth-century Europe. Aimé Cesaire, in 1950, published Discourse on Colonialism, which made the argument that colonialism made Europe a savage continent, one that had come to accept racial hatred and mass murder as de rigueur, a formulation that culminated in Nazism deciding to do those things to other Europeans. Cesaire’s English translator called this a ‘boomerang effect,’ an abstract but effective translation of the original French phrase ‘choc en retour,’ literally ‘return shock.’ Not long after Cesaire, Hannah Arendt argued in her magnum opus Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazism was the confluence of millennia of European antisemitism and the race thinking of imperialism. Hitler himself openly stated that the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was explicitly modeled on the United States.

Here I shall analyze City in Chains as a critical work, in the manner that Phoebe Wagner on this very blog discusses Andor. In attempting to critique modern fascism, he falls into myths of the original fascism. Contemporary American fascism is not something that was imported from Europe; Trump is not merely the achievement of Russian propaganda, but rather a culmination of centuries of American bigotry. A president who is promising ethnic cleansing cannot be considered a break from a country that systematically expelled its indigenous populations from their homelands. A movement that is backed in no small part by violent militias cannot be considered a break from a country that has enforced slavery, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession with heavily armed mobs, some of which called themselves militias.

As a narrative device and as abstract philosophy, the theme of complicitness in this novel succeeds. As a description of complicitness in today’s injustices, it falls flat. This novel has a model of the theme that could work perhaps most perfectly for Ukrainians under the Russian jackboot (and Lord knows they need it), but not in America or Western Europe. For the latter, the complicitness we face is different and in some ways more totalizing. Does the company that makes our food give money to pay tribute to Donald Trump? Is the fast food place we go to supporting the IDF as they raze Gaza to the ground? Is our laptop made in a slave labor camp in Uyghurstan? The complicitness we face now is our own convenience, our survival on a very basic level. What we are complicit with is capitalism, and capitalism gives us no choice. This is the essence of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

That is the sort of question that City in Chains has no answer for, as it is uninterested in probing the broader systemic reasons for why this occupation, this war, this genocide are happening in the first place. We only get broad descriptions of the prewar status quo, and most of that is a pretty clear parallel to interwar Europe. If Quimper is France, as its name will show, there is no Algeria, no Senegal, no Indochina, and from there no equivalent to the American insistence that the first Allied troops to enter a liberated Paris be white. According to this novel, the enemy is foreign, alien even, and it requires of us no introspection, no questioning of basic assumptions. In valorizing resistance to complicitness with a foreign evil, it leaves open the door to complicitness with a domestic evil, letting us be comfortable in satisfaction while continuing to play our own little part in keeping evil alive, be it through our purchases, our tax dollars, our employment, our voting, or our own personal conduct. The parallelism that is one of Turtledove's standard tricks works to the detriment of the broader moral indignation, and as such cannot even really be said to critique contemporary fascism.

As such, the basic narrative scaffolding of City in Chains is perfectly entertaining as fantasy fiction, but as an answer to the current moment it feels woefully out of date. The novel on some level feels like it’s fighting previous battles, not the current battle. Its portrayal of the struggle against fascism is what America of previous decades wanted World War II to be, and what modern white liberals want the struggle against contemporary fascism to be. It is a book that is fascinated by abstract questions of morality in years gone by, while not having much to say about concrete questions of morality in the present. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how the current moment is the compounded result of previous historical moments, and how the problems of today are deeply structural. It is a book I enjoyed very much, and it has some very smart moments, but on the whole the novel reveals the weaknesses of Turtledove’s worldview in an age of resurgent fascism.

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Reference: Turtledove, Harry, City in Chains [Aetheon Books, 2025]

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