Book Review: Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

Stick it to the trillionaires with the debut heist novel Hammajang Luck.

Makana Yamamoto’s sci-fi debut Hammajang Luck is the perfect escapist read for these trying times. Edie has been released from prison and comes home after eight years, determined to go straight, except something about their release is off. The partner who betrayed them to the cops in the first place is waiting for them, Angel Huang. Of course, Angel has a job for Edie—the biggest and last score they will ever need.

Edie says no and tries to find a job on the Kepler Space Station, but they’ve been blacklisted by the industry that controls the space station for all practical purposes. Joyce Atlas is a tech trillionaire with a thin veneer of philanthropy, but his neurologic tech is making people easier to manipulate, control, and harm. With no job or propsects, Edie is forced to turn to Angel, and the more they learn about Atlas and his plans, the more disgusted they are. The job quickly becomes personal.

Angel forms a crew of the best, from muscle to acrobatics to grifters. Edie is the runner in charge of helping them get in and out of Atlas’s secure vault. The space station is riddled with tunnels, but Edie still knows how to run through the space station’s guts while paying their respects to the station. It’s easy to die in these tunnels, and Edie has to deal with deadly electric discharge, dead ends, and venting atmosphere. While Angel’s plan seems solid, Edie wrestles with the guilt of possibly going back to jail and leaving their family in the lurch—their pregnant sister Andie and her two kids. But if Edie can help Angel pull off this job, then their money problems are solved forever.

The novel’s cover promises a sci-fi heist, and that’s what Yamamoto delivers. The sci-fi setting and focus on queer, underdog characters was a refreshing break from the often fantasy settings of other heist novels with perhaps one or two queer characters. Much like heist films such as the Ocean’s franchise, there’s an ensemble cast of characters to keep track of with all their specialties. Some of them become more multi-dimensional than others, such as Duke and Nakano, an older couple of queer grifters on which the plot hinges as they have to hook Atlas’s attention, but each character has a clear role to play in the story.

One reason the ensemble cast doesn’t get as much attention is due to the closer POV. At the heart, this is Edie’s story, and the reader sees Edie’s internal struggles as they try to piece their life back together after prison. Edie needs to reconnect with their sister and niece and nephew, and they feel sharply that they haven’t helped raise the kids or assist with the finances. Their niece Paige has cancer, and the extra financial strain has left Edie’s sister picking up additional shifts even at eight months pregnant. Because of the close focus on Edie, their family commitments are more fully developed than some of the heist characters, but the extra focus makes Edie’s internal struggles feel more intense as the guilt and fear of arrest weigh them down. 

Where the novel shines is how queerness is woven into the story without being the center piece. It’s an accepted part of the worldbuilding, and Edie’s pronouns are never questioned, but rather recognized immediately. This acceptance doesn’t mean there isn’t injustice, but rather re-focuses the issue onto class. As the story progresses, the depths of Atlas’s disregard for the station’s impoverished people becomes evident, impacting how the crew chooses to proceed. The queer-friendly worldbuilding in a somewhat dystopic space station was an enjoyable addition to the story.

At the novel’s heart, it leans into the fun of the heist and away from the issues—such as class—that are brought up. Ultimately, I found the balance to be effective except in one instance: Edie’s rebound after prison. They spent eight years locked up, and some brief references suggest it was a pretty bad time. That being said, Edie seems largely unaffected by their time in prison other than missing out on the lives of their sister and her kids. While it’s clear Yamamoto chose to focus on the romp, it felt untrue to Edie’s character and the situation that a poor, queer person wouldn’t carry some trauma from the prison system. 

In their bio on the back cover, Yamamoto says they love “imagining what the future might look like for historically marginalized communities.” This novel is a strong debut in that sense. One of my favorite parts of the novel was the inclusion of Pidgin. Including Pidgin and other cultural references to Hawai‘i in the far future is a powerful pushback against the homogenizing force of science fiction. I look forward to reading Yamamoto’s next novel and seeing how they continue to accomplish this artistic goal. 

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Reference: Yamamoto, Makana. Hammajang Luck [Harper Voyager, 2025].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

 

Wallace & Gromit Return in Vengeance Most Fowl

The quirky inventor and his trusty four-legged pal are dragged into a rematch

After a brief scare that apparently threatened the end of the business of Aardman Animation, the claymation studio is back with a bang: the treacherous penguin who tormented the adorkable duo Wallace and Gromit in the 1993 episode The Wrong Trousers is now the main villain of his own feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl, streaming now on Netflix. (Hmm, a forgotten enemy from an old episode returns in a film? And it happens to be the second film in the franchise? Yes, the pattern is clear. Vengeance Most Fowl is the Wrath of Khan of the Wallace & Gromit universe.)

The setting where our clay heroes live appears to remain frozen in its vaguely mid-20th-century state, but as an embodiment of the eccentric inventor archetype, Wallace got a big update for the 2020s. The central joke about Wallace, the recurring flaw that reveals his character, has always been that he expends more effort in building an absurdly complicated machine that washes, dresses and feeds him than he'd expend in actually washing, dressing and feeding himself. So he presents a useful case scenario for our ongoing discussion about the tasks that people ought to be doing but prefer to delegate to machines.

This time, long-suffering Gromit's cause for consternation du jour is Wallace's invention of programmable garden gnomes. Whereas Gromit keeps a colorful garden that vibrates with life, the robotic gnome turns it into a geometrically perfect nightmare of topiary sameness. The message isn't subtle or original, but our era needs to be reminded of it: automation and standardization are extremely useful for saving time, but they cannot replace the pleasure of deliberate creative choices. As you may recall, one of Gromit's hobbies is knitting. He may take a whole day to finish one sock, while the robotic gnome spits out an entire suit in seconds, which is the opposite of what making your own clothes is about. Results-oriented methods are a bad fit for tasks where having to do an effort is the whole point. (At the meta level, this is an effective argument for the worth of claymation in a world of digital magic.) To stress the same point, the plot has Wallace introduce still another redundant machine: one that pets his dog for him. One would think people don't need to be reminded that interpersonal connection cannot be replaced with machines, but... alas. Such are the times allotted to us.

However, the film doesn't just tell us what we already know. There are more sides to the issue of dangerous machines. When the evil penguin once again hijacks Wallace's invention to turn it against him, the way Wallace wins is by making another machine. That's who he is; that's how he solves all his problems. Even Gromit learns to love the garden gnomes when they help save the day. What's going on?

To understand what Vengeance Most Fowl seems to be saying, it's worthwhile to look more closely at the subplot with the police officers who are trying to recapture the escaped penguin. In a nutshell, we have an experienced senior who has accumulated a vast repertoire of time-tested heuristics (which he calls trusting one's gut) and an enthusiastic rookie who has the textbook fresh in her head and prefers to solve cases by sticking to procedure. Their disagreement mirrors the film's core conflict between spontaneity and algorithm. And yet, it's the rookie cop who figures out the truth by insisting on following the logical rules of evidence (despite her superior believing she listened to her gut). Again: what's going on?

What I suspect is going on is that the opposition between spontaneity and algorithm doesn't need to be resolved, but dissolved. It was never a real opposition. The two need not be enemies. You can pet your dog by yourself while a robotic gnome assists you with the form of gardening you prefer.

This embrace between passion and technique is visible in the very fact that this film exists. Aardman is known for its very high standards of animation quality with immensely complicated materials. One could use computers to animate Wallace & Gromit in a fraction of the time, but the studio's choice to go for the painstaking effort it takes to make inert clay come alive, and make it look no less eye-catching than today's ubiquitous digital creations, is a beautiful demonstration that the medium is the message. Vengeance Most Fowl excels in overcoming unthinkable technical challenges: a dozen tiny gnomes walking in perfect synchrony to carry a van; a boat chase on a navigable aqueduct; an arsenal of boomeranging boots (it makes sense in context).

And then there is, of course, the brilliant choice to give the villain a malleable face that nonetheless stays expressionless no matter what. It's terrifying how we can always tell when he's angry, when he's content, when he's disappointed, when he's defiant, even though his face doesn't move even once. This is a welcome comeback for one of the best characters ever created by Aardman Animation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Nigerian spirits do a heist at the British Museum, but struggle to deliver on the promises of that brilliant conceit

Cover illustration by Jim Tierny

This book is a welcome breath of fresh air into the pantheon of stories about gods and humans. No longer are we revisiting the familiar names from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, perpetually retold and reused and recycled, with genuinely fresh takes few and far between. Instead, Wole Talabi is presenting us with a pantheon that many Western readers, or readers from the Global North, will find unfamiliar: that of the orishas, or the divine spirits from Yoruba mythology. The titular Shigidi is a very minor orisha, whose responsibilities involve sitting on a sleeper’s chest to engender nightmares, and eventually suffocate the life out of the victim.

It’s not a very nice job, and Shigidi’s physical form matches that valence: he is small, squat, and ugly. But he doesn’t really have any control over it. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company—has, in fact, been created solely for the position he now holds—and he must navigate the familiar corporate challenges of unfriendly supervisors, reductions in human prayers which cut into the company’s bottom line, and competitors in the field who have their own plans for the victim he’s been sent to nightmare-suffocate. One such competitor is a succubus, Nneoma, but after a heated exchange of views they decide to team up and go freelance. This puts the team in the perfect position to take a job from Shigidi’s erstwhile boss: namely, to make their way into the British Museum and retrieve the titular MacGuffin, the Brass Head of Obalufon.

So: we have an erotic (because succubus) heist, featuring Yoruba gods stealing back their cultural artifacts from the British Museum, with a bonus commentary on modern corporate drudgery. This is so awesome on so many levels. The opportunities to do brilliant things with this narrative conceit are boundless.

And so many of them were missed.

I really, really don’t want to write the rest of this review. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was. It could have been so much better than it was. And I think, on the whole, that each missed opportunity is reasonably small, so if you think the conceit sounds awesome, then maybe you should stop reading right now, buy this book, and enjoy it. Maybe you won’t be bothered by the things that bothered me, and that would be ideal.

But if you are curious, or perhaps you’ve already read this book and were dissatisfied, read on, and perhaps what comes next will resonate with you, as I try to articulate why this book disappointed me.

First, the narrative does the thing where the timeline jumps around. So we start in medias res, with Shigidi bleeding out in the back of a cab, his arm ripped off, blood everywhere, monsters chasing them—clearly something has gone badly wrong. Nneoma tells him she loves him. Fade to black. OK, cool—I’m engaged, I want to know how they got into such a fix.

But the remainder of the timeline jumping around just didn’t work—to the point that after the second or third hop, I started looking at the copyright page and the acknowledgements to see if I’d somehow missed a Book 1 in this series. Things that hadn’t happened yet were being referred to and briefly summarized, as if I was expected to remember them from a previous book. Then, when those events finally take place, twenty or fifty pages later, they feel redundant and pointless, because I had already gotten that ‘remember when this happened?’ summary earlier in the book.

One case in point is the events surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s decision to team up and go freelance. We hear about that as a done deal from the past, before the narrative jumps backward and shows us how it happened. In principle, this could be useful for elaborating on another component of the narrative—not the specific plot-based events, perhaps, but certainly the character arc surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship. A continuing thread involves Shigidi trying to get Nneoma to admit to loving him, which she is unwilling to do for backstory reasons. This plays out in various conversations, one of which, infuriatingly, takes place during an extremely time-constrained heist. Priorities, people! But the point is: the whole question around Nneoma's admission of love doesn’t matter. We already know that Nneoma’s going to eventually say that she loves him. It happened on page 3! It was resolved before we knew it was important! So there’s no tension or uncertainty surrounding that plot arc, which means all the jumping forward and backward serves no purpose, except to make me wonder whether I picked up Book 2 by mistake.

Next, let’s talk about Shigidi himself. He’s created to be a small, ugly, minor god, and physically he is small and ugly. He doesn’t like his job, he doesn’t like his appearance; he’s miserable in all aspects of his life. There is such richness here to explore, from divine work-life balance; self-perception (what is ‘ugly’ when you are divine?); body-image and views of beauty. For example, one component of Shigidi’s ‘ugliness’ is scarification marks. Scarification, Wikipedia tells us, is the act of scratching or cutting patterns into one’s skin, after which follow-up treatment, such as repeated irritation, or packing clay or ash into the wound, ensures that the healing process leaves visible scars in the pattern of the original wounds. It is a deliberate, culturally significant procedure in many parts of the world, and if you click through to the Wikipedia entry, you can see that the results of this undoubtedly painful procedure can, in fact, be quite beautiful. To be sure, Westerners don’t particularly care for the practice, and so Christian missionaries in Africa spoke against the procedure, and colonial governments straight-out criminalized it. So, in sum, scarification and its relationship to beauty—especially in the context of orishas—raises some very deep questions! Why does Shigidi consider his own scarification ugly? What is his relationship with the culture whose patterns are etched into his body, that he thinks so poorly of them? What is beauty to an orisha, and why do specifically Western human beauty standards apply to him?

We never find out. Shigidi is ugly, doesn’t like being ugly, and pretty much the first thing he does after meeting Nneoma is allow her to remake his body into something super hot and muscled and glistening and abs-full. Through the power of sex-magic, to be sure, because Nneoma is a succubus, so there’s a certain amount of orgasmic potency to his transformation. That’s fine, I guess. Talabi wanted to write an erotic thriller, and this is one way to do that. But by doing that, he disregards all of the really interesting issues implied in Shigidi’s self-image as a corporate drudge. Shigidi was ugly. That lasted less than 40 pages. Then he becomes hot. Next.

OK, next: let’s talk a bit about Shigidi’s status as a corporate drone. This was so promising. I love the idea of a pantheon of gods operating according to bureaucratic norms. The idea of audits of prayer-income, overbearing supervisors, board meetings devolving into chaos as gods try to smite each other—it’s delightful.

But in this book it doesn’t quite work with the cosmology of the spirit world. Because it seems that the Orisha Spirit Company has been in existence for a long time. Shigidi was created to fill a role in that company; he was literally created to be a worker drone. Since records of Shigidi predate human corporate bureaucracy, and the Orisha Spirit Company predates Shigidi, then that means that the gods decided to organize themselves according to a human cultural construct before human culture constructed it. Or, conceivably, humans got the ideas of corporate infrastructure from the gods—which is again, a delightful world-building conceit—but if so, then shouldn’t the idea of board meetings and progress reports have originated in Nigeria? (I mean, maybe they did! People with business degrees, please weigh in! But my impression is that the daily grind was imported to, not exported from, West Africa.) There are ways of making the whole corporate-gods shtick really sing, but this book doesn’t do it. It just invokes the idea as kind of a gag, and ignores all the world-building implications.

Moving on from Shigidi and his employers, let’s discuss Nneoma. As I've mentioned, she’s a succubus. I’m not a huge fan of the phenomenon of succubi (especially in the absence of incubi), because I think they’re based in a deeply misogynistic perspective that sexuality in women is inherently dangerous and bad; and also that men cannot be expected to control their sexual appetites. But I went to a panel at Worldcon in which Wole Talabi made a really interesting case for Nneoma: in the same way that Shigidi must kill people for the Orisha Spirit Company, because that was the role he was created to fill, Nneoma must kill people (through sex) because that is how she is designed to live. It’s not her fault; her deadliness to mortals is also not something she enjoys. Rather, it’s a necessity. So for different reasons, these two represent a complicated relation with mortals, in which malice and deadliness are entirely disconnected. That was neat. I was on board with that.

But this book doesn’t follow through on any of those promises. Because Nneoma, as written, absolutely loves fucking people to death, and also enjoys engendering pointless jealousy in men too, just for kicks. And, remember, Shigidi is an ugly miserable corporate drone for less than 40 pages before he gets orgasmically turned into a thirst machine and sets up as a freelancer. And even though I can’t complain about a book being super sex-oriented when one of its characters is a literal succubus, I can complain when the erotic bits are so clunkily written that they’re not even hot.

Clunkily written? Oh, yes. Let’s talk about the writing style. It’s, as I implied, clunky. For example, after descriptions of women’s nipples in a nightclub we get, ‘Shadowy people-shapes gyrated sensually against each other.’ Sensually?  Oh, good, thanks for specifying. Do the sexually attractive sexy people do sex sexily together? Or this: ‘Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s [sic] where it encountered her curves.’ The typo I can forgive, but the repetition of ‘flowing’ and ‘flowed’ is a real clanger. (Don’t worry—it’s not all male gaze. We get lots of descriptions of Shigidi’s muscles too.)

And then there’s this approach to prepositions: ‘… the words of a man with whom he was completely in love with and for whom, in the moments when they lay together, he’d sworn he would do anything for.’

‘With whom he was in love with’? ‘For whom...he would do anything for?’ Yikes. I myself think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with preposition stranding (‘who(m) he was in love with’), but if you’re going for the more self-consciously formal pied-piping construction (‘with whom he was in love’), you’ve got to remember to leave out the final preposition. Getting smacked with that kind of sloppiness in the face, twice in quick succession, really ate up a lot of my goodwill about the writing style.

I recognize that a lot of these problems are specific to me. Writing style is an incredibly personal judgment, and if Talabi’s style works for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the eroticism as well. And although I really wanted the book to dig into the corporate commentary and the world-building, perhaps you’re on board more for the British Museum heist—which, as far as heists go, is lively and fast-paced (except for the bit where Shigidi and Nneoma pause to talk about their feelings, despite the inconveniently brief window of opportunity rapidly closing around them).  And there are some stunning images evoked in this book as scenes dissolve into other scenes.

I think this book achieves a lot of what it set out to do. But the things that it could have done and didn’t do unfortunately happened to be exactly the things that I was most interested in; and so I put it down feeling annoyed and disappointed. But that was me. Maybe you’ll be different.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Brilliant conceit
  
• Heisting the British museum
  
• Clunky writing
  
• Full of missed opportunities to explore things that Clara, specifically, wanted to see explored
  
• Disappointingly traditional use of succubus as main character
  

Reference: Talabi, Wole. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon [Gollancz 2023/Daw 2023].

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.

Nanoreviews: Live Long and Evolve; The Extractionist; The Frame-Up

Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, by Mohammed A. F. Noor

I bought this book through Princeton University Press’s yearly book sale, which makes available an enormous selection of PUP books at, like, silly prices. I think I paid £3 for this one, and it was worth every penny.

This book is about using the science of evolutionary biology to make predictions about—or at the very least guide our search for—life on other planets. This is itself a fasincating question, but what makes this book charming is the way it integrates a deep knowledge of Star Trek lore into the discussion in plausible and entertaining ways. Mohammed A. F. Noor is not some kook arguing that Star Trek was ahead of its time or 'right' (except accidentally); and he’s not some buzzkill doing a take-down of all the things Star Trek got wrong (although he does note them). He’s simply drawing connections between his two passions in life, which are interested in the same thing—life on other planets—from very different angles.

The book is split up into six chapters. In the first, Noor discusses what conditions must be necessary for something recognizable as life to develop on a planet. For example: what is it about carbon, in particular, that makes it such a good building block? Must the life be carbon based, or could some other element serve the same function? This leads naturally into a discussion of the feasibility of species like the Horta (TOS: The Devil in the Dark), which is silicon-based, alongside real-world experiments showing that some bacteria can form molecules with silicon-carbon bonds. Other sections of this chapter discuss the necessity of liquid water, which is a useful solvent for bringing together chemical reagents, but  not necessarily the only one.  Ammonia, for example, might do the job. Noor also considers requirid temperature ranges, which are typically best when they allow water to exist in its liquid form—but if water is not the key solvent, then things might work out differently. Tolerance of extreme temperatuers is also a concern, but not a huge one. On earth alone we have extremophiles—creatures that tolerate or even prefer extreme temperatures, either hot or cold—and such entities appear in numerous Star Trek episodes, from the tardigrade-like animal Ripper in the first season of Discovery, to the silver-blooded inhabitants of the ‘demon planet’ from the Voyager episode Demon. (Althouh Noor does not mention it, I cannot let reference to the silver blood people pass without also reminding readers that they show up in the heartbreakingly excellent episode Course: Oblivion, albeit not in their extremophile forms.)

Other chapters tackle evolution, genetics, and reproduction. Noor fills this last chapter with fascinating examples of Earth species, such as the Amazon molly, which is entirely female, and reproduces by mating with males of other species. Fertilization triggers the process, but the eventual offspring contain no trace of DNA from the other species male fish. Thus the Amazon molly species remains distinct from whatever species the dildo-dad belonged to. 

Of course, when both parties in a cross-species night out are represented in the offspring, we have hybridization. This is a frequent phenomenon in Star Trek, most famously embodied in the TOS character of Spock, a Vulcan-human hybrid, but there are a variety of other hybrid characters that Noor analyses quite thoroughly. My favourite part of this chapter is his discussion of Haldane’s rule, which captures the (Earthbound) phenomenon whereby female hybrids are more likely to survive than male hybrids, and are more likely to prove fertile, contrary to the trend of sterility among hyrids. As a table on pg 128 reveals, of all the hybrids in Star Trek (up through the first couple of seasons of Discovery at least), more are female than male, and of the hybrid characters who are known to have produced offspring, all but one was female. As Noor concludes, ‘If we speculate that this depiction reflects a difference in hybrid fertility, meaning at least some of the hybrid males were sterile, then we may be observing some signal of Haldane’s Rule just lie among species on earth. I do not think that the Star Trek writers did this intentionally, but the coincidence is amusing.’

I myself suspect that this trend actually reflects a tendency of filmmakers to assign parental roles to female characters than to male characters, but I'm happy to take it as evidence of a galactic Haldane rule. Sometimes it's more fun to look for the science, even if incidentally, than to fume at sociocultural trends among filmmaking.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

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The Extractionist, by Kimberly Unger

Eliza McKay works as an extractionist in a futuristic extrapolation of our increasingly plugged in society. Extractionist is one of those jobs that doesn’t yet exist, but becomes necessary in a world where Elon Musk’s Neuralink vision actually works, and not only works, but has become the equivalent of cell phones in today’s culture. Everyone’s got an implant of one version or another, some of them state-of-the art super-fancy versions that are only accesssible if you’ve got military-grade connections, some of them super-cheap retail level chips that are perfectly fine for daily use but not up to more demanding tasks. These implants allow to directly experience cybernetic realities—sort of like the Metaverse, but, y'know, functional. Occasionally, however, people get trapped too deep, and their consciousness must be retrieved and reintegrated with their bodies. This is where Eliza McKay comes in.

So, as plot, she is hired by some secretive black-ops person to extract a member of the team who has gone too deep and knows some crucial information about Stuff. Naturally, the Stuff turns out to be much more large scale and elaborate than Eliza planned for, and heisty cybershenanigans ensue.

I cannot overemphasize the quantity of cyberstuff in this book. Everything is cyber; everything is tech; everything AI (but, y'know, functional). It’s clear that Unger has spent a great deal of time thinking about how this futuristic world will look, how the various technological advances will interface with each other, how the economics of version control and upgrades will affect people’s ability to do certain jobs or interact with different types of equipment. I quite appreciate the way the world she's created echoes the messiness of incompatible operating systems and forced reboots that plague our current digital lives. Just because you’ve got a chip in your brain that's, y'know, functional, doesn’t mean that an inconvenient software update won’t ruin your day.

Unfortunately, for all the thoughtful cyberworldbuilding, the cyberplot and cybercharacters and overall cyberexperience were underwhelming. It’s kind of funny, actually, because when I think about each individual component, I can’t identify any particular flaw beyond a mildly tortured reasoning to justify the circumstances under which extraction is necessary. The characters were fine; their motivations were present; their relationships with each other were developed. The plot proceeded reasonably pacily. I was just deeply bored throughout the entire book. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not cyber enough to cyberappreciate what Unger is cyberdoing. 

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

The Frame-up, by Gwenda Bond

Dani used to be one of the team—a team of magic-using art thieves, to be precise—but she got snookered into betraying her mother and her team by a persuasive FBI agent, and has been something of a pariah in the magic scene ever since. Mom’s in jail, now, and none of the old team are speaking to her. However, her mother’s former patron finds Dani and commissions her to steal a very big painting, with a very big pay-out, so she has to get her quite reluctant ex-team back together and steal a magical painting, while simultaneously evading that same FBI agent and negotiating her remembered feelings for an old flame on her team, which are interfering somewhat with some nascent feelings developing for the painting’s current owner.

This books is a very straightforward heisty heist, with twists and turns exactly where you expect them to be. There are mommy issues to be worked out, old relationships to smooth over, new partnerships to build with surprisingly understanding and unbothered-by-crime painting-owners, and a very convenient diary explaining that a demon whose power is only kept in check by a magical painting must under no circumstances be allowed to regain possession of the picture.

The book is fine. The wheels work, the twists twist. But I found the romantic subplots rather tedious, largely because I don’t think jealousy is an appealing characteristic in potential love interests. And although I don’t read too many heists, and so am not used to keeping track of so many moving parts, I still think some of those convolutions were a bit unearned. For example, at one point Dani’s mother causes extreme complications for her plans for no other reason than that she thinks Dani’s got it too easy, and needs to learn how to deal with jobs when they’re hard. Which doesn’t follow, since Dani’s mother is invested in this heist as much (or more) than any of them, and certainly more invested in it than she is in Dani’s professional development. But then, since (as I said earlier), the painting’s owner seems to have no interest in actually retaining possession of the painting, and is perfectly willing to hire Dani to manage the security of his art gallery, it is undeniably true that Dani seems to be playing the game on easy. Gwenda Bond had to insert complications somewhere, and I guess she chose Dani's mother to do it.

In sum, this was fine. Perfectly good to occupy you while waiting for your laundry to be done, or to read on the bus while keeping one eye out for your stop. But it’s not a book I’m going to stay up late finishing, no matter how twistily the twists twist.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

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References

Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds. Mohammed A. F. Noor. [Princeton University Press, 2018].

The Extractionist. Kimberly Unger. [Tachyon 2022].

The Frame-Up. Gwenda Bond. [Headline, 2024].

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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.

The first Chicken Run set the bar so high that even a subpar sequel is still enjoyable

It's just... OK. It's fine. It tastes like chicken.

Twenty-four years after the incomparably funny Chicken Run, the stars finally aligned for us to get a sequel. There was a brief moment of worry that the award-winning studio Aardman Animations might not be able to keep creating, but all signs indicate it was a false alarm. However, this new entry in the saga of your favorite plasticine chickens with teeth and opposable thumbs doesn't rise to the level of the first. The now free flock have settled on a lake island and founded a prosperous little community, but their leader Ginger's young pullet, Molly, is curious about the outside world, and when she inevitably goes out to explore on her own, the adult chickens must mount a rescue operation, in the middle of which they discover that their old enemy Mrs. Tweedy has returned to the poultry business, this time with all the lethally efficient innovations of industrial farming. Can Ginger save her daughter before she's turned into fast food?

The core conflict in Dawn of the Nugget is basically the same as in the original, and the sensation of sameyness isn't mitigated by the addition of a daughter for the previous protagonist to save, as that particular trope has been done to death. The moment that was supposed to be the most exciting in the movie, the reappearance of Mrs. Tweedy, was unwisely spoiled in the trailer, and the charm of clay animation is lost under the immaculate detail of digital filming. In the "making of" short that accompanies it on the Netflix website, the filmmaking team explain that some digital polishing is always used to remove the lines and spots that naturally occur when reshaping clay hundreds of times in succession, but the finished product suggests that the artists may have gone a bit overboard with the cleanup. Viewers may be forgiven for believing that the whole movie was done in CGI.

The first Chicken Run had numerous scenes set during nighttime or in secluded spaces, which allowed the director to make impressive use of strategically placed shadows that heightened the tension. The persistent threat the hens lived under was portrayed with expressionist skies painted to stark dramatic effect.

The sequel doesn't take advantage of those tools and goes for a more natural look, with clear, open skies and realistic vegetation. The image is almost always too bright, even in spaces that are supposed to be poorly lit. Thus the emotional valence of the movie ends up being consistently cheerful, even when it shouldn't, missing the lingering danger that could be felt throughout the original.

This is not to say that Dawn of the Nugget was badly animated. Far from that: Aardman Animations has decades of impeccable experience with stop-motion techniques, and this movie boasts the same top-tier standard we know to expect from the studio. Camera movements are bolder this time and span large, complicated sets, putting to stringent test the puppeteers' ability to keep the magic hidden outside of the frame. Perhaps the presence of more light forced the post-production team to be more aggressive in hiding the imperfections in the clay, which would explain the sometimes unreal smoothness of the characters.

Unfortunately, the most expertly executed animation cannot make up for an uninspired script. The dialogues, especially between Ginger and her nuclear family, lack the wit and spark of the first movie. Ginger loses big portions of her previous characterization: the tired clichés drawn from every comedy about overprotective parents have her routinely lie to her daughter with the same nonchalance she used to condemn in the rooster Rocky. Dramatic irony is employed in exactly the most predictable manner by turning Ginger into the limiting force she spent most of her life resisting.

The opportunity to continue the Holocaust metaphor is also wasted here. As a descendant of the generation that successfully battled against a regime of prison camps, Molly could have been written as a more interesting kind of teenage rebel. The specific time period when the Chicken Run movies are supposed to happen is hard to pinpoint, but Molly is clearly the token Baby Boomer of the story. (Here I must nitpick for a second: the last scene of Chicken Run showed the freed community raising dozens of newly hatched chicks; it's inexplicable how the sequel seems to imply that Molly is the only young bird on the island.) If you squint, a kind of continuity of theme can be identified in the subtler mechanisms of control that Mrs. Tweedy has implemented in her modernized farm, but the movie is uninterested in the potential for social commentary.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget has very few surprises and no memorable lines, and too many overused jokes that will especially disappoint viewers who remember the more biting style of humor of its predecessor. But it's full of eye-catching slapstick and the impossibly convoluted machinery that has become usual in the productions of Aardman Animations. It's every bit as zany and wild as you need claymation to be, and by that sole measure, it excels.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

'Dragon Age: Absolution' packs dragon-sized themes in an elf-sized package

Against the common cliché that expects very little quality from videogame adaptations, this miniseries explores the danger of hunger for power with the depth of prestige TV

Across the iterations of the Dragon Age line of videogames, the common message has been about the tragedy of too much ambition. Time after time, someone seeks a quick path to greater power, and soon the repercussions become everyone's problem. Variations on this theme of human hubris range from the cosmic to the quotidian, turning the history of Thedas into a long series of misguided attempts to correct the excesses of the previous misguided attempt.

Any resemblance to actual events, etc.

The new Netflix miniseries Dragon Age: Absolution offers a chilling portrait of the insidious way ambition can seduce and eventually destroy. In a fantasy empire where humans reign and elves are a subjugated underclass, those in positions of power have seemingly never needed to learn that using others is wrong. The practice has taken root so strongly that it's reflected even in the smallest misdeeds: every time a character in the series is revealed to have done something bad, the badness is defined by a choice to use people—sometimes literally. This is consistent with the way the Dragon Age franchise has usually represented evil: humans using demons, demons using humans, humans using elves, Qunari using mages, mages using blood, mage hunters using lobotomized mages, armies using children, the noble families using each other as pawns... it's a very Kantian stance where the hallmark of evil is failing to see other people's autonomy and instead seeing only their usefulness. The main religion of the continent even has as its main precept that magic (i.e. power) should serve us, not be served by us. The fatal mistake of every overconfident mage in this setting is to lose their sense of purpose and become a plaything in the service of power.

What this worldview does for the Absolution miniseries is provide a moral anchoring point for characters' actions. One villain is so controlled by resentment that they plan to make a whole civilization pay for the atrocities committed by their rulers. Another is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary people that they plan to break the laws of nature to keep their former playmates. Even our heroic protagonist is at one point guilty of sacrificing the safety of a child to fulfill a job. And in each case, a plausible-sounding argument might be made for those terrible choices. This is a world that puts people in impossible situations and continues to punish them for desperately trying to break the cycle of mistakes. However, this is not a bleak world. The reason this particular type of moral failing has been represented so many times across Dragon Age continuity is not because the writers want to impart a nihilistic view; it's because multiple examples of the same mistake serve to illustrate how many opportunities people get (and miss) to make the world better. Nothing forces the factions in the setting to mistrust and scheme against each other; it's the unnecessary pattern of paying back revenge with more revenge that keeps the world burning. Underneath every well-written tragedy is this humanistic hope: it's not that the universe is fundamentally tainted; it's that people could choose better but don't.

The starkest metaphor for the way evils works in Dragon Age is blood magic, a route to power literally fueled by the suffering of others. In a neat practical symbolic package, blood magic can stand in for numerous forms of sociopathy, indifference, or exploitation. Quite intentionally, Dragon Age lore is vague enough about the earliest era of its universe that it's debatable whether it was the first demons who used the first humans or vice versa, but what is certain is that the theme of weaponizing others for one's ends is firmly established in the very foundation of the setting.

This is what makes the character of Rezaren, the main antagonist in the Absolution miniseries, so instantly compelling to watch. He is so deeply convinced of his own good intentions that he doesn't notice the incongruity of resorting to blackmail, backstabbing, torture and enslavement in order to regain a distorted idea of childhood harmony. In our times, we're sick of hearing of the ties between totalitarianism and toxic nostalgia, but the boring trope exists for good reasons. Rezaren exemplifies the villain with a motivation disproportionately smaller than his methods. A lifetime of infinite privilege has rendered him incapable of empathy, because, for the pampered nobility he comes from, the pain of growth is not a normal part of life but an embarrassment that must be punished.

Dragon Age: Absolution relies on too many flashbacks, which do the pacing no favors, but one key event in the past of both the heroine Miriam and the villain Rezaren is revisited from their opposite perspectives in a narratively fascinating manner. It's unfortunate that the plot takes so long to get to its actual theme (there's an air of the perfunctory in the boilerplate D&D party adventure of the first two episodes), but once the viewer learns what this series is actually about, once the extent of Rezaren's evil is exposed, the rest of the story goes by in a thrilling breeze. The mage Rezaren is a fantastic achievement of characterization precisely because of how casually appalling he can be. And again, we see an effective use of ambiguity in the portrayal of his backstory: is he a bad person because of the elitism of his upbringing, or was he honestly a good child who only turned bad because he was briefly in contact with a demon?

Be that as it may, Rezaren outshines our heroes in terms of viewer's interest. We've seen D&D campaigns so many times it's difficult to present an interesting group dynamic that doesn't resemble every game we've played. Rezaren is something else. He's so deluded by his privilege, so oblivious to the inherent dignity of others, that he considers the death of a slave as an affront to his property rights. He has lived such a suffocatingly sheltered life that he cannot comprehend why his former enslaved playmate would want nothing to do with him, and he even offers to enslave her again as if he were doing her the greatest favor.

The tragedy of Rezaren is that he knows no way of interacting with people apart from using them. This is nominally supposed to be Miriam's story, the epic journey that reconciles her with herself and heals her inner wounds, but as usually happens in epic stories, the heroine's victory is only as interesting as the villain's villainy.

If the viewer only gets to the first episode, it would be easy to be fooled by the appearance that Dragon Age: Absolution is like every other D&D-adjacent show. Miriam's companions are assorted flavors of generic archetypes and comic relief. But finishing the series (which should have been a single feature-length movie, honestly) is very much worth the less than stellar beginning. The combat scenes are decently animated, and the visual style fulfills its function of catching the eye, but where the show excels is in the moral drama. To be clear, there's never a doubt that Rezaren is in the wrong; there's no possible "other side" to the argument. What nonetheless makes him such an interesting character is how easily self-deceived someone can become when no one dares challenge the proclaimed goodness of their intentions.

Rezaren is a complex, fleshed-out villain on a par with the most wicked that Game of Thrones or its imitators can offer. There's no mystery to his motivation; there's just an incorrigibly warped perspective that no amount of emotional contact can fix. That such a feat of writing was possible in just six half-hour episodes is reason enough to recommend Dragon Age: Absolution. But for fans of fantasy warfare, heist missions gone catastrophically wrong, or gruesome forbidden magic, there's abundant material to sate that hunger. There's also a dragon, if you're into that. But the seriousness with which this story addresses horrifying extremes of pride, ambition and callousness is the true jewel hidden inside the sparkling, colorful exterior.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the touch of genius that was using an imprisoned dragon to symbolize the lingering tensions of a highly unequal society, +1 for creating a villain that is at the same time fully reprehensible and fully understandable.

Penalties: −1 for excessive exposition of world history facts that are foreign to this specific plot.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Microreview [book]: The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Luscious prose and compelling character dynamics abound, but The All-Consuming World struggles to deliver on the promise of its worldbuilding

There's only one sentence that can open this review: What the fuck just happened?

The All-Consuming World is Cassandra Khaw's debut novel, and it's a blend of ultraviolent action and post-human space opera that races by in a blur of dramatic heist-y tropes and ornate-but-sweary prose. In this future, humans have ways to control aging so you can live as long as you like, cloning technology if you want that life to involve dangerous life threatening stuff and don't mind the inconvenience of reconstructing yourself. AI Minds also exist, in various generations and societies, most of whom seem to exist and interact through a collective program called The Conversation. We don't see much of what this setup means for ordinary folks of the universe, because the characters we spend our time with are on the unpleasant margins of this world. To survive their mercenary life, Maya and Rita have both been cloned and augmented repeatedly, to the point where Maya's body is degrading from the imperfect technology and Rita is mostly machine. Forty years after a mission which went disastrously wrong, killing two of their former crew (the "Dirty Dozen") and scattering the rest of them, Rita reveals that one of their dead friends, Elise, is still out there in virtual space, and that finding her might be the key to discovering Dimmuborgir, a lost planet with valuable secrets. Why Elise's survival took forty years to reveal is explained in universe as "Rita is a manipulative piece of work with an agenda she isn't sharing with anyone", but it serves as a spur for the pair to get the remnants of their band back together at an interesting time in everyone's lives, and to mount an imperfect rescue, allying with a couple of AIs while avoiding the many, many more who want to kill them.

There's a lot of meaty worldbuilding in that set-up (and shades of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha and The Stars Are Legion), but The All-Consuming World is mostly interested in the dynamics of its aging cyborg gang, and particularly the relationship between Maya and Rita. We see the story mostly through Maya's eyes (including the prosthetic one she has installed, with no anaesthetic and lavish descriptions of eye socket speculum usage, after the original is gouged out seconds after hatching a new clone body... don't say I didn't warn you about gore). Her perspective is deeply warped by love and codependence for Rita, which is generally rewarded with abuse, manipulation, and speculums to the eye socket. Maya's internal dialogue already acknowledges the gap between her unwavering loyalty and Rita's sadistic responses, but when her old colleagues come back into her life, their reactions to seeing her still in thrall to Rita and the juxtaposition with their own lives provokes Maya to question even more of herself. Those colleagues include popstar and former almost-flame Verdigris, mercenary-turned-law-enforcement Constance, and Ayane, who doesn't really have any identifying features beyond "is hot and violent", which doesn't really work in this crowd (she also did the eye gouging). Maya also connects indirectly, through family, with another member of the Dirty Dozen, and it's through these relationships that the tension of The All-Consuming World builds.

This tension is all quite dramatic, and combined with scenes from AI Pimento (who is working for the AI that gave Rita the information about Elise and holds the location to Dimmuborgir), and from Elise herself, we get a decently three dimensional picture of this gritty, complicated conflict. Unfortunately, the focus on character has two drawbacks: first, because most of the interactions we see involve Maya, and Maya's brain is very specifically wired to care about Rita and almost nothing else, we don't get much character development for anyone other than her and the other two point of view characters. There are a lot of external clues as to how things have changed, and a great deal of information, from various perspectives, about the group's mercenary days and the extent to which that was actually a good time. There are also some identity shifts: notably Verdigris and Constance both come out to Maya as trans in the same scene (Verdigris is genderfluid and uses both he and she pronouns; Constance is non-binary and uses they/them). All of the mercenaries have moved on from, or become stuck on, different elements of their pasts, and while it's interesting to see through the eyes of Maya, a character who is terribly equipped to figure all of this out, let alone show any empathy and insight into what people's pasts mean to them rather than applying it all to herself, it also loses the opportunity to see some of these folks through their own eyes. Most characters feel like they have a convincing inner life that's hidden from Maya, but some (Ayane, and also Rita) just feel two dimensional as a result.

The second drawback is that, while it's interesting to get invested in these characters, their problems and the extent to which they are too old for this shit, there's a whole lot else that could be going on in The All-Consuming World and just... isn't. While we're watching the old comrades of the Dirty Dozen argue in space, there's this sense of a huge world full of AI-clone conflict and space exploration and histories and secrets of this universe that are beyond the grasp or interest of Maya and her cohort and, therefore, don't really appear here. In a weird way, this isn't a book that's very interested in what the characters themselves would identify as the story: their goals, the reasons behind the AI attacks, the importance of Dimmuborgir and the results of their finding it (this, in particular... well, you'll see when you get to the end). Once you're clued in to the fact that this stuff doesn't really matter, then it's easy in some ways to sit back and enjoy the ride, but I can't help but feel a sense of wasted potential that we didn't, at least, get more of a balance. It doesn't help that The All-Consuming World is pretty short, when it feels like there's enough to carry a much longer story here (then again, Khaw usually writes at novella length or shorter, so this being a short novel is in-keeping with their storytelling style).

We also need to talk about the writing. The story of The All-Consuming World is told in lavish, almost purple prose interspersed with regular swearing, as for example with Ayane's introduction from the opening chapter:

"[Ayane's] casual numinosity is frankly offensive. It is empirical, how stunning she is, a fact that exists external to the hypothesis that beauty is qualified by the beholder. Maya had not consented to having her breath shanked from her by something as egregious as Ayane retreating into a halo of artificial light, and she is pissed at this misstep by the universe, pissed she hasn't become inoculated to such bodily treason, that Ayane after all these years could still have such an effect."

There's a ton of interesting choices being made here which add to the characters being developed: Maya's weakness for physical beauty, even as she only has the capacity at this point to love Rita; Ayane being hot and dangerous (note how her beauty "shanks" Maya); the juxtaposition of an academic register, talking about hypotheses and empirical facts, with the religious notes (halos and numinosity) and then with slang like shank and Maya describing her emotional state as being "pissed". It's evocative stuff! But it's not a choice that's going to work for everyone, and to be honest, it's not a style that worked well for me. The All-Consuming World's expansive vocabulary it's not particularly accessible (I had to go and double check what "numinous" meant and that's nowhere near the most obscure word in this book), and it's also kind of relentless, even in pacy action scenes. It has the effect of either slowing the reader - and therefore the book - down, or making you feel like you've missed context by going along with it. At the end of reading, there are elements of the plot, especially the parts involving AIs, that I'm really unclear about, and I have no idea if it's because it was left mysterious or because my comprehension went on holiday at key moments, and while I fully accept that that's a me problem, it's a sign of this book and me not quite gelling.

All of that is quite a lot of negativity for a book that, actually, I liked reading a lot and think is objectively kind of amazing. Khaw's books have always almost worked for me, and after seeing their talents on such strong display, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I enjoy the idea of them more than the execution. Still, The All-Consuming World is going to have lots of fans out there among those who really gel with Khaw's work and those who are looking for some grim, femme-led space opera - if that sounds like you, this is one to look out for.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 amazing prose; +1 some of the best grim mercenary femmes since Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha

Penalties: -2 Really underdelivers on its worldbuilding potential

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Interview: Corey J. White author of Repo Virtual

At what point does an AI reach personhood? Once you've defined personhood, and what it takes to get there, what now?  If you suddenly found yourself in possession of a sentient AI, what would you do? Or I guess, the more interesting question is, what wouldn't you do?

If that sounds interesting,  Corey J White's Repo Virtual may be right up your alley.  Online,  Julius Dax is a repoman. But IRL,  he's a thief.   While nearly everyone plays in the online intergalactic war in the stars,  in real life, people are starving and hustling just to make it through another day.   Think Neuromancer meets Ready Player One, but crank the capitalism up to even worse, and bring in a ton more diversity.

Something that caught my eye, when the earliest reviews started coming out,  was the possibilities of being someone else in a Virtual world.  Julius has a physical disability.  Can he leave that behind in the virtual world?  Every time I make an avatar in an online game, I feel like it's my opportunity to  be a more attractive/interesting version of myself - taller, thinner, fewer zits. Now I know Repo Virtual isn't about any of those things, but still, it got my attention and made me want to learn more about the novel and about the author.   A lot of times I get something completely different out of a piece of fiction than what was intended.

Corey J. White was kind enough to answer all my ridiculous questions while offering a view behind the scenes of how this intriguing novel came to be. Other topics we discuss include AI Personhood, what might a teenage AI think about,  sci-fi body-horror novel, Creeper Magazine, and more! And I've got to say, now I'm even more interested in reading the book!  Repo Virtual is making a number of recommended and "best of the month" lists. It could be exactly the escapism we all need right now.

Corey J White is also the author of the space opera Voidwitch Saga series of novellas - Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin.  He lives in Melbourne, Australia. You can learn more about Corey by checking out his website or following him on twitter at @cjwhite.

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF: I've read some early reviews on GoodReads, and what stood out to me first is how much your readers love the characters in Repo Virtual. Introduce us to Julius Dax (JD), Soo-hyun, Troy, and Enda. Who are these folks and what are they all about?

Corey J. White: JD is our window into the world - a precarious worker, online repo man, and real-life thief with scruples. Soo-hyun is JD's step-sibling. He loves them immensely, but is never really sure he can trust them. They've gotten caught up in a streaming cult living in the dilapidated flood ruins on the edge of Songdo, and the cult leader is the one that puts the entire plot into motion: tasking Soo-hyun with recruiting JD to steal a virus she claims to have a hand in creating.
Troy is JD's ex. They both still love each other, but they've been too hurt to admit it. He's also a philosophy professor, which comes in handy when you're trying to talk about the personhood of AI. Enda is the retired operative turned private eye that's blackmailed into retrieving the stolen virus... but she's also not the type of women you should ever even consider blackmailing.

NOAF:  Repo Virtual is being compared to Neuromancer, Ready Player One, and other novels that involve cyberpunk and people working in virtual worlds. What were your inspirations for Repo Virtual? How does it feel to be compared to William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk?

Corey J. White: Neuromancer was less of an inspiration and more of a touchstone for Repo Virtual. I almost didn't want to write an "AI heist" plot because I knew it would be compared to Neuromancer, and any cyberpunk book is going to suffer in comparison to the formative text, but the more I thought about the story and the themes I wanted to address, the more I realised that the heist was the best way to go (for me, at that point in time). Then once I'd made that choice, I couldn't not recognise Neuromancer with the book, but it's more something I reference, rather than anything I was inspired by.

The real inspiration came largely from the way Damien Williams talks about the personhood of non-biological intelligences, and searching for a way to talk about that in a story. All the disparate ideas I had for the story only really started to come together when I realised what I wanted to write about.

Other inspirations include Nexus War, the first MMORPG I ever really lost myself in, and one that I made friends from that I still talk to today; articles and stories about EvE Online (but not the game itself); reportage on some contemporary Silicon Valley adjacent cults; the increasing cyberpunk-ification of our lives; and I took some inspiration for the structure of the story from Nick Harkaway's Gnomon. I don't think I would have written one of the POVs the way I have if I hadn't read his novel.

NOAF:  Something I love about the idea of virtual reality is that I can be anyone I want there. I can be 8 inches taller, I can have my ideal beach body. JD has a physical disability that hampers in him the real world. Do your characters take advantage of virtual reality to present a different version of themselves? Does virtual reality give them other benefits (or disadvantages)?

Corey J. White: For a book with "Virtual" in the title, the Virtual Reality stuff in the book is admittedly pretty slim. If I'd gone too far down that route I would have been stepping on Neal Stephenson's toes too with Snow Crash.

That said, in the book, Augmented and Virtual realities are just another facet of a hyper-connected, digitised life, a deception that sometimes scrapes at JD's psyche like pop-up ads in your browser window. In a virtual world, JD can walk without a limp and without pain, but that just tells him he can't trust it. At least if it hurts, he knows it's real.

NOAF:  I'm a sucker for anything AI related. HAL, Data, the three laws, how does sentience work, hook me up with that positronic thinks-it-understands-people goodness! How did you develop the AI in Repo Virtual?

Corey J. White: Because I'm specifically looking at the personhood of AI, I ended up looking at it in the terms of relationships, both the relationship this AI forges as the story unfolds, and relationships between ideas, concepts, people, history, etc, allowing the AI to gain context and understanding beyond the level of a simple data analysis tool. So it's AI as an agent of connection, in more than one way.

One thought I had early on in the development of the book was that if we created a race of strong AI that could travel out into the universe longer after humankind has gone extinct, they might look back on us the way kids look back at dinosaurs. That when the AI are in their developmental stages, they'd all have a favourite human, whether that's a great figures from history, or just one particular teenager from Osaka in 2019 who created their all-time favourite meme.

So I guess I was thinking of AI as our future children, and what we might owe them, rather than thinking of them as powerful tools of corporate control.

NOAF: What was your writing process like for this novel? Are you a plotter, or a pantser?

Corey J. White: The strangest thing about the process with Repo Virtual was that I signed the contract with just an outline and an introduction, which was a first for me. So every time I was faced with self-doubt or doubts about the book I was writing, I had to push that aside and keep going, because I'd already signed the paperwork and taken the money . . .

But, yes, I'm a plotter. Of course, the plot as planned may not survive contact with the blank page, and that's alright. I think some people push back against the idea of plotting because they think they'll be too constricted by it. The secret though is that it's your plot, and you can change, destroy, or ignore it as you see fit, as and when the story starts to take you to other places. It's not a plan, it's a map, and sometimes you want to set the map aside and let yourself get lost.

NOAF:  What's next for you? Do you see yourself writing more stories about JD and his adventures in Neo Songdo?

Corey J. White: Next for me (because I've almost finished the first draft already) is a sci-fi body-horror novel about our culpability and responsibilities in the face of mass extinction caused by anthropocentric climate change. After that I already have a loose idea of the sequel, but I'm also putting aside notes on a Repo Virtual follow-up. It wouldn't be a proper sequel, because I've told the story of all those characters (well, Mirae could reappear, who knows), but something that uses the world I've set up to delve into some more themes concerning this online reality we've constructed for ourselves. I'd particularly be looking at some of the questions you were asking about virtual reality before, but in regards to augmented reality.

NOAF:  What are some favorite books, comics, movies, TV shows, and other entertainment that you've enjoyed lately?

Corey J. White: This could easily get out of hand, but, recently I've read and enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark, Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue Deconnick, Emma Rios, and others, and Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs.

TV-wise, I recently started on Castlevania Season 3, which has more great additions to an already stellar cast, and the dialogue tells me that Warren Ellis was really enjoying himself when he was writing it. I've also been rewatching Schitt's Creek in the lead up to the final season. Catherine O'Hara is a treasure. And I finally saw First Reformed. I should have watched it on release as it definitely shares some DNA with the book I'm currently writing.

NOAF:  On your website, you mention your involvement with Oh Nothing Press, and something about "Weird Cultural Errata". Those being three of my favorite words, what is Oh Nothing Press all about? Where can we learn more?

Corey J. White: I guess the whole point of Oh Nothing Press is that it can be about whatever we want it to be about. So far we've released two capsules - the first was MechaDeath, a story of cosmic black metal mecha warfare told with a meticulously designed zine and some fantastic t-shirt designs.

The second capsule was Creeper Magazine issue 1, and our third capsule will be Creeper issue 2. I sometimes say that Creeper is about the horror of The Now, but that doesn't really say much about the content, so, to quote: Weird crime, conspiracies, paranoia, folklore, the occult, modern myth, bizarre philosophy, fringe tech and genre-exploding fiction. CREEPER is the sort of magazine that could never exist in the mainstream, so we had to make it ourselves!

It's really interesting watching themes and through-lines come through as we're putting together Creeper 2, so I'm keen to see it out in the world later this year.

After that, we've always got ideas for new projects, it just comes down to which of those ideas keep us inspired, and how much time we can spare after day jobs and other creative projects.

NOAF: Thank you so much Corey!

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

The Great Escape: Books to Escape Into

Need some escapism?

Need some comfort reads?

Need them to be available as e-book, for a variety of reasons?

I gotcha covered.

The following series are all available as e-book, they'll all suck you right in, and we've all earned some escapism. Because I'm the person who made this list, the science fiction books on this list are "soft scifi" - relationships, feelings, found families. Lots of science, yes, but lots of other things too. These are my comfort reads.

Kage Baker's Company series offers time travel, immortal cyborgs, the long game, romance, world travel, humor, and ten books to keep you busy. The first book in the series, In the Garden of Iden, follows young Mendoza as she survives the Spanish Inquisition and the surgeries that will make her into an immortal cyborg. Surviving being in love, well, that’s another matter entirely. Enjoy the teen angst, and grab some tissues. The second book, Sky Coyote, is much lighter and much much funnier, I promise. Oh, you’ve already read this series?  Read In the Garden of Iden again, there are so many hints there that I missed last time!

Like a good heist? Give Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora a whirl. Young con artist Locke Lamora pulls stunts, cons, and long games that even the gods wouldn't dream of. But one of these days, his past is going to catch up with him and his crew. How long can he out run it? And how much can he steal along the way? This series is chock full of heartwarming friendships, intrigue, swear words, wry humor, and unrequited love. Characters are brave, loyal, and have friends in all the right places, except when they don't. Highly recommended for fans of The Witcher.

You want a heist, but in the future? You're sure to enjoy Derek Kunsken's The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden. Genetic engineered new races of humanity, a religion gone horribly wrong, galaxy spanning governments, and a con artist who can see quantum physics at the molecular level. Pick these books up for the science, get hooked on them from the excellent characters, the incandescent plot, and the rapid fire pace.

How does a space opera series that’s heavy on politics, melodrama, humor, and romance sound? If that got your attention, you’ll be pleased to know that Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga now has 20-some novels. Even better, if you read these out of order, you'll be ok. Download the first two or three, see what you think, and then bounce around to whichever ones look interesting. It's been a few years since I read a Vorkosigan novel, and no, I haven't read anywhere close to all of them, and yes, I read them in random order. And yes, there's a reason McMaster Bujold has six Hugo awards.


Short stories more your thing? The Clockwork Phoenix anthology series, edited by Mike Allen, is criminally underrated and under-known.  The tagline "Tales of Beauty and Strangeness" enfolds genre-defying fiction from Tanith Lee, Catherynne M. Valente, Laird Barron , Rich Larson, Barbara Krasnoff, Marie Brennan, Saladin Ahmed, C.S.E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez,  Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Gemma Files, and about a million more. Within these pages you'll find surrealism,  fantasy, ghost stories, horror, magical realism, endings and beginnings. Bedtime stories don't get any better than this!

Your school age kids need something too, and what better than something you can read with them? If they haven't discovered this heartwarming coming of age story yet, the whole family has just enough time to read Carlos Hernadez's Sal and Gabi Break the Universe before the second book comes out in May.  When a pre-teen uses his skills as a magician to hide his ability to manipulate space time, who better to help him out than his cheeriest (and nosy-est!) classmate? Also: middle school hijinks, unusual families, the best Cuban food you've ever had, and characters who'll make you feel like you're walking through sunshine.  If you don't have any children in the house, read this for yourself. You can thank me later.

When you’re done with these, let me know, I’ll give you some more. In the meantime, what are your comfort reads?

Second Opinion: The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician is a highly entertaining far future heist novel with excellent worldbuilding and character voices that make for an entertaining read.

It’s the 25th century and Humanity has spread out to the stars. Thanks to some often highly suspect genetic experiments, Homo sapiens is not the only branch of humanity extant. One branch, the Homo Quantus, has an ability to process information and see things on a quantum level, which makes them fascinated with the search for knowledge and unlocking information. Belisarius, or Bel as he usually is referenced throughout the novel, is atypical for a Homo Quantus. For him, an ivory tower life of research is not suited to him. No, he’d rather be pulling off cons, and he has a whopper of a one involving a fleet, a fantastic space drive, several others of the branches of humanity, and of course a plan within a plan for his heist.

This is the story of Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician.

The novel’s strength lies strongly with the world that the author presents. It’s a world very much in the model of novels like the works of Hannu Rajaniemi, there is a high density of new concepts, worlds, polities, future history, technologies and ideas packed in a relatively slim novel. There is a very international feel to humanity in the 25th century that isn’t just “America in space” that a lot of authors  fall into the trap of. Francophone polities feature strongly in the novel, for instance, and there is a multilingual feel to the depicted future that I really appreciated and really liked.

The author also does a great job with the con artist himself, Bel. Making him an atypical, and sometimes labeled as a “failed” Homo Quantus means we get the best of both worlds, especiallty once Bel gets another Homo Quantus on his team. We see what a Homo Quantus should be like, and how Bel stretches as a rope between baseline humans, and the more typical members of his species. He comes across as a mostly very human character, but with his occasional descents into a fugue state, shows just how far along a new evolutionary path that he has gone. This is also true of the other human species we see, the Homo eridanus, who live in cold, pressurized environments, and the Puppets, small bodied humanoids who have been genetically engineered to worship a particular group of humans. Kunsken takes this extremely touchy and prickly idea and looks at it from an ethical point of view in a nuanced and thoughtful way.

The heist itself is best described in general and vague terms,especially the heist within the heist. Bel is approached with being asked for help in moving a fleet of advanced warships through a tightly controlled wormhole. Bel’s payoff for this would be a ship outfitted with the groundbreaking space drive that the fleet itself has. Such a craft would be worth millions, even split with a team. The author gives us a cross section of humanity in the 25th century with Bel’s team: An enthusiastic explosives expert. The aforementioned second Homo Quantus. A sweary Homo eridanus. A Puppet, and a descendant of the humans who created the Puppets (the territory that the fleet must move through is controlled by the Puppets, making them the “inside men” of the operation). An artificial intelligence of a very idiosyncratic sort.

And Bel has a plan within a plan for this gathered team to gain something even more out of the situation. And as you might expect, this being a heist novel, once the heist gets going, things do not always go smooth, and not always falling to Bel’s backup plans. Improvisation and a bit of scrambling to salvage a bad situation is a feature of even the most perfectly executed heist, and the Quantum Magician leverages that for excellent plotting.

I consumed the book in audio format, narrated by T Ryder Smith. I think he did a fantastic job as a narrator. He ably captured the different characters with distinct intonations, cadences and expressions of modulation. In some cases, like Stills, I can’t imagine how I could mentally improve on reading the Homo Eridanus’ dialogue in my mind much better than how Smith as a narrator brings him to life. The other characters, too, really are rewarded by the narrator’s audio work.  The complex jargon and ideas come across well, and I was consistently entertained throughout.

My major criticism of the novel is something that a lot of SF heist novels share and that is the need for a long ramp up before the actual heist can get itself up and running. How the author manages to show us how the team is put together and why we should care about them even as we don’t know much about the other team members takes a very deft touch. In a couple of cases, the author manages to bring us into the character’s world and personality rather quickly, but for a couple of the members of the team, they just don’t quite leap off the page. This does hurt the novel in the second half, as the heist proceeds, since it means there is a bit of unevenness in how I was invested in the various parts. of the team and the scheme.

Overall, however, The Quantum Magician is a promising debut, and it appears to be the first in a series, with The Quantum Garden coming in October. Based on this first novel. I would be happy to read it. I would be happier still to listen to it, should T Ryder Smith provide the narration again in an audio format.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses : +1 for an intriguing and interesting future world. +1 for the goodness of a heist chassis for the SF novel.

Penalties : -1 for a few of the heist members and their subplots being less well imagined and presented than others.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

Adri's Math: 5/10

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

Reference: Künsken, Derek: The Quantum Magician [Solaris, 2018]