Book Review: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim (tr. Anton Hur)

Taking Down the Corpse-Empire

The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).

You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.

The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.

The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.

None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.

There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.

Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence did I zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).

As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.

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Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur

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

Film Review: Moana 2

Sequelitis strikes back

The first shot of Moana 2 focuses on a hermit crab switching to a new shell. The metaphor is clear: you're about to watch a story about leaving your comfort zone and searching for a bigger home. After our heroine taught her people to sail again in her first movie, she now has to solve the reason for their isolation: a storm god, afraid of the heights humans can reach with cooperation, has sunk an island that served as meeting point for all the navigation routes. (How there can be an unskippable crossroads in open sea isn't addressed.) One of Moana's ancestors, a legendary leader, already tried to find the lost island and failed. If the scattered sea peoples don't reconnect, they'll die out in a few generations. Moana needs to gather a crew and her demigod friend Maui to raise the sunken island before…

Before what? What, exactly, is the threat here?

This is one of the most noticeable problems with the writing of Moana 2: an adventure story needs a sense of looming danger, and the one presented here unfolds on a scale of centuries. Moana could relax, train more sailors, recruit a bigger crew, and, you know, travel directly to the other islands instead of looking for a vanished one where nobody lives anyway. This artificial urgency may be an effect of translating into cinema what originally was intended to be a full season of TV. The first Moana movie had ticking-time-bomb stakes and a straightforward structure. This one shoves a massive, epic conflict between gods and mortals within a tight, crowded space.

Another of the consequences of turning a TV series into a movie is the loss of development for the supporting cast. Moana and Maui are joined by a shipbuilding engineer, a craftsman who records stories in woven cloth, and an old farmer whose unique contribution to the team is promised but not delivered. Whatever arcs they were going to have are reduced to learning to work together. These character concepts deserved more depth than they get.

While the animation effort was well spent in designing breathtaking landscapes and cool monsters, imagination seems to have been in short supply when it came to drawing people. Either that, or the shift to movie format reduced the available time for artists to devote the necessary care to each scene's emotional delivery. This movie is rated for kids, but you could play a drinking game for every time Moana makes this exact face:

To be fair, the plot makes valuable points about the civilizational dangers of isolationism and the advantages of intercultural competence. The character who weaves cloth can point the team to an important subquest thanks to an ability to read pictorial narratives. Moana realizes she's on the right track toward finding the other sea peoples because she unearthes a piece of ancient ceramic, which in the context of Pacific Islander culture, where most objects for everyday use are crafted from perishable plant materials, is a huge deal.

However, these achievements in storytelling get lost in the rhythm of events. Probably as another result of the change in format, this movie is left with a very strange pacing. The pivotal downer that ends the second act doesn't get enough time to breathe before it's overshadowed by a tonally dissonant song. A fascinating secondary antagonist gets a great costume and a banger song, but the hidden complexities of this character end up swept under the rug. In the climax scene, Maui suffers a major calamity that is almost immediately reversed. Moana 2 speeds through its beats as if ticking off a checklist, and the excitement that ought to linger after our heroine's daring adventures wears off as quickly as every other emotional moment in the story.

To complete the perfect storm against this movie, there's a live-action Moana planned for 2026, a convergence of Disney's frantic remake spree accelerating to an unsustainable pace and The Rock's meticulously curated self-mythologizing campaign reaching critical fission mass. The timing is inauspicious: the mid-credits scene of Moana 2 is an obvious tease for a sequel that may or may not matter under the shadow of the remake. I bet it's going to be hard for Disney to properly care for both projects at the same time, and it's conceivably going to be harder to do for viewers. The impression left by Moana 2 is that the studio didn't have a solid idea of what to do with it, and instead of committing to a TV series that could overlap with the remake, preferred to release it in one go just to get it over with.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

How come I never knew The Fall existed?

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pennant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Knights of the Zodiac is an exactly acceptable fight movie

Many punches are exchanged by all

One doesn't go to watch a fight movie expecting great themes. One wants visually interesting choreography and physically believable acrobatics. By that standard, Knights of the Zodiac just about delivers.

The plot is the same you remember from the 1986 anime series: the Greek goddess Athena has reincarnated as a human girl, and a team of supernatural fighters is recruited to defend her from the other gods and their minions. Through the ensuing brawls, our protagonist, the Pegasus knight Seiya, exemplifies the virtues of tenacity, loyalty and courage. This setup is simple enough for any viewer to follow through the 114 episodes of the series. Seiya and his brothers-in-arms meet progressively stronger enemies, grow stronger in turn, and keep the world safe. There isn't much else to the story.

Where the anime stood out was in its art style. There are only so many ways you can draw ambiguously teenaged soldiers punch the guts out of each other, so these fights are colored with ethereal halos and the ocassional psychic attack. Of course, the most visually interesting part of the show was the way armors could rearrange their pieces around a knight's body; this detail was a small bit of Transformers-like appeal that kept the continuous punches from getting tiresome.

Unfortunately, this movie adaptation discards what made the show visually unique. Its armors look generic, lackluster, boring. This is not entirely the movie's fault; it is inherently hard to translate the stylized expressiveness of hand-drawn shōnen animation into the real faces of human actors. Compare these two images, supposed to represent the same character:

With obviously digital choreographies rendered in videogame quality, Knights of the Zodiac fails to provide the thrills of the cartoon. Seemingly aware of this shortcoming, what the movie lacks in artistry it attempts to compensate for with drama. The family dynamics of the girl destined to awaken as the goddess Athena hint toward themes of motherhood, abandonment, resentment, and broken trust, and their dramatic resolution is just adequate enough. We're not here to complicate the human experience; we're here to watch sparks fly.

However, we've watched these sparks before. It's bizarre that Famke Janssen was cast for this movie and put in a costume that calls back to her days as Jean Grey, when the heroic climax of Knights of the Zodiac retreads the ending of X-Men 3, only with less stabbing. This obvious reference is too distracting and detracts from the supposed seriousness of the moment.

On the whole, Knights of the Zodiac is a not-too-bad adaptation, with fight scenes that keep the eyes busy and the mind switched off. It leaves space open for sequels, because of course everything must now, but in its own right, it is just about OK.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

'Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' is just as cheerfully chaotic as your most memorable game sessions

This movie is what you get when your only writing guideline is Rule of Cool

Your average gamer isn't necessarily a professional writer, so an RPG campaign full of clichés is an expected part of the deal. How many times have you created a character whose backstory can be summarized as "marauders burned my village and I had to learn to survive alone"? In keeping with that not so venerable tradition, the D&D movie adaptation Honor Among Thieves draws from la crème de la crème of tired story beats: it starts with a threat of prison rape and soon after reveals that the entire plot rests on a fridged woman (complete with the most generic domestic look and bland under-the-blankets flashback). Not very promising for a fantasy movie produced in this century, but as an adaptation of the game, it's depressingly accurate. Backward storytelling choices aside, Honor Among Thieves is undeniably fun. The action is riveting, the humor is sincere, and the attention to detail is commendable. It will certainly recoup some of the goodwill Hasbro clumsily squandered earlier this year when it tried to squeeze more money out of players and independent game designers.

If each viewer brings their own interpretation to a movie, this death-of-the-author approach applies even moreso to the freeform experience of RPGs. There's a unique appeal to this curious form of interactive improvisational theater with occasional murder and pillaging. Now, the curious thing about adapting D&D to the screen in the era of 5e rules is that the game designers have grown averse to settling on any specific lore. The (very ill-advised) goal of D&D 5e is to be as nondescript as possible, to lend itself to any kind of story, to be all things to all people. In a truly generic system, that design choice can work wonders. In D&D, it detracts from the flavor of the story and punishes the players. Rules alone won't sustain a game that declines to adopt a distinctive identity because, to be brutally honest, 5e is not a terribly well designed system. To be successful, Honor Among Thieves couldn't just be a generic fantasy movie, and definitely couldn't rely too much on game stats.

This need to balance the faithful with the interesting adds difficulties to the adaptation process. As happens with videogame movies, the rules of the fictional world are constrained by very specific expectations that players bring to the viewing experience. The casual viewer of action cinema may not care for the Dificulty Class of item attunement or what it means to give birth to a tiefling, but those are the small details that D&D enthusiasts will be looking for. Can we nitpick this movie with the rules of D&D? Sure we can: the sorcerer's personality has too little Charisma for him to cast any spells; the druid isn't supposed to put on metallic armor; the paladin's ability to detect evil shouldn't be constantly active; the evil wizard casts too many spells per turn of combat; a fiery explosion can't harm a red dragon... but does any of that really matter for your enjoyment of the movie? Absolutely not. (Maybe D&D designers will watch this and finally learn that infinite spell slots don't break the game.) While Honor Among Thieves draws heavily from the geography and fauna of the official Faerûn setting, it isn't written to follow Monster Manual stats. It's written by Rule of Cool. That's what makes it excel above previous, and best forgotten, D&D movies.

One more factor in its favor is the media landscape it's made in. Although the superhero story structure has become exhaustingly ubiquitous these days, it still sells tickets. What this means for a D&D production is that it arrives into a moment in which once obscure geeky obsessions are finally perceived as cool, in which a basic, lazy, predictable Hero's Journey can still sustain an enjoyable blockbuster. Furthermore, where the movie fails to follow the narrative conventions of adventure cinema, RPG fans will know to read those deviations as normal. Plans and backup plans that fail one after another, endless interruptions for backstory infodumps, minor side quests, an ensemble of heroes who just so happen to share compatible motivations, a totally improvised winning strategy... that's just how the game goes. In any other fantasy adventure, those quirks would be marked down as amateur screenwriting mistakes. But they're precisely the quirks that give an RPG campaign that special flavor of constant uncertainty. Where a traditional narrative relies on causal logic and character consistency, RPGs are at the mercy of the dice. Just like when your Dungeon Master allows an action not specified in the manual because your idea is too awesome to care for game balance, Honor Among Thieves gives itself permission to ignore good screenwriting advice and go for what feels cool to do.

The unfortunate result is that you need previous immersion in the specific RPG flavor of collaborative storytelling to fully enjoy the experience. Many viewers will get a sense that the pieces don't quite fit, some cuts are too abrupt, some sequences go by too fast, characterization is implausibly flat, backstory is excessive, choices are too convenient. The thing is, that's exactly how a gaming session is structured: bite-sized chunks of unrelated plot stitched together by authorial fiat. If you're in the niche audience that has been waiting for a decent D&D adaptation for decades, this is finally the movie you were asking for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

'The Wheel of Time' is an interesting exercise in adaptation

TV networks are searching for "the next Game of Thrones," but The Wheel of Time is playing a different game

After the colossally successful era of Game of Thrones (and its just as colosally divisive final season), it was to be expected that producers would scramble for something to keep feeding an audience still hungry for Medieval shenanigans. An earlier attempt by MTV to make The Shannara Chronicles the next hit resulted in failure (a big part of which can be blamed on the less than stellar source material), while Netflix seems to have struck gold with The Witcher, now on its eagerly awaited second season. In a strange turn inward, both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings have spawned prequel shows, a sign of risk aversion that runs contrary to the adventuring spirit of high fantasy. We can wish them well, for the sake of all artists involved, but the risk of Westeros and Middle Earth burnout cannot be left unmentioned.

Robert Jordan wrote the series of books that comprise The Wheel of Time more or less at the same time as George R. R. Martin started writing A Song of Ice and Fire,  but they are radically different responses to Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's theme of power as a corrupting influence is taken by Martin to ghastly extremes, with hardly any character in Westeros being fully free of the poison of ambition, whereas Jordan did something arguably more interesting: in his world, it's not that power per se is bad; rather, power has been corrupted, and it needs to be saved.

Jordan worked with this metaphor by dividing magic into masculine and feminine halves, and adding a backstory that resulted in masculine magic being tainted and incontrollable. This runs into an essentialist can of worms, on which enough has been commented, but the TV adaptation by Amazon Studios is doing a laudable job of lifting the female characters out of their simplistic archetypes. On another day, we could have a longer discussion on what it means for power to be so rigidly aligned with gender, but since this is already the source material Amazon is working with, we need to ask a different type of questions: what insight on power does a high fantasy show have to convey to current audiences that hasn't been explored by Game of Thrones in gory detail, and what deep truth about humanity can be expressed in a fictional world where masculine power is inherently harmful and deserving of suspicion?

The status quo we find in The Wheel of Time is one where women have been at work trying to repair the world while keeping masculine power in check. This feels like an unstable state of affairs, one imposed temporarily to give the world a chance to heal while people figure out what to do about men. In-universe, this period has lasted for thousands of years, but people are not satisfied with the way things have turned out. It's as if we envisioned a hypothetical future where patriarchy has been dethroned, but things are very much in flux, because a new, lasting structure for social organization has not yet been reached. As much harm as patriarchy is capable of causing, a world where an entire half of the population are viewed as dangerous is not a viable model of society. The journey of restoration that takes place across The Wheel of Time is about finding a way to reintegrate masculine power without throwing the world into darkness. This is a break from recent treatments of related themes. Where Game of Thrones consistently punishes characters for not being cruel and manipulative enough, and The Witcher repeats all the time that humans are the real monsters, The Wheel of Time trusts humans. It's not certain that the world can be fixed, but if anyone's going to do it, it's us.

To properly explore this theme in the 2020s, the first season needed to shed many elements from the original novel The Eye of the World that are no longer as well received as they were in the 1990s. There is less emphasis on traditional gender roles, less hyperfocus on a single protagonist, and less dependence on fate to propel the narrative. In the TV version, the key choice by which our hero Rand saves the world hinges on respecting female autonomy. That is an apt test of character for a male hero in the world of The Wheel of Time, and a smart move by the screenwriters, because, according to the rules set in the novels, masculine magic requires asserting one's will to dominate the flow of power. A quiet family life may be what Rand wants the most, so his true moment of heroism, at the easily suggestible time when he's just learned to wield masculine magic, is the realization that he doesn't want that life if it means superimposing his will over his beloved Egwene's aspirations.

In other words, the story trusts a male character to be responsible and considerate in his use of power. That's a level of humanization that was too often missing in the exhaustingly bleak Game of Thrones. This is not the horrible Dung Ages of impassive tyrants and cutthroat cunning; this is a more enlightened world that is actively in search of healing. The Wheel of Time is gritty, but not grim; and even when it deals with darkness, it does not revel in it. This is a world that used to have advanced technology and peaceful governments, so it is known for a fact that a less cruel life is possible.

However, the path to restoration is anything but easy. The subsequent novels in the series deal with intense scheming and backstabbing within the Aes Sedai sisterhood of witches, as well as the standard amount of palace intrigue between ruling houses. In the first season we get but the briefest glimpse of the entanglements of power play in this world, but so far it doesn't have the normalized dog-eat-dog mentality that made life so dreadful in Westeros.

The Wheel of Time is consciously setting some distance from the show that defined fantasy TV for the last decade, and that's for the better. It is a more hopeful, more empathetic look at the weaknesses of humanity. It benefits from a beautiful choice of shooting locations and a believable cast of heroes whose struggles and frictions are handled with the due maturity. This season is a very good start, and a very good promise for future seasons.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the brilliant casting of Rosamund Pike, who delivers a precious mix of compassion and toughness, of mystery and vulnerability; +1 for making a sincere effort to update 1990s gender politics to today's sensibilities; +1 for the ethereal feel of Lorne Balfe's soundtrack.

Penalties: −3 for building up to a huge final confrontation that turned out to be inexplicably anticlimactic.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Microreview: When the Goddess Wakes by Howard Andrew Jones

 When the Goddess Wakes solidly ends Howard Andrew Jones’ Ring-Sworn Trilogy, as the titular threat, building since the beginning of the series, brings danger, adventure, and notes of heroic sacrifice. 

Howard Andrew Jones Ring-Sworn Trilogy has been a recent highlight and hallmark of positivist heroic epic fantasy. In strong contrast to grimdark, morally grey epic fantasy that has long been a dominant note, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy has opted for the path of less ambiguous protagonists and antagonists, and highlighting and emphasizing the importance, and effectiveness of positive action and standing up for one’s beliefs, family, and country.  All of this takes place in a richly created multiverse.

So what about this last volume,  When the Goddess Wakes, about in particular? 

This book follows quickly on the heels of the second novel, Upon the Flight of the Queen. The Dendrassi war with the multiverse spanning invasion of the Naor has ended in peace and a tentative alliance against the greater threat of the aforementioned Queen. Alantris is a wreck, Elenai is being hailed as a Queen, much to her chagrin, but the threat and stakes have been raised, as the Goddess that the Queen wants to raise would and could have the power to unmake the entire multiverse, and has the desire to do so.

The challenge in this final volume is to face off against the Queen, and her Goddess. It is a quest that takes the characters across the realms in a desperate search for the tools to do so. Meantime, of course, their enemies are not idle, and there are those who would take advantage of this conflict for their own ends. And plenty of surprises and revelations about various characters and even the nature of the multiverse. 

Our points of view remain the same from the first (and second) novel, keeping the deep focus on our heroes: Elenai, the young Altererai Corps member whose discovery of a false sword hanging in place of a real one sparked the events of the entire series, is uneasy with people acclaiming her as a Queen. And yet it is her that the Naor (especially in the personage of their leader, Vannek) respect and it is her that is the glue for that alliance and for what of the decimated forces remain to face this last and most greatest threat. When the Goddess Wakes tests Elenai to the greatest extent yet, making her live up to her heroic epithet of Oddsbreaker.

Rylin (Rylin of the Thousand), in the meantime, has had it rough in extricating himself from his infiltration of the enemy councils to manage uneasy relationships with allies of dubious provenance in order to find a way to counter the threat of the Queen and the Goddess she is raising. His is also a slightly lovelorn story, as his attraction to Varama, leader of the resistance against the Naor in the second volume, is obvious, and not reciprocated (Varama, frankly, has Other Things to Do). Readers going back to the first volume and following his story can find some irony in this turn of events for him.

And then there is Vannek. Vannek is the leader of the remnant of the Naor horde which was the big threat in the second book. Now an uneasy ally with their former enemy, Vannek must navigate holding his forces together and facing an even greater threat, and be true to themselves as well. Vannek provides an outsider perspective to the world of the Altererai, Darassus and Alantris in general. One thing that Jones touches on, for readers who might have forgotten, is the filip and twist that the Naor are, in a real sense, the “humans” and the Darassians are, in effect, to the Naor, Elves of Faerie. The Naor “horde” is really humans trying to invade Fairyland.  It makes sense- despite the blood magic of the Naor, and their dragons, they don’t have the magical abilities Elenai, Rylin and company share. They live, relative to the Naor, in the midst of changing, and shifting realms of reality, the shards. Some of them even might be gods from a certain point of view, or to their own mind. This makes me think of Steve Brust’s Dragaera, which is of course a Faerieland to the few humans (like Vlad) who just happen to be living there amongst the native population.

But what this novel has over Amber, and yes, Dragaera is its commitment in word and deed, to inclusivity. This novel, especially of the three novels, makes it clear how welcoming a fantasy this is for all readers of any stripe. The aforementioned Vannek, although the term isn’t used in the series itself, is transgender and Vannek’s struggle with finding themselves is a theme that was touched in the second volume but gets more play here with Vannek’s further importance to the leadership of the remaining Naor horde. Other characters are depicted as gay, bisexual, and polyamorous and while having a character call this all out in dialogue may seem like “virtue signaling” to a certain mindset, it does help hammer home Jones’ point that heroes come in all stripes and types. You, too, can earn a heroic epithet, if 

As in the previous novels, there is a real “second generation of Amberites” feel to Rylin, Elenai, Vannek and their peers. The big wheels of the previous generation are here, sometimes in unusual or not quite hale and complete manners--Kyrkenall and N’alhr in particular, make room for the new generation to step up and take charge. The older generation, in power and influence are important, crucial, even, but in the end this is the story of the new generation rising up and facing challenges and overcoming them, not taking an assistant role to their mentors and higher ups. Throughout the series, Jones has done a great job with this from the beginning, and it is here in the final volume that the “second generation” really steps up. This sort of handoff is a tricky thing to do in any fantasy but it is part of the fabric and the point of Jones’ world.

While the second novel was somewhat darker that the first in terms of plot and events, this third novel, while remaining true to its roots, definitely leans into the third book of the trilogy where the hard choices have to be made, the most noble of stands, and yes the heroic sacrifices. Characters that go back to the beginning of this series are tested, and do die bravely against terrible enemies. 

The characters live up to the Oath of the Altenerai:

"When comes my numbered day, I will meet it smiling. For I will have kept this oath.

I shall use my arms to shield the weak.

I shall use my lips to speak the truth, and my eyes to seek it.

I shall use my hand to mete justice to high and to low, and I will weight all things with heart and mind.

Where I walk the laws will follow, for I am the sword of my people and the shepherd of their lands.

When I fall, I will rise through my brothers and sisters, for I am eternal."

Or, from our own world,  to quote Horatius:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

"To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods."

I can hope that this series will make more readers, and publishers take notice of Jones’ talents in specific and in general the value, importance, and joy in positivist, heroic, optimistic fantasy, even as terrible things happen and noble heroic sacrifices occur.  There will always be a place for morally grey protagonists, hard and dark situations and themes, and “evils which exist to oppose other evils”. I wouldn’t want grimdark and dark fantasy to ever go away. The Ring-Sworn Trilogy, ending here with When the Goddess Wakes, however, shows that for me, oftentimes, I would like scoop sof the complex and bright Madagascaran Vanilla ice cream of Heroic epic fantasy in my reading diet  to go with the dark chocolate ice cream of Grim and dark epic fantasy in it. 

As always you won't want to start here. Go start with For The Killing of Kings and plunge into this world, characters and ethos of entertaining heroic fantasy.

---

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for excellent action beats and spirit of adventure that keeps the pages turning.

+1 for a strong, diverse and interesting cast of characters.

Penalties: -1 A couple of the bits of plotting felt a little jangled and rushed

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Jones, Howard Andrew, When the Goddess Wakes (Tor, 2021)

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

Yasuke celebrates African heritage at the expense of Japan's

Even a mythical reimagining should make an attempt at making sense

First, the facts:

In 1582, Japan was going through a violent process of unification. After defeating almost every other local leader and conquering their provinces, warlord Oda Nobunaga had secured control over almost all of Japan when one of his generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, betrayed him by launching a surprise attack on his castle and causing him to commit seppuku. One of Oda's most loyal soldiers, an African man he had originally bought as a servant from Portuguese traders who had kidnapped him probably in Mozambique, has entered the history books as the first foreigner to ever receive the rank of samurai, but after the fall of the Oda clan, nothing more is recorded about him. We don't know his original name. The Japanese called him Yasuke.

Now, the fiction:

The new Netflix animated series Yasuke imagines the Black samurai twenty years later as a retired old warrior struggling with his inner demons but suddenly called again to battle when a magical girl becomes the target of a weird Christian cult that wants to exploit her powers. The plot gives much more attention to the girl's development as a character, with Yasuke relegated to a glorified bodyguard. In essence, this show has the character of Yasuke, but doesn't cover what he did in life, doesn't explore the significance of his achievements, doesn't give him much of a personality, doesn't rely on what actually made him historically interesting, and isn't even about him.

To make matters worse, the show just isn't very engaging. The animation is flawless, and I have nothing but praise for how the show looks, but the story is bland, generic, painfully predictable, and peppered with unoriginal one-liners that the writers had to have known were not going to impress anyone.

The writers' room of Yasuke has three African Americans (LeSean Thomas, Steven Ellison, Nick Jones Jr.) and one white Canadian (Alex Larsen). Not a single Japanese voice was involved in writing the story. The production used the services of a Japanese animation company, but the credits make no mention of any cultural advisor, sensitivity reader, or anyone who could have provided input to correct the Orientalist stereotypes and historical distortions in the script. By distortions I don't mean flying robots and sorcery. By distortions I mean things like the portrayal of Oda Nobunaga as an enlightened reformer who planned to expand civil freedoms and who was deposed by traditionalists primarily because he dared to knight a Black man. This is not only a blatant butchering of how military rivalries worked in early modern Japan; it's a clumsy attempt to transplant 21st-century preoccupations onto a setting where they don't make sense.

The story does reflect African values nicely through its titular protagonist (for example, the principle that everyone in the community is responsible for every child's safety), but when it comes to representing Japanese culture, all we get are tired clichés like the fixation with honor, as if Japanese society didn't have any other values. In the end, we don't get any tangible hint of who Yasuke was as a person (or even who the writers wanted to say he was) beyond a set of formulaic platitudes.

Yasuke does a grave disservice to a fascinating historical figure to tell a paint-by-numbers escort quest plot that doesn't illuminate his character and wastes the narrative possibilities of a crucial period in Japanese history. It's a real pity.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for beautiful landscapes and expertly fluid animation, +1 for the uniquely bold kind of worldbuilding that allows for a samurai, a sorcerer, a robot and a werebear to exist in the same story.

Penalties: −3 for using almost every Orientalist trope in the box.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Microreview [Book]: Shadowblade by Anna Kashina

An action packed lost heir story with a refreshing focus on autonomy and consent.

Another day, another book with a lady with a sword on the cover. In the case of Anna Kashina's new novel, we are treated to two swords! Winning a place in my heart over the "just a knife on its own (or maybe a snake)" cover trend, the promise of a lady with a sword, especially one striding so impactfully towards the reader, is one that's hard to resist even for an action-agnostic reader like me. Who is this lady in comfortable footwear and a practical haircut (and subtle but unmistakeable decorative boobplate, but let's gloss over that for a minute)? She's holding one of those swords like I would hold the one supermarket bag I'd accidentally put all the heavy tins into, but despite that she seems to know what she's doing, and I'm excited to learn exactly what she's got going on.

This, we soon learn, is Naia. Naia has been training to be a member of the Jaihar, a stratified order of elite warriors who are drawn from orphans and other children pledged to them at a young age, and trained from birth in various martial and mystical arts. Naia is uncannily good with a blade, but has apparently made a lot of enemies in the lower camp where she's been trained, and is on the verge of being kicked out for a mysterious insubordination incident: she's attacked an instructor and has curiously little defence for herself. Luckily, fate intervenes, as the head of the Daljeer, scholarly order shows up looking for a young woman at just the right age to impersonate a mythical princess from the murdered Challimar dynasty. After a few tests demonstrate that Naia's natural abilities significantly surpass the training she's been given so far, she's given a second chance in the upper camp with the Jai, and put on a path to engage in political machinations which, we note in an aside, she might actually be born to do...

Naia's training and her mission to impersonate Princess Xarimet divide Shadowblade neatly into two halves. The first half, in which Naia goes from near-outcast to prodigy of the upper camp, sets out an interesting and refreshing take on the concepts it is dealing with. Although Naia is set up as the only person who can set out on the particular mission she is being trained for, and that she could be more than the impersonator which the Jaihar officially want her to be, Shadowblade returns again and again to Naia's agency and her own desire to learn and train with the Jai. The Har section of the camp where she has come from is defined, at least in the limited views we get of it, by brutality and bad eggs, with the incident that almost led to Naia's expulsion soon revealed to involve her stepping in to protect a servant almost being beaten to death. The Jai, the elite warriors, instead come across as being defined by respect for each other and for their students. It's fascinating to watch Naia go from being beaten down and undervalued to training with people (mostly men - unfortunately this is a pretty dude-heavy story, with only two living women of particular note) who respect her, encourage her to reflect on her performance and identify her own weaknesses. There's a constant prioritisation of consent in Naia's narrative which could so easily be absent from a story like this, especially once the romantic tension with Jai master Karrim starts.

Naia's training goes by in a series of montage-like chapters which take us through multiple years of weapons training, understanding her own weaknesses, and learning more about her Chall heritage from Mehtab, a mysterious woman from the Daljeer order who quickly becomes one of Naia's most trusted tutors. She also introduces her to the magical in-universe reasons for decorative boobplate, which involve iron-calling properties that throw off everyone wielding conventional weapons, and... that bit is fine, I guess. The building up of trust and agency in the first half of the book plays right through into the political action of the second, where a fully trained Naia is sent off on her mission to challenge for the Empire's throne in the wake of the old Emperor's death, removing the unpredictable son who has seized it in favour of a more pliable - though uninspiring - candidate favoured by the Daljeer. The deeper threat to Naia comes from a slightly different angle and builds up into a climax which really pays off the themes of consent, autonomy and learning to trust one's own judgement and surround oneself with people who respect it. There's not much that's surprising about how this plays out - the twists are well signposted in the narrative and the general thrust of what's going to happen was fairly easy to see unfolding - but this is a narrative that's more about the "how" than the "what", and the unfolding of Naia's victory not just within the terms of her mission but against those in the background who are setting her up to be a pawn.

Shadowblade is a book which seems to know exactly what it's doing and what it wants to prioritise, and how to make the other elements of the story work towards that goal. The focus is on delivering an action-packed story true to its blade-twirling hero, and that means the political plot, the empire's history with the Chall and the betrayal of a generation before which led to Naia's coming into the Jaihar are all just fleshed out enough to carry her story. There are vaguely Asian, desert-culture trappings to Chall and Zeg which aren't really fleshed out, but there's honestly not much recognisable "culture" in Naia's sheltered corner of the world - we could be anywhere, and I'm fine with that. The lack of women in Naia's world outside Mehtab is odd and frustrating despite the narrative attempts to wave it away, but there's a core of central characters who, with the exception of a few interchangeable seniors, are all distinct and interesting with believable quirks and motivations. Shadowblade leaves itself open, though not in need of, a sequel and it will be interesting to see whether some of these worldbuilding aspect get explored further in future instalments.

Action-driven novels are hit and miss for me but this one was satisfying on a level that I wasn't expecting it to be. While Naia's world is not the deepest or most fleshed out you're likely to visit this year, this entertaining, driven story does what it sets out to do while centring consent in a way which most narratives of this trope have no time or space to do. If the confident, blade wielding woman on the cover of Shadowblade is calling to you, I recommend you pick up her story and give it a try - it does what it says on the tin, in ways that I'd like to see a lot more of in future. Just, maybe we can go with plot relevant full body armour next time, please?

The Math
Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Weaves consent and autonomy into a destiny driven story; +1 Satisfying action with a great payoff

Penalties: -1 Brilliant woman protagonist is surrounded almost entirely by men in, uh, plot relevant decorative boobplate...

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Reference: Kashina, Anna. Shadowblade [Angry Robot, 2019].

Microreview [Books]: Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Salvation's Fire by Justina Robson

Adrian Tchaikovsky and Justina Robson kick off an inventive, satisfying shared universe with a difficult past.

Oh hey, a shared universe! In books! Perhaps I'm not reading the right things, but this feels like a pretty rare occurrence, and aside from George R. R. Martin's Wildcards series (which I haven't read) and the occasional posthumous series continuation, I'm struggling to think of any intentional collaborations of this kind. Redemption's Blade and Salvation's Fire are a sequential pair which together open the "After the War" series. Redemption's Blade - and, I believe, the concept for the whole world - was written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who is fast on his way to becoming one of my favourite authors; Salvation's Fire continues with Justina Robson, whose work I hadn't read before.

The series is set in a multi-species fantasy world which is dealing with the aftermath of a demigod's warmongering. The Kinslayer was defeated at the battle of Bladno, a battle Celestaine remembers all too well - she was there, dispatching his giant dragon-thing and helping to bring him down. Now the world is full of the kind of horrors that only a demigod on the warpath can inflict, and Celestaine and her pals are driven to try to make things just slightly better, one quest at a time. And it's definitely quest-driven fantasy that's on the menu here: there's no political post-conflict reconstruction going on here, no leaders arising from the ashes or chosen ones returning to their rightful thrones. There's just people doing their best, in the absence of much else to occupy them.

The fantasy world here is probably best described as "Legend of Zelda except society makes sense". Humans share their world not with Tolkien-issue elves and dwarves but with the (formerly) winged Aethani, the water-dwelling Shelliac, forests full of ethereal Draeyads (some of which are now eternally on fire), some spider people (a Tchaikovsky special!), and most prominently, the Yorughans. The Yorughans are After the War's "always chaotic evil" race, subterranean dwellers who were brought out and conscripted into service by the Kinslayer and whose members now have rather a lot to do to rehabilitate their species (not least because, actually, many of them actually quite enjoyed serving in the war, service to evil aside). Celestaine's two closest travelling companions, Heno and Nedham, are both Yorughan, and bring a pair of interesting, sceptical and frequently funny perspectives to her human outlook on the world. Also present are several of the Guardians, ageless beings created by the Gods who are now basically the only divinity left after Kinslayer (himself a Guardian) severed the Gods from the world as part of his campaign. Despite their divine origins, most of the Guardians are pretty human in their motivations and emotions: because of the war, it's only the less heroic of the group that have even survived, meaning that most bring a blend of cowardice and self-preservation to the table (nowhere more obviously than Deffo, "The Undefeated", who maintained his title through the war by hiding as a badger). Taken as a whole, everything feels brilliantly lived-in and the sense of both ancient and recent history really lifts the worldbuilding to another level.

Celestaine is a compelling main character, although she's got more going for her in Redemption's Blade, where the plot is driven by her desire to make amends for one of the war's greatest atrocities, than in Salvation's Fire, where she ends up being more of a passenger on a trip belonging more to other characters. This is a shame, because Salvation's Fire introduces some cracking supporting characters, including the Bride of Kinslayer, who skirts close to being a fantasy manic pixie dream girl but ends up something much more interesting and dangerous, likely due to the influence of youngster Kula; there's also Tricky, a Guardian who appears to represent change and chaos as manifested in a gloriously snarky middle-aged woman, and whose interactions with returning bard Ralas were a constant highlight (and a ship I gave my blessing to). That said, Redemption's Blade gives us the fabulously amoral duo of Dr Catt and Fisher, who also haven't met a scene they couldn't steal. There's a real RPG-esque element to the character interactions in both books, which take as given that the characters will get together and stay together, using their different classes - sorry, character traits - to complete their various missions.

As I guess you'd expect from a shared universe set-up, the plot of each book is self-contained, although character relationships do change and grow between books and we can assume that the set-up for a future Book 3 will continue that trend. As noted above, Celestaine is very much the driving force for Redemption's Blade: she's seeking Kinslayer's magic crown, which she has promised to Amkulyah, prince of the Aethani, in order to return the power of flight to his people. The crown itself is, of course, an effective tool to encourage the characters to travel and showcase some of Tchaikovsky's worldbuilding, as well as setting Celestaine and co. up for deeper questions on survival and reparations - with a world that's been ruined so badly, how can this one thing even begin to make a difference? Naturally, Tchaikovsky doesn't let his characters off easy with an artefact that can simply undo the past, and this nuanced payoff ultimately benefits the journey the characters go on to a far greater extent.

Salvation's Fire, in contrast, takes longer to set up, and when it hits it's more the story of Lysandra, Kinslayer's manufactured bride. After being discovered by Kula (who has some mysteries going on herself), Lysandra provides the impetus for a trip across the ocean to find the ethereal plane the gods have disappeared to. Unfortunately, despite my love for Lysandra herself, this doesn't work as well as Redemption's Blade for the simple reason that Lysandra isn't a character with relateable, well-explained motivations, to us or to the other characters, and it feels like our returning characters end up following her more from lack of better things to do. Luckily, there's enough going on here in terms of the new characters and continued strong worldbuilding to smooth this over, and it all comes together in similarly nuanced fashion. From an RPG player's sense, it also just felt that we were too early in the characters' journey with us for them to be travelling into a parallel dimension to resurrect the Gods, and I don't think this plot brings the weight of the world's history to bear in quite as successful a way as its predecessor.

Ultimately, this is the kind of heroic fantasy one reads for one purpose only: heroic characters doing awesome things. While Redemption's Blade and Salvation's Fire deliver a slightly inconsistent experience in that regard, the strengths of each volume still speak for themselves. Tchaikovsky and Robson both manage to walk a line between capitalising on satisfying heroic fantasy tropes and giving their characters moments of glory we can root for, while still making their post-conflict world dark and complicated and lacking in any easy ways forward. Its as deep as it needs to be, and the change in authors brings a fresh new take which outweighs the continuity niggles especially where some of the character growth is concerned. I'm hopeful that there are more adventures in store with Celestaine, Heno, Nedham and the crew, that I can come back to and scratch that heroic fantasy itch in a brilliantly inventive world.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Worldbuilding that delivers on every level (even the one involving giant spiders and voidcrabs); +1 Bursting with excellent characters across both volumes.

Penalties: -1 Salvation's Fire's plot doesn't quite come together as well as its predecessor

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

References: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Redemption's Blade [Solaris, 2018]

                            Robson, Justina. Salvation's Fire [Solaris, 2018]

Feminist Futures: Amazons!

Dossier: Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. Amazons! [DAW, 1979]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Amazons! is a slim anthology from DAW books, collecting 13 tales of "Heroic Fantasy" with women protagonists. As that genre description suggests, most of the stories here are  secondary world fantasy, involving warriors of some form, although a couple do stretch the definition beyond that. The contributor list is formidable: Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Megan Lindholm (better known now as Robin Hobb), and Elizbeth Lynn all put in appearances. There's even a contribution from Joanna Russ in which she compiles and speculates on the fantasy worldbuilding of Emily Bronte, and the queen of her fantasy childhood world of Gondal.

The editor of Amazons!, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, is known to me through her Tomoe Gozen series of novels, which are on my "must read someday" list. Through this anthology, I also learned that in the late 70s she was editor of a small press zine called Windhaven, which apparently printed both fiction and non-fiction from a feminist angle. I couldn't find any issues of Windhaven online in my admittedly short research attempts for this piece, but I'd love to know if any of it is still accessible to audiences of the intertubes. 

Feminist Future: Although most of its content isn't as overtly politicised as some of the other works of this period (or, indeed, from these authors), Salmonson makes it very clear in her introduction to the anthology as a whole, and to some of the individual pieces, that this work is very much situated in the context of feminist SFF and its concerns at the time. Her introduction, which reminded me of Kameron Hurley's "We Have Always Fought", she notes the historical legacy of women warriors from cultures across our world, and the way in which these have been forgotten or overlooked by writers. In line with that, Amazons! feels primarily like a reclamation - using that legacy to re-situate women in the myths and archetypes that heroic fantasy builds on, and showcase the potential that these magical worlds have for telling stories beyond those of gruff half-naked murder-men. This is also the first fiction anthology I have read with a "further reading" section at the back, which feels very fitting: Joanna Russ' seminal How to Suppress Women's Writing was still a few years off at this point, but I have no doubt that the community represented here were already well aware of the cycles of erasure and lack of canonisation that disproportionately impacts women's work.

Hope for the Future: As an anthology, there's obviously no one worldview being portrayed here. However, the dominant theme of the anthology is one of triumph, and almost every story ends in an unambiguous (though not necessarily simple) victory for the worthy hero who has put themselves out there to achieve it. There are only a couple of stories where this victory is predominantly against "the patriarchy", such as "the Woman of the White Waste" by T.J. Morgan; more often, any struggles that women face by virtue of being women are secondary to the main plot.  It's not all happy endings, however: some stories, like Cherryh's "The Dreamstone", are tinged with tragedy (although I understand Cherryh updated the ending of this story in later printings), or "Morrien's Bitch" by Janet Fox.

Legacy: I read Amazons! in 2018, sandwiched between the Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon, a trilogy about a sheepfarmer's daughter who finds her calling as a warrior, and Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky, in which a woman veteran seeks restoration after killing the renegade demigod who took her entire world to war. In that context, the legacy of Amazons! - and, perhaps more importantly, the writers in it and the movement it represents - is one that has made a huge difference to the range and depth of well-crafted woman-centred fantasy narratives out there to discover. Reading the anthology has definitely piqued my interest in the stories that prefaced full novels, namely "The Dreamstone" - which started the Ealdwold series - and "Bones for Dulath" by Megan Lindholm, which was the first appearance of Ki and Vandrien (although neither is a work that the authors are primarily known for now). 

It's also important to note that this is likely the first major SFF anthology edited by a trans person. While this doesn't really affect the content, I think being aware of the position that trans and queer authors have played in the genre - and particularly in the feminist SF of this era, which often feels a bit "heterosexuals and binary lesbians only" in its focus - is very important to counter the erasure and objections to "exceptionalism" that queer voices still face in genre today.

In Retrospect: Basically, it's hard not to believe that Amazons! is a victim of the genre's own progression since the point at which it was written. While the stories still hold up, for the most part what makes them radical is the presence of women protagonists, rather than any inherent message in the stories themselves. Salmonson specifically notes in the introduction to Tanith Lee's stories that she had passed up more "message heavy" submissions when she felt these detracted from the story, because "the depiction of strong women in heroic fantasy (or any other art) is, in and of itself, so innately political to our male-dominant society that any additional polemic is redundant". While I follow the logic, I don't think this was as true in 1979 as Salmonson believed (this is a very white lineup of authors and there's no overt recognition of intersectionality between gender, race and other marginalisations which were just as salient then as now). 

Moreover, I certainly don't think that its true any more: I could probably fill a library with books about "Strong Female Characters" who spend their time getting rescued and/or undermined despite their expertise, and take time out of their limited third person narratives to describe how their breasts feel at random moments. An anthology of stories which just happens to be about women - especially when most of those women happen to be straight and white - isn't inherently radical now in the way Amazons! was intended, and while that description does a disservice to the intent that clearly went into this volume, it's a sad fact that the impact of the stories themselves has been largely lost in the intervening years.

That's not to say there isn't still relevance here, and areas where concerns authors were raising in 1979 are still with us today. This is particularly the case for perhaps the most morally ambiguous, and interesting, story of the bunch: "The Rape Patrol" by Michelle Belling. This is effectively an urban fantasy about a group of vigilante women who hunt down men who have committed crimes like rape and assault, and dispense their own violent justice upon them, before disappearing back into their regular lives. "The Rape Patrol is uncompromising and strongly resonated as a tale of holding men accountable for gender based violence in the face of systems that fail to do so - a story which most of us will find all too familiar.

As a whole, Amazons! is, I think, a book we should know about, whose overall message and design resonates across the ages, even where its specific content has not retained its radical intent. It's a book I'd love to see back in print, at least as an e-book, and one that I'd recommend picking up if it crosses your path. If nothing else, you'll have a diverting evening with a series of kickass women to look forward to - and lots of further reading to follow up on once you get to the end.

Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 2.5/5
Wollstonecraft Meter: 6.5/10


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