Review: The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds

The world might be flat if you believe it hard enough

cover artist: Martin Simmonds

Imagine a world in which believing something made it true. Not simply magical thinking about winning the lottery, but the kind where gods can be made, the devil can be summoned in a high school, and the world can be made flat.

What if, when enough people believe it, Lee Harvey Oswald escaped death, Kennedy was killed by the government and every other conspiracy you can think of might just be true.

Except in this world only a very few know this power is true—and so people schooled in stability and predictability can be controlled.

The Department of Truth (TDOT) is up into the mid-thirties now and there are six collected editions following a new member, Cole Turner, brought into the eponymous department as he gets to grip with what his new job in this secret organisation entails. The thing is, he’s not alone, and nor is the department. Author James Tynion proposes that this power of belief is well understood by those who’ve been in charge of the world going back millennia, and that when empires collapse, it’s as much because their enemies controlled the narrative as it is because of force of arms.

As a result, every major power in the world has its own equivalent of the Department of Truth whose main mission is to ensure that their truths prevail. With the legacy of the Cold War hanging over their heads, both Russia and the US are stuck with ideas and beliefs that seemed powerful weapons just yesterday but now hang around their necks like lead tires threatening to drag them to disaster.

What starts out as a mission to control conspiracy theories before they become dangerous turns out to be a mission to control all truth, not just conspiracies. Tynion suggests that once you start to question the nature of truth, everything is up for grabs.

Most worrying for all concerned is a third party and rival to TDOT called Black Hat, which wants truth to be decidable by whoever comes along with the most sway and influence. This third party revolves around a “Woman in Red”—a grotesque who appears around disasters and seems to feed on these conspiracies.

The threat from a breakdown in the sense of what truth is and what it can be is the central theme of this series—tied in with how the powerful manipulate media, ideas and social structures to maintain the world that benefits them most. TDOT is a dark and deeply challenging story about how easily fooled we are, how easily we become willing members of mobs and how easy it is to hack and twist human beliefs.

Tynion’s writing is dry, sardonic and, most of all, bleak. The story, which is well into its run, is very dark and shows no signs of really revealing what’s going on under the surface. After spending time telling the reader that there’s a deeper layer yet beneath the idea of a fully malleable truth via the belief of crowds and even that there is a being who might just be the apotheosis of that state of affairs, Tynion has steered away from revelation, but that deliberate refusal to provide clear answers is very much a part of the overall style of not only the story but what Tynion’s saying with this comic.

With Tynion’s focus on truth as a construct and the perils of letting ourselves lose sight of what is true and what is deception comes Martin Simmonds’s art style, which is one part collage, one part impressionistic, and several parts scratchy painting that is reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream. It brings to Tynion’s writing a sense of saturated scenes that could reach out of the page and eat you whole. It’s a tremendous achievement that I’ve shared with my daughter (an animator) that deserves to by studied for how it lands the vibe of what Tynion’s writing about while elevating the story in the process.

This lack of respect for boundaries in the visual presentation, the overwhelming richness of the colours and the frequent ghost-like quality of how the cast appear calls into question everything you’re seeing, reminding you that this is a story that wants us to fear a world in which truth is radically unstable.

Spies, murder, psyops, propaganda and conspiracies that are true—demons and mothmen, flat earths and assassinated presidents. These are the tools in The Department of Truth, the levers the characters use, but they’re also the subject of its metanarrative that asks us to remember that we are all too susceptible to falling for scams and cons and believing liars when they lie.

We humans aren’t built for distrust—we’re built for community, and part of what makes The Department of Truth bleakly compelling is how it dives into these ideas and pulls them apart and in so doing pulls us apart too. It might be speculative fiction, but the truth (see what I did there?) is that we’re easily fooled, and most of the conspiracies appearing in this series have serious advocates who have built their lives around them in the real world of the reader.

The Department of Truth is a lengthy exploration of the very idea of consensus with the most stunning artwork. I really love it.

Highlights:

• Stunning art
• Proper weird SF
• Truth as malleable set in a world of sleazy spies

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, A great comic about truth with great art and with a long running story line you can really dig into.

Reference: Tynion, James IV (writer), Simmonds, Martin (illustrator). The Department of Truth [Image Comics, ongoing at time of writing].

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

Film Review: Disclosure Day

It’s not about the power of whistleblowing. It’s about the power of movies

The common refrain I keep seeing in most reviews of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is that the 79-year-old-director is too behind the times if he believes that showing people the truth will suffice to fix the world. Those complaints don’t give Spielberg enough credit. It’s too literal to read Disclosure Day as a movie about secret alien files. It’s like reading Inception as a movie about psychonautic espionage. There’s no way Spielberg isn’t aware that we’ve fallen into a cynical, post-truth world, and yet this is the movie he chooses to make at this point in history. I suspect the guy knows what he’s doing, and he knows that, precisely because we’ve stopped placing any trust in truth, this movie’s plea for unafraid openness to each other is the message we need to hear.

Moreover, I think Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s Inception: it’s his personal statement on what moviemaking means to him. (Yes, I know The Fabelmans exists. But that one merely tells us his point. This one shows us.)

It would be one thing if Disclosure Day had stuck to the character of Daniel, the hacker who steals a trove of secret government videos that prove aliens are real, and just followed him on his race against time to make the files public. That would be the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times, the kind of movie the haters believe they’re criticizing. But the message of Disclosure Day is not “Our problems would disappear if the truth were exposed.” What it’s trying to say is, rather, “Our problems would be seen more clearly if the truth were received.” That’s where the character of Margaret comes in. Healing the world takes more than having someone brave enough to make others see; you also need someone brave enough to do the seeing.

The power of seeing has been a constant in Spielberg’s work, most obviously noticeable in his signature move of framing a character’s awestruck face. In a couple scenes of Disclosure Day, which have been unfairly mocked by reviewers, a character who is not very well hidden manages to sneak away from the bad guys who are looking for them. That’s not a mistake in scene composition; it’s fully intentional. In this story, what marks the bad guys as bad guys is that they don’t want to see. In a movie that is so explicitly about moviemaking, that’s got to be the closest there is to a definition of evil, and that’s why the two heroes in this movie are one who shows and one who sees.

In parallel with Daniel’s quest, we follow Margaret, who after an encounter with a mysterious bird gains the power to read into people’s souls, speak in their language, understand their deepest truths. What is happening is that she has become the ideal moviegoer. Margaret sees a stranger and instantly understands their whole life. That’s what happens to you when you sit at the movie theater. Later, she gains the power to show people hidden parts of themselves. If a movie is well made, that’s also what should happen to you at the movies: the story should tell you something about you. In the most symbolically charged sequence of Disclosure Day, Margaret visits a replica of her parents’ house, which is for all purposes a movie set, so she can relive a repressed memory of a childhood encounter with aliens. She’s watching a movie that turns out to be about herself.

That’s how Spielberg feels about movies. He’s showing you a story he made up for his own reasons, but he hopes it reveals a truth about you.

There’s a scene in the middle of Disclosure Day where Daniel shows his girlfriend a sample of the files he stole. If you pay attention, you’ll see that an opening in the wall lets a bit of sunshine enter the room from behind her head. It looks just like a movie projector. That’s the Spielberg formula in a nutshell: let me show you something that will change your life. He’s been saying this, in various ways, throughout his career. In his adaptation of Minority Report, people are judged based on movies made about them (in the original novelette, the reports were written). In the night scenes of Jurassic Park, the only sources of light are the heroes’ handheld lanterns that expose the hidden dangers, effectively movie projectors that create the next bit of action.

In Jurassic Park, the idea was: let me show you… a simulation of life. In A.I., it was: let me show you… a simulation of love. In Minority Report, it was: let me show you… a simulation of you. And in Disclosure Day, the trick is turned on itself: let me show you… what’s on the other side of the simulation. Spielberg has already said plenty about the power of seeing. Now he’s trying to tell you that he sees you, and he hopes to provoke in you the no less transformative experience of feeling seen.

Disclosure Day opens at a wrestling match, a quintessential simulation if we’ve ever seen one. And the very first shot is a boot stomping on the camera. Of course Spielberg knows there are dangers to the power of seeing. In Jurassic Park, you’re safe as long as you’re invisible to the T-Rex. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hubris of trying to see God is what kills you. In Minority Report, your eyes are the key to how the state controls you. In Disclosure Day, the villain finds perverse uses for an alien machine that (quite literally) lets him see through someone else’s eyes.

Many have called Spielberg naïve for making a movie about his belief that movies can save us. That critique is not only unfair, but also logically self-defeating: if he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be making movies in the first place. How else would any sincere art exist? It’s only fitting that the ending of Disclosure Day has the entire planet turned into a movie theater, all of humankind joined in the experience of seeing something that makes them feel seen. Is that schmaltzy? Very well, let it be schmaltzy. It’s not like jaded cynicism has taken us anywhere worth being at.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The Bride!

A smart, visceral, unapologetic cry of rebellion

The rules of the game are ambiguous from the beginning. Speaking from beyond the grave, Mary Shelley addresses the audience directly, bored with the endless void of the afterlife where nothing ever happens, and frustrated at not having had enough time for telling the stories she still had in mind. This theme of a woman’s voice tragically silenced will reoccur through the film. What sets things in motion is Shelley’s impossible feat of self-necromancy, as if applying the forbidden arts of Victor Frankenstein to her own life’s spark to find a way back into the world of the living.

We’re brought to 1930s Chicago, with its blinding lights and its sordid dark corners, its charm and its promise and its disillusions. There Shelley has sensed a spirit that resonates with hers, another woman exhausted of playing appendage to a certain breed of men; and their joining, rather than a possession in the way we’re used to seeing in horror cinema, is a two-hour-long primal scream, a verborrheic burst of irrepressible wrath and ecstasy and dread and revulsion and despondency and grievance all at once. Through this new woman, whom death itself is powerless to silence, Shelley completes the story she confesses to us she’d been meaning to write for centuries: the tale of the Bride of Frankenstein.

A motif keeps playing on a loop across Western myths, a Freudian fixation we can’t seem to outgrow: in one iteration after another, the creation of Man is a worthy end in itself, but the creation of Woman has to satisfy an instrumental justification. When God builds Adam, it’s for his own sake (and my bifid usage of “his” here is fully intended), but when he builds Eve, it’s solely for Adam. So it goes with every artificial woman from Galatea to Alexa: she exists to be put in the service of someone else, to fulfill a function. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature’s curse is that no one is willing to love him, Frankenstein’s creature’s Bride’s curse is that her willingness to love is already assumed. That’s the whole point of her. Whatever she may want for herself isn’t part of the equation.

This Bride, however, won’t play along with the plan. After her death and reanimation, she may be a blank slate with no traces left of her former identity (and that’s exactly how Frankenstein’s Entitled Incel wants her), but she still has Mary Shelley whispering inside her head. Even more dangerously, she carries the names and stories of many other women that 1930s Chicago has killed. She’s bound to attract the wrong kind of attention soon.

The rules of the game are kept ambiguous. The setting of The Bride! never pretends to be our 1930s Chicago; it has the gangsters and the neon signs and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, but it also has clandestine clubs with strobes and modern beats. It’s a world where Mary Shelley lived, wrote and died, but somehow Victor Frankenstein existed too, and his masterwork is known to other researchers of fringe science. So Shelley’s ghost is aware of us in the audience, and on top of that she can access a world where her fictional creation really happened, and there she reenacts Bride of Frankenstein (to the point of adopting its gimmick of casting the same actress as both Shelley and the Bride), with a stint under the false name Penelope, the name of a mythical character whose whole deal consisted in putting her life in pause for a man (and to further highlight the point, The Bride! features a real-life actress by the name of Penélope in the role of a woman who has been denied a career of her own).

To this erudite pile of allusions The Bride! adds a side wink toward the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde plus explicit callbacks to the victim-turned-criminal-turned-revolutionary-symbol strain of social commentary that 2019’s incel hagiography Joker tripped over and fell on its face attempting—which has got to be a deliberate choice, given that writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal once played a woman murdered by the Joker, and then took the Batman from that same film and cast him here as the 120-Year-Old Virgin. The Bride! juggles a dozen flaming daggers of intertextual connections and metafictional layers while tap-dancing backwards in high heels.

Movies have always loved monsters. So it’s only appropriate that this time, the monsters love movies. This version of Frankenstein’s creature is infatuated with a star of musical cinema who has conquered the devotion of the masses despite living with a physical deformity. It’s easy to see how the creature takes the actor as an aspirational symbol, even though the nature of this affection is not appreciated in return. In another of the film’s many tricks that blur the boundaries between levels of fictiveness, we see the creature and his Bride superimposed on the screen within the screen, replacing the protagonists of whatever movie they’re watching. They see a glamorous world of conventionally beautiful people and dare to see themselves in it. The Bride! couldn’t be more unsubtle in its plea to the audience: this story is about you. Try seeing yourself in it. Try letting its spirit possess you.

The Bride! is a movie about the power of movies, and about the trope of the instrumentalized woman, and about the injustice of being robbed of your voice and the exhilaration of seizing it back. It’s the protest against heartless callousness that Joker wished it were. It’s the anthem to unhinged feminine power that Cruella wished it were. It’s supremely uninterested in pleasing everyone. It dances to its own rhythm.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann

 Queer space pirates fighting the mundane evils of AI

Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman is a book about the power of stories to help us figure out who we are, the ramifications of giving a corporate AI the power to decide what kinds of stories are told, and what happens to the people it leaves out of those stories.

The story is told from the perspective of Kelli Reynolds, an autistic woman who lives on Callisto and works as a script supervisor for Inspiration, a media company that also runs the surrounding system. Kelli has been contacted by an ex, an old friend from school, named Rowan, who needs a favour. Rowan is trans, and Inspiration has outlawed surgery for trans people, meaning that hormones for trans people are a controlled substance. Kelli worries that he’s in trouble and agrees to meet him. Shenanigans ensue.

Interspersed with the chapters about Kelli in the present moment are chapters featuring Kelli as a child and teenager. In these chapters, we see the development of her friendship with Rowan (who we meet as a girl named Amelia, who quickly begins to go by ‘Am’ and eventually chooses the name Rowan).

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a fun heist story where Kelli gets tricked into helping her old friend steal intellectual property from Inspiration. To do this, they have to fight Inspiration’s community standards enforcement division as well as a criminal syndicate. Rowan has styled himself as something of a space pirate, smuggling “illegal” content and helping people jailbreak their computers so they can read without Inspiration looking over their shoulders.

The story was fun and absolutely worth reading! But for me, what makes this story great is how Hoffman uses it to reveal what a realistic world controlled by a corporate AI system could look like. Hoffman uses the chapters where Kelli is a child to explain the LLM, so they can explain it to the reader like we are also eight years old. This works surprisingly well. In a special lesson, “who does a story belong to?,” Kelli and her classmates are introduced to the idea that Inspiration owns all the stories because it solved the problem of having an LLM trained on stolen data by buying and trademarking not only story components, like pirates and dragons, but also story structures like “misunderstandings and redemptions, comedies and tragedies, romances and victories over impossible odds.” Then the company trademarked the names of places and famous people. It ended up owning all the intellectual property of storytelling, so it became the only one who could tell and sell stories.

The discussion of a world crafted by a corporate AI kept me thinking about this book long after I’d finished it. I have been an AI hater from the beginning, mostly due to ethical and environmental reasons, but Hoffman clearly shows the possible ramifications of allowing all our content to be created by a corporate-owned LLM: identities deemed “problematic” suddenly just do not exist in stories. Stories with unlikeable or unreliable narrators just don’t get published anymore. We no longer get to see stories where people grapple with trauma, hurt, and wrong, because those stories are too “divisive.”

Hoffman has a PhD in computer science, and their dissertation focused on AI systems; they know what they’re talking about with the tech. In the afterward, they discuss how they thought hard about how AI is portrayed in fiction: “Exaggerating AI’s power and intelligence, even if it’s the bad guy, can sometimes reinforce inaccurate ideas about what AI is really capable of and about what kinds of AI risk are most pressing, and AI companies adroitly use these misconceptions for their own benefit.”

Hoffman demonstrates how AI can constrain the stories we are allowed to tell when, in a flashback chapter, the kids write their own story with a special version of the LLM: “StoryGen—Kids’ Edition!” The program does not actually let them write very much of their own. They can write a sentence and then they’re prompted to ask the LLM to make it “more exciting!,” “happier!,” or “funnier!.” One of the kids wants to write about a shark that eats everything, and laments that there is no “angrier!” button. Instead, the StoryGen writes a milquetoast story about “a shark who was nice and made good choices, because sharks are an important part of the ecosystem and we should not be afraid of them.”

As Hoffman explains in the afterword, “At heart, large language models work—like a very sophisticated autocorrect—by predicting the most likely continuation of a given series of words. This preference for the most likely output causes any biases in the model’s training data to be not only reflected, but amplified. Even without censorious policies like Inspiration’s, the model will be more biased towards the majority, and more reliant on stereotypes in general, than whatever text it trained on, unless very careful training and prompting techniques are devised to counteract this effect.”

In the story, Hoffman shows us how Kelli and Rowan, now queer and neurodivergent adults, grew up without any ability to see themselves reflected in stories. While homosexuality is not illegal in Inspiration space, it’s considered “private” and inappropriate to discuss with minors. So Kelli and Rowan had never actually heard about queer people or different ways of presenting gender until they get access to a parent’s tablet to search for terms like “dyke” and “lesbian”—terms they’d heard as slurs but did not understand the meaning of.

This is a fairly dark book masked behind what Hoffman refers to as an “unsubtle cartoonlike aesthetic.” In addition to the disappearing of queer identities in Inspiration space, we also see what it’s like to grow up neurodivergent in such a society. Kelli, who is autistic, has been issued a companion robot that runs an LLM to “help” her learn to be “normal.” One of their friends, Elaine, goes to weekly appointments with an AI therapist. The robot and the AI therapist cannot help Kelli and Elaine because neither acknowledges that it’s okay to be different.

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a cleverly written space heist book, with surprising depth in its discussion of queerness, neurodiversity, and the harms of AI. It's absolutely worth reading.

Highlights:

• Well done queer and neurodiverse characters
• Contemplates harms of corporate AI
• Space pirates doing a heist

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention.

Reference: Hoffman, Ada. Ignore All Previous Instructions [Tachyon Publishing, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

A Russian nested doll of stories, characters and relationships, and yes, magic

Jamie is a grad student in Massachusetts, working as best she can to teach classes and make her way in the world. She’s also a witch, has been for years, and has gotten more and more interested in the uses of magic. But it is her relationship with her mother, and the story of two women in the 18th century, and a book, and the story within that book, that truly drive and reinforce the narrative.

This is the story of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

On the level of basic plot description, the novel is a relatively straightforward affair about Jamie’s relationship with her mother, and about uncovering what happened to her other mother, Mae. This proceeds as Jamie struggles with her relationship with her mother, with her spouse, Ro, and with the nature and uses of magic. Oh, and there is also drama and issues with her graduate studies and classes in the modern day.

Anyone with a parental relationship as an adult will find a lot here to think on and absorb. There is a real dividing line from when you stop being a child and start being an adult with an adult parent; and what life is like on that other side can be uncomfortable, especially if relations have had a break for a time. This novel explores the implications of that sort of relationship intimately and with feeling.

The narrative is far more than the sum of its parts. It is a rich dive deep down in levels and layers that wind up influencing and talking to each other, and to the reader. The novel works on those interlocking layers. At the very top, this is a story about a mother and a daughter and how they try to reconnect, with the daughter teaching magic to her mother, and the use of that magic having all sorts of spinning consequences. This impacts severely the relationship. And since this is a Charlie Jane Anders book, nearly all of the sympathetic characters are queer.

Jamie’s graduate studies center on the author Sarah Fielding, a real-life author, and sister of the more famous author Henry Fielding. The story of 18th-century women like Sarah is part of this novel. Anders devises a fictional novel of hers called Emily, making the text (and Jamie) focus on that book and speculate on the relationship between Emily and one Charlotte Clarke. Charlotte is a fascinating real-life character who transgressed gender roles in complicated ways, was often known as Charles Brown, and dressed in men’s clothes. In real life we don’t know how much Charlotte and Sarah knew each other. In this novel, bits of a speculated relationship between the two is a “level” of the story underneath the main ones.

The novel is like that: levels upon levels, echoing and reflecting on each other, like a layer cake. From the top:

• Main day story of Jamie, Ro (her partner) and Serena (her mother). Plus magic.
• The story of Serena and her partner Mae (Jamie’s parents). It’s a tragedy in many ways. I was moved to tears at points.
• The story of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Clarke. Anders takes what we know and, thanks to it being part of Jamie’s thesis, has her speculate on the relationship.
• The fictional novel Emily by Fielding (which we get excerpts and commentary on, since this is Jamie’s thesis).
• Finally, inside Emily there is a layer further down: a fantasy story, the Tale of the Princess and the Strolling Player, that definitely has connections at least up to Fielding and Clarke’s story, and, I think, all the way to Jamie and Ro’s as well.

Although there is no actual time travel involved in this book, what comes to mind when reading it is Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, which focuses on the early 19th century, and the work of an imaginary Romantic poet’s work and its importance to the narrative. With all these layers influencing each other, I am also reminded of the Dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

So the novel is extremely geeky in a literary sense. It’s a fascinating high wire act from Anders. It’s also a very science-fictional geeky book. For all of the focus on an 18th-century author, the novel lives in a modern context and has plenty of references and genre awareness—not to the degree of, say, a Jo Walton novel, but enough for someone new to genre works or movies to find it just very slightly off-putting. That said, this IS the novel to give your queer or queer-friendly friend who has never read science fiction or fantasy before but wants to try it out.

That subject has been in the water in recent months. Here, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, there are no spell-slinging wizards; the magic is subtle. While people might reach for Kelly Link here, what this novel made me think of (besides earlier works by Anders and the aforementioned Tim Powers), is Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb)’s Wizard of the Pigeons, where magic is also very subtle and hard to notice.¹ The threat in that novel is mystical, whereas the challenges Jamie and her family and friends face are all too real and present.

The theory of magic, such as it is for Jamie and her family and friends, is one of discovery and of liminal places. There is a numinous, mysterious and only-vaguely-understood nature of magic that is very much against codified rules. Jamie, who has been practicing this magic for some time before the book, has theories about it that don’t always seem to align with the actual results. Serena, to whom she teaches magic, has her own ideas on what it’s good for. When Serena and Jamie find other practitioners, the bounds and sphere of actual theory, craft and knowledge expand further. At no point is there a Sandersonian ruleset defined. Magic is, in the end, mysterious. And it’s not the entire focus of the book, as witness the book’s Kelly-Link-like title.

The voice in the writing of Lessons in Magic and Disaster is contemporary and open. In this year of 2026, Jamie’s voice resonates as someone you might know, or at least be neighbors with. Her concerns and problems, aside from the issues of magic, and of the 18th-century material mentioned before, are of this moment too: the rising intolerance against queer people, and the difficulties of relationships with a spouse and a mother. It’s not a comfortable read, given what Jamie and those around her go through, but Anders makes the experience easy for us to immerse in, and find sympathy in both Jamie and her mother despite their differences. There are no easy answers at the end. That in itself is a form of magic.

There is a point in the novel where Jamie finds a thesis statement (or thinks she has) for her study of Fielding. It’s really an echo for the thesis statement for Anders’ s novel as well, and so, atypically, I am going to quote it verbatim:

So now Jamie is thinking of Emily as a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart’s desire in spite of everyone else’s expectations. Emily is a book about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind to move to towns at the very start of industrial capitalism, and the changes that people can make in those places. It’s about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and Emily’s struggle to have both.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a queer, immersive character study that sometimes uncomfortably (in a good way) speaks to fractured relationships, both familial and otherwise, and the costs of both action and inaction in dealing with challenges. Plus magic.

Highlights:

• Character-focused, immersive story
• Russian-doll narrative, layered story reinforcing and exploring theme
• Possibly a very good fit for a first SFF novel for queer-friendly readers

Reference: Anders, Charlie Jane. Lessons in Magic and Disaster [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve thrown a number of books and references at you, the reader, in this review, but the book is like that, too. There are both a Historical Note and a strongly felt Afterword where Anders reveals her thought process, ideas, and a reading list. And a music list, because she’s like that.

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

TV Microreview: Wonder Man

‘To thine own self be true’ is a superpower

Much like the 2005 movie Bewitched, the MCU series Wonder Man tells the story of the remake of an old production about a superpowered character, with the twist that the lead actor chosen for the role happens to actually have superpowers. Now, before you get too excited: just because Marvel decided to make a superhero story about the making of a superhero story doesn’t mean that it’s finally casting a critical gaze on itself. The show’s acknowledgment of the problematic cultural footprint of the superhero business doesn’t go beyond the briefest lip service. Don’t expect the level of awareness you find in The Boys, for example. Far be it from Marvel to bite its own hand. But what you do get in Wonder Man is a sweet character treatment of a talented, hopeful artist learning to get out of his own way, joined by a more mature artist who has used his talents in disgraceful ways and gets a chance to put them in the service of a nobler purpose.

First we meet Simon, a son of Haitian immigrants who first learned as a child the usefulness of putting on a performance when life got too cruel. After watching the old Wonder Man movie, he became enamoured with the art of fiction. Now he’s a struggling D-list actor who overthinks his roles and stresses out his agent because he can get annoying to film with. When he hears that there’s a Wonder Man remake being produced, he drops everything in pursuit of the lead role. But his complicated acting style is the least of his troubles: he also has superpowers, and they’re very hard to control, which would ban him from the acting profession if it became known. His arc is about deciding which side of him it’s wise to let people see.

Then we have Trevor, whom we met in Iron Man 3 and then in Shang-Chi. He’s trying to rebuild an acting career that he can be proud of, but his past misdeeds keep catching up with him. Under threat of sending him back to prison, the Department of Damage Control recruits him to gather information on Simon, who is considered extremely dangerous, but as the two become friends, Trevor ends up reevaluating his priorities and risking his own future to save Simon’s. His arc is about recognizing the one moral thing he can finally do, and daring to do it.

Together, Simon and Trevor are a lovely duo, the aspiring artist pushing the older one to rediscover his goodness, the veteran artist nudging the younger one to be more authentically himself in his craft. These two form the beating heart of the story, and the scenes where they nerd out about their love of acting are a pure delight. Fittingly, the theme of acting resonates with their respective problems: on Simon’s part, with the constant pretense that it takes to keep his superpowers hidden; and on Trevor’s part, with his secret mission to infiltrate Simon’s life. Their mutual game of masks is resolved when each realizes that there’s a time for vulnerable self-disclosure, and there’s a time to put on an elaborate act for the right reason.

It’s refreshing that, for once, a Marvel superhero doesn’t have to save the world from an all-devouring cataclysm. There’s also value in finding that there’s something worth saving in yourself.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s ambitious new novel tackles major global issues from AI to the power of storytelling

The title alone, Death of the Author, sets up this novel to engage with how we think about authorship, readers, and the life of a story. The novel follows Zelu, a failed adjunct professor, who at her lowest moment, writes a science fiction novel. Her previous literary novel, which she had worked on for a decade, had failed to sell, but after she sends in this new novel about robots in Nigeria thriving after humanity has destroyed itself, her agent declares it will be a hit. And it is. Zelu’s life entirely changes as she is swept up in the fantastical life of a celebrity author.

Zelu’s rise to literary stardom is marked by her struggles with her family. As a girl, she fell from a tree and became paralyzed from the waist down, which impacted how her family treated her and continue to treat her as an adult. Zelu comes from a large diasporic family, with many of her siblings living successful lives in Chicago, while Zelu is, at first, the failed writer with only an MFA. As her uncle says later in the book, “You’ve been shrugging off the house they built around you since you wrote that book. […] You rewrote your narrative” (312). The more compelling part of this novel is following Zelu as she rewrites this narrative that her family and Nigerian culture has constructed around her. Even before her success as an author, she displayed a level of independence from her family by smoking weed, using autonomous driving vehicles instead of relying on the family for rides, and having an active dating life.

Braided within the story of Zelu’s family life and literary career is the novel that rockets her to stardom, Rusted Robots. This novel follows Ankara, a Hume robot who collects stories. While walking the human-less earth, Ankara learns a terrible piece of information that will lead to the destruction of the planet and must find more Humes who can help avert this destruction. During the search, Ankara becomes entangled with a NoBody, a type of AI which lives in a hive with other NoBodies. They believe they are superior to Humes and other robots who continue in a physical existence. Even so, Ankara and the NoBody named Ijele learn to work together for survival. 

Meta books like Okorafor’s novel are particularly tricky to pull off. Usually, when describing a novel within a novel where the story is a global sensation, there are two common routes: either the sensational novel is included, emphasizing the story-within-story, or it is only referenced and summarized by various characters, never giving the reader any, or very little, insight into the text. The problem with including the sensationalized story in the novel is that it has to live up to being a global sensation, which is a task for any novelist. Okorafor braids the story within a story of Rusted Robots throughout the novel, but it never caught me up as an inspiring hit. Moments of Rusted Robots were moving, funny, beautifully described, but it didn’t quite deliver the promise of the frame: that it would capture readers globally to the level of reading it over and over, obsessed with these characters, obsessed with the author. Rather, Zelu's story is more compelling and personal. Even so, Rusted Robots has a lovely meditation on the importance of story as the character Ankara collects tales and ultimately, uses fiction to help save the planet. As Ankara says: “Stories are what holds all things together” (412). 

The reference of the novel’s title promises the reader an investigation of storytelling, and the novel does deliver on some of those ideas. The title, Death of the Author, comes into play as Zelu must release her novel Rusted Robots into the hands of her readers, thus completing Roland Barthes’ maxim at the end of his essay by the same name: “We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” This release becomes particularly troublesome for Zelu when the movie adaptation is far afield of the Nigerian-based book that she produced, becoming a much more “American” version, which Zelu hates. Yet, the movie becomes incredibly popular and praised, leading to more interest in her novel via this interpretation of her work that she deems incorrect and insulting. This meditation on the struggle of being a successful SFF author captured the meta-ness the novel promises as Zelu struggles with being “canceled” and the demand for a sequel alongside the threats that come from becoming so rich so quickly. In something of an American fairytale, Zelu manages to pull herself up by her bootstraps and is richly rewarded for her hard work as a writer, with even her snotty students apologizing to her after her stardom. Of course, there are also struggles as she has negative interactions with interviewers who want to focus on her race, her disability, or her class, but these interactions and right criticisms of the media industry do not detract from Zelu’s ultimate success and wealth. 

It was refreshing to see this type of meta narrative in science fiction as opposed to the postmodern literary novel. Throughout the novel, the commentary on science fiction as a powerful tool is clear, as one character says: “[Science fiction is] about being different, seeing more, examining human nature, and imagining tomorrow” (383). To that end, parts of Zelu’s stardom story are troubling if we are to believe in the power of science fiction to imagine tomorrow. Plot points hinge on the interest and action of two rich, white men—one working in medical science and another investing in citizen space travel. The timing of this book does not lend to the positive associations these character garner from Zelu—published a few days before a “rich” white man was inaugurated for a second term as President of the U.S. and a few weeks before the richest man in the world would speak in the oval office while disassembling parts of the U.S. government. There are gestures of criticism in the novel to the fact that Zelu is accepting opportunities from these rich, white men, but I struggle to find a thoughtful examination of these moments. 

In the spirit of Barthes, the title asks the reader to separate the author’s biography from the text and reader’s interpretation (or not, if we are to interpret this novel as refuting Barthes, which there is evidence for in how closely Zelu’s life mirrors the Hume Ankara). It is important to note that Okorafor does not agree with Barthes’ theorizing and told The Bookseller: “You can’t separate the author from the work. You can’t separate it and that’s okay.” To not separate this book from the author creates a strange dissonance around the economic politics of the book, upon which much of the plot hinges. Zelu’s economic success changes her life, and she has fantastical experience after fantastical experience because she is rich. While the book gestures at the occasional critical comment of the wealthy characters, ultimately the rich white guys are good. Only in science fiction is such a world possible.

The cover of Death of the Author promises “the future of storytelling is here.” While the novel does not quite live up to the idea, this book demonstrates Okorafor’s range as an artist. The economic plotline of the novel leaves something to be desired in our current moment, but this layered text will leave interested readers with much to discuss.

Reference: Okorafor, Nnedi. Death of the Author [William Morrow, 2025].

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

Close your eyes and enter Dream Productions

Turns out you can give yourself an epiphany without being quite sure how you did it

Dreams aren't stories in the strict sense: they don't proceed from an authorial choice, don't follow an ordered causal progression, and don't express a deliberate stance on their theme. Only the most surreal category of stories would include the semi-random free association carnival our unconscious minds are capable of spitting out. But dreams do have some sort of secret logic, a symbolic language that is unique to each of us. Because they're generated from our own thoughts, they can never tell us something we don't already know. It's just that sometimes we need to be reminded of an obvious truth.

The world of Inside Out is the perfect venue for that kind of exploration. In the limited TV series Dream Productions, a school dance approaches, and our girl Riley is going through the messy balancing act between her childish whimsy and her drive toward maturity. Unsurprisingly, the forces inside her head are working full-time to process those complicated feelings. The surprising part is how neatly the dreams-as-stories metaphor corresponds to the inner conflict.

In the abstract mindspace of Inside Out, dreams are made in a movie studio with a limited repertoire of plots and an unlimited VFX budget. We meet scripwriters, actors, directors, stunt performers, camera operators—but let's not forget these homunculi are actually fragments of Riley's mind. The cutthroat rivalries and artistic disagreements that drive this series are meant to represent unconscious urges that are channeled into dream imagery. The question troubling Riley is whether she has enough social competence for teenage activities; she loves fun, but she's terrified of being perceived as uncool. Her mother's less-than-ideal choice of dress for the upcoming occasion triggers a whole week of disturbing nightmares she needs to sort out on her own.

What adds a level of meta awesomeness to this premise is that it lets us witness (albeit very indirectly) the creative process at Pixar. Since its foundation, the studio has been praised by its strong grasp of emotional stakes; when you go to the movies for a Pixar production, you know you're going to end up crying, and you're looking forward to it. You love how Pixar makes you cry. You love how it seems to understand you so well. That is the degree of insight that Riley's inner movie studio has about her.

The use of dreams as a catalyst for self-knowledge and growth will be immediately recognizable to viewers familiar with The Cell, Paprika or Inception. Where Dream Productions sets itself apart is in the argument that we can learn from our dreams even if we don't remember them. And here the connection between dreams and stories is especially relevant. Maybe you grew up watching Pixar movies, but do you remember everything that happens in them? What Pixar seems to be telling us in Dream Productions is that what matters in their stories isn't their plot, but the emotional imprint they leave upon us. What stories do for us is something deeper than provide models to follow or cautionary tales. They suggest ways of feeling we hadn't considered. They test our stated values. They teach us to be human.

As if that weren't enough substance, Dream Productions adds yet another meta level: the series is told as a mockumentary where Riley's homunculi talk to the camera. Who is supposed to be filming this and interviewing Riley's unconscious? Who are these characters addressing? Go figure. Like in Diego Velásquez's painting Las Meninas, you're invited to put yourself at the center of this piece of art. You're meant to participate as a character in the story, but the world of the story is a slice of you. You're watching yourself watch yourself.

And here Dream Productions finally reveals the ace up its sleeve. I won't spoil how this plays out, but if you connect the idea of dreams as an improvisational form of storytelling with the idea of deliberate introspection turning its gaze on itself, you'll probably guess what I'm talking about. As I've said a thousand times on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And Dream Productions draws you into an infinite page of potential plot, the text of which comes from a pen your hand is holding.

That is the hidden lesson of every story about dreams: you need to become aware that you are their only author, and you have always been.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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.

Microreview: The Last Movie Ever Made

At the end of the world, art may not save us, but it will prove that our lives meant something

One morning, every human being on the planet hears a voice in their head. It's not a hallucination: it's a public service announcement. The simulation that hosts our universe will be shut down in a few weeks. Be sure to say your goodbyes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To prevent mass chaos, the people running the simulation have dialed down our rebelliousness. They want none of that rage against the machine, thank you very much. We're expected to just go gentle into the night.

And yet, one man will spend his last days ensuring that his brief stay among the living will leave a mark. Our protagonist, Marshall, is a complete nobody. But in the face of eternal oblivion, that's what we all are. Regardless of his complete lack of talent, friends, or any redeeming qualities, he will stop at nothing to finally make the movie he left unfinished years ago. It's not a good movie, not even a good concept. But it's his movie. That it matters to him is enough. That hopeless scream against the void is the premise of the indie film The Last Movie Ever Made.

Now, to be clear, the fact that you're making sincere art doesn't automatically mark you as a good person. Marshall has learned the same narcissism he criticizes in his mother, and the way he gathers his moviemaking crew exposes the faults of character that have left his life stranded and directionless. He does acquire a more mature perspective about himself during the runtime of the film, but it's still an indictment of his person that it took the end of the world for him to begin that process.

Art is meant to be useless, if you go by Oscar Wilde's word. Nothing will change because of Marshall's movie existing. It won't convince the makers of the simulation to keep us alive. It won't buy our reality even one more day. When everything ends, so will art. So why bother?

The Last Movie Ever Made rejects that question. Its position is that it's precisely because we are limited and ephemeral that art is worth the effort. In fact, our finitude is what makes art valuable. It doesn't even matter that the beauty we create is doomed to fade away. It suffices to elevate the universe, to be a place where beauty once existed, as opposed to one that never had it.

It's a pity that the script doesn't maintain a firmer grasp of its own theme. The character of Marshall lacks consistency from one act to the next because the plot requires his immediate world to warp itself around his goals: one day, his ex-wife is angry at him for caring more about finishing his movie than about her recent family tragedy; a few days later, she happily stays for his sake and dismisses whatever her family supposedly meant to her. This muddles the film's earlier point about the lines that Marshall has crossed for his art. It's as if the fact that everyone will soon die rendered moot any consequences for repeated misbehavior on Marshall's part.

The film is made with almost the same simplicity with which Marshall makes his. The characters' situation already carries enough emotion without any need to punctuate it with fancy camera tricks, digital effects, or even a relevant soundtrack. This is a bare-bones production whose only ambition is to say what it means, and it succeeds at that.

In a possible parallel with the larger premise about a computer program coming to an end, the film's third act begins when Marshall's computer crashes and most of the scenes he's shot are lost. At that point in the story, it appears that his entire life's work has been for nothing. Even if he were to start again, he may not have enough time before the universe is shut down. There you have the human condition in a nutshell: We never know whether it makes sense to try, because none of us is promised there will be enough time.

So what does Marshall do? He tries again. Of course he tries again. Because that's what humans do when confronted with the absurd. Because, although no human effort can destroy death, art is the one human effort that death can't destroy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Harold and the Purple Crayon

A character who can create anything goes in search of his creator

Think of the character Harold in Stranger than Fiction, who learns his life has a narrator, and is desperate to go on living. Think of the character Augusto in Miguel de Unamuno's 1914 novel Mist, who learns that his life has a narrator, and is desperate to not go on living. Think of Daffy Duck in the short Duck Amuck, shocked at the revelation that an artist armed with a pencil can freely create or destroy his existence.

But also: think of the NPC Guy in the film Free Guy, who learns that his life is scripted by computer code, and decides to seize independence. Think of Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, who learns that his face and his voice belong to an actor, and decides to fulfill his mission no matter what. Think of Douglas in the film The Thirteenth Floor, who learns that his life is a digital simulation, and decides to go out into the real world. Think of Giselle in Enchanted, thrown out of a fairy tale into the endless whirlwind of modern urban life, and decides to search for happiness.

But also: think of Akira Kurosawa turning Van Gogh's paintings into whole worlds to get lost in. Think of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel that becomes real and traversable. Think of Cursor in Automan, able to create any object by drawing its outline. Think of Sphere and the cursed power to make imagination real.

Breaks in the boundary between fiction and reality have a long tradition going from Pygmalion and Galatea to Deadpool and She-Hulk. The classic children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson is, like The Thirteenth Floor and Wile E. Coyote, a two-layered instance: it shows a drawn child who is able to draw things into existence. Its recently released film adaptation adds one more level: the child, now grown up, reasons that, if he can interact with the things he draws, he should be able to interact with the one who drew him. What ensues is an understated but deep exploration of the possibilities of fantasy.

In the movie, soon after Harold emerges from the world of the book into the real world, he runs into an aspiring fantasy writer whose style is the polar opposite of Harold's. Harold comes from a cute, whimsical picture book meant to inspire little kids. His nemesis in the film writes edgy grimdark with world-shattering weapons and unpronounceable names. In a literal case of the pen being mightier than the sword, Harold's sweet imagination proves capable of defeating the most twisted creations of a would-be tyrant sorcerer.

The genius part of the movie, however, isn't even in this unsubtle commentary on fantasy subgenres: it's in Harold's quest to meet his author. As it happens, Crockett Johnson has passed away. At first, this news leaves Harold feeling without purpose or direction. But he eventually learns that he doesn't need a creator when he has his own power of creation. In other words, the movie is presenting us with the provocative argument that to live under existentialism is basically to apply Death of the Author to reality. You are your own giver of meaning and your own interpreter.

Harold and the Purple Crayon coats these philosophical insights under shiny layers of common slapstick and fish-out-of-water misunderstandings. But even allowing for the contrivances of a fantasy for kids, this one is so full of them that one is tempted to suspect that the movie is deliberately drawing attention to the fictional quality of its setting, a version of Providence RI that seems to consist of just half a dozen blocks, judging by how frequently the characters run into each other when it's convenient for the plot. More care is employed in handling the parallel between Harold's sense of cosmic abandonment and his human friend's grief over his dead father. It's not only picture book characters who need to learn how to live by their own guidance.

It's a fortunate authorial choice to keep the plot at the right scale for human-sized drama. Other authors might have made Harold's all-powerful crayon end up in the hands of military tech researchers or something like that. It's a mistake that can happen in live-action adaptations. Instead, to stage the climactic conflict between tonally incompatible versions of fantasy keeps the ideas of the film at the right level of abstraction. It's not about what you'd do if you had a magical item that could create anything. It's what you'd do if you removed the restraints of your imagination. Some come up with gritty worlds of endless battle and hypermuscular champions. Others think beyond those limitations and come up with purple ice cream. I know which one I prefer.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon Green

A myth about understanding why we love myths—a metamyth, if you will

Fantasy is a genre built on myth. That is what J. R. R. Tolkien was quite explicitly doing with The Lord of the Rings, and in traditional Western fantasy the myths of Western Europe are reinterpreted in any number of ways. In non-Western fantastic literature, the same is done to the mythologies of a variety of other cultures. Here, that concern is made more explicit than most fantasy, of any tradition, in Simon Green’s novella For Love of Magic.

For Love of Magic starts off with what appears to be a fairly standard urban fantasy setup: a magical painting has begun to cause problems in a museum in London, and His Majesty’s government calls in the freelance magic hunter to solve the problem. This opening scene alone is inventive, if not the most original, by virtue of it involving our esteemed magic hunter literally walking into the painting and forcing what’s on the other end into a shape that is more amenable to the non-magical world.

But that is only the opening salvo of a barrage of interesting magical set-pieces. Our protagonist is rapidly sucked into a war that has lasted for eons, between those who want to see magic gone and those who want a better coexistence between the magical and the mundane. This war has suddenly escalated: the opponents of magic have now found a way to travel through time, trying to erase that which made magic meaningful—to erase myth, to erase heroism and whimsy. Our protagonists simply cannot allow that.

It is here that For Love of Magic begins to really shine, as it sets out to interrogate the meaning of myth. That is why you find yourself sent back in time to Roman Britain, where you meet Boudica, as well as King Arthur and Robin Hood, among other figures of British mythology, not quite as you remember them, because time has done a number on how we perceive them. These were men and women, all too human, as Green stresses, who have become something else as time marched inexorably on, becoming the heroes, myths, and legends of British culture, and those of its former colonies.

Green is willing to show heroism become a burden, not so much literally as metaphorically through the incursions of the time travelers. These are people who have become special in a time when their Lord-knows-how-many generations of their descendants have passed on, with their own long lines of descendants likewise. They have become pawns in a war far more literal than what we call ‘culture wars,’ a conflict that truly deserves that title over the role of magic in human society. They are burdened with the vicious arguments of their progeny, but unlike the cold and silent statues of our day, be they in Bristol or Charlottesville, these heroes get to speak back and fight back.

The action in this slim little volume is well depicted, never bogged down in the minutiae that can tank a good action sequence. Green’s writing is brisk when it needs to be in these dynamic scenes, and tender when it needs to be among some of the character moments, be they concerned with romance or with the gravity of the situation. It is a style, indeed a combination, that feels properly heroic, with the gravitas that such a story naturally needs. Green never lets the story feel puny.

If anything, I’m disappointed this book wasn’t longer. There are many more British legends he could have gone with. The last one he depicts, while written by a British author (although not within Britain), struck me as a very odd choice for this sort of book, and some of the setting of that story is brought to Britain in a way that feels odd. Indeed, it’s a format that could have made for a much longer book, and part of me really wants to read that book (I can think of at least one British literary legend in the public domain that wasn’t in it, and frankly I was surprised that this figure was omitted). I don’t know whether Green is planning any sequels, but he really should be, for there are so many directions this story could go. There are other British myths, but also myths of other countries (his Wikipedia page mentions he studied American literature in university, in addition to British literature). Indeed, I daresay this novel could set up a whole shared universe like that of the late Eric Flint’s 1632 series.

For Love of Magic is a book that is not particularly original in a number of elements, but makes up for all of that in its bold use of intertextuality and its investment in understanding why its audience reads stories like this. It is fantasy that doesn’t just crib from mythology, but engages with and even probes these stories for why they became myths. It is a fantasy that is in many ways more self-aware than its contemporaries, and is all the better for it. Now only if Green could write another one…

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Green, Simon. For Love of Magic [Baen, 2023].

Argylle is every cliché it thinks it's mocking

It's bold, to put it mildly, to make a story about storytelling that has no clue of how stories work

Matthew Vaughn's new spy film Argylle is clearly proud of itself for stacking so many secrets inside secrets, although the trick is not executed as elegantly as a Matryoshka, its artfulness befitting more a turducken. Twist after twist pile up in absurd proportions without even the benefit of being surprising, killing the plot by starvation moments before it would regardless have died of strangulation. It's possible to tolerate a ridiculous movie that is aware of its ridiculousness. It's torture to live through a ridiculous movie that knows it's ridiculous and also believes it's being clever.

Argylle kicks into motion by shaking the world of novelist Elly Conway, whose cheesy spy fiction has veered too close to real life and attracted the attention of actual spy agencies. So, for the first third of the movie, it looks like we're in a higher-stakes version of Stranger than Fiction. How is Elly able to predict international crises in such detail? That's a big premise. Alas, the plot twists in Argylle quickly fall into a routine of replacing the viewer's suspicions with a less interesting alternative. Oh, does Elly somehow sense the future? No, it turns out those events already happened. Oh, is her new spy friend plotting to kill her? No, he was speaking in hyperbole. Oh, is a close relative secretly also a member of the bad guys? Well, yes, but he wasn't really a relative, so the emotional impact is lost. Oh, did Elly betray her spy friend? Sorta, but only as part of an overcomplicated gambit that goes nowhere because she forgot a password. Every time a twist seems to steer the narrative in a more exciting direction, the next twist deflates the excitement and brings the plot back to the mundane. Argylle doesn't use its twists to reveal more substance beneath, but to disguise the absence of substance. There's never a resolution that satisfies the viewer's curiosity; only the disorientation of continuously having to discard all that was said a moment ago.

To this basic filmmaking sin is added the misuse of the character of Elly as a writer. For the duration of the film's starting pretense that her imagination is connected to the events in the background, there's a fleeting hope that our heroine will take advantage of the devices of storytelling to anticipate the bad guys' moves and break their plans. After all, who better than a mystery writer to solve a mystery? But soon enough, the script expressly disavows that promise and turns into a more boring type of story. We weren't following Stranger than Fiction; we were following Total Recall. Everything we believed was special about Elly is the part of her she no longer has. Worse still, later we learn that Elly, the professional narrator, has been living a narrative crafted by someone else, and once again there's the missed opportunity to play with the power of stories to convincingly simulate reality. What does it say about the nature of storytelling that the unwitting subject of an entire fictional life ended up using fiction to unconsciously liberate herself?

There's no use in expecting answers. By this point, what little coherence still remained has gone out the window. We can almost hear the director giggling proudly, convinced that his genius has blown our minds, but he's just punched them repeatedly into a bloody pulp. Quick successions of betrayals and reveals of past betrayals make the actual, hidden plot so nonsensical in hindsight that reason gives up, rendered defenseless to swallow the hyperviolent extravaganza that ensues. And then the director goes deep into an exploration of the pointless question that no one asked but cinema seems unable to move beyond: Is mass killing an art form? I haven't watched John Wick, so I may never know. But Matthew Vaughn seems to find a form of beauty in a duet of machine guns in the middle of smoke bombs that form the shape of a heart, shortly followed by a disturbing blend of Olympic-level skating and serial slashing. Are we meant to laugh? Or look in awe? Or shake our heads at the shared acknowledgment that all spy fiction is inherently unserious? The tone of these scenes is so unstable that their intricate choreography is wasted on the confused audience.

The escalating ridiculousness in the last third of the movie culminates in a couple of reality-breaking twists that don't even register in the viewer's by now desensitized awareness. Sure, this character was never dead. Why not. Sure, this other character who isn't even supposed to exist can show up in the flesh. Go ahead. Who cares. Oh, this was all along a spinoff from the Kingsman franchise? What the hell, nothing matters anyway. Austin Powers already told all the jokes there were to tell about James Bond, so what's left for the rest of filmmakers is to mock themselves in a self-referencing death spiral as cosmic punishment for needlessly keeping this genre alive.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Asteroid City lays bare the scaffolding of narration

It's an outstanding magic trick to expose the inherent insubstantiality of storytelling by means of such a solid, heavy-hitting story

Onto this Earth has landed an otherworldly fabulation: a film by Wes Anderson, which tells a [fictional] documentary filmed as monologue, which reenacts [allegedly real] events in the life of a writer, who writes a play with a troubled production, which narrates a short quarantine in a tiny town in the US southwestern desert, where an actress rehearses her upcoming movie. That's at least five layers of stories within stories. Asteroid City not only boasts Anderson's signature punctiliousness in set design, shot composition and character blocking, but also extends that deliberate artificiality beyond the look of the screen, reshaping its authorial relation from a single straight line to a segmented chain of railwagons, one leading to the next, serving as yet another form of expression of Anderson's artistic and personal fascination with trains.

In this Cold War-set multi-story, ironically structured as an Old West satirical paean to American achievements that is contained inside a set of Russian dolls, visitors to the town of Asteroid City, whose children are competing in a hilariously advanced science fair, are suddenly forced to stay at their motel for several days, overseen by the army, because the prehistoric meteorite that is the town's only tourist attraction has been stolen by aliens. This plot by itself is fertile ground for drama, and the film more than delivers on that front. However, in a reverse manner compared to a movie made by literally any other director (except for maybe Christopher Nolan), where the formal choices are a vehicle to deliver the message contained in the story, in Asteroid City the story is a vehicle to deliver the message contained in the form. Marshall McLuhan would approve.

The multi-story device that Anderson had already used in The Grand Budapest Hotel is here blown up to the stratosphere: the theater play is shown to us as a movie, set in a desert that extends to the far horizon, shot from several angles (always straight angles, mind you), with digital visual effects, with titles superimposed—you know, what any movie does. But there's the catch: that's the story that is supposed to be a play, but you experience it the way its supposed audience in the theater never could. You're not watching the play; you're watching what the play represents. For extra mind-blown-ness, at one point the perspective is reversed and we see the backstage as one of the actors leaves the play. And for a brief second, in a shot worthy of Las Meninas, we get a glimpse of the audience. We see us. Not literally us, because the function of images on the screen isn't being, but representing; that's what makes the trick possible. The best stories are those about stories, and Asteroid City achieves a Sierpińskian level of structural beauty in the way it folds upon itself. Even the dialogues are self-referential, with frequent use of easily missable constructions such as "He said that he said," "I believe that I think," "I wonder if I wish."

Every level of the production is influenced by this self-folding. In your typical Anderson shot, a main event happens in the foreground while equally important events are simultaneously happening at one or two degrees of separation in the background. The difficulty of reading an Anderson movie lies in the fact that each shot has a main focus, but you have to be fully aware of the entire screen all the time. Asteroid City takes the basic design of that multilayered space (three dimensions flattened into two) and uses it to create a multilayered plot (parallel lines converging into one). An actress rehearses her movie in a motel room; the play where she exists is shown to us as a movie; its author's life is shown to us as a play; and all those layers of fiction are shown to us as a documentary (that is, the genre of truth), but the documentary itself exists inside Anderson's scripted movie (the genre of lies). For super extra mind-blown-ness, the three acts signaled by the title cards inside the play-shown-as-movie contain some scenes of the upper levels, as if the documentary were part of the play that is mentioned in the documentary. This referential loop ends up eating itself when the layers start blurring together and the most significant emotional beat is revealed to take place offscreen, in a deleted scene, set in a dream, performed by an actress who was removed from the play. The secrets that explain the story rest on a moment that doubly doesn't exist, that its audience will never know.

In a tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale]]]], where does the innermost level lie? In English, folk tales start with "Once upon a time..." In Tamil, it's "Having been said and said and said..." In Arabic, it's "There was and there was not..." The complex relationship between recursively referenced layers of reality and unreality reaches a hard limit when one considers that, although some characters in the play-shown-as-movie seem aware of the audience, none of them show any awareness that they're in a larger movie, the one made by Anderson. In the first level, the narrator of the documentary talks to the camera, but he's addressing an imagined audience, not us. For mega super extra mind-blown-ness, Asteroid City ends where the play ends, but we don't return to the upper layers to see how they end. For all we know, they're still happening. (Another possible explanation, which closes the referential loop, is that we occupy the same layer of the play, and the upper layers contain us.)

So let's look more closely at that play. It contains several signifiers of quintessential Americana: cowboys, UFOs, absurd military guys, the Space Race, a roadside diner, vending machines, summer flings, overconfident teenagers, oblivious parents. This microcosm of US life is bordered on one side by a perpetual police car chase and on the other side by perpetual nuclear weapon tests. The script barely acknowledges them. Small and big violence are so commonplace that they've become part of the landscape, while the army looks with greed upon the children's fantastical futuristic inventions that prove completely useless to defend one coconut-sized rock. One marvels that the screen doesn't melt with how caustic the sarcasm is here.

Wes Anderson's distinctive style has recently been repurposed for hundreds of insultingly superficial, horrific, lifeless imitations. Asteroid City should come as a relief for artists worried that an algorithm may one day do their job. A machine that scoops up image files and regurgitates their rearranged bits can't express the intimate experience of solitude, regret, self-doubt, and compassion that you get from Asteroid City, nor can it design the web of narrative threads that support the plot, nor can it think of drawing from the influences and the context that complete the movie's meaning. Anderson is in every sense a human being and in every sense an artist if either has ever existed in Hollywood.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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