Book Review: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

Ilona Andrews expands their fantasy and romance talents into the burgeoning realm of isekai in English

Isekai. Portal fiction. The very Japanese origin of the word suggests it is relatively new, even exotic, but it is a tradition that taps into a small but active stream in English SFF while using the enthusiasm of its Japanese taproot for basic concepts. Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the latest iteration of isekai fiction in a mainstream English language format.

Online encyclopedias define isekai as a genre of Japanese manga, anime, light novel, video game, etc. It has characters who go into a different world. But that’s not quite right, since you might be thinking: What’s the difference between isekai and portal fantasy? Portal fantasy does all of that too. One can think of portal fantasy as a bigger umbrella category than isekai. Portal fantasy covers any time characters go from one universe to another, usually from our world to a fantasy-based world.¹ Examples are numerous, and the concept goes back at least to the pulp era of science fiction.

Isekai is a more specific form of portal fantasy. There are some strains and varieties, but the main thrust is that the protagonist is transported to another world. Sometimes they have to die in order to get resurrected into this new world.² A lot of the time, unlike some portal fantasy, they wind up getting powers and abilities, even godlike ones, by the act of transferring across to the new world.³

Some isekai have an explicitly roleplaying element to them. The protagonist finds themself inside of a roleplaying game, or a piece of fiction, sometimes one that they know quite well.⁴ This knowledge can itself be a superpower, but the thrust is, the character has been transported into a new world that can run on rules that can be manipulated.⁵ There are even subsets of this where the protagonist finds themself in the role of a specific character from the book/property whose world they are now in. There is a sub-sub-genre of this where the protagonist finds themself specifically in the body of a villain… a villainess in fact, and has to figure out how to avoid the sticky end that inevitably awaits them.⁶

So let’s get to This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me and see how this fits into isekai. Our protagonist is Maggie. Maggie has fallen into the world of her favorite fantasy series, one that has never been finished. She is in the city of Kair Toren, and she knows the plot of the two books by heart. She is immersed fully in the world of the books. The problem is, she is absolutely penniless. She is not in the body of a villainess or anyone else, and she knows that the world is in for a rough time. And so she decides that, in addition to survival, her goal is to stop the tragedy that the book unfolds.

Maggie does have a superpower, one that she does not expect. She dies early in the book… and then she is resurrected. This is not like Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. The world itself does not reset; the world keeps going on, and the resurrections are painful and take time. Maggie herself thinks about the gruesomeness of this, and whether she could come back from, for example, being torn to pieces. So she uses her extensive knowledge of the books and tries to bootstrap herself out of poverty and try to derail the beginnings of the plots that will consume Kair Toren in fire and blood. Along the way she makes some friends and gets wrapped up in intrigue and adventure. She also discovers a secondary superpower that is subtle but important: although she has read the book many times, she discovers that she can quote from the book, chapter and verse as it were. It gives an interesting metatextual twist to things. It also means that at points she doesn’t know some facts, because even the braided multiple POVs of the book don’t cover everything, so she is forced to guess and deduce some things about the plot and people around her because they were not in the book.⁷ As far as telling her companions what she is, she does not tell anyone that she is from the world outside the story. She is genre-aware enough to realize the problems of that. As it is, her ability as a seer means she has to try and keep her head down to avoid entities who might want to grab her for information.

And then there is the romance. This is an Ilona Andrews novel, and romance is a common subgenre in the novels they write. So there is no surprise that Unresolved Sexual Tension is shot through the book, especially when Maggie realizes that one of her companions and friends is not who she thought they were, and is instead someone far more dangerous and compelling. Given that the character in question is, according to the book, destined to marry someone else, this provides narrative tension as well.

And that is the real heart of this book and what it tries to do, and what it is in the isekai subgenre. Maggie knows the book by heart and even better than she should given that secondary superpower. What she finds is a conservation of narrative working against her. She does indeed try to stop the tragic events of the book, including even the “pebble” that rolls downhill to start the avalanche of war and rebellion and conflict, but at every turn, the narrative tries to assert itself and put the story “back on track” despite her efforts. It’s a fascinating use of metatext here, as Maggie tries to defy what happens in the books, only to be resisted and have to find a different approach or fight a new problem.

The story ends on a cliffhanger, with a situation seemingly resolved, but then, out of nowhere, the problem arises anew and puts our protagonist in peril. But that, too, is a narrative convention (and our protagonist knows it), which suggests to me that she is still trapped in a narrative structure that keeps wanting to assert itself despite her efforts. So this is not a novel that is going to satisfy if you are looking for the one-and-done approach. Instead, we have a series, and we still have a whole set of unresolved mysteries, and of course, peril for the protagonist. The novel stays entirely in Maggie’s point of view, which is an interesting commentary and choice given that she is in a world of multiple POV epic fantasy. I like that tension for the reader, and wonder if she will keep up that for the inevitable sequel.

Highlights:

• Isekai, in a English language SFF mode.
• Yes, this is a kissing book. Or at least slow-burn would-be kissing.
• Interesting metatextual elements.

Reference: Andrews, Ilona. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me [Tor, 2026].

¹ A notable exception to this is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Out of This World and sequels, where there is portal travel from our world to a fantasy world, *and* to a space opera world. The space opera world may have a touch of science fantasy to it since it's not a rigorous “the net is up” sort of hard SF universe.

² That bit doesn’t seem to yet be popular in mainstream English versions of Isekai. However, the far out of print Through the Ice by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise (1992) does use this, having its young protagonist fall through ice and then get resurrected into a fantasy world. I thought it very strange at the time I read it, not knowing at all of isekai in any form. But in Japanese isekai, it would be bog-standard. Did Kornwise and Anthony read isekai at that point, or invent it independently?

³ The first time I came across that in mainstream English form was Dave Duncan’s The Great Game series, which explicitly has as its worldbuilding that if you transfer to another realm, you basically have it in you to be a god in that realm. The protagonist goes from 1914 England to a realm where he has the potential to gain prodigious power… but the gods already there have very mixed ideas about someone else joining their pantheon (especially the God of Death). The author’s foreword, 10 years after the fact, doesn’t mention isekai as an inspiration at all. But, again, by Japanese framing, bog-standard isekai.

⁴ And showing that this is old in English language SFF, I present to you The Incompleat Enchanter ‘verse of Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague de Camp. Harold Shea and his friends find that portal magic, and magic in general, is based on verse, and they wind up in a variety of worlds that they know—Norse myth, the Roland cycle, The Faerie Queene and other worlds that they recognize. There is even some directed targeting at one point, seeking a world with a magician powerful enough to handle a problem, and picking it based on their reading. Also a bit of Duncan here, as, except for portal magic, the protagonists seem unable to do spells with verse in our world… but in other worlds, they are indeed magicians with verse.

⁵ LitRPG enters the chat at this point, as well as its outgrowths and parallels. Being thrust into the world of a game is much older than that in mainstream English SFF, however. One can look to the 1980s and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, which runs on this premise. Or Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame novels, which have the characters transported into an RPG world. Although it is not a videogame, Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying has a protagonist who was brought across, portal fantasy style, but every time she dies, the world resets. Wexler is extensively deep into anime and manga, as seen in other books of his, and he is definitely channeling isekai tropes throughout.

⁶ And this is where Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil comes into the chat, because it runs right on this chassis in a mainstream English language form. Main character Rae is dying and makes a magical bargain… and winds up in the world of the books… but she is not the superfan; her sister is. So she doesn’t know everything, but she does know that she is Lady Rahela, and that in that role, she is due to die the next day.

⁷ And what of the book and its actual world? As revealed by Maggie and what we see, Kair Toren is a high-magic epic fantasy world with lots of intrigue, and yes, lots of blood. Think Martin’s Westeros or Elliott’s Wendar, but with the magic turned on to high. The two fictional novels have lots of PoV characters, extensive worldbuilding and backstory, and are exactly the kind of thick doorstoppers that someone could read and reread extensively and obsessively.

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

Book Review: The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles

A potent anti-colonialist novel that sets its stakes on not just the fate of a planet and a species, but more importantly, the heart and soul of its main character

Ada Quintrall is the heiress to the Dukedom of Corbridge. Her grandfather the Duke has managed the aforementioned dukedom, which is actually on the planet Corbridge, in a future where humans have gone to the stars. The terraforming of the planet has been a harsh affair, and the native life has resisted. But when Ada finds out the long connection between her family and that native life, she is forced to confront what her grandfather and her family have done, and her complicity in it. And what is to be done about it.

This is the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh plays with a number of genres in order to explore its overall themes, which are, unapologetically, anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian in nature. Let’s begin with the most unexpected, and that is portal fantasy. In the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, Ada learns that her ancestor wrote a bestselling fantasy series (The Chronicles of Yeneh, hence the book title). As the novel proceeds in its opening phases, Ada realizes that the native inhabitants of the planet are not mindless “plants,” but rather are the fantasy species from her ancestor’s book. Just how and why this is true, and what it means, puts a portal fantasy frame front and center in the book.

As this is a science fiction novel, the nature of the world, combined with the portal fantasy already alluded to, gives the setting and the story a significant layer of science fantasy. It retains this even as the novel progresses; the novel isn’t as interested in hard SF as it is in the sociological, political and personal stories. You don’t get any sense of what the interstellar drive is or how it works, for example. That’s not the kind of novel this is.

And then we get into the worldbuilding and some more genre-bending. In this future, a portion of a diasporic humanity has decided to reinstitute aristocracy as a social system. It is explained that in a world where some people turn away from merciless post-Capitalism, the appeal of personal rule by means of hereditary aristocracy for some planets was strong. It’s not a new idea¹ to have an aristocratic “feudal” future.² Miles, however, does it a bit differently. Aristocratic nobles like Ada’s family are not the only social system out there; it’s made clear that there are still capitalistic systems, and aristocratic ones, and even socialistic ones. There is a plurality of social systems in Miles’ universe, and while we are under an aristocratic one in this book, a main character, Zamora, is from Luna, which is mainly a socialist state, This does set up some cultural distrust at first between Ada (as an aristocratic heiress) and Zamora, and in general between Zamora and the population of Corbridge.

And then there is the straight-up science fiction as a genre. Ada (and Zamora) understand that the natives of the planet are more than just “plants” (as Zamora already argued); moreover, there is an entire civilization in the toxic and dangerous zones beyond what has been colonized and terraformed by the humans. So we switch up into the novel’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial and pro-ecological themes. With the previous layers to this, this makes The Final Chronicle of Yeneh a science fiction novel with interesting and intriguing underpinnings, providing a fresh story in the process.³

But beyond all that genre-mixing and worldbuilding, this is a very personal story, focused on Ada, who as heiress to her grandfather, is confronted with the ecological, sociological and personal costs of imperialism, colonialism and the rapacious nature of her family and her family’s legacy. It’s a painful story for her in some ways, especially as it puts her on the other side of her grandfather and her legacy once she completely learns those costs and takes a stand. The novel is about those costs, and the difficulty of that change. And as importantly as coming to terms with that legacy, the novel is about taking action, making recompense and taking active steps to do better.

Yes, while Ada herself is in a position of privilege (at least at the outset), the novel’s message is that people can and do make a difference—and indeed must do so in order to effect change. Change is hard and is scary, but it is possible, with action. That is a message that the novel hits home, and it is a very necessary message in this day and age.

In sum, what The Final Chronicle of Yeneh does, brilliantly, is to channel Miles’ excellence in character depth and make the very soul of the main character, Ada, to be as important as the fate of the native Yeheneh and of the planet Corbridge. It stirs a swirl of portal fantasy and a hint of science fantasy into a far-future story that examines and criticizes colonialism, imperialism and exploitative social systems. Miles’ focus remains tight and sympathetic, having us join Ada on her own journey to recognizing, confronting and acting on working on systemic problems on Corbridge and beyond.

Highlights:

• Strong character focus and background
• Interesting space future sketched in and intriguing
• Bold anti-colonial, anti-imperial message, told well

Reference: Miles, Jo. The Final Chronicle of Yeneh [Horned Lark Press, 2026].

¹ Melinda Snodgrass’s Imperials Saga has capitalism evolve into a Spanish-focused monarchy and aristocracy, in space. And of course, there is always The Mote In God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

² Obligatory note that feudalism, as you might think of it, really didn’t exist as you might think of it. The huge variety of local political systems in Western Europe really put paid to that notion. Read the works of David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, among others, to learn more. (e.g. The Bright Ages).

³ The worldbuilding about the local inhabitants of the planet has resonances to many previous works of science fiction. You can certainly look at The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. I also see touchstones to the work of Adrian Tchaikovsky and James Cameron’s Avatar universe.

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

TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: Breath and Bone by K. V. Johansen

Johansen’s penchant for epic fantasy distilled instead into a twisty sword and sorcery tale

Cover art by Laura Galli

It starts off simply, or seems to. Arrany, a young woman, is trying to get her twin brother free of the possessive control of a witch. She travels far to find a pair of godlings that have the power to free him. Or at least kill the witch. But the godlings are not who they appear to be, and neither is Arrany. And neither is the witch. What seems to be a simple quest across the landscape turns out to be a much more complicated affair than anyone anticipated.

Thus begins Johansen’s standalone sword and sorcery novel Breath and Bone.

In this review I want to discuss the form and nature of the book, its characters and its world more than a recitation of the plot points. And also posit an idea of theorycraft for genre.

Johansen has written a number of fantasies on a variety of levels, but is probably best known for her epic fantasy series The Caravan Road (starting with The Blackdog and ending with The Last Road). She has written a number of fantasies for children as well. But sword and sorcery is a stratum that she has not written to before. In her interview for this blog, she mentions that:

“… the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.”

And I do like this idea and want to explore it further. Pony and Hedge have DONE the epic fantasy thing, and Breath and Bone makes lots of deep references, allusions and connections to their past. In many ways, this novel is their past coming to impinge on their present. Their present was a quiet one, living in “retirement,” with the boundaries of their life much smaller. And the novel supports this by Arrany’s journey and the initial steps of their adventure to free her brother to be entirely within the sword and sorcery mold. It’s a low stakes and seemingly straightforward story.

It doesn’t quite stay that way, but it puts me in the mind of a D&D campaign starting at level 1. Low-level D&D characters are basically in a sword and sorcery story. They don’t have control of epic powers as yet (or if they are associated with one, they can’t handle it). Their foes are low level. The stakes are low. There is a wider, wilder world out there that the PCs will get connected to, one way or another, over time, but they start small. Over time, as characters rise in level, the GM provides larger and more world-spanning challenges and opportunities. Player characters’ abilities rise. Clerics can raise the dead. Wizards can cast fireballs, and then things like plane shift. Rogues and fighters grow epic in their combat abilities. In other words, the campaigns shift from sword and sorcery to epic.

So there can be a progression in fantasy characters, going from the sword and sorcery of a low-stakes and small adventure, all the way up to epic conflicts and grand fates. You don’t have to have this progression; you can dunk characters into the deep end, but generally the inciting incident or two can be of small enough stakes to feel like one is touching the base of sword and sorcery before launching toward more epic realms. The Wheel of Time television adaptation shows this tactic in particular.

In Breath and Bone, we have two characters, Hedge and Pony, who have gone all the way to the epic phase and to the other side, to retirement. They became movers and shakers, capable and willing to topple an emperor and his empire. They have left legacies and legends and their names across the landscape. But now they are retired, living in the aftermath, in a cottage in a nowhere village keeping waterfowl.

The call to adventure in Breath and Bone for Hedge and Pony, as they get wrapped up in Arrany’s plight, is like a “second childhood” for them. Although they have done the epic thing, the initial steps are pure sword and sorcery, low stakes. They meet bandits. They run into a stray old god. Arrany gets kidnapped, and her story begins to unravel as we find out there is much more she did not say, and that matters are larger than Hedge and Pony realized. The scope widens as this rebalancing of the narrative continues, as we reach the lair of the witch. It’s a slow and gradual widening, and the true abilities and powers of Hedge and Pony become terrifyingly clear.

I’ve seen the rise to epic power many times before, but this “second childhood” of retired heroes slowly getting back into it by means of a return to epic fantasy via sword and sorcery is somewhat less common in fantasy. There have been a spate of retired hero books, but generally, given how much fantasy as a genre is a “young person’s game,” having a retired hero return to the fold happens, but less commonly than you’d think.¹ So in Breath and Bone, the shape of a graph of time and stakes and scale proves to be a curve with two humps, with the first hump in the past, but as the story progresses in the new storyline, we get a new rise.

The backstory is key to all this. At first it seems like a simple story: Arrany is trying to rescue her twin brother from a witch, so she seeks out a legendary hero to help. But what the story slowly reveals is that “first hump” and just how dangerous Hedge and Pony were as renowned movers and shakers. We slowly learn just what deeds they are responsible for, and as the novel progresses, I felt trepidation that Arrany had awakened from retirement two very powerful individuals… and worse, has not been entirely truthful with them. Arrany asks two retired and extremely dangerous individuals on a seemingly simple quest but withholds key knowledge about herself and what is really going on. It’s a logline that is ripe for drama, action and adventure as we head across the landscape.

And the landscape supports this sword and sorcery narrative. Arrany travels across relatively mundane locations to reach Hedge and Pony, and as they travel toward the witch, their surroundings become somewhat more fantastic, particularly the inhabitants. By the time we get to the glaciated area of Under Ice, we have definitely abandoned the quiet and peaceful cottage for a wilder and more dangerous place. All through it, the lush landforms are wonderfully described. If the Caravan Road was based on the Silk Road, from the Caucasus all the way to China, this is much more of a glaciated Western Europe, with fells, lakes, swamps, mountains and eventually the border of the Ice.² Landscapes are important to sword and sorcery. Even if the range of possible locations is massive, from teeming cities to bloody frontiers, a sword and story story must give the reader a good sense of the landscape to be effective. Breath and Bone succeeds on this level. This world feels a bit like her epic fantasy The Wolf and the Wild King (with a sequel forthcoming), with the cold landscape and a huge lake as a central figure that a bunch of the action occurs in and around. But in all cases, the landscape continually invites the reader to step into it and imagine what the characters will run into around the bend.

The novel is a one and done, completing the story in one volume (a relatively compact book by Johansen’s standards but more in keeping with a sword and sorcery length). In the course of this book, Johansen unfolds a world, a set of characters, and a set of premises that invite the reader’s imagination. And, perhaps, it will spark the author to write more in this ‘verse. Find out more about Breath and Bone in the interview I did with Johansen here at Nerds of a Feather.

Highlights:

• Sword and sorcery from an epic fantasy writer
• Excellent characters
• A world that invites going around the next corner

Reference: Johansen, K.V. Breath and Bone [Candlemark and Gleam, 2026].

¹ The reference and tie-in I want to go with here is Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver. The inciting incident is that a military force decides to decimate a small town. It just so happens that this town is the retirement home of general Cobalt Zosia. Zosia does not take this well, not well at all, and goes on a carefully constructed campaign of revenge and retribution. It is suggested at points that the attacking force was directed to make an example of Zosia’s village by someone who knew she was there, and how she would respond. Zosia had already had her epic adventure and was in retirement. She gets pulled out of that retirement and ramps up her revenge, and by books two and three in the series, we are firmly in epic fantasy territory once more.

² Sort of like a Western European answer to Michael Scott Rohan’s The Winter of the World. Also, the Doggerland books of Stephen Baxter, or the colder world of Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic series.

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

Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

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

Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled o another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

Irene is no longer the person she knew herself to be. In the film Redux Redux, one of the best science fictional examples of literalizing a feeling I’ve ever seen, Irene is stuck in an endless cycle of hatred, ruminating on her unprocessed grief and pursuing the same quest thousands of times because she feels unable to return to her own life. In every universe she’s visited, her heartbroken counterpart has committed suicide, so she believes (there’s the classic Lie that a protagonist typically believes at the start of a story) that repeating the perpetual hunt for the killer is the only alternative she has left.

In general, this film delivers information in a carefully measured manner. The editing at the beginning, which repeats Irene’s vengeance in a rapid-fire sequence, seems on first watch to be telling a time travel story, and the script is comfortable with letting us sit with that confusion until it’s the proper moment to reveal the actual story.

The multiverse-crossing routine Irene has established for herself mirrors what real life looks like for someone caught in a self-destructive pattern. She no longer keeps a job or friends. She has no other task beyond chasing the killer and making him pay again and again. She has brief flings with the same cute guy from a grief support group in every universe, much like someone may serially hook up with thousands of casual partners looking for the same ideal in all of them.

It’s only when Irene unexpectedly rescues the killer’s next victim that it begins to feel conceivable for her to live for something other than anger.

This other character, Mia, gives Irene a mirror for her own situation. She’s only a kid, but Mia has been bounced from one foster home to another; jumping between universes isn’t any weirder for her. She’s eager to join Irene’s bloodthirsty campaign against the serial killer, and that’s what finally makes Irene realize that the life she’s leading isn’t something she’d want to inflict on anyone. For the first time in too long, she has a reason to stop. The problem is Mia doesn’t want to.

Redux Redux makes efficient use of its minimal special effects to keep its multiversal plot at just the right measure of complicated. Most of the time, it looks like a standard noir tale of self-perpetuating violence, but its allegory for unresolved trauma is never far from view. In the middle of its runtime we follow a side quest that gives us a quick glimpse of a larger underground community of multiversal travelers, but fortunately, it doesn’t draw too much attention away from the central problem about Irene and Mia.

If some horrible harm has been done to you, perhaps you’ve spent your waking hours thinking of the countless gruesome ways you’d like to take revenge. Redux Redux is saying: if you could really do that, if you could enact all your fantasies of getting even, it would destroy you. It would consume your life and leave nothing, and the people who make a living from fueling that obsession are the last people you should trust. And if you find yourself already down that road, saving someone else from it may show you your own way out.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: The Photonic Effect by Mike Chen

The Photonic Effect wears its twin inspirations on its sleeve, and boldly launches Chen’s work into the subgenre of space opera and makes it so.

These are the voyages of the GCF Horizon. Its mission was to establish and map a new trade route for the Cluster. Instead, it spent ten years in a gravity well with a host of other trapped ships. Upon escape and return to Cluster space, they had found that in the decade since, a civil war had broken out. Now, with the experimental photonic drive that allowed them to escape the gravity well, the Horizon is seen as a tool, or a weapon, by both sides. And it turns out they have unfinished business with the Lumersians in the gravity well. Although the costs of pursuing that might be high indeed for the crew, and perhaps far beyond, as well.

This is the story of Mike Chen’s turn into space opera, The Photonic Effect.

Star Trek, in several of its incarnations, particularly TNG and Voyager are two of the clear antecedents and inspirations for Chen’s Horizon. This is in terms of the ship, the multi-species nature of the crew, the Federation-like Cluster. In terms of characters, our focus is primarily on the bridge and engineer crew of the Horizon, just like a typical Star Trek episode or series. Our Captain, Demora Kim, even has a Star Trek catchphrase, “Take us there.” Like any Star Trek series, we have a multi-species crew. In addition to the humans, including a human from another universe (thanks to that gravity well), the Horizon also has a Dwyen, a humanoid species with a pack-based hierarchical structure and outlook. And then there is Chuck… who is rather unusual and not really an active member of the crew at present, although he was crucial to the Horizon’s return to normal space. Given that Chen has written a DS9 comic, it’s clear and easy to see how he is channeling Star Trek into his unique world.

The other inspiration is a somewhat more complicated and in some aspects, darker one to draw from on occasion. And that would be the videogame series Mass Effect. Mass Effect, for those who have never played the games, takes place in a galaxy where humans are the new kids on the block and eager to prove themselves. The game can turn dark and complicated, with various forces and factions striving in a cutthroat galaxy, including secret factions and powers that the player character is engaged with. And to be truthful, the Horizon does feel much more like the Normandy from Mass Effect than most of the mainline Star Trek series central ships, except maybe Voyager. The ship is not all that large, and it is not even built well for war,¹ which makes people coveting it all the more perilous for the crew of the Horizon. They cannot shoot their way out of situations, even if they would consider doing so.

With these two powerful influences, Chen has the tools to tell his own tale and develop his own story and ’verse. Chen relies on a core set of characters and is interested in telling a story of how this flawed found family has to deal with the challenges of return, their own limitations, flaws and failures, and how to forge and come together to face threats. From Kim on down, we get a set of complicated and multi-sided characters much more DS9 in some ways in terms of characters than other Star Trek characters. Or, again, see Mass Effect. The fail points and weaknesses of the characters make each of them real, and engaging to read and follow.

Chen keeps his points of view on three characters:

Kim, the Captain, as our primary character, and the framing device at the front tells us this is her retirement interview and debriefing of her last mission. Kim went through a lot to try and get crew back home, and paid a price herself in seemingly losing her chance at romance with the aforementioned Chuck. Kim is interestingly flawed, often caught in bad decisions or situations, and has to strive to regain her crew’s trust, and to do better.

Another primary point of view is Tanav. Tanav isn’t part of the crew, not exactly; he’s an entertainer from another universe whose ship got caught in the gravity well. Circumstances forced him, along with other ships, to get on board the Horizon. He’s not crew, but he acts in a capacity of an entertainer. Tanav is conflicted—he misses his home universe, although his relation with his parents was rather complicated. And in a ship full of officers and engineers, he does wind up being a bit of an odd man out. Tanav’s story is one of growth in the face of conflict and fire, and it shows you don’t have to be the Captain or Chief Engineer to be a hero.

Third, Neera is the Chief Engineer on board the Horizon, and is the aforementioned Dwyen, which allows Chen to play with humanoid but not quite human. Chen does a great job not only in appearances, but going further and giving Neera a distinctive verbal cadence. I will bet that when I listen to the audiobook, I will be able to tell when Neera is speaking by the way she constructs her sentences, distinctive from all others. Like Kim, she’s imperfect, and her choices in trying to get the photonic drive to work wind up with major consequences for everyone.

The whole situation, seen in flashback and recollection, of that last mission that had the Horizon in the gravity well for ten years is an excellent bit of writing, dribbling out details from their ordeal and how they had to make sacrifices and paid costs in order to stay alive. In this way, it feels a lot more like a darker Voyager and much more into Mass Effect territory in that regard. And all that provides backstory and ballast to the core crew of the Horizon, including the characters who don’t get viewpoints.²

Chen has two crucial characters who are not from the original mission, and since they don’t have the ballast of the backstory of having gone to the well and having that connection to the crew, or to the world, they don’t come off quite as well. Commander Matthews, foisted onto the Horizon upon their return to the Cluster, definitely has an agenda of his own, and his antagonistic relationship with the crew provides much tension. He’s a more classic sort of square-jawed hero, and one, in roleplaying terms, that has gone on the heavy side of combat and physical skills that most of the rest of the characters cannot begin to match. The other character I will not mention, as they become the ultimate antagonist of the book. The slow reveal of their true plans and intentions is an excellent bit of craft on the part of the author.

The unusual nature of Matthews vis-à-vis the rest of the crew makes it clear that this is a much more late Star Trek than early Star Trek in terms of the characters’ approach to problems. The relatively weaponless nature of the Horizon and the lack of skills in weapons and tactics (Matthews excepted) means that the problems faced and solved usually fall to cleverness, or engineering, or science, as opposed to high-grade weaponry and battle tactics.

And the book is a lot of fun to read. If you are a fan of Star Trek, or Mass Effect, this book is relevant to your interests in creating a familiar yet unique space opera world. And if you ever wondered what you would get by mixing that peanut butter and chocolate, this book, like it was for me, will entirely be your jam. It’s entertaining, deep, philosophical, reflective; and when the action beats need to happen, Chen delivers. The world portrayed is a rich space opera ’verse with enough detail beyond the bounds of the Horizon itself to invite the playground of the imagination.

The book closes off Kim’s story, but given that this is a retirement debriefing on page one, the reader must surely guess that this is the end of her career anyway. The adventure may continue with the Horizon, and with other members of the crew, but as primary point of view and this being Kim’s story, the novel is not, as you might be worried, first in an endless series. Like the rest of Chen’s oeuvre to date, it is a standalone novel that provides an excellent story, flawed and memorable characters, strong worldbuilding and much more for the reader to discover.

Highlights:

• Mass Effect × Star Trek = entertaining space opera
• Strong set of flawed and interesting characters
• Rich and interesting world

Reference: Chen, Mike. The Photonic Effect [Saga Press, 2026].

¹ A reference point for me that Chen probably did not intend comes from the board game Star Fleet Battles, which is set in a version of the Star Trek universe. In that game, there is a design for a Federation cruiser that is very much defanged for war but has high capabilities for science and long-range reconnaissance—the Galactic Survey Cruiser. The Horizon feels a lot more like a Galactic Survey Cruiser than a regular Federation ship.

² There is a tuckerization from Star Trek, too. Watch for it!

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

Graphic Novel Review: Free Planet #1

A wildly inventive comic/graphic novel by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty

The planet of Lutheria has been through a lot. However, after much strife and struggle, they have gained independence from a tyrannical interstellar polity that has exploited them and their resources for a long time. They have struggled mightily against great odds and have achieved a precarious peace and stability. But it is what happens now that freedom is won that is the real story of Free Planet, a comic by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty.

Graphic novels and manga are not my usual medium to read and review. And I am not the usual person here at Nerds of a Feather to review such work. But, in the spirit of spreading my oeuvre and skills, I decided to give it a try. And I am glad that I did. I was drawn immediately to the complexity of the art style. The creators take full advantage of the medium they are working in and push the boundaries of the form in telling their story. How? Graphic novels and comics are a visual medium; they tell the story by using imagery to do the heavy lifting alongside the dialogue and text, but it is imagery that they rely upon to tell the story. Comics have a structure that is recognizable: issues, pages, panels. If you’ve read some comics, you know precisely what to expect. And while that superstructure is here in the physical sense, the authors do much more with it, and create a visual language and a graphical vocabulary.

This first panel is a traditional comic panel, easily recognizable to anyone who has read a comic:

But many pages go much further. Look at this second image and the information density here:

We have a tense standoff between forces of the revolution and a mercenary outfit. But look on the left and you also see the story behind the story, the consequence of the revolution on grain prices as well as orchaleum production (orchaleum is a material needed for FTL travel; Lutheria has an abundance of it). Many pages of Free Planet use infographics like this to enhance and enrich the story.

This is a story about how fragile a revolution can be, and how the aftermath of success can affect the characters and the world itself. Using the visual vocabulary, we get a full sense of just what the costs of victory have been. The infographics, maps, and charts such as the one seen above do the heavy lifting of worldbuilding that would be difficult to replicate in prose.¹ We get a sense of a revolution, a planet, and the characters who are all on the edge, all of them under stress in the aftermath of the revolution. The novel focuses on the disappearance of one of the leaders of that revolution, and in the process gives us a “tour” of the revolution, both in the present and in key moments leading up to its success. Free Planet is entirely effective in using its sui generis approach to tell its story.

As a result, for me, Free Planet did not seem like a traditional comic, and I did not read it like a traditional comic. This was a deep and immersive reading experience that I took slowly and carefully, lingering on details in the graphics and visual vocabulary. It was like reading a dense space opera novel, once you don’t batter through with speed to flip pages, but rather linger on, thinking about the word choice and the scene being set. And for all of its graphical use, Free Planet has as much in common with that dense space opera novel as it does more traditional comics. I can’t imagine the amount of effort and resources it took to create Free Planet; it has to be an order of magnitude harder to accomplish. The fact that it is done so well is a testament to the work that the creators have put into it.

Thus, Free Planet has immersed me and engaged me deeply into its story, characters, backstory and worldbuilding. There is something hopeful and scary and unflinching about the story here—revolution and change are possible—but there is no happily ever after, and it takes work, a lot of work, to handle what comes next. The story of what comes after the revolution is as complicated and messy and interesting as the story of the revolution. Through the imagery, characters, and graphics of Free Planet, I was able to get my head around the costs of that revolution. And to be clear, those costs are high. And we do see bits and pieces in flashbacks of the struggle, but just enough for context, for understanding what the characters and the world of Lutheria are in for, now. But the point and focus of the graphic novel, always, is “what now?” And of course, what the revolution means. Each of the characters wants freedom… but what that actually means is not a single thing. And those definitions of freedom can and do clash.

The comic itself proclaims touchstones to Saga, and to Dune, and those are good reference points to those wondering just what kind of world this is and whether you might like to immerse yourself into this story and its characters. Other touchstones connected for me as I read the story. One in particular I want to bring up is Andor, the series as well as Rogue One. The series and the movie are at their core about getting the revolution off the ground, about how resistance is not futile, and how opposing tyranny can have high costs. So it is set “earlier” in a cycle of resistance and revolution than Free Planet is. But what the Andor saga shows, as Free Planet does, and what the main line of the Star Wars movies do NOT, is the often uneasy and prickly alliances and pieces of that revolution. Luthen, in Andor, is trying to put together a whole host of different factions into the Rebel Alliance.² And those factions are often at odds with each other as with the Empire and have very different ideas on what freedom from the Empire’s tyranny would be like. Free Planet shows that those contradictions and tensions are still there after the revolution. Readers of history (or listeners of, say, The Revolutions podcast) see this dynamic again and again.

One final note. As you could see from the panels above, the cast and society and world of Free Planet is diverse along a variety of axes, ranging from a mostly POC cast to a wide range of genders and sexualities. Lutheria and its inhabitants are a world and a people trying to find itself among a riot of diversity, and trying to find those commonalities and find strength in that diversity is part of the story of the comic. There is a definite Spanish/Brazilian flavor to Lutheria, and we see that not only in the cast, but in the use of language as well.³

I look forward to reading more issues of Free Planet, and continuing this fascinating and engaging story.

NB: The work of Aubrey Sitterson has previously been covered at Nerds of a Feather in some of the Thursday Morning Superhero columns.

NB: Although I do not do a lot of Hugo Award Nominations for the category Best Graphic Story or Comic, Free Planet #1 is going on my nomination ballot.

Highlights:

• Unique, enthralling and engaging format for visually telling the story
• An important story: what happens after the revolution wins.
• A diverse,queer and rich set of characters.

Reference: Sitterson, Aubrey and Dougherty, Joe. Free Planet Vol. I (Issues 1-6) [Image Comics, 2025].

¹ Ideas that come to mind include the use of footnotes, or perhaps the Dos Passos method of conveying information via metatexts, that has been since appropriated, adapted and evolved by authors like John Brunner and Kim Stanley Robinson. ² That is a bit of nice worldbuilding in Andor and Rogue One, isn’t it?  The core movies have the rebellion as a unified thing, with a unified command… but the name of the group is the Rebel alliance. Alliance of *what* is a detail that had to wait to be explicated. ³ And that, of course, makes me think of the Viagens Interplanetarias novels of L. Sprague de Camp.

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

Book Microreview: The Blossoming of the Big Tree by Dilman Dila

A hopeful tale of a fight against hopeless odds

You know the failure modes that democracy can fall into: the formation of cliques that don’t share information, the hoarding of resources facilitated by positions of high prestige, the avoidance of accountability after decisions are made in secret. It’s a massive challenge to devise a system of full and equal participation, and a no less daunting one to keep it in healthy functioning condition. Multiply that by a whole order of magnitude if the geographical neghbors of your egalitarian welfare society are puppets of a warmongering corporatocracy.

In the future described in Dilman Dila’s novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, while the great industrial and economic powers were busy fighting World Wars 3 and 4, a large portion of southern Africa has turned into a league of communitarian, decentralized polities with self-sufficient production thanks to an innovative technorganic method that involves hijacking a silkworm’s metabolism to turn it into a natural 3D printer.

In parallel with that invention, a blend of digital code and traditional divination has given rise to a whole new computing paradigm, which allows spiritual forces to be put into mechanical automata. With a horizontal model of governance, where via ubiquitous digital connection every single citizen is a member of Parliament with an equal voice, and every remote village acquires the productive capabilities to sustain a city-sized population, this new state has in-built mechanisms to make corruption all but impossible; and its technological development is quickly making it an indispensable provider of post-petroleum products to the world.

But things get complicated when an American weapons manufacturer, which operates as the de facto government of half the planet, orchestrates an invasion of this new state to steal the secret of its 3D printing process.

The unlikely hero upon whose shoulders it will fall to repel the invasion is Adita, an elderly peasant woman who would rather be left alone to keep growing her garden, but by a process similar to sortition she’s been given a position of leadership in her village, plus she’s the closest thing her country has to an actual Minister of Defense, so it’s up to her to lead the meetings and coordinate the efforts to save her nascent utopia.

One problem: by natural temperament, she has an intense dislike of social contact. So all the variables seem aligned against her mission: How do you get collective consensus when you can’t stand people? How do you win a war when you very deliberately refuse to have a weapons industry? And how do you protect national security when the structure of the state is designed to make official decisions open to all citizens?

There’s a sense in which The Blossoming of the Big Tree resembles classic hard SF, except this time it’s about finding a creative solution to a puzzle of political theory instead of rocket science. Just like in the pulp novels of old, we’re given the measure of the problem, the type of resources at hand, and the urgent stakes in pley, and then we watch smart characters reason their way out of an impossible scenario. So the plot proceeds almost like a thought experiment, a proof by example so cleverly constructed that its logical conclusion feels inevitable in hindsight.

To give only the tiniest of spoilers, it’s precisely the monolithic model of hyper-centralized power that turns out to be the enemy’s weak spot. The world that emerges afterwards is one where such large-scale military operations aren’t possible again. It may sound far-fetched to posit such an outcome in these times, but as the best of SF keeps reminding us, creating a future worth living in requires that we first dare to imagine it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Dila, Dilman. The Blossoming of the Big Tree [Ododo Press, 2026].

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

Book Review: Green and Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons

A standalone fantasy novel by Jenn Lyons, set in a new fantasy verse of necromancy, knights and old secrets and powers.

Mathaiik, as I like to say in many of these reviews, has a problem. He has several problems. First, he wants to be a knight, one of the Idallik Knights. But he has never been able to manifest a magical weapon, which has kept him from that rank. Also, he has a very strange and unique connection to plants, one that becomes even more intense when the nearby forest seems to be waking up, featuring a trio of plant-like queens. Even before the queens, he was on the outs and distrusted because of his nature. And, this is far different than the threats the knights were born to face. So what are these plant based threats? Are they the vanguard or allies of their hostile neighbors, the Kaliri? A sign of the necromancy that the knights have been fighting? Or something else?

Math doesn’t know the answers, but he does try and act when danger strikes. Math makes a deadly alliance and a bond with a magician buried in a magical tomb, and finds that most of the truths he knows about magic and the world are completely and utterly wrong. And that this is coming just as the world and the conflicts within it are set to turn to a new and deadly phase.

This is the story of Jenn Lyons’ standalone fantasy novel Green and Deadly Things.

Green and Deadly Things runs on a few rails. We start with Math as our point of view character throughout the book. As a result we get a character who is on the outs, but desperately wants to be a knight, to be a hero, to be a protector. This sort of duty and honor is not an abstract characteristic with Math, either. There are a group of children at the base where Math is struggling to become a knight, and their protection, throughout the book, is something always on Math’s mind and he takes action again and again in order to protect them. Math is not a perfect character, but Lyons time and again presents him in a heroic light, even if he doesn’t think he has the abilities of a hero. And it turns out that he’s wrong about that, too.

The worldbuilding and overarching world is a deep and interesting world, a feature of Lyons’ previous works here in full flower. Lyons has a real balancing act here for the reader and she manages it: she has to convey to a new reader what they think and how they think the world work, with necromancy, knights, and the wild and weird forest. And then, even as the book conveys the world, it also has to make the turn to show that what Math and most of the world thinks is absolutely wrong. And that is done by Kaiataris. Kaiataris is what Math thinks of as a Grim Lord, a necromancer from an earlier age that should all be dead and gone. So, in a desperate attempt to save himself and those he cares about in a forest gone into a rampage, Math manages to unlock the tomb where Kai has been sleeping, and wakes her up. And, accidentally, forms a magical bond with her. And Kai, being from the far past, a different age of the world, has a very different view of magic, and uses a very different magical paradigm. There is a real delight, in that Kai doesn’t understand how Math does magic even as Math is stunned by Kai’s abilities and nature¹.

And the rest of the worldbuilding is rich and deep as well. We do get a whistle-stop tour of the regions behind the forest where we start, and Lyons does enjoy enriching her world. There are trains (hence the whistle-stop reference), teleportation circles, and ancient secrets. We get dangerous adversarial nations, ancient ruins, intrigues within factions of the knights and much more. Its a complicated and rich world, and Lyons gives us enough information and pulls back the fog of war the world to provide a world that seems as rich as the Chorus of Dragons world, but in a more compact space. This is a world that I could see more novels and stories set in, but this story is a more distilled and concentrated presentation than the more luxurious, expansive series. And, this novel is written explicitly and directly as a standalone and one and done story that gives satisfactory endings to the characters and their relationships. The novel goes from a local problem, to, quite logically and in easy steps, the fate of the world, with the largest possible stakes.

Relationships and the connections between characters helps drive plot and action throughout the novel as those stakes rise. While the novel stays in the point of view of Math throughout, Lyons does a solid job in giving us characterization and development on both sides of his relationships. His affection and caring for the children of the fort. The love of his sister. The rivalries and personal antagonistic relationships with some of his fellow knights, too, get full character arcs and development. It’s a rich web and tapestry of characters and how they interact, and she does well in tying this to the major overarching plots.

Oh, and speaking of relationships, there is a very slow burn romance. As it turns out Kaiataris, as the novel unfolds, has a slow growth of her relationship with Math throughout the novel. The growth of their relationship, warts and all, is one of the chassis of the book, but it doesn’t feel tacked on or perfunctory, as they so often can be in an epic fantasy. Instead, Lyons has it as a natural avenue for character growth, for Math and Kai alike. They are very different people, a would-be knight, and a sorceress, put under pressure and trial and learning to care for each other. There are some very funny moments, and some very tender moments, and seeing Math and Kai trying to figure out their relationship, through and beyond the bond, is excellent and affective and effective writing.

The pacing and scales of the novel, finally, shows the deft hand of the author. We go from an incident in a forest border fort, range across the world, contract the action when needed to a small scale tight focus and expand out again. Lyons has a great affection for this world, be it a dangerous forest, one of the largest libraries in the world (and the fact that Math loves libraries is not lost on me as a reader), ancient ruins (such as the one that we find Kai), ballrooms, or expanses of deadly desert. Lyons loves to follow up quiet moments with furious, kinetic action. I was entertained at every stage and “one more chapter” sense is strong in her writing.

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Highlights

• rich epic fantasy in one volume
• interesting and dynamic character development and relationships
• page turning and enthralling writing.

Reference: Lyons, Jenn, Green and Deadly Things, [Tor Books, 2026]

¹ The paradigm and comparison I kept going to, although it is not exact, is the stories of Aahz and Skeeve by Robert Asprin (Another Fine Myth and sequels). This would make Kai as Aahz and Math as Skeeve. Skeeve didn’t know what he was doing, and needed Aahz’s help, who had lost his magic and had lots of knowledge, but not any power. 

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

Book Review: The Subtle Art of Folding Space

A story of two sisters and their tangled relationship, plus maintenance of the laws of the universe

Ellie lives in Boston. She is on her way to DC, where her elder sister Chris has been taking care of their mother, whose condition has slipped into a coma. Chris is the type of elder sister that never, ever stops telling Ellie how worthless she is, how much she clearly doesn’t love their mother as much as Chris does.

Oh, and did I mention that Chris has sent a number of assassination attempts Ellie’s way?

Oh, and did I also mention that their family is among a secret group of people who maintain this universe, and others?

This is the story of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, short story author John Chu’s jump from shorter forms into a full-length novel.

There is a point in the novel where Ellie, and a few others, are discussing the fact that within their society there is apparently a secret cabal of universe tinkerers, maintainers and builders, and how it’s a problem that there are secret factions amongst them. It’s funny, but Ellie never seems to consider that she herself, and all of her colleagues, are in fact a secret cabal within the wider universe, and universes, that the secrecy goes from the very beginning. So let me explain:

Ellie, Chris, their mother, family members and others, some of which are not from this particular universe, and some of which are most definitely not human, are members of a group of people who build, debug and maintain universes, including our own. They do this by means of an attached “sub-universe” called the “skunkworks.” That’s where the universe can be tweaked. Those who can do this are expected to do it not for their own gain, but as an unheralded public good, and as needed. Ellie may not be her mother (who is and was Chief Builder), but when she finds that there’s new hardware and code in the skunkworks, and that someone is exploiting design flaws, she’s forced into action.

The mechanics, methodology and paradigm of maintaining the universe feel somewhat like computer programming, when you have some very old code that has not been completely debugged and probably can’t be. That means continual work for people like Ellie. Just how this all came to be in the first place, and how someone can get initiated into this, are never made clear, but the programming of the universe is a scaffold for telling a story of heart with these characters and their relationships.

Take Chris and Ellie. Chris, as mentioned above, continually tells Ellie she is not good enough and really doesn’t love their mother. Plus the assassination attempts, and the gaslighting. The novel takes pains to have Ellie slowly really realize just how toxic Chris’s relationship with her is, and how it is not a normal sibling rivalry relationship, but something worse. The untangling and exegesis of the Ellie-Chris relationship is what this novel is all about. The skunkworks, the machinations, the secret societies, changes to the universe, and intrigues, all really in the end boil down to Ellie’s relationship with her older sister.

This means that readers who are hoping for even more crunchy details on how these universe maintainers do their work are going to be a bit disappointed. Just enough detail is there to tantalize the reader (such as mentioning casually that a century ago they had to add quantum mechanics to the universe), but it does not go endlessly deep. The sense that we get, and is explicated directly at points, is that maintaining the universe is a thankless job, if you are playing it straight and not for your own gain. It’s a lot of work, scut work, to keep the machinery of the universe running, especially when it’s filled with exploits and code problems.

But the book really isn’t about the mechanics of all this. This is a book about the characters in that space, and what they do, and why, and how they relate to each other. There are also hints, as mentioned above, of various philosophies within the factions of how to do all this.¹

Besides Ellie and Chris (who is not actually on screen so much but remains a looming antagonist), the other major character we get is their cousin Daniel. He is a prodigy of the skunkworks on axes that Ellie is not, and it is clear that he, for all his affability, is extremely competent—and dangerous. I also liked Ahdi, who is Daniel’s boss in the hierarchy (or is he?), and has some rather startling skills of his own. Through Ahdi we get a window into the greater world of the people who maintain the skunkworks of this and other universes, and it’s a tangled relationship map that Ellie, Chris and Daniel are only just getting themselves into.

In many ways, this feels like a multiverse modern world novel that is in conversation with Max Gladstone’s Craft Wars books. Both authors have a strong sense of humanity and relationships, queer-positive worlds, and characters that are dealing with some often unhinged and mighty powers (magic on one side, multiversal manipulation on the other). But what counts is how people deal with such power, and the philosophies of handing it. A lot of the Craft Wars is about how to maintain societies and what it means to siphon off power for your own ends, even with the best of intentions. Here, Ellie and Chris’s relationship, and the fate of their mother, falls squarely into that conversation.

The novel reaches an inflection point in the sisters’ relationship, a very satisfactory ending to a self-contained story. Anyone who has had strained relations with a sibling, especially revolving around their relationship with their parents, can see and get a lot out of the Ellie-Chris relationship. The skunkworks and the problems, personal and otherwise, revealed in the course of the novel are not resolved, and if Chu wanted to write more in this multiverse (I do think he has a lot more to say about power than what he has said here, again, like the Craft Wars ’verse does), I think there’s room here to really explore these ideas with an aggressively character-centered focus.

In other words, I certainly read more novels set in this multiverse.

Pass the bao, and some more novels, John!

Highlights:

• A very strong focus on character dynamics, the Ellie-Chris relationship in particular
• Universe maintenance as computer programming of an old and somewhat creaky system
• This novel made me hungry for bao

Reference: Chu, John. The Subtle Art of Folding Space [Tor, 2026].

¹ The description of exploits and how the universe can be circumvented reminds me a bit of the description of how magic works in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files ’verse, specifically The Regicide Report.

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

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.