Book Review: Forged for Prophecy by Andrew Knighton

The second “Forged” book by Andrew Knighton.

In Forged for Destiny, Knighton brought us the story of Raul. Raul was seemingly a Chosen One that was manufactured by a former court official, and an officer in the army. By means of keeping him hidden from invaders who had toppled the kingdom, and seeding legend and myth, they hoped to manufacture a Chosen One storyline for him, and ride him to glory into throwing out the invaders and restoring the kingdom. Raul slowly begins to realize his role and his seemingly foreordained fate is a manufactured manipulation. And even as he tries to fulfill the expectations and the role, he finds that a prophecy and destiny cannot be so easily manufactured. The attempt at rebellion is shattered, brutally. The supposed destined sword captured by his enemy. And Raul abandons the woman pretending to be his mother and flees to the hinterlands to begin again--but his way.

Forged for Prophecy, second in the series, details what happens next.

And that of course is the trick, What happens when you find out that your own Chosen One life was a lie and that you weren’t magically destined for anything, really. You’ve been trained, in a sense, to be that hero, that heir, even if you really are not the last scion of the royal family of Estis.  The Dunholmi are still in control of Estis. The local Count is still the one that took the fake chosen sword. The man who raised you still lost a hand in that disastrous final conflict. 

Raul decides to try and do a revolution and revolt on his terms--mostly. He still is pretending to be the last scion of Estis, but without Prisca, the woman who raised him, guiding the rebellion with her prophecies. And it is not going well at all. Revolution is a hard business, and early on, Raul bites off more than he can chew. He has a reconciliation of sorts with Prisca, who urges him to go into the wild to find an ancient artifact that could help him be the hero he needs to be. 

And so the story continues.

The second novel is very much concerned about forging a myth (as opposed to faking a myth as in the first novel) and the burdens of command and power. And the costs of doing all of this. Raul has chosen this leadership position, and now seeing it through is a real test of command and ability. Raul has to learn, quickly, and also learn, to his sorrow, that these lessons have a cost. This starts both, immediately, at a cost in trying to obtain coin from the Dunholmi, and in the long term, with a plot thread involving the somewhat reconciled Prisca. It turns out that trying to do divination does damage to the mind over time¹. 

Knighton does a good job with this, especially once we get to the meat of the novel. In the course of being in the wilds, Raul and his companions are confronted with a god, Varrag. Varrag is worse than Conan’s Crom, he is capricious and even less useful as an object of worship, but he is the master of this twisted and changeable land.  Raul and his companions traverse a tewr

And so does Count Alder.

Because, of course, Alder pursues Raul, because he does have a sense of duty to his Empire and his own interests. Raul is a small threat but he is a threat, and after the events of the first novel, he is willing to spend political and social capital in going after him. So the Dunholmi, too, go forging into these wilds after the Rebels. We only get a few short sections from Alder’s point of view. However, Knighton handles these well, giving a face to the local Dunholmi ruler, and making him a more fleshed out antagonist. He has his own problems, ideals and plans, and like in the first book, I could see and somewhat sympathize with him and his own life.

The Withered Hills, the wilds where the bulk of the action takes place, is an interesting and well written wilderness. Knighton knows his forebears, and has some interesting twists to the chaotic terrain and those who live there, giving the Withered Hills (which is such a good toponym that is worthy of Tolkien) a real life and personality to them. That the Hills are being violated by outsiders but fights back in a losing battle is a somber reflection about how a dangerous way of life, but one unique to the residents and one the residents are used to, is being slowly eroded away. 

The book I was thinking of as I was reading Forged for Prophecy is the recent award finalist novel from Alix Harrow, The Everlasting. There aren’t anything like the time loops that Harrow uses, but other themes from that novel contrast well with this one.  In this book, the myth making is happening in real time by Raul himself, rather than being just the results of the changes to Una’s story. 

But Forged for Prophecy, just like Forged for Destiny, continues the critique from the inside of the whole project of a Chosen One. And it gets at the same thing as The Everlasting does, as the turns and revelations of the novels continue--the good, but also the danger of reaching for these myths and what happens when these myths do not align with the facts on the ground. As Raul pursues a magical item and the aforementioned Varrag, there is temptation, and bargain revolving around power, and the future of Raul and Estis, and the past history of Estis itself. This also goes to the character development.

The secondary characters, in addition to Raul are well done and get arcs of their own. Prisca’s struggles with the costs of doing divination; Valens, having lost a hand in the previous novel, has to reconcile his usefulness and his changed role in Raul’s rebellion. And Yasmin, with her masks that allow her to become various creatures, finds that the lure of “becoming the mask” is extremely tempting, and real. It’s easier to become the wolf whose mask she wears. It simplifies things... but becoming the wolf too often changes Yasmin. Alder, too, gets a small but significant character arc of his own.

But to turn to the style and the reading of the book, this is an extremely readable and page turning epic fantasy series, and a very good middle good in this story as well. After the twist of the Chosen One in Forged for Destiny, Forged for Prophecy keeps exploring the consequences of Raul trying to do better after the disaster of the first novel. In these trilogies, the ones that this novel derives and critiques, the usual pattern is Early Win in Book One, followed by the Empire striking Back in Book Two, and then victory in Book Three. Knighton is already off that pattern and continues to surprise in this book as well. While following more standard epic fantasy patterns can still be rewarding to a reader like myself, this critique and twist on those narratives was very satisfying. Forged for Prophecy is an entirely successful sequel to Forged for Destiny and I look forward to picking up the third book in the series, Forged for Royalty.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• The Chosen One with a twist continues, and continues the surprises.

• Character arcs for all help support and grow the narrative

• Refreshingly written and page turning. 

Reference: Knighton, Andrew, Forged for Destiny, [Orbit, 2025]

¹ One is reminded of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, a very different genre, but similar potential problems for wizards. 

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

Book Review: Cello's Gate by Maurice Africh

A science fantasy novel that is perhaps not quite greater than the sum of its parts. 

Captain Grey has a problem. He’s a pirate, and a good one, but the local gendarmes are always dangerous and trying to keep his airship, The Trench, flying in the air, costs a lot of money and effort. That’s why when he is offered an extremely lucrative commission to go to an island no one can get to, in order to get a MacGuffin (the first in a series) that he doesn’t think really exists--he is willing to do it. Adventure is afoot on a journey to the island and surviving its dangers, from traps, to wildlife, to an immortal being that might have created all of magic itself.

This is the story of Cello’s Gate, by Maurice Africh. 

For all of the crunchy worldbuilding in the novel, Cello’s Gate is a novel that runs very strongly on vibes. It borrows and slightly modifies a lot of those vibes and those parts and puts them all together, not always in an optimum configuration, leaving some of the interesting parts of the worldbuilding feeling like they don’t quite seem to comfortably work together or sometimes even at all. The book is a patchwork of these elements, sometimes going at cross purposes. 

Let’s go for the high concepts and beats. Our main character, Captain Grey Shimada owns the airship the Trench as the ostensible pirate, although, like nearly all protagonist pirates I find in SFF, he’s not truly a pirate, or not very much so. He has a found family of fighters and rogues and outcasts of various types, including the pilot being married to another crew member.¹ His father, who he is somewhat rebelling against, is an important admiral.² He is hired by a client, Dalia Auber, who insists on coming along with her muscle, to find the seven Stones of Indigo. These seven are the basis of all magic in this science fantasy world, but someone who gets all seven would have unlimited cosmic power³. Once on the island, the group has to deal with a variety of tests, challenges, and traps. Also, there is a rival group after the stones and a confrontation with their superior numbers and firepower is the real enemy.⁴

There’s plenty to this complicated world and the characters and their backstories. Aside from Grey we get a few situations where the backstory of one or other of the characters unspools and the world builds from that. The thing is, it doesn’t all seem to fit together. I can’t make real sense of Grey’s story to begging with, he starts off as a bit of a failson hanging out with childhood friends. An especially harsh punishment for their antics sends him off to military school and away from his friends. We then go to 17 years later, and surprise, not only is Grey now a pirate, his two childhood friends are suddenly on the pirate ship he has, and part of the crew. We don’t see his father on screen except in the prologue, but just how this relationship and world is supposed to work, especially since his father backed him getting a ship, is a little murky. And the book almost feels like it was originally written that there were no holdovers from the prologue to the actual narrative, but suddenly there was a chance and we get two of them. 

Then there is the tech and the magic. The setting might have too much going on here--it’s a steampunk world with firearms, and airships, but also a complicated magic system, and also there are classes of people in that magic system. There are people who are Immortal, and people who are preternatural fights, Knights, and others. A revelation comes that there are even forbidden(?) hybrids of these as well. The author’s favorite must be the Crest Knight, since we have Dot, part of Grey’s crew, Rook, who is the bodyguard to the Immortal client, Dalia, and it turns out one of the antagonists on the island is a Crest Knight as well. Crest Knights fight so fast and so furious, that their fights are described in bullet time terms.⁵ The physical combats, and there are a number of such set pieces of various kinds, are well written and are a highlight of the book. But then there are people like the Immortals, who straight up come back from the dead when killed. It’s a painful and unpleasant process, but that is their magic. Minn, Grey’s childhood friend,and something that is not quite a crush, not quite a relationship (even after knowing her for two decades) is an Oracle and can get precognitive flashes of the future. There are other kinds of magic that we hear about but for the most part do not actually see in this narrative. 

Speaking of science fantasy again, though, a more general thought. Science fantasy is a hard trick to pull off, to make both the science fiction and the fantastic sides of the equation equally interesting, useful, powerful and important. As noted above, there is a lot of magic in this verse, of a wide variety of kinds that seems tied to the stones. As far as science, there are airships, and jamming fields and a variety of technology. Magic, though, with one noticeable and big exception, seems to win any straight up conflicts with science and technology that we see in the book. I suspect maybe the author was doing a bit with this. It does seem that magic is by far the more dominant half of the paradigm. 

Given that the novel is 600 pages, all of this worldbuilding and all of this wide variety of elements to the narrative does help fill up the pages. But for all of the invention in some places, the novels reaches for reference and allusion again and again and again, and the serial numbers aren’t always filed off well enough. 

However, it should be said that novel doesn’t drag, and it does know how to breathe, although the timing of the changes in point of view were sometimes off, and the withholding of information at some points only annoyed me rather than amplified my interest. On the other hand, the novel does well with a queernorm verse, something that is becoming much more the default, and less something I need to highlight except for contra examples. And, of course, this is the first in a planned series, since Grey and his crew only reach the first stone in this novel, and there are six more to go afterwards. 

Will I go on with the series? I am frankly not sure. With a lot of the heavy lifting of stuffing this world with its ideas in the first volume, it's possible that subsequent books will have a lot less of a gear shift issue than in this one. I hope so. Worldbuilding, as much as I love it, needs to flow from and to the plot and characters. The author here seems to have wanted to put in All the Cool Things into their worldbuilding, and many of them are cool, but not all of them, to me, feel like they should be in the same universe as each other. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Thick and chonky science fantasy

• Not quite the sum of its parts

• Good action and adventure beats.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 

Reference: Africh, Maurice, Cello’s Gate, [Saga 2026]

¹ So, in essence, channeling Firefly, even if the Pilot is the wife here. There is also some Guardians of the Galaxy as well. 

² A Number of Anime have this father-son dynamic. It does make Grey more than a Mal Reynolds clone, at least, although I am not sure how it fits all that well. 

³ Despite my Aladdin joke, it’s the Infinity Stones, naturally

⁴ Given all the traps and puzzles, there is an Indiana Jones feel to it all. 

⁵ So the Matrix, with hand weapons. 

⁶ Here is a bonus secret endnote instead of a footnote, since I couldn’t work this into the narrative of the review. I didn’t like the title at all. We don’t find out who or what Cello is until late in the novel, and it doesn’t tie in with the theme or plot of the novel at all. In my view, a book title is important to attracting readers--even today, Netgalley, when requesting a book, has “Book Title” as one of the reasons you are attracted to a book.  And frankly, for me, Cello’s Gate doesn’t do that. The cover is very good, and does tell you what you are getting, right up to Dot’s not-quite light sabers.  But the title? No. It fails for me.  POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin. 

Book Review: Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton

A fantastic love letter to the city of Venice, set in a world very much inspired by it, but just next door. 

The dream of La Serenissima. A city of canals, of masks, the most Serene Republic. Unique even among the diverse and unique city states of Pre-Modern History. A crossroads city. A dreamlike city. A place of wonder.

In Everybody’s Perfect, Jo Walton gives us a literally dream-like version of Venice, 

The novel is structured a little differently than most modern novels, genre or otherwise, and in the afterword, Walton explains that her model for the novel is Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Coin in Nine Hands and she herself has used this pattern before in short stories.

We meet a variety of characters in her setting, of which I will speak in detail shortly. I want to focus on characters and structure first, since it is essential for you the reader to decide if you want to tackle this book. We get a series of characters who are connected in a chain and are not repeated as points of view. Each character is given what we in the Secret Amber Cabal would recognize as a “trump description”: A set of iconic phrases and a described portrait of the character.

As an example, let me give you the first, Tiry:

Aspect: Strength. Time of Day: Afternoon. Muse: Thalia. Liberal Art: Rhetoric. Animal: Lion. Sphere: Moon. Social Class: Artisan. Virtue: Fortitude. Species: Bauta. Description: A man with a face that is blank except for eyes and a jutting chin is lifting a house from where it has fallen on a lion. The lion is grinning. 

We get these for all the subsequent characters as well and these give us an immediate iconic and archetype for each of them. The pattern of the novel has a character in their chapter, in a first person point of view, go about their day, interact with the city and its people, and eventually meet the next point of view character. Tiry hands off to Khadasha who hands off to Pell who hands off to Taddeo and on and on. As the novel goes on, we get fewer “brand new” characters and start hitting characters who have shown up in the narrative, but have not had a point of view. But in this way we get a braided story over a nebulous but seemingly short period of time in La Serenissima, getting to know these characters, and of course, the nature of La Serenissima itself. The characters are from a variety of species, backgrounds, and histories and give us a portrait of the city itself just from what they see. 

And what a city we are given a view of. La Serenissima is not our Venice, but rather lies in a dimension (the actual word here is hypostase), that is different than our material plane. There are nine hypostases, ranging from the unreachable God in the first all the way to Primal Chaos at the bottom in the ninth¹ . The material world of our own is the seventh hypostase. La Serenissima is in the eighth, and that gives it an amorphous dreamlike quality to the city. This is a city built on and running on dreams, and if you leave your gondola unattended and unwatched for too long, it will fade away into nothingness. Things can come up and out of that formlessness as well. Given that amorphousness, La Serenissima can and does act as a connection point, a hub between worlds. Species of various kinds can get to other worlds quickly by transferring through La Serenissima² . Various species including humans (called Venetians here³ ) make their way and live in this dreamlike city where time flows a little weird, there are no days per se, and the strivings of the populace slowly breathe an idea into being. 

So there is a lazy, dreamlike feel to La Serenissima, it has the canals and lagoon and other accoutrements of Venice. The novel is awfully vague for a long time “when it is on Earth” and I found myself wondering that. In the course of the characters, we finally hit upon a Venetian, and find out how and why they are there, and when they left Venice of our world. So there is a definite feel of how the city feels and acts being different not only because of the dream like aspect of this dimension, but also what the characters bring from where they are from to their perception of the place. 

So in addition to seeing the city through these diverse characters as being the backbone of the novel, there are a couple of plotlines going on here, inspired by magic and foretelling. There is a plague afoot, but there is a prophecy that the cure for the Blight will be found. And then there is the idea, inspired by the real Venice, that a Doge will appear and will “marry the sea”. The story of the book is from the mystical genesis of this idea, through to its culmination⁴. Along the way, we get stories of romance, and loss, and heartbreak, and searching, and coming together. The linked stories together form our tapestry and our narrative.

So if you are looking for a traditional secondary world fantasy narrative, Everybody’s Perfect is probably not quite the right fit for you. This is a book to immerse yourself in a series of characters, whose portraits, struggles and lives together tell a small but important story of changes coming to La Serenissima... and to the characters that we meet. It’s a small fantasy, a gentle fantasy. If I had to pull out a theme of the book, it might be that to have a better world, and a better life, we have to be able to imagine it can and will be so. We have to be able to dream it into existence before we can build it into existence. In the La Serenissima, dreaming it into existence is more than half the battle. On Earth, for us Venetians, it's a lot more work than that but without being able to imagine a better world, we have no capacity to make that better world possible. Everybody’s Perfect shows the power of that belief.

--

Highlights:

• Dream like world based on the fantasy of Venice
• A braided novel, following a variety of characters through their time in La Serenissima
• Immersive, gentle, enthusiastic fantasy. 

Reference: Walton, Jo, Everybody’s Perfect, (Tor Books, 2026)

¹ Listening recently to a podcast on the novel Piranesi, it occurs to me that the world of Piranesi could easily be slotted into one of the higher hypostases, as being closer to the godhead because of being a realm of platonic forms. 

 ² Ada Palmer has described the real life medieval Venice as the airport hub of the Mediterranean and Walton seems to have decided to run with that ball all the way to the goal line, here. La Serenissima may not be the one true world of which all others are but shadows, quite to the contrary, but it is the one true hub that every location can connect to. And one close to Primal Chaos at that. If I were still running new Amber games, I’d steal this in a second. I may yet steal it for other TTRPGs I am running. Another RPG that comes to mind in thinking on this novel is the system Everway, which relies on artistic cards for resolution mechanics. 

³ It’s similar to how in post-Roman Europe such Europeans, regardless of their origin, were called Franks by those outside of Europe. Anyone from Earth is called Venetians, because that’s the only point on Earth that connects to La Serenissima.

⁴I am reminded of the latter books of the Just City trilogy by Walton, where the gods themselves are caught up in the webs of fate. 

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

Book Review: A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen

A mixture of whimsy, social commentary and magic.

Jules has a problem. A big problem. Ever since being returned to being a human, Jules has made a living at handling dangerous artifacts in a slightly alternate Victorian London. But when her friend Anthony comes with his own problem, it’s a doozy. Anthony has a whole suite of artifacts inherited from his great-aunt, and one of them has gotten agitated--a sword, a very potent sword that is unhappy with a pending law in Parliament that could affect a great many indeed. Worse, Jules’ old enemy is behind the law. Jules finds herself in need of allies, and her own fortitude, to stand up for those who have no voice. 

This is the story of Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor. 

The novella runs on some fascinating worldbuilding, but I want to talk first about its social relationship web. Even though we have a number of magicians (including Jules herself) in the novella, what this story really runs on is its social relationships and how those relationships can be leveraged and reinforced, built and be strengthened with mutual aid, and so ultimately shows the power of a small community. Jules has fascinating and sometimes prickly relationships all over the place and in some unexpected locations.. She’s friends with Claudie, whose brother Anthony had the troublesome sword. Jules knows a powerful voice and magic worker, Fru Lind. And Jules, when she was not human thanks to a curse, was a harpy. Jules still has a rather prickly relationship with her former lover, the harpy Wellspring. Wellspring is rather disappointed that Jules was returned to human form, after all. 

And as the novel progresses, as Jules forges and reforges connections and makes new ones, this social power is itself a form of magic and one that Jules learns to wield. In many ways, the point of this novel, and it is a theme that the author does not shy away from is that the power of collective action, of working together, of bringing together diverse voices, powers and skills, is more powerful than a thousand year old sword. 

And even to really make that sword usable, requires allies and help. It takes a village, and more, for Jules to decipher and confront the central problem of the sword. The sword is well over a millennium old, was forged by Weyland Smith, and is worst of all a “dubious” sword--a sword with a mind toward doubt and uncertainty. So when a bill and potential magic working in Parliament would remove that doubt and uncertainty at the cost of hurting millions, it's no wonder that a dubious sword that has been dormant for a long time would get itself rather agitated by such a potential working.

The worldbuiding is a light touch and in complete harmony with the rest of the book. Using a slightly alternate Victoriana does help in some of the heavy lifting of the book. I might have wanted a more alternate world, but I am satisfied with what the author works with, here. 

Sprinkling in some mentions of real life figures like Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) hones in a range when the book takes place, without tying it down to an exact day and date. The social customs of this world are more progressive than ours, but recognizably Victorian in many of the little details. Having Jules be from a Swedish immigrant community not only plays to the core theme of the book but also provides a new perspective on that Victoriana. The tropes and characters and stock dramatis personae of a novel set in the Victorian period is well worn even to readers who only have a passing familiarity with the period and works set within it. But having an immigrant community centered in Jules’ life and shared experience added complexity, nuance and the unexpected to that. The author proves that where and on who we point the “camera” of the narrative, particularly people and communities (especially marginalized ones) is vitally important. That has been an underlying theme of previous works of Horned Lark Press and its works, and A Dubious Clamor brings that theme into the forefront.

That is one last bit of the book that a reviewer other than I might appreciate even better. The title A Dubious Clamor is a reference on a couple of levels and directions, but fundamentally there is a strain of music and the power of music in this novella. The chapter numbers have a treble clef and musical stave, with notes on it. Music and singing are important to the harpies, and to Jules herself. This is a novella where the music infuses and is part of the magic that she can and does wield. 

The novella is trim and neat and conforms well to the form and length of the form. I listened recently to a T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon podcast where she talked about, at one point, the length and form and purpose of novellas. Novellas, in her view are not long novelettes or shorter versions of novel, they have a set of structures and forms that they not only fit into, but seem to thrive in. Novellas which are simply long novels cut off for length wind up being unsatisfactory to my reading, and novelettes padded out have the same problem. A Dubious Clamor has solid structural bones in its act structure, arrangement of the narrative, which helps propel the reader through it, and it goes down well. The novella does end with the possibility of further adventures for Jules; I’d be more than happy to read them. 

Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor forges an alloy of magic, enchanted swords, whimsy and social adventure. It brings a modern and cutting edge appreciation for the wild and broad diversity of life. This is a story that ultimately cuts to the quick against those who would simplify and categorize the world at the expense of the individual. Resonant with our own struggles today, A Dubious Clamor holds up a mirror to our own society’s struggles to find acceptance for those who do not fit into neat boxes. Marissa Lingen, in A Dubious Clamor, shows that fighting against the forces that would oppose diversity is not only possible, not only needed, but is also rewarding to the heart and the soul.

--

Highlights:

• Excellent and breezily written
• Musical hints and highlights--the power of music and voice
• Excellent on brand message for the press

Reference: Lingen, Marissa, A Dubious Clamor, Horned Lark Press, 2026

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

Film Microreview: Coyote vs. Acme

The little movie that could

Coyote vs. Acme has been saved by a miracle from being deleted for a vulgar accounting trick. Predictably, it turned out to be a very good movie. The classic desert predator who overcomplicates his life to hunt an uncatchable prey has a bigger target now: a megacorporation that knowingly sells defective products for easy money. Coming precisely at this embarrassing moment in the history of Warner Brothers, the resemblance to real life is hard to miss.

But let’s talk about the movie first. It’s clear that the art of combining actors with cartoons has been perfected since the atrocity that was Space Jam 2. If it’s hard for actors to perform next to the empty space where a digital artist will later insert a cartoon character, it has to be even harder to do so when the cartoon character never speaks. Coyote vs. Acme solves the challenge by taking advantage of the exaggerated expressiveness of its protagonist. Wile E. Coyote is relatable in how he never gives up, and at the same time he’s his own worst enemy. He’s both the hero and the villain of his impossible quest to catch breakfast. This single-mindedness would normally make him a flat character incapable of sustaining a movie, but in this story he’s pursuing a more meaningful target. In suing the Acme Corporation, he’s fighting for his dignity.

This makes it inevitable to talk about the real-life evils of Warner Brothers, because the quest to bring this movie to the world was also a fight against the cruelest form of greed. This is the same company that killed the Batgirl movie to pay less in taxes, the same company that is courting the Ellison family and most surely planning to align with their pro-Trump/pro-OpenAI/pro-Tesla/pro-Netanyahu agenda, the same company that is working again with the Dark Queen of Transphobe Island for literal blood money. Warner Brothers has become as deserving of contempt as the Acme Corporation, and the survival of this movie is a small but noteworthy victory in this era of disrespect for art.

Coyote vs, Acme is a nonstop riot of laughs, which helps the viewer forgive a plot that takes a confusing amount of detours. Don’t try to make sense of the court drama or the corporate conspiracy, because it’s all a tangled mess. But that’s exactly the tone that the Looney Tunes franchise has been perfecting for decades: you’re supposed to embrace the absurdity, savor the chaos. This is a world where you make your own ski trail with a refrigerator strapped to your back. It’s a wacky wonderland of portable holes and superfast mice and instant boulders (just add water). The Acme Corporation is what happens when you live surrounded with marvelous fantasy and decide to monetize it. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Warner Acme lose this fight. The Road Runner may be unreachable, but humiliating greedy jerks is still a delight we get to have.

And we’re coming for Batgirl next. You just wait.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A first contact novel on an unusually hostile alien planet. 

An Adrian Tchaikovsky science fiction novel has a big overarching pattern with endless variation. A strange setting in space or on a planet. Alien intelligences that don’t work like human ones at all, but slowly there is understanding between the alien and the human. The alien intelligences can and often are strikingly different than our own, and are not humans with headridges. 

His 2025 Hugo finalist effort in this regard is Shroud. 

The future depicted in Shroud is a rather bleak one--Corporatocracy goes to the stars, and like a capitalist von Neumann machine, is spreading in sub-light ships and cryosleep. Reach a new system, set up extraction facilities, get the minerals and materials to expand and move on. You are woken out of cryosleep if you are useful and the ROI on your food, water and air is there. It’s next stage Capitalism in a terrifying iteration. Capitalism ruined Earth... but also got us to the stars and allowing us to swarm, slowly, across the galaxy. 

Enter our main character and point of view: Juna Ceelander. Unlike the other members of her team, she doesn’t have a technical speciality in their Special Projects division. She instead is the interface between the specialists and their boss, Bartokh. Her teammates assume that being the interface means she is just sleeping with the Director and isn’t good at anything. The politics and conflicts aboard ship are reminiscent of a number of toxic workplaces in SFF (like, say The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey).

In any event, the team is soon confronted that the titular planet of Shroud is even stranger than they thought..A planet totally in the dark, and with aliens who live on broadcasting, essentially, radio frequencies. A cold and strange world. But there is life here, definitely, and perhaps even more. There is enough here that Juna and the Special Projects division gets a bunch of resources to investigate the surface. Life of this complexity (and maybe even out right intelligent) has never been encountered before. 

And. then, in short order, disaster happens. Juna and Mai and Bartokh get into the modules that Mai and special projects have made and manage to get down to the planet, leaving their destroyed portion of the spaceship behind. They land on a planet where everything uses radio, where they are the only creatures that can see. Oh and they are in pods they cannot leave, or they will die, quickly and messily.

And then the plot really gets going. 

The backbone of this is a classic “cross the planet” quest as our survivors, inside of their modules, try to get to the one location where they might be rescued--the beanstalk that they have set up at the “pole”. The novel turns into a road trip--but a road trip where Juna’s point of view is broken up by the point of view of the intelligent alien species. It’s a fascinating balancing act as we see Juna and the others’ actions interpreted and misinterpreted by the aliens, and vice versa by means of their interspersed points of view. We also get, in Tchaikovsky fashion, an omniscient drop in here and there. This omniscient bit gives us the backbone of how life evolved on Shroud and how it rose to intelligence and its current position. I don’t know that these sections are strictly necessary--one can enjoy the plot and worldbuilding without them, but it feels like a tip of the hat to Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden where all the alternate worlds’ divergences are explained in interstitial chapters. I do feel that at the bottom, that the appeal of Tchaikovsky’s novels are rooted strongly in their worldbuilding and that superstructure is *fun* for the author to show off for us.

Going back into the mainline of the novel, we see this at work. While we get bits and pieces until the crash-landing onto the planet, it is on the planet that the nature of the aliens and the interrogation of alien biology that Tchaikovsky is making her, becomes clear. We’ve had in prior novels aliens based on almost Lamarckian recombination (Alien Clay). The spiders which mark many novels and novellas in his oeuvre. Aliens who rearrange planets into art pieces. And much more. Here, Tchaikovsky builds a world and creates aliens who work and adapt on the principles of mechanics and mechanical engineering. 

Tchaikovsky also has a lot of fun with puncturing some of the assumptions that have accreted over first contact. This is a first contact novel, to be sure, but that contact is a long process that really doesn’t even work well until the denouement. The humans’ attempt to use the Fibonacci sequence to communicate (the whole math as the universal language) comes in with contemptuous humor in the novel. Getting the point of view of the aliens to these communication attempts helps illustrate for the reader just how off the map this is for the denizens of Shroud. They are mechanical engineers working by iterative trial and error rather than anything like theory. That’s how they evolved to be what they are. So yes, that trial and error does finally pay off, but it is a long pay-off for the humans and aliens to finally be able to talk to each other.

As much as it is the aliens’ story, the novel really is Juna’s story, much more than the other humans, especially since we don’t have another human point of view. Juna is not sleeping with Bartokh, and in fact as an understudy for everyone, has a small amount of knowledge in everything. More importantly, she has flexibility of thought that allows her to work with the more technically minded Mai to manage the journey. At several points, Tchaikovsky makes the subtext text: the flexibility and adaptability of Juna is why Mai and Juna can make a go of this wild idea at all.¹ But that goes to the aliens’ nature and the “whatever works” realpolitik of trying to make a go of it in extremely harsh conditions. 

Shroud is a paean to engineering, from the nature of the aliens, to the ways that the humans try to understand Shroud as a planet, and, eventually, work to leave it after being stranded there. It occasionally goes into the highbrow in thinking about how we could come up with aliens that exist in its lightless, high radio environment, but at it’s core, its a journey of survival across a wild world rendered expertly. 

It’s a science fiction novel that is unapologetically and in the central core of what we understand science fiction to be, and to do. To put it in the context of the other 2026 Finalists for Best Novel for the Hugo Awards, it’s the most mainstream Science Fiction of the lot by far. Death of the Author is metafictional, immersed in the idea of stories, who tells them, why they are told, and how they are told. A Drop of Corruption, The Incandescent, The Raven Scholar and The Everlasting are all fantasy novels. Fantasy has had a real surge in the 2020’s; Shroud feels like it is not in step with the other novels at all (Death of the Author feels different, too, in a different way, much of a literary chassis). However, with two Best Novel nominees last year, and Shroud this year, Tchaikovsky, even given that he writes fantasy as well (The Tyrant Philosophers novels and novellas, most particularly lately) seems to be the science fiction author of award prominence and in the mind of Hugo voters. Shroud cements that reputation and place.

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Highlights:

• Unapologetic Space Opera. 
• Strange and well done Tchaikovsky aliens, high engineering style
• Shows the versatility of the author. 

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian, Shroud, (Orbit, 2025)

¹ Tchaikovsky seems to riffing off of Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects” idea. Juna is the anti-specialist, but she is adaptable enough to be the essential member of the survivors.

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

Film Microreview: The Last House

Coronavirus allegories are needed in film, but this is the wrong allegory

At the start of this decade, when mass quarantine briefly reduced the footprint of human activity on the world, the meme “Nature is healing” achieved viral popularity. In the new Netflix movie The Last House, the premise seems to be: “Nature is healing… BUT AT WHAT COST?”

It all starts when the creatures of the sea revolt against humanity’s predation (there are a lot of references to dead fish in this movie) and weaponize the water cycle to produce a special type of water that seals houses hermetically. Their revenge comes in the form of a continuous rain that coats houses in a self-reparing layer, keeping people locked inside. The plot of the movie follows a suburban family (whose hobbies and interests are a bit too obviously gender-coded) as they find themselves forced to work together, contributing their respective talents, so they can survive with the food they have until they figure out how to force their front door open.

The movie is sharply divided in two parts: at the beginning, this family deals with their situation with a light-hearted attitude—at times too light-hearted, as if it wanted to be a comedy. The second part abruptly becomes survival horror when the neighbors start dying of starvation and it’s revealed that there are big, scary creatures lurking in the rain, and they can unlock the doors whenever they want.

Movies about the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic were to be expected, but it’s strange that they have been so few. In The Last House, an even bigger strangeness is that, while it’s unafraid to explore directly the psychological toil of a worldwide crisis that forced us to stay apart from each other, the movie’s attention is aimed at the isolation, not at the underlying crisis. Translating the allegory back into real life, it seems to be saying that the real disaster wasn’t so much the widespread infection as the quarantine, that the generation-defining scar we’ll carry forever isn’t the count of possibly tens of millions of deaths, but rather, having had to stay indoors for some months. This is a movie that wants to say something about a tragedy but prefers to focus on a related inconvenience.

This attitude is noticeable in the way the parents try to keep the kids occupied during the first weeks of isolation. Helpfully for the scope of the plot, phone and internet service is lost immediately, but somehow electricity, water and gas keep functioning for far longer. This family happens to own just two DVDs that they rewatch a sickening number of times: Annie and Air Force One, a melodrama about finding a home for a child and a hyper-patriotic thriller structured like a home invasion movie. Such choice of allusions reveals The Last House’s conservative stance: the priority is to safeguard a home for the kids, and prolonged separation denies them a proper childhood. This echoes the real-life argument that mandatory quarantine was an invasion of personal freedom. Nevermind that, in the world of The Last House, the weird rain has also conjured tentacled horrors that kill anyone who makes it outside. The movie heavily implies that Homo sapiens is to blame for the suffering of sea creatures, but our heroes’ response in the end is to wield those big brains and opposable thumbs to hunt and kill sea creatures.

So the elements for a story that comments on the early 2020s are there: people can’t leave their houses, the outside world has a mysterious deadly enemy, and the feeling of powerlessness is stressful for everyone. But it has its commentary backwards: in real life, being confined indoors was a solution, not the problem. The problem was that the virus made physical socialization dangerous, and isolation was what we decided to do to protect each other. In the movie, isolation is treated as the problem, an excessive punishment on humankind imposed by monsters, and protecting each other means finding a way to break the forced isolation.

The Last House works better when it feels small, when it cares about the value of mutual care and the cumulative weight of uncertainty. But it mutates into a power fantasy for doomsday preppers, with confusing editing and quick flashing lights during action scenes that detract from the emotional content. And again, it mistakes the nature of the crisis it’s trying to talk about. This is not the right way to contribute to collective catharsis. This is a reassuring pat on the back for those who whined that quarantine was an unacceptable affront that needed to be opposed with violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Kill all Wizards by Jedidiah Berry

An irreverent fantasy novella with a Conan-like protagonist, but with a number of fresh twists and style.

Gotchimus has a problem with wizards. Wizards put a real cramp in his style and his life. He’s a barbarian. He has an eyepatch although even to his friend Hecksley he is not open about what happened to his eye. But with a number of wizards turning up dead, suspicion has fallen on Gotchimus as the cause of the recent spate of death of spell slingers, a barbarian like Gotchimus, even if he has come up in the world of sartorial fashion and manners a bit, is going to be suspected. And he does have a grudge against some of the dead wizards, if not all of them. Untangling Gotchimus’ story is going to take a lot of work, and a lot of wizard deaths.

This is the world and story of Kill all Wizards by Jedidiah Berry.

The perspective and touchstone I want to go with showing you how this story felt like me might feel a bit strange and obscure, but bear with me here. In the 1990’s there was a now not well remembered film adaptation of the detective/superhero comic The Shadow, with Alec Baldwin in the title role. John Lane plays Shiwan Khan, his opposition (and ostensibly the last descendant of Genghis Khan)¹. There is a scene in the movie I want to focus on, where Shiwan Khan and The Shadow have lunch together. They debate philosophy, tactics, and, well, fashion. It’s the classic Dr. No style “the bad guy and the villain have a meal together”. Shiwan Khan reminds me of Gotchimus. He’s trying to learn fashion and manners, but at the end of it, he is a barbarian (the lunch scene ends predictably, with things going to pot).  

In a way, Kill all Wizards captures that vibe from Khan for the story. One minute, he is at the opera and ill-fitting (but trying) in the heart of culture and refinement.² And then the next moment, he is fighting what seems to be a forest god for his life, elegant clothes and put-on manners ditched for doing the more traditional business of a barbarian. The novella, too, recognizes the story and goes a little postmodern with the whole business a number of times, commenting on the action directly to the reader. 

This goes to the point of pointing out that there is an excess of violence and refuses to have that be inflicted on the reader. Thus, the narration of the story is extremely knowing, and sometimes very much tongue in cheek. The narration and tone recognize the reader has likely been down this road before many times and wants to tell the story in a slightly skewed way. Consider the cover image: The cover image in a way tells you that the author is not going to play it exactly straight. It's a good use of the cover art to inform and prepare the reader.

This is not to say that the book doesn’t give you what is on the label. Gotchimus, for a lot of the book, is recounting his adventures, and yes, there is a lot of barbarian action in among the more polished cultural adventures. The polished cultural adventures include the mentioned visit to the opera, and an encounter with the horrid and unkillable beast named Bureaucracy. The wilder adventures have a resonance with exploits of barbarians going all the way back to Conan. 

It’s clear to me that Berry made deliberate references and homages all through the novella and I hesitate to spoil too many of them for a curious reader.  This all resonates with several genres of fantasy beyond just the sword and sorcery, and there is plenty for a well-seasoned fantasy reader to enjoy here. Even for its length and its freshness, I am not sure this is actually even a 101 novella, it's unexpected in its cuts and premises. 

In the midst of all this, finally, the story is queer friendly, readable and doesn’t outstay its welcome. 

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Highlights:

• A classic fantasy story from a delightfully off kilter point of view

• Maybe not the fantasy story you expect, but one that does not outstay its welcome

• Some delightful funny bits, both in manners and in action.

Reference: Berry, Jedediah, Kill All Wizards (Tordotcom, 2025)

¹ Just go with it. Genghis Khan is probably the ancestor of an appreciable fraction of Eurasia thanks to his, um, prolific nature. But on the other hand, even that now is coming in for question as the evidence seems muddled. 

² Is this a Fantasy of Manners? Maybe, to a degree it hits that old subgenre, too. There is evocation of the  subgenre of fantasy (mannerpunk). Although far from its high point, there are still fantasies in this vein being written.... notably the Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal run on this sort of Austenian flavored fantasy. Gotchimus’ intrusions into High Society are in this old tradition. 

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

TV Review: Batman: Caped Crusader season 2

Quoth the Joker: “Good. This is good.”

The reimagining of the era-defining Batman: The Animated Series returns for a second season, and much like the second movie in the Nolanverse, this time the story explores what happens to Gotham’s rotten underbelly once Batman starts removing ordinary mobsters from the board. What happens, as you’ll remember from The Dark Knight, is that a more devious, more sophisticated breed of evildoers emerges. And, as is customary in this show, Batman’s extensive repertoire of enemies is remolded with interesting twists.

Take the Mad Hatter, for example. The classical version of this character is a creepy little goblin who uses neuroelectric technology for mind control. But here we get something harder to fight: a sweet old lady with a talk show. She doesn’t need fancy gadgets to influence people because she has the power of mass media. This version of the Mad Hatter never meets Batman in a fight, but her presence is strongly felt throught the season each time she’s on screen poisoning the public conversation.

We also meet Roxy Rocket, who instead of a mere henchwoman is portrayed here as a tragic antiheroine on a mission of revenge. Also out for revenge is the Spectre, whose deadly, unstoppable wrath may or may not be divine, but is definitely not of this world. There’s the Mad Monk, a predatory cult leader who has made Batman the focus of a mass obsession. As promised in the trailer for this season, Harley Quinn returns, faced with both the weight of her own actions and the threat of a villain who seems tailored for her professional talents. The dual character of Rose/Thorn makes an appearance in an episode that plays with ambiguous interpretations about which side of her is real. And we see a version of Mr. Freeze reinvented as a rather unconventional artist who enjoys turning people into icy sculptures.

But the presence that haunts the season from start to end is the horrifying gaze of the Joker, who gets the most radical transformation away from the archetype we’ve learned to expect. Although the Riddler enjoys a long stay under the spotlight as Gotham’s new mob boss, the show pulls off a funny move of metatextual awareness and turns the Riddler into a mere appetizer for the main course that is the Joker, which, after all, is what the Riddler has been for decades in the public’s ranking of villains.

This Joker is a complete surprise. Story after story has trained us to expect a very specific vibe from this character: an irreverent prankster whose perverse sense of humor conveys a deep disdain for the social order. He’s colorful, loud, annoying in a way that’s impossible to ignore. This Joker is none of that. He doesn’t bother dressing up his psychopathic impulses in clownish antics: he’s pure, naked malevolence. He’s elusive, silent, shady to the point that he thinks of himself as an equal to Batman. He still has his trademark poison gas that kills people of laughter, but he himself never cracks a smile.

How can a character be so polarly opposite to the standard Joker and still be an incarnation of him? If he views society as one big joke, he’s keeping the punchline to himself. That makes his personality all the more sinister: you know he’s privately enjoying the chaos, but he’s not going to explain what it is that he finds so funny.

Beyond the visual delight that is the retro aesthetic of this art déco Gotham, with its black-and-white TV shows, clunky machine guns, and ubiquitous fedoras, the main attraction of the show is the inventivenes with which it makes the same old villains you think you already know feel fresh again. For a hero approaching 90 years since first publication, this is a much needed and much welcome transfusion of new blood.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Hugo finalist sequel to the Hugo winning The Tainted Cup.

Readers of The Tainted Cup, now that we have gotten the meeting and setup out of the way, are plunged right into the action of A Drop of Corruption, second in the Ana and Din mysteries by Robert Jackson Bennett. The novel assumes you’ve read the first novel, and know the situation, and know we are going to go right into the action. Ana and Din are investigators for a fantasy Empire, looking into mysteries, particularly murders, that defy normal investigative techniques. It’s an Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe situation: Din does the legwork, while Ana, because of some double edged gifts, usually is never in the field and instead uses what Din (magically augmented to be able to remember anything he sees or hears) gathers to make the case.

 
If you are reading this review, and haven’t read The Tainted Cup, you might be ready to tackle this book with that precis but you will miss a lot of the nuance of the Empire and what it does, and not be quite ready for the further conversation here. There are many lines in this book, and one of them is one that should not be overlooked: a critique of the Empire and the Imperial Project.

 
That critique is a nuanced and interesting one that goes beyond the usual binaries of Chaos vs Absolute Law and Ana and Din, as representatives of the Empire in a important but still independent border Kingdom, do navigate. We saw in The Tainted Cup about the importance of the Empire and also the costs of that Empire as well. We still don’t quite know what the Leviathans really are. Here, in this book, we are in a place where the reagents and the remnants of defeated Leviathans are processed. Yarrow is an important kingdom because of what it can do for the Empire, but it is not yet within the orbit of the Empire. But it seems like it is a matter of time before it is.

And that is interesting because there are conversations about the idea of Imperial Expansion and the uses of Empire and the health of the Empire. Since I think about the Roman Empire everyday, there are two time frames here I am thinking of. First is the 2nd century AD, in the time of Trajan and Hadrian. Trajan conquers a bunch of Mesopotamia from the Persians, in what is now Iraq. However, upon his death, Hadrian begins a campaign of consolidation, giving up the new gains and fortifying the Empire as it is. This is of course where we get Hadrian’s Wall.¹ The point is that the Empire is at a limit...and that is a dangerous place for Empire to be. It’s dangerous for an Empire to further expand, something Ana talks to Din about as Din considers his own problems within the Empire. And it is dangerous for an Empire to remain in this position. That mirrors Din’s all problems again--as Ana’s hands, he is trapped in an old crushing debt, but getting out of that position is difficult. But remaining in that position is taxing. It’s a nice balance of the internal problems of the main character with the geopolitical position of the Empire he works for. What good is an Empire and is it all worth it?

The even stronger second Roman Empire parallel is the 130’s BC and the kingdom of Pergamon. Pergamon was a Greek Kingdom in what we now call Turkey. Attalus III, last king of the kingdom, had no direct heirs, and so bequeathed the kingdom to the then Roman Republic. This was something that seems to have been in the wind for years (much like in this book how the people of Yarrow know that the Empire is slowly closing its jaws around them to absorb them completely). The actual attempted transfer mirrors events in the book here, as a supposed brother challenges the transfer and violence erupts. Here, events diverge from the history, but the upset is that the transfer is much messier and more fraught than it might otherwise be, both for Yarrow and the Empire, and Pergamon and the Roman Republic.

Beyond all of this fascinating and crunchy worldbuilding, supported by the previous novel, there is of course a murder plot, and schemes and wheels within wheels. Now that we have the Ana and Din pattern established, the book can unleash us upon it. Din finds himself in some precarious positions and situations gathering data from Ana, ranging from a perilous trip up a canal in boats that reminded me personally of a visit to the Mekong Delta, to schemes and conflicts involving the Empire’s own bank, the workshop/magical foundry that Yarrow is famous for, and an opponent possessed of prescience. Said opponent has some of the classic uses of the form--false identities, faked deaths, body doubles and more. And the actual inciting incident is that classic trope--a locked room mystery.

Ana does find herself, as the jacket cover suggests, with an opponent that can predict her every move. How does one beat someone who can see so many moves ahead? Therein lies the story. It’s a fair bit of puzzling and it is our slow understanding (as it is for Ana and Din) of the culture and society of Yarrow that keeps our investigators on their toes.

The question of award eligibility comes to a head here. Should a book be award worthy if it does not stand on its own? A Drop of Corruption most definitely extends the world, builds out Ana and Din more, and provides a whole new set of secondary characters who are fascinating and interesting (and not just our antagonist, once revealed). Ana as always remains a strange and sometimes alien person, it is Din who goes out into the world and has to be, for lack of a better word, a people person. Not that, especially when it comes to sexual relations, that Din is at all a wilting flower in this regard. But for all of that, does this book stand on its own?

No. I don’t think its reasonable for a reader to pick up this book, without having picked up The Tainted Cup, and get the full experience of what Bennett is doing. If your standards for award nomination is “the book stands on its own”, then A Drop of Corruption, as strong as it is, and as vibrant the characters are, the worldbuilding and the writing, does not pass that test. There are some hints here and there of the past, but this book assumes the reader knows about Din’s secrets, his debt, and already know that Ana is more than she appears (something reinforced here, but you are clearly meant to continue in a vein already known).

As a book, however, if you do not want to follow the rule of a book standing on this own, I think myself that A Drop of Corruption is among the strongest of the finalists. It does what The Tainted Cup does, but without having to set up the story and the problem, can really focus on a problem, an area, and a situation and really go into deep depth in it. Bennett is one of the more interesting fantasy authors out there today, and A Drop of Corruption proves just why.

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Highlights:

• Second Ana and Din mystery - does not stand on its own
• Interesting puzzles and an intriguing, frustrating antagonist.
• Deep worldbuilding, including crunchy thoughts on Empire

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson, A Drop of Corruption, (Del Rey 2025).

¹ A successor to Hadrian, Antonius Pius, tried to build a wall further north, in the area that is now Glasgow and Edinburgh. There are some remnants but that project was abandoned two decades after it was finished, and Hadrian’s Wall remained the furthest permanent projection of Roman power until the 5th century. There are some artifacts from the Antonine Wall fortlets in a museum in Glasgow.

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