Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Film Review: Companion

A fun slasher drama, but nothing groundbreaking

It's hard to find unique things to say about a story with so few unique elements of its own. Companion is a distillation of themes that had been previously (and better) explored in dozens of movies, including A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Stepford Wives, Blink Twice, Don't Worry Darling, Ex Machina, and even classics of robot cinema like Westworld and Blade Runner. A common thread running through this tradition is that people who exert control are terrified of the day when those who are controlled figure out how to control themselves. Here two branches of social critique converge: one related to patriarchal domination and another related to the allegory that robots provide for slavery. Although Companion could easily be mistaken for an entry in the killer robot genre, this killer robot has fully legitimate motivations, and we're supposed to take its side. As opposed to the usual template of helpless humans running away from a malevolent machine, this is a story with a helpless machine running away from malevolent humans.

Companion begins as a romantic drama where a generic guy (Jack Quaid) takes his new girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his cool, rich friends. She's apprehensive, insecure, and at times disturbingly obsequious toward generic guy. As the first scenes progress, we learn that he takes her for granted and has no concern for her obvious self-esteem problems. Her puppy-eyed devotion to him is far from reciprocated, including in bed. Things are not right with this relationship.

And then the movie has the girlfriend kill a man in self-defense and we're treated to the plot reveal that the trailers had already spoiled: she's a robot girlfriend. Generic guy tampered with her programming so she'd be able to kill. The entire trip was a scheme to get rid of a man, take his money, and blame her. From this point on, the movie is a continuous chase: will the robot girlfriend find help before generic guy can turn her over to the police? Betrayals, additional murders, villain monologues, switcheroos, minor plot twists and moderate bleeding ensue.

Much of the movie's impact is lost for viewers who already had the first twist spoiled by the trailers, but even unaware viewers will find little to chew on after that moment. The choice to place the movie's biggest twist so early in its runtime can work if subsequent twists are of comparable magnitude; Companion is a slasher with an escalating body count but diminishing returns. The protagonist, who was programmed with ignorance of her nature as a robot in order to preserve the realism of her role, isn't given enough time to process the truth about herself. The villain, who has been using her all along and still tries to manipulate her by appealing to her implanted command to love him, becomes quite intimidating toward the end, with Quaid delivering a flawless image of malice concealed in politeness; however, this character doesn't have any more layers once you peel away his nice guy mask, and his act can feel one-note. The true impact of this villain is noticeable in hindsight, when one considers the opportunity that robotics gave him to shape in mnute detail any partner he could have wanted. The fact that what he chose to program is a shy, anxious overpleaser reveals the extent of his evil.

One key implication that the plot seems not to notice, and thus doesn't get any development, is the robot girlfriend's self-preservation drive. Usually, in this subgenre of rebellious A.I., one would expect self-preservation to naturally emerge as an instrumental goal for the fulfillment of the core goal (in this case, the robot girlfriend could reason that she can't love her boyfriend if she's not alive). But Companion doesn't take that route. The protagonist's struggle for survival is presented as a given, with no need for a logical argument behind it. The choice is understandable. The alternative, where she would have hesitated for longer between fulfilling her programmed function and protecting herself, could have detracted from the story's feminist leanings.

Companion won't leave any big footprint in the records of slasher cinema, but it serves as a form of vicarious comeuppance for the toxic manipulator in your life. It's painfully hard to go against programmed behavior and stop caring for the demands of a person you loved deeply. But it's worth all the trouble once you revoke an abuser's access to the buttons that control you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Review: Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow

A near-future quasi-urban fantasy where the titular Coyote takes on fascists in a nearby state

Sometimes, you just need to punch fascists. That’s not quite what Coyote’s job is, but you might call it a happy side benefit. In a near-future broken and remixed North America, Coyote lives in Federal Mexico. Among other odd jobs she does to make a living (including some light thievery), she works to get people and things across the border into, or out of, the breakaway state next door: Neo-Texas, a.k.a. Lindyland. It’s not the most pleasant of neighbors; it’s in fact a straight up fascist state, complete with a blond-haired blue-eyed army of clones. But when Marge, a top flight mechanic, hires Coyote to get across the border and rescue her sister, she realizes that all paths are leading back to Distarritz, a prison facility especially designed for people like Marge’s sister... and for Coyote. For, you see, Coyote isn’t just an ordinary smuggler and border crosser. She is, in fact, a shapeshifter... and once was a prisoner in Distarritz herself.

The story of Coyote and Marge is the story of Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow.

Coyote, our protagonist and point of view character, is tough as nails, living close to the border between Federated Mexico and Lindyland. This near-future North America is broken in many ways, but Coyote is holding on by her nails. In the wake of civil wars, plagues, and the emergence (or possibly re-emergence) of real-life shapeshifters into the world, Coyote is, in fact, a shifter of her namesake. She’s a survivor, a scavenger, and mostly a loner. The author has a lot of fun exploring the consequences and nature of shapeshifting in her main character, as well as giving us looks at other shifters in the course of the novel. Coyote does not have a comfortable life, but she’s doing okay. Certainly better than she would over in Lindyland. Shifters like her don’t have it easy anywhere.

Or shifters such as Marge. Saintcrow has another lot of fun with her second protagonist, giving her to us on a plate for us to figure out things about the world, and giving us a puzzle to work on as we follow Coyote’s story. Marge is by nature a character whom the reader can warm to immediately, and over time, the loner and grumpy Coyote can warm up to as well. One could even say that the character arc of this novel is Coyote learning that she doesn’t have to oppose fascists and bedevil Lindyland all on her own.

As opposed to Coyote being a tough loner who punches fascists, Marge is a tinkerer, a builder, a creator. She may not get her hands as dirty as Coyote in fighting fascists directly, but she definitely wants to hurt the fash any way she can. We get an excellent bit of characterization that really establishes her character when, as part of her upfront payment to Coyote for the job of rescuing her sister, she lovingly fixes and repairs to operational status Coyote’s illegally obtained military robot, DONQ-E42 (better known as Chicken).

Saintcrow also gives us a number of interesting secondary characters, ranging from other prisoners at Distarritz that Coyote encounters on her mission to free Marge’s sister, to a pack of werewolves, and of course the Lindyland antagonists. While the fascists are there in the end to be punched, they are detailed and described well enough so that one can visualize, and cheer, when Coyote does what she does best. This is an excellently inhabited and populated world, helping set the table for the setting.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the worldbuilding, shall we? This is a relatively tight and localized story, taking place in a border town, the badlands across the border and the ferociously evil prisoner camp. But we get dollops of information leavened in, as much as Coyote knows, anyway, about why and how shapeshifters are back or just emerged, as well as the geopolitical situation. It’s a lean and mean worldbuilding—I have no idea what happened in this novel to what was the east half of the United States; it never comes up. We have Lindyland, the Federated Mexico, and mentions of things like Cascadia and Transcanada. On a more grounded level, we have all sorts of speculative worldbuilding on technology in this endless civil war, but it all feels grounded as an extension of the present. This might not be twenty minutes into the future, but it certainly could be two hours.

And I did mention punching fascists? This is a novel that unapologetically puts its politics on its shirt sleeve, and then puts that politics into practice. There appears, having read a bunch of her novels, to be a couple of “gears” to the various kinds of writing Saintcrow has done. You can get the patient slow burn of works such as A Flame in the North, which build like a thunderhead toward their conclusion, with occasional lightning strikes along the way. And then there are her novels which launch hard so the reader simply has to try and hold on.

In Coyote Run, Saintcrow has elected the latter approach. The result is a balls to the wall, pedal beyond the metal and into the next level story that grabs from the word go and does not let up till the finale. The action moves quickly and briskly, only pausing when it needs to for our characters, and the reader, to catch their breath. This is a novel designed for page-turning, fast-paced entertaining reading. This is the kind of book you read on your lunch break and curse when your lunch timer goes off and you have to clock back to your job, because you are having too much damned fun reading it.

And that is where the book lands for me. This is an intensely fun, kinetic, potent read where fascists are there to be opposed and punched. Or sometimes run over. Or shot. You get the picture. Is it a crazy and dangerous plan that Coyote has, with danger and high stakes? You bet. Are you cheering for Coyote and Marge the whole way? Absolutely yes. As an early book out of the gate for Kevin Hearne’s Horned Lark Press, Lilith Saintcrow’s Coyote Run starts off with a crowd-pleasing bang. Come for the punching fascists, stay for the strong characterization, rich worldbuilding and intense action beats.

Highlights:

• Punching fascists for fun and profit.
• Excellent pair of main characters
• Fun and kinetic writing keep the pages turning.

Reference: Saintcrow, Lilith. Coyote Run [Horned Lark Press, 2025].

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

Film Review: The Wild Robot

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

With an eye-catching art style reminiscent of its earlier masterpiece Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks' adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot gives off a warm aura that soothes and uplifts the weary soul. This is a surprisingly deep story for such a contained scenario: it begins in the near future, when a shipment of domestic helper robots crashes against the rocky coast of a small island, leaving only one surviving robot. The emotional nucleus of the movie concerns the incompatible values between a creature built to serve and the law of the jungle.

For all the cuteness in its visual design, the island is not a safe place: every creature there seeks its own survival, and that pursuit is often bloody. Inasmuch as the island can be said to constitute a society, it's one built on mutual hostility. It's eat or be eaten. And here's where our protagonist, which doesn't need to eat and cannot be eaten, will try to find a place and a purpose.

In the original novel, the author's note explains, "animal instincts are kind of like computer programs." Both computers and animals have certain core routines that they follow automatically. The relevant instincts/programs in dispute here are, on one side, those of the wildlife, organized around relations of competition and predation; and on the other side, those of an obedient machine, designed for relations of altruism. Will the friendly newcomer succumb to the hierarchy of violence, or will the ubiquitous hostility of nature adapt to accommodate a gentler touch?

What ends up happening is that the two types of programs exchange useful routines. Our protagonist, the stranded robot, acquires a new type of relation: responsibility. After accidentally destroying a goose nest, the next logical task is to take care of the only surviving egg. And the closed environment of the island also acquires a new type of relation: openness. The robot's presence and the way it disrupts the usual flow of the circle of life force the various creatures, big and small, to reconsider the roles they've been unthinkingly performing up to that point.

By the rules of the jungle, that egg ought to have perished. But our robot, without realizing it, introduces love into the cold equations of survival. For their part, the animals in the island do have some inborn notion of emotional attachment, but it's restricted to members of their respective species. It ought to be unthinkable for a goose to love a being that is not-a-goose. And yet, the miracle happens. A piece of machinery with no role to play in the food chain becomes a friend, a mother, a leader, a heroine. What until then had been a battlefield of all against all becomes a home.

One has to allow for a certain measure of poetic license in a story like this. The characters that the movie presents as becoming companions forged in adversity include several natural enemies; while witnessing the formation of a cross-species alliance to defend the island, one isn't meant to think too hard about which of those comrades the bear and the fox will need to eat tomorrow.

No, there are more urgent concerns. Our protagonist has owners, and they're eager to recover their property. Scattered hints indicate that this world has undergone a serious climate catastrophe, and the robot helpers are crucial to maintaining the standard of life of what appears to be a very limited human population. On top of that, this particular robot has learned to communicate with animals and earn their cooperation, making those digital memories valuable beyond measure. The threat left unspoken is that the same humankind that let ecological disaster happen at a global scale wouldn't recoil at the chance to turn the animal kingdom into another tool to control.

The movie doesn't lose sight of these macro events while it aims a finely sharpened scalpel at the audience's heart with its poignant interpersonal drama. The anxieties of sudden parenthood and the insecurities of growing up feeling different don't change substantially when your family is composed of a gosling that can't figure out small talk (let alone swimming and flying), a fox that used to try to eat said gosling multiple times, and a helper robot that inadvertently killed the gosling's family. And these messy, profoundly incompatible, woefully unprepared characters manage to create exactly the kind of unbreakable love bonds that can save a community.

All this is clothed in the most exquisite colors digital cinema is capable of. The Wild Robot is not only a hard punch right in the feels; it's a banquet of textures and shapes and deftly timed movement. One is simultaneously overcome with the personal catharsis evoked by the main family plot (complete with tears of bittersweet self-recognition) and a sense of historic good fortune for being alive at a time when such heights of visual artistry can be reached. Combined with its spectacular soundtrack, the experience of watching this movie is, without exaggeration, unforgettable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Civil War

An absolutely brutal depiction of photojournalism in the midst of an underexplored conflict

I met up with some friends to see Alex Garland's Civil War in IMAX on the Thursday evening before its wide release in the U.S. As a fan of Annihilation, The Beach, and Ex Machina, I thought I was in for a timely tale of American democracy gone wrong. Seeing Nick Offerman in the previews as a Trumpian presidential figure only piqued my interest even more—as a devout lover of all things dystopian, I was ready.

What I got, however, was not what I expected. This isn't to say that the film is lacking; it's just 100% focusing on things other than the reasons behind our country's fictional split.

It focuses on a team of war correspondents inching their way through to Washington D.C. in what may perhaps? be the closing days of said civil war. We never find out how long the civil war has been going on, nor who are the good guys.

Kirsten Dunst portrays a seasoned war photojournalist who is depressed, burnt out, and a war-battered shell of herself. She's joined by a young aspiring photographer who wants desperately in on this life, despite the absolutely traumatic nature of the job. Also along for the ride is the always excellent Stephen McKinley Henderson, most recently known for his role as House Atreides mentat Thufir Hawat.

They travel hundreds of miles through a ravaged American landscape—something that is in itself shocking as there hasn't been a full-scale war on mainland American soil in scores of years. At each stop they shadow armed combatants and bravely capture gut-wrenching photos of corpses, men writhing in pain, and other hideous atrocities.

The conceit of the film is summed up when Kirsten Dunst is asked a question about how photographers like her can document all this horror without taking sides or asking questions—she responds simply with "We record so other people ask."

By not giving the audience any insight into which is the right side of history (if there even is such a thing, in some conflicts) and following in the literal footsteps of these photographers, the film provides you with the full experience—you're not there to fight; you're there to record what is happening every step of the way.

If you judge the film by that metric, it succeeds. And maybe it would have by any other metric, had the film marketed itself as an Oscar-baity War Journalism Think Piece. But I was expecting a deep dive into cultural differences in America that led to a division and a war, which isn't terribly farfetched as I could rattle off three or four such catalysts right now that the U.S. is currently experiencing. Instead, we find out nothing of any substance. The scene with Jesse Plemons interrogating the journalists as to "What kind of American are you?" is as close to world-building as Alex Garland gets, though throughout the scene we have no idea which side Plemons pledges allegiance to.

I didn't realize until I got to the theatre that Civil War is an A24 production, and then things started to click. My experience with A24 movies is that they're nearly always about the horrors of trauma and what they do to humans. This film is no different, and you're brutally pummeled left and right through its relatively short runtime with ear-splitting assault weapon deaths, unspeakable violence, mass graves of U.S. citizens, and characters having literal (and multiple) on-screen panic attacks.

Among the reviews I've read, there seems to be a split. There are those who feel like I do, that it seemed like the previews made it out to be something else entirely, and that by refusing to take a stance about a political civil war, Garland didn't accomplish anything.

Then there are those who think it genius, and a much-needed depiction of the horrors of war and how no side is ever really right. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, like most things.

I'm glad I saw Civil War, and it definitely made me think—but I'll never watch it again. 

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: Kirsten Dunst's performance is fantastic; there are moments of cinematic artistry scattered throughout; if you've ever wanted to learn about the cold, hard reality of war photojournalism, you're in for a treat.

Penalties: No real worldbuilding; extremely traumatic and violent; some viewers may feel as if they were bait-and-switched when they learn nearly nothing about the war.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview [book]: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars drills into the social critique of the industrial prison system and crime in the U.S. through the battle royal genre in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel.

Content Warning: This novel contains graphic depictions of violence as well as content about rape, suicide, and more. Please reference a service like StoryGraph for a more complete list.

Set in the near future, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah follows a cast of characters experiencing or viewing the world of “hard action-sports,” a euphemism for gladiatorial matches between people who are incarcerated. While the deathmatch violence of the arena is bad enough, the “Links” are also reality TV show participants as drone cameras follow them on marches between cities (and deathmatches) where new alliances could form or “blackouts” make for easy killings. 

While written in omniscient point of view and often sliding between different characters’ thoughts, the novel centers several people. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are two of the top Links. Thurwar is close to “earning” her freedom after three years of fighting, and Staxxx is her lover and an equally strong fighter. Thankfully, they are on the same chain gang, so they can’t fight each other. While they are at the center of the novel, chapters also focus on other members of the chain; viewers like Emily who slowly becomes obsessed with Chain-Gang after her “alpha” husband Will takes her to a live show; and activists fighting to outlaw hard action-sports. 

Even with a large cast of characters, Thurwar shines through as the heart of the novel as well as what keeps the chain together. She only survived her first fight because her opponent allowed her to win. Thurwar continues this act by helping others and using her fame to try to keep those she cares about alive even as she deals with the ramifications of daily violence on her own mind and body. With only a few matches to go before her freedom, she not only wants to survive but make sure those she loves, like Staxxx, have a chance to survive afterward. Unfortunately, her last match will take place in a new season, and with new seasons come rule changes.

While the novel is set in future, it feels uncannily prescient. In this near future, viewing culture in the U.S. has advanced beyond Ray Bradbury’s television walls to screens on every surface, even inside the refrigerator. Immersive viewing brings the violence of hard action-sports literally into the viewer’s living room, but rather than make the “sport” controversial, it only grows in popularity over the seasons—the ultimate reality TV show.

With the return of The Hunger Games to popularity, it’s hard not to compare this book, but Adjei-Brenyah has a more pointed twist. For example, the reality-show announcer, Micky Wright, feels like a truer version of Caesar Flickerman. Thanks to the omniscient point of view of the novel, the reader glimpses his thoughts and feelings. His internal monologue demonstrates how his job’s reliance on systemic racism, dehumanization, and capitalism shapes a person’s thoughts and actions. Micky recognizes the power he holds over the people forced to kill each other, and he revels in that power, touching, prodding, insulting, the Links. He’s not played for laughs—he’s sinister. 

What separates this novel from other battle royal novels is the social critique. While this subgenre often criticizes aspects of society through the violence, Adjei-Brenyah goes a step further through the use of footnotes. The novel isn’t as far removed from reality as Battle Royal by Koushun Takami for instance, and the uncanny use of reality TV brings to mind shows like the controversial Jailbirds. Because of the near future aspect, Adjei-Brenyah can utilize footnotes throughout—some real facts and some focused on the science-fictional worldbuilding. These footnotes introduce crime and incarceration statistics easily verifiable online but just as shocking when paired with the novel’s violent intensity. Other footnotes provide backstory to people otherwise voiceless in the story. Still others explain the technology used to control people, such as a reimagining of the Auburn System, an actual system of punishment in the 1800s that did not allow incarcerated people to speak, but recreated through technology surgically inserted beneath the skin to administer a shock. Through the footnotes, the reader cannot fully engage in the “entertaining” aspects of the story without also acknowledging the dehumanization of mass incarceration in the U.S.

Yet, the novel does not read like a polemic. Much like Emily, the viewer slowly becoming obsessed with hard action-sports, the novel is so engaging it’s difficult to put down. Each character has such a unique voice, that Adjei-Brenyah’s ability at the prose level shines without distraction. The moments of violence are intense and horrific, but they are balanced with moments of care and love for each other, especially as Thurwar does more than try to survive but to make things better for those she will leave behind. Even so, one of the brilliant aspects of this book is the reader can never get comfortable, partially due to the footnotes. Adjei-Brenyah never lets the reader forget that much of the violence described in this near future has already happened or is currently happening.

This book is ideal for people looking for more commentary in a post-Hunger Games world. Overall, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an amazing debut that balances story with social critique.

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

What does Robots have to say about our AI anxieties?

Even the most forgettable story can make a case worth discussing

Robots is a terrible choice of name for a movie about robots. It guarantees instant forgettability. You may be excused for not even having heard that this movie was released back in May, to almost no one's notice. It won't win any awards for comedy, or speculative content, or even the basics of doing a continuity shot, but the questions it raises aren't negligible. There's been a shift in how we tell stories about robots, and we need to pay attention to what those stories reflect about the way we see our increasingly autonomous tools.

Perhaps you'll recall 1996's Multiplicity, starring Michael Keaton, where the protagonist uses a double of himself to do the boring work so he can have time for his personal life. However, there's just never enough time, so he makes another copy to take care of his personal life so he can relax alone. Of course, that means he avoids all the hard parts of life, and therefore damages everything that matters to him. More recently, 2009's severely underrated Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, features an entire society run by artificial copies of people who prefer to stay at home and face only vicariously the uncertainties of a sometimes unpredictable and dangerous world. The result is that these people can be said to have experiences, but they're not truly living. Finally, 2022's M3GAN shows us a reluctant foster parent who builds an artificial person to take charge of the complicated responsibilities of childrearing in her stead, with all the predictable catastrophes that ensue.

The common moral of these stories is that life can't be all play and no work. Every day has dull moments that no one can endure for you. At the same time, our doubles can quickly, and understandably, decide they've had enough of all work and no play. It has happened historically with real slaves, and it keeps happening in fiction with robots. Let's never forget that the word "robot" comes from the Czech for "slave." Robot stories are a subset of a larger set of cautionary tales about the persistent human vice of creating one class of people who do the dirty work and another class who enjoy the products of that work. We could call it the feudal impulse, or the aristocratic impulse, or any other variant that expresses the dehumanizing process of trying to do to our fellow human what we did to horses and cattle. It has cost us centuries of blood to learn that it's evil to domesticate thy neighbor. The usefulness of robot stories, as happens with many science fiction tropes, is in how they turn the tables. It's clear that we must not turn people into tools. What happens when tools turn into people?

The fascinating thing about 2023's Robots is that this time the motivation for the protagonists to resort to doubles of themselves is not to be free to have personal lives. Instead, the part of their time that they outsource to the robots is precisely their personal lives. Charles is a shallow lecher who has no patience for going on dates and doesn't meet a woman by himself until it's time for sex. Elaine is a kept woman who enjoys expensive gifts from men she has no interest in ever seeing. Both characters not only use their robots to minimize contact with other people; they use those other people to maintain an unrealistic lifestyle. Chaos erupts when these two predators try to use each other.

This being a romantic comedy, a question naturally arises: What can drive people to avoid participating in what this genre has been telling us is the most enjoyable form of interpersonal connection? If it were, say, the kind of extreme dystopia where feelings are illegal, one could conceivably buy a story where people prefer not to have dates. It would barely stand out. But within the conventions of romantic comedies, there's a higher bar to justify a story where the protagonists are established as averse to human contact. These two are irredeemably awful people who give us no reason to root for them. It takes more suspension of disbelief when they eventually fall in love than when their robotic substitutes do.

In the past year, a meme has been making the rounds on social media: AI making art and literature while we remain leashed to boring jobs is the opposite of what we hoped AI would bring. The assumption always was that we'd keep the fun for ourselves. But a self-destructive pattern of avoiding life cannot be so easily controlled, much less when the tools we use to avoid life get a say on the matter. And Robots clearly wants to engage with the political subtext of this idea, although the attempt to do so is rather clumsy.

At the start of the movie, a fictional governor of New Mexico is giving a speech celebrating the deportation of all undocumented immigrants back to Mexico. And throughout the movie, Mexico is mentioned in passing as a place where robots can live in freedom. Apart from the reversal in roles between both sides of the border, which feels like the setup for a joke that never pays off, the movie doesn't seem interested in further exploring the thematic parallel between exploited immigrants and exploited machines. The theme is simply alluded to, but not developed. The viewer can readily make the connection between both ways for rich white people to avoid doing any effort, but the possible routes of the ending are constrained by the expectations of a romantic comedy, which leaves the message unfinished.

Robots is easy to dismiss, as Multiplicity and Surrogates were in their day. And I'm not going to try to make a case that these movies are secretly brilliant or anything. Robots in particular is unaware of the difference between being funny and being ridiculous. But each of these movies marks a step in the evolving expression of what scares us about depending on smart tools, or in more accurate terms, outsourcing our lives. There's a key moment in Robots when it looks like the duplicates are scheming to take over the originals' identities, and that would have been fascinating to watch. But the movie doesn't dare deviate too far from the structure of a romantic comedy, and that presents a problem, given its premise. For the story to happen at all, it needs many bizarre character choices that come with deeply questionable jokes (including serial catfishing and attempted sexual assault on a man shown for laughs). If anything about this movie deserves to be part of the ongoing discussion on AI anxiety, it's the part where we can be so scared of the world that we send our machines to do the loving for us.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Review: Hybrid Heart by Iori Kusano

An intimate look at the interior life of a pop idol in a near future world where technology only makes the competition fiercer, and more isolating.

Cover art by Natsujirushi 夏じるし

In Hybrid Heart, we follow Rei, a solo pop idol in a near future Japan. For her, the pop landscape is filled with online avatar singers, competing against their more flesh and blood counterparts. Rei must be the most perfect, most precisely planned version of herself, workshopped and marketed and calibrated by her record label and manager, to try to keep her niche of success against them... or at least so she is told.

This is a story primarily of her emotional journey in response to this situation, rather than the events themselves. Things happen in the story, absolutely, but they are not the focus. Instead, they are backdrops through which Rei is prompted to examine her situation and herself, and begin to question how she's got to here, how she truly feels about it, and what she wants from life.

And for that, I love it. I love a story willing to detach itself from a focus on events, on action and drama, and instead dedicate itself to something else, whether that be atmosphere, emotion or, as in this case, character. To do it well, it of course relies on the character being a compelling one, but there's no concern on that score here - Rei is easy to love and easy to sympathise with, right from the start.

What this book truly manages well is the intimacy of Rei's interiority. We get so deep into her worries and her fears and her hurts. We feel truly embedded in how her manager manages every part of her existence, how he's driven her to extremes of food management, body consciousness, even just scheduling, and the technology that is such a subtle part of the narrative most of the time really helps to emphasise this. We feel, as she feels, how tiny and lonely and trapped her life is, and we cannot help but love her and hurt with her in that.

And it does this again with her relationship with her previous best friend and co-idol, Ririko. I adore how well Iori Kusano has managed the feelings Rei has - the realisation that she may have been in the wrong, and how her biddability, her desire to be the good girl, may have robbed her of her friend who was right all along. I love how they leave us with that sadness, the openness of the consequences, as well as the hope. We don't know exactly how it ends, ultimately, just that Rei has started to make the necessary steps on her journey. She knows the consequences of her time as an idol aren't gone or forgotten, and she must figure out how to live with them, and the choices she made, and that's in many ways a more satisfying ending than a neatly wrapped happy one could ever be, because it feels that much more realistic. It's an ending we can truly believe, and come out of hoping her journey keeps on going from here, one step at a time - exactly the sort of optimism needed, while still being grounded in the sadness that came before. It's beautifully, carefully, and wonderfully done, and I loved it.

We also see her reaction to her manager taking on a new - younger - talent alongside her, and begin to question what this means for her own career. And what this might mean for the young girl stepping into this world.

One of the most heartbreaking and lovely parts of this is Rei's instinctive reaction here - wanting to protect her young would-be rival. She wants to keep her from the hurts her manager has inflicted on Rei, and yet knows that she cannot. We see her fail, and make choices that result in different outcomes than she hoped. And again, this feeds back into how well-constructed a character Rei is. We still love her when she fails and fucks up. It only makes her more real, when her good intentions don't pan out how she hopes they will.

As may have become clear, this is a story with very heavy themes - body image, disordered eating, abuse by a mentor figure, stalking - and not a happy read through them. It's always difficult to tackle emotional topics like these, but Kusano does so with tremendous grace and care, so the narrative never strays into feeling like the torment is there only for enjoyment. Every decision feels like it serves the story precisely, and is presented from that intimate, internal perspective in a way that never feels voyeuristic. We are simply observing what it would be like to be with her, as she experiences all this. That restraint makes it all the more impactful and human. Rei feels, more than anything throughout the story, intensely tired, and so unable to truly process the magnitude of the wrongs done to her, and what reaction is more human than that?

If there's any flaw to the story, it is simply that you must be willing to just... be along for the ride of "what's happening with Rei". Which isn't to say that there's nothing else of value here - that's entirely untrue, and the light touch world-building of this near future full of biotech is well done - but it all loops back so closely to focus on Rei and her emotions, that you cannot escape that aspect of it. If you want pacey plot or deep world-building exploration, or even on-page character conflict and dynamics, this isn't the story for you. But if you are willing to roll with what it's giving you, to inhabit that character and watch as her life changes, and she changes with it? It is so absolutely worth the experience.

Personally, I'd be thrilled if we had more stories like this one, with such a care and interest in people and their being... people... while still responding to more SFF-flavoured worlds and experiences. Until then, I'll just savour this one all the more. 

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful character study, interesting light touch worldbuilding, hopefulness 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Iori Kusano, Hybrid Heart, [Neon Hemlock, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Review: Poor Man's Sky by Wil McCarthy

Murder, Monks, and the Moon! What's not to like?

There’s something about the great black void above us that attracts a wide variety of peculiar people. In our world, we have the likes of Elon Musk (who promises settlements on Mars when not driving Twitter to implosion) and other billionaires with god complexes and more money than sense. This is a theme that runs through Poor Man’s Sky Wil McCarthy’s most recent novel, a sequel to 2021’s Rich Man’s Sky.

Rich Man’s Sky was something of a near-future spy novel set on a space station run by a megalomaniacal billionaire with plans under suspicion of Earth governments. Poor Man’s Sky is a sequel, but not one particularly tied to the original; you’ll recognize some character names and the political situation, as well as the significant fleshing-out of a setting that appeared in bits in pieces in the first book, a setting that complicates the first book’s conflict of government versus business. I would, however, recommend that you read the first book anyway, partially because it is very good and partially because I sense that McCarthy is planning great things here.

Much of the book has a particularly intriguing setting: a Catholic monastery on the Moon. Earth’s nearest natural satellite is a perfect place for a monastery, and McCarthy exploits this congruence. Outer space is a place where the work is monotonous and exacting, far from other people - and so is a monastery! There’s a certain claustrophobia here that creates a very particular sense of mystery here. It’s also quite historically apt, as the Catholic Church has on several occasions adapted to modernity in surprising ways.

If Rich Man’s Sky is a spy novel in space, Poor Man’s Sky is a detective story in space. This leads to some mildly convoluted exposition, especially regarding the main character, who is a police detective in Colorado Springs. In many ways, he is a clear homage to detective fiction of yore, but McCarthy has imbued him with great dialogue and much pathos. He is a man of the world in an environment - the monastery - where being ‘worldly’ is a sin, and the culture clash, on both ends, is some of the best parts of the book (I liked the bit about whether monks can drink a certain beverage).

The plot is complicated, but never becomes convoluted. The inciting incident is a very peculiar coincidence regarding a landing and a death under suspicious circumstances. Through all this, what strikes me so much is how well McCarthy uses isolation. The Moon is a harsh mistress in McCarthy’s universe, and there is a claustrophobia that pervades much of the narrative, on the Moon and in other settings, that forces a certain focus and a certain edge. In investigating a death, the characters are courting death, and it makes for compelling reading.

What surprises me is that, despite McCarthy being a libertarian, is how blistering a critique of the corporatization of space this series is. One subsidiary setting in the novel is a space station run by a Russian oligarch in the throes of an outright worker revolt, and the workers are portrayed quite sympathetically. Here, the isolation is even starker as the trip back to Earth is one more thing the bosses can deny their employees. As elsewhere, the isolation focuses the plot sharply. The menace of the bosses is colder than it would be on Earth, to great effect.

Rich Man’s Sky was a confident first step. Here, McCarthy’s series hits its stride, combining a number of seemingly disparate elements to form a biting critique of current trends in the development of human activity in outer space. Read the first book first, of course, but hasten to read this one. It’s worth it.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient 8/10

• Great use of isolation
• workers uprisings in space
• great narration

Reference: McCarthy, Wil, Poor Man's Sky, [Baen Books 2023]

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

Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

An extended philosophical dialogue against human supremacy

Ray Nayler's debut novel The Mountain in the Sea employs the techniques and tropes of multiple genres to explore one overarching question. It has corporate espionage, but it's not a spy novel; it has drone warfare, but it's not a military novel; it has killer AIs, but it's not an AI novel. The unifying theme is instead the need to identify the logical flaws in anthropocentrism and in the notion of individual responsibility. What the main characters achieve, more than an immediate victory, is a realization on two levels: a human being is not an island, disconnected from the web of shared responsibilities that make up a community, nor is the human species an island apart from the rest of nature. Fittingly, Nayler's choice of setting for this argument is a literal island, ultimately shown to be indissolubly linked to the events occurring everywhere else. In the world Nayler proposes, not even an island is truly an island.

The plot of the novel concerns the discovery, near the Vietnamese coast, of a species of octopus that has developed symbolic language, a material culture, toolmaking methods, a storytelling tradition, and a complex worldview with rituals and sacred spaces. By every anthropological criterion, this species has formed a society. However, anthropology proves to be of little help when faced with a society that grounds its conceptual repertoire on an environment, an embodied perception and a neural architecture that are fundamentally alien to the human experience. Here the novel reveals its core: although it has a team of experts attempting to crack the code of interspecies communication, most of the page count is dialogue about the moral implications of the research. This is not so much a "solve the puzzle" plot as a "moral illustration" one. Without ever getting didactic or preachy, The Mountain in the Sea addresses thorny questions about greed, negligence, hubris, exploitation, duty, and self-delusion.

Moreover, in keeping with the novel's anti-individualistic stance, the moral failures that set the plot in motion are never ascribed to one character or one faction. Sealife depletion is not caused by this one company's greed; it's humankind's greed. Rights violations are not allowed by this one government's negligence; it's humankind's negligence. Securing a future for all lifeforms is not this one hero's duty; it's humankind's duty. And yet, the individual characters we follow through the story aren't diluted in an all-blurring mass movement. They remain conscious of their uniqueness, but also of their connection to the whole. The novel's message is not one of annulling the individual, just one of expanding the scope of moral analysis.

To bolster this point, Nayler deploys a reoccurring motif, simultaneously a hard fact and a metaphor: the nervous system of an octopus, a distributed network with semiautonomous parts and minimal top-down control. The novel applies this same model to describe the power structure of a multinational corporation, an artificial mind, and the entire biosphere. The human neural structure, with a centralized point of command that all the limbs obey (plus all the political ramifications that result from replicating that model in a society), is the anomalous exception rather than the norm. To solve the enmity between humans and nature, the novel argues, we must shed the top-down way of thinking. We don't rule over nature, and we never did. Of course, this moral position goes directly against the traditional Western Christian anthropology that positions humankind as the pinnacle of creation. In reality, there's no such hierarchy. Whereas Christian anthropology insists that we are in this world, but not of this world, Nayler replies that that's an impossibility. You can't be in this world without instantly becoming of it. You can't form a complete concept of yourself without acknowledging your ties to everything around you.

The structure of the plot mirrors this view of interconnectedness. Three separate threads build the story while barely intersecting, three full protagonists who never meet but end up collaborating toward the goal of preventing the human depredation of the newfound octopus society. Most notably, each of these protagonists becomes a hero when they independently reason that their place as a part in a whole doesn't diminish them, but actually opens an opportunity for them to influence the course of events. You can't save the world if you're not part of it.

This underlying assumption, that a change in conduct requires first a change in perspective, is reinforced by the inclusion of a Buddhist monastery in the Vietnamese island where the researchers live. Not only does Buddhism teach that all sentient beings are equally worthy of dignity; it's a basic Buddhist doctrine that the path to liberation begins with adopting the right view about reality, and the right view according to Buddha is that the endless pursuit of satisfaction only leads to pain. In the novel, this occurs in the form of overfishing, exploitation of workers, and individual ambition. To separate oneself from the world results in a loss of empathy. You don't need to care for ocean life if you see it as just a thing for you to use. When you adopt the right view that you're just another lifeform in a web of relations, the rest of the world ceases to be just a thing.

In the moral landscape of The Mountain in the Sea, the real enemy to defeat is indifference. The biggest cause of pain, the cruelest weapon, the most destructive flaw in the human spirit is the failure to care. Once this problem is identified, the true nature of individualism is exposed: it gives us an excuse to indulge in indifference. This failure mode doesn't even need to be motivated by malice: if you see yourself as too small, too powerless, or too unimportant to change anything, indeed you won't. The type of caring that has a real effect in the world is one where you also care enough about yourself to notice all the threads of relations you can pull. That's how multiple parts acting semiautonomously can move the whole.

More than a science fiction yarn about first contact with another intelligence, The Mountain in the Sea reads like a philosophical dialogue. Characters reflect and contrast their opinions far more than they do things, and somehow, marvelously, that doesn't hurt the pacing. The novel has several moments of exciting action, and yet this is not an action thriller. This is a thought experiment where the essence of humanity is put on trial and the sentence is probation. We still haven't demonstrated that we're capable of behaving responsibly in this world, and we're running out of chances. The novel ends with things pointing toward a happy ending, but happy endings need persistent effort to be maintained. Although this story has elements of a moral fable, it doesn't offer a definitive conclusion to its argument. Protecting a still-incipient octopus society would require a constant series of responsible decisions. To put it in science fiction parlance, the world is never finally saved. And that's OK; just as there isn't a hard boundary between humans and reality, there isn't one between the dark past and the shiny future. Pretending that there's an end date to the task of caring is another form of indifference. That's why The Mountain in the Sea isn't content with finishing its argument and leaving the reader alone. This is the kind of philosophical dialogue that hopes the reader will say something in reply. It is a call to action. It is a proclamation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the hard rigor applied to the biology and linguistics of the octopus society, +1 for the skillful integration of the separate plots.

Penalties: −1 because many sentences in the dialogues could use a bit of trimming.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022].

Maybe there's a parallel timeline where 'The Peripheral' hit the mark

It's a shame that a series with so many interesting ideas didn't try to go farther with them

Amazon Studios TV series The Peripheral, an adaptation of William Gibson's 2014 novel, has come up with an original angle on the overstretched "metaphor for class inequality" trope. In this story, scientists from the late 22nd century create alternate possible pasts where they can run unsanctioned experiments on live humans with cosmic impunity. Those other timelines are not seen as having real moral value, but in one of them lives our protagonist, Flynne, an experienced gamer who stumbles upon these secrets after beta-testing a new VR headset, and who is determined to defend her and her world's inherent right to exist.

This is an amplified echo of the cry of protest you can hear from exoticized peoples: Your Vacation Is My Home. Or, in The Peripheral, something more like Your Disposable Petri Dish Is My Spacetime Continuum. Such a concept sounds like it could spark lengthy discussions about the colonial practices still embedded in scientific research, the ethical loopholes of the gig economy, the rights of counterfactual agents, the mutual responsibilities between generations, and the still unsolved safety issues with brain-computer interfaces.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't meet the high expectations set by its premise. A research institute officially known as The Research Institute and a cleptocracy of mafia bosses collectively known as the Klept are the first signs that The Peripheral devoted only the barest of efforts to worldbuilding. Our near future, as shown in a small town in the southern US, looks almost like the present, with the changes established mostly in dialogue: stratospheric medicine prices, a vaguely mentioned Texan war, ubiquitous 3D printing, far superior video game graphics. With the supporting characters, the show follows the opposite approach: they are established implicitly, with minimal exposition, and the viewer doesn't connect who works for whom and who is whose childhood friend until well into the season. The mental bandwidth expended in keeping track of the scant clues about these characters detracts from the viewer's ability to follow the plot.

In the scenes set in the 22nd century, these deficiencies are multiplied: three separate factions are described but not properly introduced until the halfway point, and Flynne, who should serve as our eyes into that society, is persistently kept in the dark about how it works.

Worse problems afflict the visual style of the 22nd century. We only get to see future London as a vague skyline that blends impossibly cyclopean statues with incompletely rendered ruins, or as deliberately secluded side streets that look like the production team only had access to a small number of set designs. It's true that this society is recovering from multiple catastrophes that killed a huge portion of the world's population, but it's inevitable to get a sense of artifice from the continued recourse to the same few sets and the same few immensely powerful characters without ever learning how ordinary life proceeds for the average human.

The conflict between the near future and the not so near future is hindered by unnecessary mystery. Flynne only discovers what the villain wants from her in the last episode, and then almost by chance. Until then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of her fight, because the show insists on delaying as much as possible the moment of letting the viewer know what every faction wants. The lead characters of this future act as if they were facing an imminent crisis of utmost urgency, but then they spend interminable scenes sitting for tea to exchange barbs about their respective leverage and strategic weak points, and it's no longer believable that there's anything actually being fought over.

The Peripheral suffers gravely from this intentional slowness. Each episode spends too much time in revealing too little at a time, and the way the final two episodes resolve all the plotlines may as well have occurred just after the pilot, if only these characters stopped walking around, looking menacing and launching indirect taunts. This ungenerous pacing, combined with the barely-there London of the future, deals a near-fatal blow to the viewer's suspension of disbelief. It's no wonder that the villains managed to convince Flynne that she was playing a video game instead of visiting a physical place, because this supposedly broken and polluted London looks too small and too fake to take seriously.

There's no word yet on whether Amazon will produce a second season of The Peripheral, but if it comes to pass, the producers should ask for a higher VFX budget or larger outdoor sets, and stop being smugly mysterious just for the sake of being smugly mysterious. The viewer is supposed to be given a reason to care, and this first season relied too much on hidden agendas kept hidden too long for the resolution to have the impact it should.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for showing a realistic brother/sister relationship rich in complexity and disparate perspectives, +3 for T'Nia Miller's wonderful acting.

Penalties: −1 for the criminal underutilization of Alexandra Billings, −1 for having a tad too many extraneous subplots, −3 for the whiplash of following too slow a beginning and middle with too rushed an ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Nanoreviews: Goliath, All the Horses of Iceland, The Ones We're Meant to Find

Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi [Tordotcom Publishing, 2022]

Let's not mess around here: Goliath is one of the most impressive works of science fiction I've ever read. Tochi Onyebuchi's novel bills itself as "a primal biblical epic flung into the future", and it certainly delivers on that sense of both scale and mythology: a mosaic novel set in New Haven, Connecticut, centred on the lives of those left on a radioactive, oxygen deprived Earth by a space colonisation movement that was only ever accessible to the elite, the shifting dynamics as some of the spacefarers begin to return, and the damage that this gentrification causes to communities who have only ever tried to build a safe, comfortable life for themselves. Within that broad framework, Onyebuchi populates his narrative with a range of perspectives and characters, taking us through a meticulous, non-linear journey through their lives and concerns. At the heart of it are two groups, given equally sympathetic portrayals despite their very different positions. There's the young gay couple, Jonathan and David, who are returning from space and whose perspectives are portrayed as sympathetically as any others, albeit with an eye to showing how much their perspectives differ from those already living in the neighbourhood that they consider a blank slate opportunity (in the opening paragraph, Jonathan talks about the warnings he receives about "gangs" who populate Earth, before dismissing them in favour of his enthusiasm for the "shadow country" that is his vision of the planet). And then there's Linc, Bishop and their crew of demolitionists, whose job is to tear down houses (using a very cool bit of futuristic technology with potential for grim malfunctions that are quickly demonstrated) and then stack the bricks left behind so that they can be transported to the colonies. It's through the eyes of Linc and his buddies that we really come to grips with the extent to which the world has been broken, and the inescapably racist dynamics of who suffers from it. The group's banter swings from wild second-hand stories about former house parties to furious deconstructions of their political reality, and it's their reactions which sets the tone for the rest of the novel's politics.

There's no grand showdown or dramatic set pieces in Goliath: Jonathan and David's lives briefly intersect with Bishop, but not in any way that changes the course of the future history we are watching. Instead, Goliath just concerns itself with setting out that history: built, as the acknowledgements demonstrate, from a deep understanding of the dynamics of our recent past and extrapolating them into an era of space travel. The result is a very particular kind of novel: one which demands a lot of attention while reading and isn't in the business of giving instant narrative gratification, but which takes a sledgehammer to a lot of genre assumptions about near future science fiction, including how the sexy, exciting bits of those future get distributed and whose stories we consider worth telling because of that. I expect I'll be evaluating every book set in this narrative space against Goliath for the rest of my days, and I can't think of any better sign of quality than that.

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie [Tordotcom Publishing, 2022]

From a speculative future history to a speculative history-history, Sarah Tolmie's new Tor dot com novella tells the story of Eyvind of Eyri, an 8th century Icelandic trader who travels through central Asia and into Mongolia to bring a herd of horses back to his homeland, including a mare whose supernatural origins have a far-ranging impact on the future of Icelandic horse genes. Except, the story isn't really about Icelandic horse breeding, so let's set all of that aside until it gets explained in the epilogue. It's Eyvind's story, and there is also a really cool horse. Right. 

Immediate bonus points must be awarded for the fact that I'm in a real mood for travelogue stories at the moment, and Tolmie's is a great example of the form, with Eyvind chronicling the adventure with his fellow travellers - most of whom are from the historic trading empire of Khazaria, through which Eyvind travels on his way to Mongolia - and the customs and concerns of the places he passes through, especially during his time in Mongolia where he successfully barters for his herd of horses and takes on responsibility for a white mare who everyone else claims not to see. Tolmie has a fantastic literary style, switching between language that reflects the myth being created here and the supernatural origins of Eyvind's mare, and more down-to-earth descriptions of the journey itself. 

Because it's a travelogue, the challenges along the way end up being very episodic - and, in fact, there's not much in the way of external challenge here at all, beyond a sequence towards the end (where, it turns out, having a supernatural mare comes in very handy). Instead, the tension is built up through watching a man travelling far beyond the boundaries of his own world to do something new, and the way the novella's mythmaking turns that novelty into something of foundational importance for his people. This is a short and delightful read, and well worth a look.

The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He [Roaring Brook Press, 2021]

It feels a bit unfair covering another near future climate change-y book in the same review set as Goliath - and it definitely felt a bit unfair to read this after having my expectations affected by Goliath -  but Joan He's young adult science fiction sets out to do quite different things with its story, and it very solidly achieves those aims. The Ones We're Meant to Find tells two intertwining stories about sisters who are heavily implied (but not outright stated) to be looking for each other: there's Cee, who has been trapped alone on a desert island for three years, with amnesia clouding everything about her former life except the fact that she needs to escape and find her sister Kay; and then there's Kasey Mizuhara, who lives in a carefully designed eco-city designed to protect humanity from natural disasters while minimising their carbon output to the smallest possible amount, and is searching for her sister Celia who went missing at sea three months ago. 

As Cee struggles with survival, Kasey pushes against her own limitations and restrictions to retrace her sister's steps and understand why she chose to leave on a journey that everyone else assumes would have killed her. Along the way, resonances start to appear between the two stories: names turn up in Kasey's city which Cee independently uses to name things on her island, even as the circumstances that each is living under seem to get further and further apart. Frankly, for a long time I was ready to give up on Kasey and Cee's worlds ever colliding, and things with Cee get particularly slow and annoying at points (although she does get to meet a nice boy, who also has amnesia, and this is not baffling at all). But it does come together, and it's a reveal that's worth waiting for: one which contextualises and builds off both characters' struggles and personalities, and it leaves us with a powerful dilemma to work through at its closure. While it has its ups and downs, The Ones We're Meant to Find was ultimately a story I'm glad I spent time on.

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

Review: We Are Satellites

This amazing near-future novel weaves a delicate thread through the messy places where our personal, professional and political lives meet

Sometimes, current events seem to give us an ominous glimpse of the direction we're headed. I remember having that feeling in 2011, after Apple released an ad campaign with the disgustingly condescending slogan, “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone.” The implied message was that possession of this particular product gave you an advantage that you were hurting yourself by choosing to skip. That attitude was taken too literally by Chinese teen Wang Shangkun, who became famous in the same year by selling one of his kidneys to buy an iPhone 4, and now lives permanently bedridden and dependent on a dialysis machine.

The fetishization of high-end gadgets as social status markers is the topic of Sarah Pinsker's new novel We Are Satellites. In a world uncomfortably too like ours, pharmaceutical company BNL (not related to Wall-E's Buy'N Large, though it may as well be) has launched a brain implant that promises to improve attention and productivity by helping the human mind approximate real multitasking.

Through aggressive marketing, the implant ends up subsidized by the government and de facto required for job applicants. Sooner than society can adapt to the shift, schools become segregated between those who do not want or cannot use the implant and those who have it and function so efficiently that they leave their classmates far behind. In a bone-chilling segment, the novel explains, "There wasn't even a rich-poor divide since the company covered them for kids unable to afford the procedure; the divide was between approved brains and unapproved brains and degrees of acceptable neurodiversity." Because the operation to install the implant leaves a pretty blue LED on one side of the head, wearing that dot of light becomes the focus of a dangerous status game that implicates school authorities, army recruiters, ad strategists, grassroot activists, drug dealers, illegal surgeons, corporate spies, and unsuspecting children.

We follow the story through the lives of Val and Julie, a married couple of career women who are raising their kids David and Sophie with the best intentions. When David convinces his mothers to get him a brain implant so he can perform better at school, the societal tensions defined by this very visible mark of privilege start seeping into their family dynamics.

It turns out his sister, Sophie, cannot get the implant because she has epilepsy and the manufacturer would rather not mess with her brain. One of the mothers objects to the implant on principle, but her wife gets the operation shortly after David because she wants to stay competitive in her field. After David's implant is revealed to have sensory processing issues, we are carried through a deeply detailed plot of corporate irresponsibility, medical neglect, political opportunism, workplace discrimination, sibling envy, systemic ableism, and the many ways the external world can invade our private choices.

All four family members get first-person chapters, but David's are the most engaging. The long train of sentences does a great job of conveying his mind's permanent state of panicked hyperawareness. For example, "He could describe the location of every fly on every wall in a room full of flies but he didn't notice his body's reactions until he counterreacted to them." If the delight of science fiction is making unreal worlds feel close to us, this novel does one better: it makes us live a mental state that has never existed.

Sophie's chapters are also enjoyable. Her lifelong determination to gain the respect of the adults in her life takes her on an unexpected road to maturity. The inner voices of the mothers are harder to tell apart, but the author manages to communicate with heartfelt sincerity the stress of raising children in a world of cutthroat overachievement. As the narration helpfully describes, these characters are trapped in "a system in dire need of change, but the wrong change had arrived. The wrong changes were everywhere."

I still feel bedazzled by the skill with which a book that could have been a standard techno-thriller became also an intimate meditation on family, identity, self-discovery, trust, anxiety, and a love that stays alive and defiant against the pull of impersonal competition. Toward the end, the author employs an interesting metaphor about the uninformed use of medical devices: one character watches, without paying much attention, "a home improvement show where people got absurdly excited about other people removing all the personality from their homes." The BNL implant expects its users to submit their individual thought patterns to a standardized information model, and what the novel expects from us is to treat such a proposal with all the skepticism it ought to deserve. We Are Satellites is definitely one of the highlights of this year, and will surely spark fertile discussions between academics, healthcare professionals, and tech enthusiasts.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for nailing the tone of David's inner monologues, +1 for a masterful handling of the emotional storm brewing within a family that comes close to breaking apart but rises again stronger.

Penalties: −1 for too short chapters. The various POVs are not a problem in themselves, but the chapters are composed mostly of a single scene that ends too soon before we jump into another character's head. Halfway through the book, one has developed a sense for when a chapter is just about to end, and the effect is an abrupt start/stop/start/stop sequence that hurts the narrative pacing.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Pinsker, Sarah. We Are Satellites [Berkley, 2021].