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.

Review: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

 Ctrl C, Ctrl V: The novella

And Side by Side They Wander is a novella absolutely brimming with interesting ideas delivered in accomplished prose, but one of the most interesting things about it is that as a single coherent work it just doesn’t quite, well, work.

The premise for this slim book is that aliens called the Celerians arrive on Earth a few years from now and promise to give us the technology to solve all our problems—social, economic, environmental—with their advanced technology. All we would have to give them in return is all our most important art, but don’t worry: they’ll give us perfect, indistinguishable replicas in return. The art is taken to a perfect, safe, secure museum on the Celerian homeworld, and they promise to give it back when the Earth solves all those problems and the art is no longer at risk of destruction. 300 years later, problems solved, Earth something of a paradise thanks to the (bio)technology given by the Celerians, and it turns out they aren’t so keen to give it back. Enter our narrator and her companions, about to start an interstellar heist to steal the art back.

If this sounds very much like the situation the Greek government has been in at the very least since the completion of the Acropolis Museum in 2009 in relation to the Elgin Marbles still firmly, smugly ensconced at the British Museum, Tanzer’s author’s note makes it clear the reference is deliberate. And so you would expect the novella to be a sort of reverse reclamation heist (à la Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon), and that plot is absolutely there—we get its key details, slightly out of chronological order, from planning to execution—but that really isn’t what the book is about. Tanzer’s jumping off point for And Side by Side They Wander is in fact a proposed techbro “solution” to the Elgin Marbles problem: what if they did a high-res scan of the marbles, then laser-cut precise replicas out of virtually identical marble? Very obviously, this would satisfy neither Greek nor British government, but Tanzer is interested in the why of this: what is it about a copy that makes us instinctively think it is inferior to the original?

So the book is absolutely fixated on the nature and effect of copying, not just art but people. An Elon Musk-esque billionaire ascendant just before the Celerians arrived preserved his legacy by creating a series of clones and androids who looked like him. He was also involved in the development of a fungal nuclear cleanup device, which was released after insufficient testing, and turns out when it ate a bit too much radiation, it became sentient and started producing fungal simulacra of animals, plants, landscapes… and people. These elements are all used to ask questions about what it means to make or to be a copy. These are very interesting ideas to explore from these different angles, and by and large Tanzer does so with real insight and in a lovely written voice. Throw another alien race which has a very different understanding of “self” and “other” into the mix, and these concerns about similarity, difference, self and authenticity become all-consuming.

But this does mean that ultimately the heist plot, too, is largely consumed. It isn’t even really the primary vehicle for all that exploration of copying; that comes in the backstory, explaining how our narrator, Fennel Tycho, ended up part of the gang. Starting with her grief at the death of her brother, and her hiring by Earth’s lone megacorp (run by the descendants and clones of this dead billionaire), this runs through her time as a minder of sorts to one of the billionaire copy androids, Jack Kirby (the androids were all named after artists). That professional relationship evolved into a romantic one—at least on Fennel’s side; we’re never given access to Jack’s feelings on the matter, and are again invited to think about the extent to which a copy of a human has access to the emotions and motivations of the original.

This time spent with them means that the dynamic between Fennel and Jack is nicely done, effectively if briefly sketched. But the rest of the cast and much of the plot is shaded in perhaps too lightly. The sheer overstuffed quantity of ideas and plot points simply do not fit easily into the page count. And there are darlings that really should have been killed in editing. Walter Benjamin is clearly influential; he is discussed reasonably extensively in the author’s note. But that doesn’t mean it entirely works to have Jack quote him verbatim in-story: like the Elgin Marbles nod, it is perhaps just a little too on the nose. The insertion of a twist and brief action plot that begins and ends in under 5 pages at the end is also very odd. Grief, love, copying, heists, colonialism, sentient fungus, clones, androids, interstellar war, a nominal core cast of five needing attention: it’s a lot to cover in a double-digit page count (front and back matter take the printed page count above 100, but the substantive story is less).

This all leads me to the conclusion that a novella just isn’t quite the right venue for the stories Tanzer wants to tell here. The firehose of ideas and multiple, slightly attenuated storylines are asking for either the space of a novel or the discipline of being split into a series of short stories in conversation with each other. Either would work well, and I think could have been a genuine triumph. As it is, the book feels somehow both overstuffed and underdone. It feels an odd conclusion to come to when I like so much of what Tanzer put in here, but this is an occasion where the whole doesn’t quite measure up to the sum of its parts. Others may have a different impression—I can imagine being sufficiently charmed by the ideas and aesthetic exploration such that the tangled wisps of plot and character don’t matter to you—but for me, the fine work Tanzer has done here is undercut by a story fighting against its form.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Overstuffed with great ideas.
• Exquisitely crafted prose.
• It really is overstuffed, though.

Reference:  Tanzer, Molly. And Side by Side They Wander [tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social

Book Review: A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo

 Food and stories open up deeper stories about people and their culture

Nghi Vo writes wonderfully about food; I said as much when I reviewed the previous volume of the Singing Hills cycle, A Mouthful of Dust. There, food was held in contrast with famine, in a book about lack and loss, haunted by memories of absence and hunger. The vivid descriptions of dishes and their effect on human senses, feelings and memories was critical to offer a contrast to their absence, to make clear what that ravaging hunger was taking away. Food is still critical in the next book, A Long and Speaking Silence, but in a very different way; here, it's a way into culture.

In contrast to the previous entries in the series, A Long and Speaking Silence is a prequel of sorts. Cleric Chih, of the Singing Hills Abbey, whose job it is to collect stories for the archive they preserve, is only newly minted in their role. They have been sent out with a specific duty, to collect information from the harbormaster at Luntien, but have been thrown off their task by the theft of their coin purse. As they wait for their stipend to be sent from the abbey, they have found work waiting tables in a local restaurant during the festival rush. Around this necessary work, they still try to practice their trade, asking questions to collect the stories of those around them. But they struggle: they have yet to develop the people skills needed to ask the right questions, to understand when to push and when to fall silent, and so are suffering something of a crisis of confidence as they make mistakes, bolstered by the self-assuredness and competence of their neixin companion Almost Brilliant. As they work to collect the stories of Luntien, they find themself embroiled in tensions between the townsfolk and the newly arrived refugees, fleeing disaster in their native islands and reflecting on the forced movement of people, both in their own history and in the history of their abbey.

Because of this focus on displacement, on people uprooted from their homes unwilling and without time to prepare, it makes sense that the story keeps circling around the parts of culture we keep, and the parts we lose or change as time marches on. Food, this thing Vo has consistently written so well, is the perfect window into this fraught set of musings. The world she has created in which Chih lives is a complex one, full of different peoples, culture that is grounded in its specific place, and this can be reflected, using the established foundations of the series and her deft hand at dialogue, in cooking and eating practices. There is a particularly lovely scene in which a cook gives Chih a dumpling and asks them to identify what's in it. As they work through ingredients, they linger on what's missing ("it's not supposed to be crayfish. It's supposed to be this kind of bony fish that we don't have here") and what's there ("we're the only ones who use the wood ear mushrooms around here"). This gets you regional specificity, what grows where, and imports, and bans and trades and relationships. It gets you family memories too, the recipe handed down from the mother who fled the other region where the mushrooms grow. It gets you what some groups eat and others don't, cooking styles and preferences ("they were still trying to get used to the sharp flavours - the kingdom of Feiyu used some kind of spice that opened their sinuses up and made their nose sting"). It gets you so much of just people.

And it sits perfectly alongside the core of the whole series, the telling of stories. Both a ways to craft cultural differences, and to show how people are the same as much as they aren't, and both are things transmitted generation to generation, even after displacement and strife. They are core parts of human experience. Chih's time in Luntien has them seesawing between the two, bouncing the resonances of the one off the other to put the pieces together of a puzzle they didn't even know was there to solve.

They can also help with wider worldbuilding, the landscape and the culture working together to reinforce a sense of place. Vo often casually imbues her geographical features with personhood - the rivers and the mountains have their names and behaviours dropped in dialogue - and even alone, that does a lot of work for implying depth of culture. If the river has a personality, if it has stories, it shows that there were people to tell them, after all. But then, sometimes, the stories are represented whole within the novella, and in their telling show the culture of the teller, and give a sense of location too, like the tale given to Cleric Chih in this volume of the formation of the island from which one of the refugees has come. Up until that point, there was no clear sense of where the island was, in relation to this place. By having the girl tell that story, Vo says "this is who these people think themselves to be" and "this is where they come from" all at once.

A Long and Speaking Silence also showcases some of the other things Vo has done so brilliantly throughout the series, many of which likewise bend towards the crafting of cultures that feel real without the need to overexplain. There are many moments - throughout the series, but I noticed them particularly here - in which a conversation or a misplaced word allows someone in dialogue (or Chih in their own thoughts) to make clear what the social norms are (and how they differ from place to place). There's nothing more immediately vivid as a piece of cultural worldbuilding than suddenly realising that x is impolite here, or that y is the norm. They're the foundational building blocks of communities, these shared norms, and it is rare to find them so well displayed as Vo does here. It's never heavily marked, never part of a long exposition, they're just flashes that pass by as conversation flows naturally, but the give shape to parts of the world, and imply the sort of depth that makes something feel truly lived in.

Which is particularly critical in writing, as she does here, about displaced people. Vo is obviously interested in their culture, in the trailing tendrils of it that make their way down to the next generations, but she is not blind to the dangers of it in the moment either. Luntien's people, right from the start of the story, are hostile to those who have come to their shores looking for shelter. "Too many" and "we're full" are frequent refrains, alongside assumptions of thievery and moral laxity in the newcomers. Over the course of the story, those tensions escalate, resulting in clashes in the street and physical violence, in which Chih finds themself overwhelmed but incensed on behalf of those who have come with so little, asking only for help. Its message is clearly tied to the world as it is now, but Vo also manages to loop it beautifully into more of the overarching thoughts of the series as a whole, and to Chih themself. 

Which is nice, in this step into prequeldom, and into a story that definitely lingers on the lore of the abbey itself. It's not something that has been a key focus in most of the books so far - Chih is, after all, usually wandering on their duties - but by the point of the seventh book in a series, it is probably safe to assume the readers are invested enough to want a bit of backstory if it might be forthcoming (it's me, I'm the readers). This felt like the right time to deploy it. It didn't overshadow the contemporary plot, and indeed Vo did a great job in integrating what could have been quite disparate pieces into a seamless whole, the different parts resonating off each other and making something that feels significant between them.

I do, a little, miss the excitement of the earlier volumes, where each new one provided a new structural conceit to discover as you were reading. It made them unusual and special, especially if you are (as I am) the sort of reader who thrives on structural nonsense. But Vo has continued to build a world that I want to spend time reading, with a main character whose foibles and flaws make them compelling, sympathetic and intensely relatable, even as their job feels entirely fantastical. Even without the structural flair, these continue to be novellas that each feel like they have their own story to tell, and which use the world slowly being built to explore big themes in a relatively small space, with a deftness of touch that often eludes longer works.

In this case, it's displacement and loss, and home. Who knows what it will be next time. Vo crafts all of this through the tangible, bedding down broader, bigger themes into the mundane and the quotidian, and making it all feel incredibly real. That angle, that constant touchstone of the small as a way into the big, is what truly brings me back every time, and based on this entry, will absolutely keep on doing so going forward.

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The Math

Highlights: food that makes you want to explore the world, a deft hand on complex politics, a dumpling so good someone wants to marry it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence, [Tordotcom, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang

Linguistics science fiction that isn't just the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis redux? And that will emotionally devastate you? Hook it to my veins.

The first thing you need to know about The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang is that none of the characters in it are human, and that's great. 

It's not at all surprising that space-faring science fiction tends to focus on situations that at least contain some humans, even when they're a mixed species galaxy. Writing the alien is, I imagine, pretty hard, because aliens that feel properly alien but are still written to be accessible to a reader's emotions surely take some work to get right. It's a tight balance. I don't blame people for not doing it. But when someone does... it's always a little bit exciting. If I'm going to imagine a galaxy that contains a wide array of sentient life, it's nice to get a chance to revel in the unfamiliarity of it, to truly explore what that imagined spectrum of life looks like.

Huang predominantly explores that unfamiliarity via the medium of language, unsurprisingly given the novella's title. The main character, Ro, is a linguist, who has trained hard to become fluent in one specific language but with a lot of facility in a wide array of others. Moreover, Huang has written him as someone gregarious and chatty, whose internal monologue (and external dialogue, sometimes) is peppered with little factoids about this or that language and how it relates to culture and physiology of this or that species.

But Huang also takes care to embed Ro's narrative in his own body, as well as his thoughts about those of other species. While they never provide a full, clear description - the typical look in the mirror scene of the start of many novels - Ro experiences the world in terms of his physiology, and that is deftly conveyed in his internal monologue. We know he is furred, that he has two hearts, we know about his empathic capabilities, the shape of the world he lives in and how that reflects the shape of his own body. It's very well done, and very necessary. If a story is going to explore a perspective outside of the humanoid this way, downplaying it takes away half of the fun. 

Ro is, in mind and body, the perfect balance of strange and accessible, not least because of his own alienation within his society. He feels like an outsider, someone whose behaviour doesn't quite meet the demands of his elders, and in that difference he gives us a window into what that normal looks like, and what the deviation from it feels like for Ro. He is the ideal window into a story that goes on to focus on these kinds of alienations and disconnections.

The second thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that it spans a whole universe of worlds, and their interlocking needs and differences. In brief, deft strokes, Huang manages to create the sense of a vast, complex and interlocking, galaxy spanning set of polities, not just through Ro's understanding of language, but in a wider, political sense. This is a universe whose function demands the constant mining and utilisation of a specific resource - meridian - to bridge the gaps between worlds. Many of those worlds, including Ro's own, would cease to function without it and lack the means to produce their own basic needs, right down to oxygen. While the story focuses in on Orro - Ro's world - there are constant nods and gestures to the other places within it, their needs, their respective status compared to Orro, their political inclinations and oppositions. Huang has the knack of explaining little but giving just a big enough suggestion of it to let me nod and carry on. Everything has enough sense to fit with intuition, to imply the necessary complexity, without having to get into the weeds of intergalactic trade routes. For which I'm grateful, because that's not really what I'm here for reading (sorry economics nerds). But it's also very difficult to do well, and a skill I think is particularly critical for novella authors.

There's a narrowing of priorities necessary to make a good novella, to cutting all the things that need to be cut to make something substantial fit into the space of 155 pages as this book does. There are a lot of ways to achieve it, but Huang has cut themself off from a lot of them by going for this high stakes - because boy the stakes are indeed high - and wide space narrative. And so, if they can't focus in tight and small, they instead have to skim things, hint things, let the reader do some of the work of embedding this world into plausibility. Luckily, they have done so masterfully.

The third thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that even if you see the end coming, even if you know what the story is going to tell you about this world before you get there, the revelation is still going to hurt. Ask me how I know. I had an inkling early on that I might know where some of the clues were pointing, but it truly did not matter one bit. The discovery, the way Huang set up and deployed the information the book coalesces around, does not rely on surprise to deliver its value.

Such plot summary as I'm willing to give is this: Ro is a linguist studying to make what's called a "jump", that transports him into the body of an alien race called the Star Eaters. It's a rare talent for linguists on his world, but a necessary and highly honoured one, one that Ro is desperate to achieve as a way to prove his worth to the society he struggles to fit into (despite his great talent for languages). And, despite and because of his doubts about himself, he succeeds. The Language of Liars is the story of what happens when he does so.

It's about language, about relationships between people, about exploitation and the weight of moral decisions, and who gets to make them. And it's about the big impacts of small decisions, not just the sweeping horrors of the universe but the tiny, individual atrocities that can be committed too. It handles all of those things incredibly well, bringing them together to deliver a gut punch at the end that gets into a lot of big ideas about how history and politics work, and what the right choice is in a hard place.

And a last, little, enormous thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is one you'll only learn properly if you read it yourself: that it is an incredibly bold book, because it leaves you in a state of unresolved emotion that is far more productive than any tidy conclusion would be. Huang has made such a good decision in how they close this story, and the sort of thoughts they leave the reader to experience in the aftermath.

That ending, that sucker punch and the refusal to give the reader an easy closure, is the capstone of a bold, interesting, deep book, and a very worthy end indeed to the complexity of the story they've given us up until that point. The Language of Liars is an exquisitely formed novella, a stunning example of what good writing, good ideas and a willingness to do something different can achieve, without the need for sprawl.

And it's a book of science fiction linguistics that isn't just a rehash of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That's a gold star right there.

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The Math

Highlights: a story situated well in alien mind and culture, deep and full use of language to great effect, big stakes tackled thoughtfully

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: S. L. Huang, The Language of Liars, [Tordotcom, 2026].

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

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

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

Book Review: Fate's Bane by C. L. Clark

 A forbidden romance and an exploration of the complexities of duty.

Specificity is not always a virtue. Fantasy readers often disdain the generic medieval fantasy setting - and with good reason, given how overdone it is - but that doesn't mean that sometimes, a light hand on the worldbuilding tiller can be just as effective, or even more, than one that digs into granular details. Fate's Bane, the new novella from C. L. Clark, is a great example of exactly that.

The story follows two young women, one, Agnir, a hostage taken to ensure her father's good behaviour (read: not making war on the hostage-taker) and the other, Hadhnri, the daughter of the clan she's been taken into. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love. But Agnir is never truly one of Clan Aradoc, and Hadhnri cannot seem to see that her father will never let them be, and that Agnir is never so sure and comfortable of her place among them as she is in Hadhnri's affections. Clan Aradoc, and particularly their leader, expect of her the duty and loyalty of one born to them, but don't afford her the trust that would naturally go alongside it, denying her the weapon she yearns for as she goes into adulthood.

But in that imperfect childhood, the two girls-then-women find a magic that allows them to create, to influence the world beyond the realms of the mundane, the use of which brings them as close as their burgeoning feelings, until Agnir shies away from the risks that Hadhnri wants to take.

And so in the early part of the story, this tension is built up - two parts of the relationship with very different positions in the world, and thus very different outlooks, and very different ways of measuring risk and cost/benefit. Sitting within Agnir's perspective, it is easy to see all the dangers and problems that afflict her life that Hadhnri misses, blithe in her own security. And so, when Agnir's own clan steals her back, the reader sees easily how conflicted she is. On the one hand, she has all of her childhood experiences, the affection of Hadhnri and her brother Gunni, the food and shelter and care given, but on the other, the knowledge of how that situation came to be, and the ties that predate it all, to Clan Fein, her blood siblings and her father. To them she owes the loyalty of family, even if, after years of being raised elsewhere, they are nearly strangers to her. Clark makes clear - without belabouring the point, but in showing us in little snippets of life in these two clans - how clearly those blood ties and their sense of honour and duty matter to those in this world, these Fens. Agnir's divided self is set up and grounded just enough for it to feel a part of this setting, so that the story can then shift on to studying the (necessary, tragic) outcomes of that division of loves.

And that light touch embedding of the sense of this world's mores truly is one of the virtues of the book. It's a novella, and so such setting and groundwork as it does needs to be conveyed quickly, so the fact that Clark more evokes than explains stands it in good stead. I infer from words like "fens" and "seax" where and when in the world this is meant to be implying. Reference to the baneswood, and its stories, make clear the pagan nature of this culture, and so when outside forces come in wearing robes of a certain shape and worshipping a different god, it's easy to nod along and think "ah yes, the coming of Christianity to the British isles" and know roughly when and whereabouts this draws its inspiration from. It doesn't need more than roughly, because it is also very clearly a fantasy world - there are little shifts in culture, along with the clear magic, that take us a step outside of the bounds of reality. What Clark gives us instead of specificity, though, is coherence. We may not get a thorough explanatory guide to this place, but every single little detail we do get - the love locks courting couples share, the training grounds, the material culture, the clans and their quarrels - feeds into that sense of time and place, and helps to make it feel whole. It's a delicate line to walk, but one I think Clark has done phenomenally, in this instance.

Some of that is, of course, that the slightly abstracted historical period being evoked isn't the traditional-unspecified-north-west-European medieval. It's not taverns and wenches and kings and castles, and so gets points for rarity. But the skill Clark uses in sketching a sense of place in these clean lines with little moments of clarity is critical too. They know exactly when to give the reader a touch of something real, to ground the more nebulous whole and give it the semblance of greater depth.

It helps too, that the shape of the story owes a little to older traditions of "romance" as well as to modern, and that genre-shape helps guide how the story is read and make it feel of a piece with its setting. There are echoes of modern tropes, don't get me wrong. I recognise these lesbians from plenty of fiction. But there's also plenty of moments that draw on older myths and stories too. Which is to say that... happily ever after may not be the thing to be seeking here.

And, having read The Unbroken, I am not exactly surprised. Thematically, they're treading very similar ground here again, exploring how a person can have their loyalties owed in different ways to very competing people and powers. Both books examine the way that the deeper tie of family can be suborned and complicated by other forces, and that a person can quite blamelessly find themselves torn in two by the loves and duties they owe to the two different parts of themself. It's a very compelling theme, and one I think bears up under this repeated scrutiny. Interestingly, the story I found myself most reaching to for comparison however was one of the other yellow lesbian books of the same cohort - She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. There's a lot of thematic overlap between the two, don't get me wrong, but the particular love between someone raised by an enemy, and the child of the enemy, echoes really well between the eunuch Ouyang and Fate's Bane's Agnir. Both feel compelled to act against their personal desires in service of a duty greater than themself, and are pulled into a vengeance that can do nothing but hurt them. And both are extremely compelling for it. Agnir gets much less page time to get to a place of complexity than Ouyang does, but Clark does an excellent job of skimming where skimming needs to happen and lingering over personal moments to give us the shape of her personal feelings and dilemmas.

Again overlapping with Ouyang's story, as well as The Unbroken, Clark is clearly interested in thinking about power and powerlessness, agency and how that can be suborned or denied. Agnir is a symbol more than a person for much of the book - a token of her father's good behaviour and then, later, a symbol of the crimes of Clan Aradoc to her own people and those whose support her father seeks. Even to her beloved, sometimes, she becomes as much a token of rebellion against her family and their expectations as a real person with loyalties of her own. As with Ouyang and Esen, Agnir cannot seem to quite make Hadhnri see that she has ties outside of the ones that bind her to Clan Aradoc, and that what they have done to her has plenty of marks in the "bad" side of the ledger to balance out such good as there may be.

Much of this tension is built early and clearly, leaving an amount of the story's direction quite obvious to the reader. This is not a criticism - rather than the twists of an adventure novel, this again invokes older-style doomed romances, with the car-crash experience of watching two people bound by circumstances walk into a doom they cannot escape. Of such things is the entire tragic genre built, and for good reason.

It is not, however, a perfect book. I have two points to highlight that don't quite fit the otherwise excellent storytelling. The first is much more minor (though doesn't sound it), and that's the place of magic within the story. Despite the unexplained magic being the force that binds the characters to that tragic fate, its infrequent appearances within the story undercut its dramatic weight. Unlike so many of the other parts, here Clark's light hand doesn't quite do justice to the role that magic needs to play in the story, and leaves it feeling remarkably tacked on for what is, in essence, the motive force of the entire plot. And yet... I mostly couldn't bring myself to mind all that much. The character work is sufficiently compelling that it was easy to handwave in my head the course they were heading onto, rather than need it all spelled out. It's not missing, either, just a little thin, perhaps a casualty of the rather short length of the story and the greater focus (which has worked excellently) on character development. Given that it's a story that rides heavily on the strength of one character's own internal dilemma, this feels like a sacrifice that can be accepted, on the whole.

The second is more significant, but also one about which I've not quite made up my mind. For the majority of the book, the story follows a fairly linear standard structure. There are a few brief deviations into the mythic, but they are short and fairly closed off, and do not seem to say much to the shape of the story itself, rather instead to feed into the texture of it. But the ending takes something of a structural turn from all that. Clark opens up something of a wider possibility space for the shape the ending might take, and I cannot quite decide if this is a stroke of genius - leaning into the doom that has been shadowing the story the whole way to remind the reader that some stories cannot have a cleanly good ending - or a step away from that doom that undercuts some of its heft. Whichever way I find myself leaning, however, I cannot deny that the choice is an interesting one, and is one of the things that I suspect I will remember most clearly about the story when I look back to it in future. And I would rather that, I think, even if I come to a resolution that the ending does not work for me, I appreciate that it's such a distinctive stylistic and structural choice. I would always rather read a book that takes a punt than something more staid.

And I certainly couldn't call Fate's Bane that. In light sketches and deft moments of personal intimacy and turmoil, Clark has drawn out a story that manages to feel mythic and tragic, as well as with the more personal level of character work that is the best of what I like in modern story telling. It's an extremely competent novella, and one with a strong thematic core that helps give some of the lighter parts a greater narrative gravity and make it feel more than the sum of its parts. Alongside a prose voice that is distinctive while unobtrusive, and which feeds very neatly into the coherent atmosphere of this fantasy-but-slightly-historical world, the compelling chemistry and tragedy of the romance at the story's heart make this a novella well worth reading.

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The Math

Highlights: Interesting setting with cohesive atmosphere, compelling main characters, interesting tension between duty and romance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: C. L. Clark, Fate's Bane [Tordotcom, 2025].

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

Book Review: Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill

A fantasy story with hidden depths and nuanced contemplations of deeper subjects.

Martin Cahill’s debut novella, Audition for the Fox, has a premise that at first feels light and frothy and before cracking open the novella. The setup is that Nesi, who is a godblooded descent of one of the 99 pillars (gods) needs a divine patron in order to leave the temple she has lived all of her life (there are those who would capture and kill people like Nesi for their power, so it is non-negotiable that she can't leave the temple without such a patronage). There are 99 gods in the pantheon, and Nesi has had interviews/tests with 96 of them, and failed (in a funny bit, one of those is her own divine ancestor, Bison). So, if Nesi does not want to stay at the temple, or wait years and try auditions again, she has three choices, the God of Assassination, a God of Battle...and the God of Tricks, the Fox. Nesi decides on the last. And does she get an audition!

While the logline does say that she is thrown back 300 years in time when her homeland was occupied, that doesn’t quite show how dire Nesi’s position is, and how a god of tricks is far deeper than you might think. The novella opens us in a in medias res, and only gives us some background and establishes what is in the logline after Nesi is already in the deep end. Indeed, Nesi is back in the past, the past is not fixed, and yes, she could absolutely die here during the occupation.

Audition for the Fox, then, is a story that starts off as a story of survival, adaptation, and resistance. In that, instead of dealing with a relatively shallow god of tricks, Nesi and the reader find out just how complicated and complex Fox really is. Nesi asked for this trial, and Fox is not going to let her get out of it as easily as Fox’s brethren seemingly shrugged off her failures.

And it’s a story of belief and revolution, and resistance. This is not to say that there isn’t humor in it, but it is a far far more serious novella than I expected. I was going in to this thinking, even when the time travel was revealed, that this would be a much lighter fare than it actually is. The power of trickery to mildly befuddle an occupation, or showing a small light against the darkness of that occupation. And there is that, too but there are more and much deeper things going on here.

You see, the Wolfhounds of Zemin, in this era, are devotees of one god, the Wolf of the Hunt. The 100th God (which, yes, already made me start wondering right from the get go). They are the kind of monotheists who forbid, absolutely, the worship or respect of any of the other gods. Why the 99 other pillars do not intervene at all is not precisely clear, but given how hands-off Fox is once Nesi is going, there may be a timey-wimey effect here¹, or a reluctance to muck with the human world as the Wolf has done. One parallel I thought of, in contemplating this, is how little for so long the Maiar and Valar actually do anything to stop Melkor/Morgoth in rampaging across Middle Earth.

So, Nesi, babbling about the Fox in an era where such outward belief will get you punished, puts her on the radar of the occupying force. In turn, it makes her a leader, of a very small force, to commit small acts of resistance against the Zemin. As the story proceeds, then, Nesi realizes that while she can’t start the revolution against the Zemin alone (one that will take decades), but she can certainly be one of the first pebbles in the eventual avalanche. And it is recognizing that her potential is to do that, and in the precepts of the Fox, act on that, that is in the end the story of the novella.

So there is a lot more here too, in a tightly and sometimes to the brim novella Cahill writes to overflowing a bit in the book, I find this to be a feature. A fair chunk of this story and the worldbuilding are conveyed through stories within the narrative and the power of story (which clearly is something the Fox has in spades) is a central pillar (pun intended) of the novella. Fox tells some of their background through some of their encounters with other pillars. Nesi tells her story of some of her failed challenges. Fox addresses the reader and breaks the fourth wall. Cahill makes it clear that story alone can’t overthrow the Zemin and won’t (and also shows us how her people, the Oranoya, changed after the occupation, a “build back better” approach to their society in the wake of that authoritarian takeover), but story and narrative are important and central to Cahill’s narrative.

The novella also shows how authoritarianism is bad for the oppressors as well. We are introduced to a character, Teor, who is definitely not of the marching to victory type of Zemin. And yet, the society that he is in him is forcing and molding him into a shape, a design, an ethos that he himself does not want. Teor is a great example of how toxic empire can be to the denizens of the imperial system itself, as well as to the oppressed. Teor is shaped and molded to be an oppressor and is not allowed on his own to pursue his point of view and ethos. Part of Nesi’s ultimate arc is not redeeming him on her own so much as to show him that there is indeed another way of being.

I do have a criticism of the novella that I want to highlight here, for as much as I enjoyed it. It is something that broke my immersion a bit. As mentioned above, we have an invading and occupying force that is intent on universal conquest and universal devotion to the Wolf God. We are in a relatively isolated fortress far away physically from the main centers of their control in Oranoya and power. It’s a backwater, plain and simple. And while they do give a justification on why they hesitate to murder her, it didn’t sit with me, given what we see of the Zemin (see above, Teor). So it felt more likely to me that long before her grand and culminating strike against the Zemin, they would have had her killed or permanently imprisoned as a brutal example of what happens to resistance. Instead, she gets a series of lesser punishments, even when it is clear that she is a Troublemaker and probably should be dealt with harshly.

Aside from that concern, I found the nuance, depth and exploration of theme in Audition for the Fox to wipe away my changed expectations and draw me into a novella that has a lot of things to say about authoritarian systems and living under them that is unfortunately very relevant for today. With a richness to the worldbuilding and its approach to story, I highly enjoyed Fox and Nesi’s story. The story ends satisfactorily without any need for a sequel, a one-and-done story that will draw you in with its deceptively light premise, and leave you thinking much about authoritarianism, oppression and how to resist it--and the costs of that.

So this novella sits in a spectrum of recent books that clearly are playing in overlapping spaces. The epic fantasies of R R Virdi (The First Binding) are entirely about the power of story. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is theatrically staged. Much more recently, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson has a strong element of a trickster god manipulating events. Other works are exploring god spaces, the spaces of what telling story can and does do to a narrative, and, I will note, fighting authoritarian oppression or resisting it.

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Highlights:

• A bright and delightfully playful cover...that belies the contents
• Strong themes of resistance and fighting against oppression and authoritarianism
• A powerful story that uses the power of story within it. 
• A novella not from the 800 pound gorilla of novella publication and award winners and nominees.

Reference: Cahill, Martin, Audition for the Fox [Tachyon, 2025].  

¹ For the Fox, anyway, it's absolutely timey-wimey.(and I use that deliberately, given the grace note that the novella ends on). They know this past, has brought Nesi to it, and they are aware of the opportunity and possibility to change history (and not necessarily for the better). I do appreciate that it doesn’t feel like a stable time loop here, that what Nesi is doing is new and fresh and not just “playing out” something that is foreordained, which is true of a lot of time travel narratives. Nesi even calls them out on this and Fox responds that the future is NOT set in stone.

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

Book Review: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

A tale of two men pulled off the ledge.

Content warning: this piece deals with both suicide in fiction and disclosure of a real suicide attempt

I’m going to tell the readership this bluntly: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a book about suicide. This is a slim novella about a man who boards the subway to the end of the line intending to drown himself, but upon leaving the train finds himself in an endless maze of corridors and rooms, with only one other person for company.

I’m going to tell the readership another thing bluntly: in April 2023 I tried to kill myself by jumping off of a bridge. The way I experienced this book, and the way I have interpreted its themes, is completely and utterly inseparable from having had that experience. This is going to be a thematically heavy piece on that front so I am warning people now.

With that said: this whole thing also, at first, reminded me of the new season of Severance, which I watched the week before writing this review. The unending corridors with the occasional vaguely recognizable business (such as the convenience store, always empty, from which our protagonist pilfers his nourishment) strike the same chord as the featureless corridors of the severed floor of the Lumon building. Both works are wrangling with the meaning of living when the world around you is so crushingly, miserably oppressive, and why ending your own life wouldn’t be a rational response to it (such as when Helly R. tried to hang herself in the escalator). The severed floor, however, at least has decent lighting. For at least the first half of the rather slim book the narrator had the voice of Seth Milchick in my mind.

The supernatural element here is something that is more hinted at than displayed, the most vivid of that rare open depiction is a harrowing physical depiction of the narrator’s grief. The entire feeling of all of this is a certain grottiness, a sort of brutalist gracelessness that makes the whole novella feel cold, uncaring, impersonal. The few other characters there are in this wasteland of corridors are not much better; all of them are too locked in their own problems, their own focuses, their own obsessions to care about our main character, a man named Vicken who is of Armenian heritage living in Montreal.

Vicken is a medic who has himself talked people out of suicides. Ajram spares you gory details of what brought Vicken to the metaphorical ledge, and chooses rather to shine a light on the voids in his life. In Vicken, you see an ultimately decent human being, but one who is on some level deeply empty of things that make life worth living. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this is a very eerie book by Fisher’s definition, which is the deep unnerving lack of something that should be there, but isn’t. Vicken’s life is deeply and profoundly unwhole, and that is the focus of the novella: not details, but mood.

It’s a mood I can relate to all too well. When I look back to the months before I drove to that bridge in the middle of the night, the feeling was that of a profound emptiness. I am not comfortable making too many details public, but suffice to say it was about me, in my status as an autistic person, to be able to truly fit in a neurotypical world. Human beings are social creatures; we evolved to live in small groups. What had set me down that dark path was the fact that I had not even a small group, but no group, or so my mind had resolved, and that removing myself from aforementioned neurotypical world was my only realistic option. After my attempt failed due to the intervention of a kindly passerby, I spent the next several months in a sort of aimless state.

It’s that aimless state that this novella captures so crushingly well. Vicken is, and I once was, someone who had every intention of ending his life and then found himself in a situation where life was going to go on. The end result, for both of us, was an unnerving existential shrug, a sense of ‘now what?’ pervading every aspect of our being. There is the unpleasant undercurrent where you ask yourself what the point of any of this was, and what the point of still being here is. Once you’ve walked back from the metaphorical ledge, you are confused on an existential level. Your soul, as much as that could be said to exist, is bewildered, and you just keep thinking about it. Your internal monologue becomes a droning question, never ceasing, affecting every single fiber of your being.

Not everyone will like the ending to this book. I think it worked, for what it’s worth, but it absolutely refuses to wrap up the narrative neatly, all wrapped up in paper with a colorful bow with a knot. The ending is deeply, profoundly messy, and it will make you wonder, as I did, what in the narrative is ‘real,’ as firmly you can define that in a work of fiction. I think that was the right decision, creatively. It is of the same sort of issue that makes too many works about historical tragedies, the Holocaust and American slavery being the most prominent examples although by no means the only ones, end neatly, where the victims live on, learn to be happy, and are improved through suffering. This book does not do that; Vicken is harmed by all this, indubitably, but it is not a purifying experience in that nigh-omnipresent Christian way. I can speak from personal experience: attempting to kill yourself and surviving is not an ultimately uplifting thing to go through, and Ajram knows this well enough to leave enough threads dangling that it feels true to life.

The phrase ‘coup de grâce’ is a French term meaning ‘mercy kill.’ It is the shot from a gun that puts down a wounded animal that will never recover. When I was in that state, leading up to that dreadful night, removing myself from the world certainly felt like a mercy to myself, who would never fit in with the neurotypical world, and to the world, so that my inability to read it would harm nobody else. It is a title that is provocative, attacking not the need to talk suicidal people out of that self-destructive haze, but rather to everyone else, challenging them to understand the dejection, and all too often the crushing sense of abandonment, that leads people like Vicken, and me once upon a time, to take their lives. The title, and the novel, are pleas for mercy from the world towards those it has abandoned so utterly. It is a plea I hope you, the reader, will heed, if you feel you can handle the telling.

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Reference: Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce, [Titan Books, 2024]

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

Book Review: The Artistry of Magic by Helen de Cruz

It takes a lot to know a person

One of the reasons why I’m so happy that Bluesky is a thing is that I get to discover the work of new writers. One such writer is Helen de Cruz, whose blog came up on my skyline some time ago back when that site was shiny and new and had invitations. I have followed their blog with great interest in the meantime; their writing is deeply, profoundly moral in a world that is intent on beating cynicism into the people at large (is that not what all authoritarianism is, on some level?). They have now released a debut fantasy novelette, after some short stories, The Artistry of Magic, in early February 2025.

The setting is the early modern Low Countries, in a fictional city; the city and its environs feel very much like fantasy cities, but there is mention of real countries and real events such as the French Revolution, so there is a dialogue with the real Enlightenment era that is threaded through this work. There are two major characters, Maarten and Johanna, one a wandering homeless magician, the other a librarian, who each reflect certain anxieties of that time, of the mystical versus the rational (inflected through fantasy, as Johanna very much engages with magic as if it were a science). The setting, a mishmash of the fantastic and the real, gives the whole thing an almost dreamlike quality, the feeling, almost, of a fairy tale. There is nothing in this story that is too dark for such stories (at least in their modern form), and it has that fictionalized early modern period that many such stories have. You can believe that something like this was happening off in some obscure Ruritania in some corner of Europe as the mob stormed the Bastille and the continent marched off to the largest war in its history up until that point. But, fittingly, the great upheavals are relegated elsewhere to provide mood, rather than to disrupt what is clearly a very personal, intimate story.

As the title of the novella signals, this is a love story between the two, star-crossed and from wildly disparate backgrounds, one a professional (and the professional is a woman here, rare for the time period and very welcome to the reader because of it). There is a very pleasant back and forth between them, a mutual intellectual curiosity that becomes a very strong personal curiosity, as the subject matter becomes intimately entangled with the people who deliver the knowledge to begin with. Much of this book is about knowledge, intellectual and interpersonal, and how those two can share their knowledge, and in the process share themselves. There is something very potent here about knowledge, about how it is always contextual, about how a story told is always inflected through the storyteller. Knowledge is a human thing, says de Cruz, and that is a message worth bringing into the foreground. Cold rationality never exists without the fiery passions of the human beings that profess to wield it.

There is a strong undercurrent here of class, and how different classes use and interpret knowledge. Johanna, being an academic in the course of her studies, deals with knowledge as a very formalized thing, what the Greeks once called ‘techne.’ Maarten, on the other hand, is worldly wise in a way that Johanna simply never had to be by virtue of being homeless. His magic is folk magic of a sort, what the Greeks called ‘metis,’ the sort of knowledge gained through experiencing a great many similar but not identical experiences, often manifesting as a sort of ‘gut’ knowledge that can be hard to put into words (I learned this framework in James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like A State and it has made a lot of things make sense). But more importantly, his life experience is one of being hated by society at large, of being an outcast, an opprobrium, a vagrant. One could describe Johanna as ‘middle class,’ in a sort of professional sense, and David Graeber once defined the middle class as the class of workers who believe that the apparatus of the state exists to serve them. The lower class, says Graeber, is the one that is aware that the state hates them and views them as a nuisance at best. Maarten is the sort of person for whom every day is one spent in a hostile environment (not to say that Johanna doesn’t have her travails, but they are of a distinctly different nature), while Johanna’s whole career is predicated on the fundamental legitimacy of the academic system and by virtue the state and early modern capitalism. Their love is forbidden on a social level; the classes are simply not supposed to mix, to keep the engine of exploitation running smoothly, but human connection throws a wrench in that system, as it so often does.

The Artistry of Love is a short, efficient book. It is a book that does not pad itself, and it can be read in a single sitting, as I did. De Cruz succeeds in packing a lot of insight, a lot of character work, and a lot of heart into such a small package. To love something is to know it intimately; to love someone is to know them, extremely intimately. Metis and techne are never isolated from one another, but dance together in quadrilles and tangos and lindy hops. Our emotions act on our intellect and our intellect acts on our emotions; nobody is entirely a cold computer, nor is anyone entirely a beast of pure feeling. The Artistry of Love is a cry to remember that linkage in a world that wants knowledge to merely be a tool to pass standardized tests and make CEOs even richer day by day. Knowledge is beautiful, this book says, and we would do well to remember that. De Cruz takes all of those threads and weaves them into a colorful whole. One could even call it artistic.

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Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Helen de Cruz, The Artistry of Magic, [Pink Hydra Press, 2025]

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

Book Review: The Scourge Between Stars

You'll wish that space were a little more empty

We like to refer to the vastness of space, of space as a gulf, a maw, an expanse. All of these bring into stark relief the scale of the universe, so much bigger than anything that we can realistically comprehend on an individual level. With training, we can grok it with high level mathematics. With space so big, and with so many things unknown in it (cosmologists believe that much of the matter in the universe is not composed of atoms at all), it is logical that humanity would put scary things in it in our myths; after all that is what we have done with caves, with oceans, with jungles, with mountains. It is that urge, to fill in the scary unknown with something scary yet comprehensible is what Ness Brown’s 2023 novella The Scourge Between Stars runs on.

The plot is aboard the generation ship Calypso, one of several arks carrying what’s left of a failed extrasolar colony on its long, cold journey back to Earth; there, one can see a philosophical parallel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, a book which takes the twelve-year-old you once were who fell in love with the grandeur and majesty of science fiction and strangles them with a bedsheet. But Brown adds another element to the mix: something is aboard the Calypso, and it apparently had been on the other ships before all contact with them was lost. Your protagonist, Jacklyn Albright, is acting captain of the Calypso, is leading the effort aboard the ship to figure out what the hell is going on, and what is killing so many of her shipmates.

There is a particular cramped atmosphere to this whole story that really works. Not too long ago I read Alexei Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage, much of which is set on a similar ship. The ship in Panshin’s novel feels spartan if pleasant, at times. Not so here - the Calypso is a ship in dire straits. There are rebellions in different parts of the ship, going on to downright mutinies in parts. Things are so bad to the point that there is significant dissent as to where even this ship should go: onward to Earth, or back to their ruined colony to give that planet another go. This is not a harmonious voyage, and this is not a harmonious ship. Brown does a good job of creating a ship that feels not only lived in, but overcrowded, even with plenty of physical space. When I imagined the innards of this ship, much of which involves the passages within the walls, I visualized it as very, very dark, a sort of horror movie lighting if you will.

Jacklyn Albright is a character who will be instantly relatable to anyone who has had to juggle too much on their plate. She is in charge after her father, the previous captain, has locked himself away in his quarters and refuses to leave for any reason. She has become the apocryphal turtle on a post, and the post is the captain’s post, and she herself is wondering why she was put there. She is determined, but Brown is more than willing to show just how taxing this is on her, how much everything crashing down around her is destroying her sanity. In this regard, she is a traditional sort of horror protagonist given substantially more responsibility; one could describe her as the ‘owner’ of the house that is being haunted.

There is a major side character, by the name of Watson, who is a robot. She was created by one of the chief scientists aboard the Calypso, a cantankerous sort with many highly visible flaws and a willingness to cause mischief. What is particularly interesting about Watson is that she only recently received the programming to be able to experience human-like emotions. As anything resembling normalcy disintegrates around the human protagonists, Watson is experiencing a rapid crash-familiarization with the very concept of feeling anything. This means that she is both incredibly empathetic and surprisingly levelheaded, if a bit bewildered now and then. Watson as a character is an interesting addition to this sort of story, with a particular point of view that inflects everything towards the reader in a way that illuminates the stakes.

The only particular issue that stood out to me in the novella taken as a whole is that the ending can feel a bit too convenient, bordering on a deus ex machina. The entire plot, messy and gory as appropriate for what could be considered Alien on a generation ship is eventually wrapped up with a bow. It’s too clean, ultimately, and the major conflicts are ultimately resolved by certain things being possible that were not given nearly enough foreshadowing or at least a sense that they were possible in this particular universe. As a result the end of the book feels unearned on some level, that this ending wasn’t justified. It’s disappointing, as the rest of this book is properly harrowing as a horror story set in the gulfs of space should be.

I ultimately enjoyed The Scourge Between Stars, too clean an ending notwithstanding. One of the cover blurbs says that it could be read in a single sitting, and it would be great for someone looking for something matching that description (I confess that I intended to do so but I felt myself nodding off for non-book related reasons so I ultimately finished it at a Japanese restaurant on lunch break from work the next day). More than anything else, Ness Brown succeeds in creating a compelling unsettled feeling that never lets up until the end, which will keep the seasoned horror reader turning the pages. I think that Brown has a good career ahead of them, and I’d like to see what they can come up with. They just need to find a way to wrap up their stories better, make those endings feel a bit more earned.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Brown, Ness. The Scourge Between Stars (Tor Nightfire, 2023)

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

Book Review: Queen B by Juno Dawson

Returning to the world of HMRC for a Tudor throwback with a witchy, lesbian twist

Anne Boleyn, historically accused of witchcraft—what if she really was a witch? I mean, you're not getting points for the originality of the premise, but I can't say I'm not interested. The eponymous Queen B exists in the background of the existing two HMRC novels as the progenitor of what grows into a national, official coven, and this novella purports to give us the beginnings of it all.

And it does well... kinda?

We are not following Anne for this story. Instead, we begin with the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, her closest companions, her coven, watching as the swordsman takes her head. The narrative then jumps backwards and forwards in time between the year of her death and the time, a few years earlier, when she prepared to ascend the throne, and her brief time on it, all from the perspective of Grace Fairfax, transplanted Yorkshire girl, lesbian and witch. Because we couldn't stray too far from the métier of the original two novels, after all. Grace has the proximity to give us an intimate view into Anne's life and goals, trying to get a witch onto the throne of England to make life better for all her sisters in the process, as well as an emotionally invested view into the aftermath of her death—what this means both for the witches of England and for those who were closest to Anne herself. This ultimately leads to some events that in some ways prefigure the world we come to know in Dawson's novels.

But don't go in expecting a story about the creation of an official bureau of magic. This isn't that. This is, instead, a much messier, more personal story about love and people, and wanting and betrayal. It's about the risks people take, the lies they tell themselves, and the things that matter enough to them that they will make terrible choices to get them. Also, lesbian witches. Plenty of that.

As it happens, that's exactly the sort of story I like, so I was very happy reading this. Grace is a great narrative viewpoint character, occupying a half-in/half-out position with the royal household, thus giving us a way to evaluate the events of the story with a slightly more objective eye while still being invested in them. And by god is she invested. We get a good bit of rage, as well as some more complex emotional moments from her, and if nothing else, the woman doesn't go by halves, which is great fun to read.

But despite not being the protagonist or a viewpoint, it's the characterisation of Anne herself, occupying the edges of the narrative, that is the most striking. Obviously Anne Boleyn is a much covered fiction staple—her position in English history, her relationship with Henry and his break from the Catholic church, her ultimate end, all serve to make her a fascinating, shifting character onto whom a number of takes can be projected to suit the narrative need. Temptress, victim, political machinatrix, religious reformer, pawn—all available angles to take, all options explored in fiction already. But Dawson chooses simply to make her... messy. Which I'm absolutely sure has been done before as well, but it's the first time I'm reading it and I rather like it.

Dawson's Boleyn is compelling, charismatic and political, yes, but she's also someone whose motivations and ambitions are a little opaque, even to her. Possibly (probably?) she is lying to herself. The options are left open to interpretation by the reader, but what we are definitively given is a person, someone who exists as more than one thing to more than one of the people around her, and does not do it flawlessly. Someone whose perfection is only in the eye of the ones who love her more than they see her, for a time. We also see her exclusively through the people around her, and her own legacy-making—half of the story exists once she has already gone away, and some of it through what she has left behind, the words spoken to friends and lovers, letters hidden, gifts bequeathed. For a story not told from Anne's perspective, it does an awful lot of interesting centring of her, her interests, her propagandising and her failings.

Particularly interesting is that it does all of that, all of that focus on Anne, her wants and her machinations, while at the same time almost entirely sidelining Henry as both a character and a narrative force. He exists off to one side, reported on, creating change, but rarely spoken of directly or the focus of discussion. And even for the stories that centre Anne elsewhere, this is incredibly rare—as with all of the wives of Henry VIII, her entire narrative is conveyed to us now through the lens of her relationship with the king.

I have mixed feelings about this, as a choice? On the one hand, I deeply appreciate the narrative detaching the story of a really quite famous and interesting woman from the male framing and focus she receives in almost all tellings. More stories of people who get to exist outside of their status as wives, mothers, siblings and daughters of the powerful men of history, please. But at the same time, the story is deeply interested in a lot of things that were going on because of Henry. Anne's death is extremely central, as is the impending coronation and installation of Jane Seymour as her successor. For the women who are telling this story, Henry is an important motive force in their lives. He is the architect of the seismic changes in the world they live in, and will be again. To ignore his presence in the story renders its telling a little strange. We see the ripples in the pond, but never the stone that made them, and I wonder if the story would be less effective if it did not rest on the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader—is this story less well told for someone not familiar with this bit of British history?

Then again, for all that those dramatic ripples shape the story, they are not the substance of it, and perhaps it truly does not matter—maybe the knowledge of things works against me, distracting me from what is on the page and back to the conventional narrative? Who knows.

In any case, this is a story that lives in the empty spaces, the rooms of women in a court of men, the relationships between women in a world whose documentary evidence largely ignores them, and aside from any concerns about narrative framing, that is wonderful. The moments that focus on the relationship —romantic, in case that wasn't already abundantly obvious from the blurb— between Grace and Anne are few, but nonetheless moving. Dawson has a knack of capturing moments, little frames of view that work as vignettes, as if we're seeing fond or closely guarded memories, sectioned off from the world around them. In those moments, we can clearly see the foundations of Anne and Grace's affections, as well as the faultlines, and they give us a great deal more insight into both characters as much through implication as by actually showing.

What is likewise wonderful is how clearly Dawson acknowledges the limits of the perspective she's chosen. Grace, our narrator, is a noblewoman and member of the court, in the inner circle of the queen, but also someone whose beginning was... if not humble, then rather more middle class than many of her now-peers. She has enough of an eye for social disparity that, when faced with people of much poorer origins and lives through the course of the story, she gives us someone whose sympathy and understanding seems plausible. She's not one of them, but she's those few steps closer, able to exist in the space between, and mediate. And this has allowed Dawson, though briefly, to do some very necessary acknowledgment that, while the problems the witches the story follows are serious and significant, impacting them all deeply and emotionally, at the same time they are living charmed, gilded existences, and their oppression as women and witches exists on a spectrum that continues well past them. This is a story about a Tudor royal court with commoners in it fully willing to speak up for themselves, to name the hypocrisy of the wealthy, noble women and look it straight in the eye.

But it is a novella, so the space for such things is brief. Good, well managed, pleasingly blunt, but brief.

Likewise, Dawson does not go into great depth, but there are glimmers of a very well handled approach to religious belief and witch-hunting in a story that could very easily have leaned into an easy good guy/bad guy approach. We see witch-hunting and the religious fervour underlying it used both cynically and entirely in earnest, by different groups of people with different aims, and understand that for every person using it as an excuse to squash such female power as could survive in the world of 16th-century England, there is another who truly believes that his actions follow the will and mandate of god himself.

Warlocks, too, get an interesting complexity. We have met them in the series' novels previously—typically less powerful than their female counterparts, sometimes resentful of this difference, but fundamentally under the same umbrella of magical ability, if separate in hierarchy. Here we see them before that union, men existing in an explicitly and intensely patriarchal system, using their social superiority in opposition to the witches' magical one. And then again this is unbalanced by class hierarchy—a noble woman witch and a common man warlock exist in extremely interesting dynamics of shifting power in different contexts, and it's a space Dawson is very happy to play in. This is possibly my major criticism of the story; I wanted to see more of this. The narrative is at its best when it plays with the messy social and power systems it has created, but we simply do not spend the time with them to truly explore what they mean to the people living under them. It makes sense: the novella is a novella because the linear story, the set of actions it follows are fairly simple and brief. Extending it would risk wallowing and soggy pacing. But there is so much in what Dawson has created that is fascinating and unusual that I nonetheless wish there had been more story to tell, just to give us the time to spend here.

But it's not, alas, the book we are given. What we do get —an emotionally engaging, historically interesting little snippet into the history of the world of the HMRC books— is still extremely enjoyable. It's a book that's easy to consume in a single sitting, a narrator it's easy to sympathise with, understand and root for, even as she makes decisions the reader may not agree with, and a little insight into how the world of HMRC came to be. If we imagine them as an alternative history, this is in many ways simply a story of the branching-off point, the slight difference that leads to the dramatically different present.

And that's neat. Is it a great deal more than neat? Of that I'm less sure. But if you go in with your expectations set, knowing it's a window into a short period of time, an implication of what's to come after, rather than a thorough explanation, it is very easy to have a great time with it and see some interesting storytelling choices while doing so.

The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting choices in depicting Anne Boleyn; brief glimmers of some cool intersectionality; fun backstory and worldbuilding to the existing books

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Dawson, Juno. Queen B [HarperVia, 2024].

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