Film Review: Mercy

If you had to endure 90 minutes of this garbage, you’d legalize summary executions too

Timur Bekmambetov, who still hasn’t paid for his previous crimes against cinema, returns with another movie told almost entirely through computer screens. Contrary to appearance, this production wasn’t made during the coronavirus quarantine, which one would assume based on the gimmick of having an actor strapped to a chair for the entire movie. One thing about its marketing campaign does work successfully, though: when you leave the theater, all you can say in your dulled stupor is the movie’s title: Mercy. Mercy. Please, have some mercy.

Mercy is set in a near-future Los Angeles where a rising crime wave has prompted law enforcement to adopt the genius solution of simply killing suspects quicker. The “Mercy Capital Court” is a 3D VR room where you’re presumed guilty from the start (strike 1 against basic constitutional principles). The tool you’re given to try to prove your innocence is a digital cloud with records of everything that citizens of Los Angeles do online: chats, photos, emails, phone calls, restaurant reservations, credit card transactions, gambling, you name it. Nothing is safe from the system’s unblinking eye (strike 2). Whatever information you find needs to convince a digital judge to lower its probabilistic assessment of your guilt. The trial is closed to the public and doesn’t use a jury or a defense lawyer (strike 3, claim your Big Brother T-shirt at the lobby). At the end of the 90 minutes, you’re either set free or executed instantly.

I guarantee there’s going to be a million YouTube videos titled “Real Lawyer Dissects Mercy.”

At the level of craft, Mercy is painful to watch. If you thought shaky cam was a problem, get ready for shaky cam when looking at a computer. Presumably to immerse the audience in the suspect’s point of view, the camera hops between the digital judge’s face and assorted floating screenshots of folders or maps or phone screens or police records, without letting the eye find an anchor to focus on.

The disorientation gets worse when the suspect starts pulling up pieces of evidence from the city’s omnipresent surveillance cameras: janky, jarry, low-framerate, low-resolution snippets of chases and fights that add a redundant level of nausea to the movie’s already distasteful premise. For the most part, the only times we get to see actors act is through closeups of Chris Pratt playing the accused and looking either very confused or very tired, and Rebecca Ferguson playing the digital judge and nervously suppressing her smile because she wasn’t supposed to laugh at the script.

At the level of theme, Mercy is downright evil. Note how the opening narration describes the crime wave worsening in intensity, as if it were the rain or the flu, a natural phenomenon causally unrelated to human choices. This is classic Calvinist rhetoric: humans are naturally rotten, ergo crime isn’t preventable. All that society can do is brace against it and punch back harder. At no point does the script show any curiosity about what caused this crime wave, what institutional failures the unrest is a response to. In this (not too) fictional future, the government’s response is to cordon entire areas of Los Angeles and shrug them off as basket cases. Anyone accused of something is thrown at the “Mercy Capital Court.”

A comparison will be useful here. In 2002, the film Minority Report presented another futuristic justice system that aspired to complete control over crime, and the system’s inherent flaws proved unfixable. That’s not what Mercy does. In Mercy, the invasive web of total surveillance is shown to be flawed as well, but the way the script addresses this is by doubling down on more total surveillance. Just like in Minority Report, the unfairly accused protagonist ends up uncovering a conspiracy to trick the system, but whereas Minority Report concluded that a system that is vulnerable to being tricked cannot be trusted to judge and sentence people, Mercy goes in the other direction, solving the defects of an invasive all-seeing government by relying more heavily on the invasive all-seeing government.

As a vision of the near future, Mercy couldn’t have come at a worse time. There’s a literal Nazi in the White House, unaccountable government goons are murdering civilians in the streets, the private sector is pushing for citizens to surrender even more of their privacy and autonomy, and here comes this shameless piece of copaganda about an AI-based regime of total control that works, and when challenged for its errors, comes out vindicated. So congratulations, Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve earned our rarest score for the second time. Now go to the corner and think about what you’ve done.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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

TV Review: A.A.R.O.

Come for the Paranormal Mystery of the Week, stay for the animist theodicy

To the Western viewer, likely acquainted with The X Files, Fringe, Supernatural and Evil, a show like A.A.R.O. may at first feel like another iteration of the "whodunit, but make it spooky" genre. And the limited series that's been released on Netflix goes for that vibe in its initial episodes: this is a world where people can vanish into thin air, leaving just their empty clothes and bucketfuls of blood; where breaking the shrine of a fox spirit causes a wave of mass faintings; where pieces of an airplane that's been missing for years suddenly fall to the ground out of nowhere; where a shadowy terrorist faction can't succeed at planting bombs across Tokyo because a clairvoyant keeps frustrating their plans.

So far, so standard. But as we gradually get to meet the protagonists, a jaded misanthrope who can cite the classics of Japanese mythology from memory and a wide-eyed newbie with a keen nose for asking the right questions, we discover that the plot lurking under the surface is far more alarming than the occasional unexplained anomaly. It's not just that the monsters and curses from Japanese folklore happen to be real; it's that someone has declared war on the entire spiritual realm and has been extending tentacles at every level of Japanese society. This is a world where someone has been buying mummified mermaids to harvest their flesh; where someone has been running experiments with a spell that causes unending hunger; where someone has created a sound frequency that induces suicide; where someone is scheming to put heaven and hell under new management. What begins as a series of seemingly unconnected cases for a clandestine government agency to investigate turns out to lead to a potentially world-ending conspiracy whose best chance of succeeding is the fact that humans are the worst.

That's a fortunate thing for the viewer's enjoyment, because on the purely police investigation side of the story, A.A.R.O. just isn't very well written. The quiet pleasures of meticulously following the clues and formulating logical deductions are eschewed for impossibly lucky guesses, unprompted confessions, frequent instances of literal deus ex machina, and a tsunami of melodrama that would make Candy Candy blush. Also, the plot plays an increasingly ludicrous game of "guess who's possessing whom" that abuses the bait-and-switch trick with regard to the true identity of the villain four times, including one time it does reveal the actual villain, but still tries to pretend there's a further bigger villain behind. No, this detective/mystery show doesn't stand out because of its detectives or its mysteries. It stands out because of the ideological conflict it dramatizes on the nature of evil and the redeemability of humankind in an era when we've become almost godlike with technology we're too immature for.

It's worth highlighting once more the non-Western nature of this story, because the dynamic between mortals and the supernatural is very unlike what we're used to seeing in Western fantasy. Over here, we're still under the Miltonian spell, conceiving of spiritual power as flowing in a vertical direction, which makes humans either the helpless playthings of omnipotent overlords or the blasphemous rebels who seek to punish heaven for being too harsh on this world. But in the animist mindset, spiritual power flows horizontally, because humans are no less capable than the gods of influencing events in heaven, and if anyone seeks to punish heaven, it's for being too permissive with this world. With enough discipline and study, a determined human may turn into a worthy adversary for the gods.

A.A.R.O. thus twists the formula of the paranormal procedural: this time Earth isn't a means for spiritual factions to play out their eternal battles in; it's an end in itself, where all the spirits are responsible for protecting humans, even as humans grow more and more self-conceited, cruel and treacherous. Instead of fighting demonic incarnations of evil on behalf of humans, the protagonists of A.A.R.O. fight the demonic extremes that human hubris can reach. Instead of treating the gods the way, say, the Greek epics do, as capricious tyrants to fear or to pacify, in A.A.R.O. the gods are long-suffering, overworked benefactors who can only do so much in the face of human self-destructiveness. Whereas a story like God of War treats the quest to dethrone the gods as heroic liberation, A.A.R.O. treats the quest to dethrone the gods as a sad consequence of ignorance.

A case could be made that treating the Shintō gods as the preferrable status quo gives the show a conservative bent, and it would be hard to argue against that interpretation. The story clearly leans toward blaming human hubris for the problems in the world. However, it knows to avoid the extremes of anti-humanism and binary morality. The two protagonists constantly argue for opposite sides about the worth of humans, and a key reason why the good guys (somewhat) win in the end is because a god chose to trust a human. One villain is so strongly convinced that their cause is just that they can fool another character whose superpower is to cast detect evil. Moreover, a spell that reduces a god to human status isn't treated as a profanation every time. A former god reflects on this turn of events with admirable equanimity: yes, dying as a human is horrible, but living as a human can be full of wonders.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Paradise

We all have our ways of coping with death. Unfortunately, this lady has all the money in the world

Stop me if you've heard this one: after a worldwide disaster destroys the modern world as we know it, a few lucky survivors have moved to a secluded underground habitat to ensure that humankind will endure. However, some years later, the assassination of this small community's leader will risk exposing the secrets of the people who actually run the place, and it will be a random nobody's mission to pursue the leads while still dealing with grief over a lost love, a death our protagonist blames the authorities for. Whom can you trust after the world has ended? How do you even get away with murder in a secluded panopticon? And what's really going on outside the shelter?

The Hulu series Paradise isn't entirely unoriginal. It does a fine job of turning post-apocalyptic drama into a meditation on the various ways we learn to keep living after a loved one dies. Each of the few thousand survivors who live in this underground city has someone to mourn, and the extensive flashbacks that take up a good portion of each episode's runtime provide the necessary context for the main cast's seemingly extravagant choices. The viewer ends with a complete idea of what makes these characters tick, even if sometimes it's a broken moral compass.

All through this first season, characters remind each other (and the viewer) that the placid, uneventful imitation of American suburbia they live in doesn't make up for the billions of deaths that happened on the surface on a single, horrific day. If they were ever on their way to getting too comfortable, the loss of their leader is a shocking reminder that death still exists, and no shelter will ward it off. That realization hits especially hard for the billionaire who funded the entire project, a grieving mother who has embarked on a Quixotic mission to keep death away from her remaining child, the world be damned.

This is the most interesting character in Paradise. Normal people understand that death is a thing that happens and our efforts against it can only succeed so many times. But the founder of this underground city is the world's richest woman, and having so much unchallenged power tends to warp your idea of what's possible. One flashback reveals that, when she heard that environmental devastation was imminent, her first thought wasn't to look for ways to use her fortune to save the world; she looked for ways to use her fortune to save the one person who matters to her. She's already lost one child, and now she lives in permanent alert mode. To keep her living child safe, she'll let civilization go to hell if it comes to that. And as the season progresses, the viewer discovers how many deaths she'll consider acceptable for this monomaniacal goal.

When you believe you're prepared for the end of the world, but one day it takes you by surprise, whatever life you manage to build afterwards will be defined by your actions at the moment of crisis. Paradise builds on that idea, and it traces a few parallel plots that mirror each other: parents who make ugly choices for their children's sake, brokenhearted widowers with survivor guilt looking for absolution, desperate people pushed into impossible dilemmas. Although several characters are already dead by the start of the show, their presence haunts every episode. This is a story that relies very heavily on flashbacks, because the way the living characters are written requires the viewer to keep in mind the details of their past in order to make sense of their current actions. The screenwriters seem to be making an argument that every person, even the ones you dislike, is carrying some burden that explains who they are, and empathy for your fellow human requires that you acknowledge how their pain molded them.

Then again, how do you feel empathy for an unfathomably wealthy person who manipulates several scientific geniuses, hundreds of unsuspecting construction workers, and her own government into indulging her fantasy of safety? We've all heard (and some of us have been) parents who say they'd do anything to protect their children. That sentiment looks quite different when it touches someone who is actually able to do anything.

For a show about an entire underground city, Paradise doesn't look particularly impressive. Part of the reason is that the community is intended to remind people of home. Still, the set design is so lacking in an identity of its own (*cough* Silo *cough*) that some of the flashbacks in the outside world are easy to misread as taking place in the underground present. The show also suffers at times from clumsy dialogues and characterization, with some plot developments transparently contrived for the sake of drama. The songs selected as thematic summaries of each episode come too close to the cringey side of in-your-nose-ness. And again, the overuse of flashbacks is a sledgehammer against any hope of maintaining a sense of cohesive pacing.

The draw, despite these failings, is to be found in the performances. As our protagonist, Sterling K. Brown does a solid job of portraying barely contained fury under a face of professional equanimity. Krys Marshall, who has been fantastic in For All Mankind, is here a complex player in the murder investigation, struggling to balance her conflicting loyalties with her sense of justice. Gerald McRaney is positively frightening as the type of domineering patriarch who can bend a nation's fate. And pay close attention to Nicole Brydon Bloom's meticulously controlled performance. Just saying.

This first season ends in the right cliffhanger that was reasonable to expect, and I wouldn't object to seeing more episodes set in this strange, messy, delusional last hope of humankind. But let's say I won't exactly jump in exhilaration if it comes to happen.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Microreview: Dragons of Deepwood Fen by Bradley P. Beaulieu

Introducing a new fantasy world, filled with the intrigues of an empire, its unwilling vassal state, a grasping church, and oh yes, dragons.

Rylan Holbrooke has a problem. Well, a bunch of problems. He is the illegitimate son of the local governor. He has a rapport with dragons, in fact he is a dragon singer, able to calm and work with the dragons that the empire relies on. But he is also a thief and scoundrel stealing from said empire as well.  His checkered nature, his straddling (however very uncomfortably) of two worlds puts him in position to notice the threads of a dreadful and dangerous plot. A plot that will change the vassalized realm of forest known as The Holt forever. And, perhaps, the entire Empire as well.

Rylan's story, and the stories of his fellow protagonists, are the matter of Bradley Beaulieu's The Dragons of Deepwood Fen.

Rylan is our primary protagonist and gets the most screen time out of all of the characters we see. He's caught between two worlds and trying to balance his lives in both worlds, and the author aptly shows his inner and outward struggles in handling that. This is best shown in the points of conflict--his lack of desire to have anything to do with the Red Knives except when forced, and then later, on the opposite site, the very prickly relationship he has with his half-siblings in his father's house. Where does, in fact, Rylan fit in and feel himself, the best? Alone, flying over the holt with his dragon, and, it is shown, nowhere else. 

Our other major protagonist is Lorelei. Lorelei is an Inquisitor (investigator) for the Empire, and with her queer partner Creed, she, like Rylan, goes from her day job to being wrapped up in the tendrils of the conspiracy and danger to the Holt and beyond. Starting off with investigating a drug smuggling ring, Lorelei starts to learn that there is something rotten in the Empire city of Ancris. Lorelei is a fascinating character and perhaps even slightly more interesting than Rylan on a character level. Rylan is interesting because of his spending time in two worlds. Lorelei is more connected, with her partner, with her mother. She also very clearly has what we would call undiagnosed ADHD with a side order of social anxiety disorder. We don't use and see those terms of course, but Lorelei is so clearly not a social creature, is always leaping ahead in her mind, and really is only herself when she is working on a puzzle or problem, in limited company. She does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting to see the scope of the problem. 

Third, and to a lesser extent, is Rhiannon. Rhiannon is the youngest of the three, and has magical potential and power that she herself does not quite understand. Also, being young, she is also the one who is the most manipulated out of these three characters. This makes sense, but it makes for sometimes a bit of a frustrating read when she is on stage. Also, hers is the point of view that seems to have the most flashbacks to them. While these flashbacks provide extremely important context and development of the byzantine and labyrinthine "plots within plots" that the novel revels in, it means that as a result, that Rhiannon feels like she has less agency than Lorelei and Rylan, and is much more of a narrative device and tool than an actual character that I could really feel for. I could imagine (while holding my nose thanks to his odious smoking) talking with Rylan and meeting his dragon. I could definitely imagine getting to know (carefully!) the shy and introverted and socially awkward Lorelei. Rhiannon, by contrast, I have a far less good hold on, as a character in my mind. 

There are a couple of other viewpoint characters (this is epic fantasy, and so we have a good half dozen of them in all), but I actually want to hold my fire in discussing them, because it is very easy to get spoilery regarding them. Suffice it to say, Beaulieu is firmly in the Point of View Solves Problems school of writing, and we get other sides to the conflict through these characters. We also get some rather unusual twists regarding these characters and their nature, and once again, the author gives our characters very understandable, and sometimes rather painful flaws to deal with.

So given a thick fantasy novel with a complex plot, where does one start? For one thing, let's lay the groundwork. Refer to the map in the book (this is a case where audio is a weaker medium, because the map is definitely important here). The Holt is not part of the Empire at the heart of this world, it is an uneasy vassal state with a government that is a messy hybrid of control from the central Empire and local magnates having their say, with the current holder of the position, Rylan's father, about to face a regular vote of confidence. It feels like a somewhat more aristocratic and less monarchist version of the Roman Empire era Kingdom of Armenia. It's not officially part of the Empire, but its government certainly is overshadowed by the nearby Empire.

In point of fact, the right model is surely a flavor of the Roman Empire. Latin terms and names abound in the book. The Five rulers of the empire are called a Quintarchy. Lorelei's last name is Aurelius.  The center of Ancris is called the Quadrata. There are legionnaires as the military force. And so on.  Fortunately, as witness Lorelei itself, this is a far far less patriarchal Romanesque world than the real thing. Lorelei is not unusual for being a woman, she is unusual in her lack of social skills and the convoluted method by which she became an inquisitor in the first place. We see women in power and authority throughout the Empire, and the Holt as well. 

The plot of the novel does move slower than what is good for it. Beaulieu, even with the shorthands above, has a lot to try and get off the ground. So a lot of the novel has Rylan bustling about, and Lorelei wrapped up in her police procedural storyline that proves far more important than even she realizes. So this fantasy novel adds that as one of the balls that it is trying to juggle along with the hybrid low fantasy world of a lot of the work (a notable touchstone here might be the world of Joe Abercrombie except with significantly more magic and less gore). It does feel like its a while before Lorelei truly gets out of her storyline and really into the main action, or the main action in general. Beaulieu lays down a lot of the world in the time, including, of course, dragons.

So let's talk about the dragons, given the title of this work. There are two schools of dragons, and two supergroups of them. The metallics, based on metals, are the dragons used by the Empire. They are magically controlled and coerced, the Empire turning to raw power. This is what makes Rylan so valuable, his Dragonsinger nature means he has a better understanding of his charges than even the dragon's owners in many cases. It is a very hierarchical, dominance based system (I wish that Rylan made his feelings about this system planer earlier, but he eventually vocalizes just how horrid he thinks this whole thing is). 

By contrast, a rebellious faction living in the Holt, the Red Knives, and as mentioned above, secretly, Rylan, use a magical ritual of bonding to tie a rider to their sragon. The dragons of the holt are non-metallic, and their scales are often used for alchemical reagents. There is a much more sure pairing of dragon and human, and the connections to McCaffrey are obvious (also, Robin Hobb and Tracy Hickman, among others). Given how fraught the first meetings can be, I was also reminded of the movie Avatar, as Jake must bind and tame a flying mountain banshee, and then that bond is permanent.  The Rylan-Vedron connection and their relationship is one of the highlights of the book. 

In all, yes, Beaulieu does deliver on the dragons, and really, given all the intrigue and characters as given above, the prose and the feel of the book really do achieve lift-off when Beaulieu is writing passages with his dragons front and center. Be it a glorious aerial battle of dragon versus dragon, or the quieter ministrations of Rylan doing his job as Dragonsinger, Beaulieu clearly wrote this novel with the dragons front and center. 

I give good credit to Beaulieu for going beyond the usual settings in creating The Holt. Empires and colonialism are complex and complicated subjects. Rather than going for an occupied province, or a land outside the boundaries of the Empire entirely, The Holt is instead a vassal and dependency. This is inherently an uneasy and uncertain status for it and its inhabitants. It allows Beaulieu to have some of his cake and eat it too. They aren't quite part of the Empire, but the Kin (the inhabitants of this region) are certainly connected to the Empire. Rylan himself is half-Kin and suffers prejudice, particularly from the Empire, for his nature. It helps give depth and feeling for both Rylan and the Holt itself. I mentioned Hobb above, and I do believe that the Rain Wilds were an obvious inspiration for the forested vastness of The Holt, although more temperate in climate.

I do have some thoughts about other aspects of the worldbuilding here, ones that frustrated me.  Fortunately, not the map itself or the basic geography. There are no rivers that fork unexpectedly, or anything that violates basic conventions of geology. I am less clear on something that really isn't touched on and I wished it were. This is a novel, as discussed above, that is all about the vassalized but not incorporated Holt and how it chafes under that indirect control, and the interesting ideas that entails. We've plenty of works set in empires, and in "barbarian" (sic) lands, but the polder and borderlands of vassalized and client-kings, is a setting we get little of. But my question is, just where is the heartland of the Empire? It's not entirely clear. We have these important cities in the mountains, and we have the fivefold Quintarch structure to the government representing these five cities. But are the mountains truly their heartland? It sure seems so, and if that is the case, he missed a big worldbuilding opportunity. The Holt is very different than the mountains, but we never get a sense of the sense of place of those mountains. We definitely get a feel for the Holt, as mentioned above. But an Empire built and developed in those mountains, well, the denizens are sure to have opinions about lowland forests as a terrain. I've mentioned before how much Beaulieu has modeled his empire on the Roman, right down to the Latinate names. Well, the Romans complained incessantly about the cold north of England and Scotland, the forests of Germany, the desolate heat of Syria, the weirdness of ancient Egypt. And yes the Romans went there anyway. But this Empire feels pale by comparison. In making the Holt as such a rich tributary vassal and place for the action to take place, the Empire itself as a place suffers. Ancris, one of the five capitals, suffers in comparison to the Holt as a setting. 

The ending of this novel doesn't really have an offramp if you want to one and done the series. The immediate threat and problem, once the true scale of what is going on is revealed, is thwarted but not defeated. All of the major characters have gone through a lot, and the stage is set for the next novel, the next round in the conflict. Despite my reservations above, I did enjoy the novel, as I have enjoyed Beaulieu's work going back to his earliest novels. Perhaps with worldbuilding under him, the second volume can move from the strength of the last quarter of the novel (where things ramp up) into a stronger second book.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Diverse and interesting fantasy world
• Rylan and Lorelei make a strong two hander of the primary protagonists and viewpoints
• Some issues with the worldbuilding and pacing. 

Reference: Beaulieu, Bradley P.,  Dragons of Deepwood Fen, [Daw, 2023]

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