Film Microreview: Coyote vs. Acme

The little movie that could

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Anime Review: The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Escalating drama, family secrets, disturbing themes, and increasing heat on the slow-burn romance

After a clever and addictive first season, it was no surprise that The Apothecary Diaries earned one of the coveted nomination slots for 2025 Anime of the Year. The first season introduced Mao Mao, a cynical genius apothecary in an ancient kingdom who gets kidnapped and sold into bondage as a servant in the harem of the imperial rear palace. Mao Mao’s foil in all of this is the gorgeous and clever eunuch Jinshi, who is in charge of the rear palace. Despite his swoon-inducing good looks, Jinshi is clever and clearly more than he appears to be, just as Mao Mao is more than she appears to be. In the first season, Mao Mao solved mysteries ranging from dying royal infants to dancing ghosts and mysterious murders. Both leading characters spend much of season 1 hiding who they really are while dealing with a relentless assassin and lots of palace intrigue.

In season 2, Jinshi is hunted by political assassins and Mao Mao is abducted during a clan insurrection and tasked with a heart-rending task while the safety of the nation is at risk. The new stakes are higher and the emotional investment is deeper, with a sinister conspiracy to overthrow the emperor, and revelations about the lead characters that will permanently change their relationship. Mao Mao is publicly revealed to be the secret daughter of the quirky genius and politically important clan leader, General LaKan. Similarly, Jinshi’s true identity, which was hinted at in the first season, is finally revealed to be Ka Zuigetsu, the Moon Prince, younger brother to the emperor.

While season 1 delivered a solid combination of a historical detective mystery, quirky opposites-attract personalities, hidden identities, lethal adventures, and lots of subversive feminist commentary, season 2 leans into the drama with upsetting sexual power dynamics, violent betrayals, profound family revelations, and an explosive uprising with far-reaching implications.

The Apothecary Diaries continues to use clever techniques to captivate viewers. For example, the show gives access to different characters’ points of view. As a result, in a given scene, the audience is often aware of more facts than one or both of the lead characters. This storytelling technique adds to the anticipation as each revelation occurs. In a recurring plot point, Jinshi’s repeated attempts to tell Mao Mao the truth about his identity become increasingly entertaining, especially since the audience knows a deeper level of truth about Jinshi than Jinshi does. Their fraught conversations are also funny because Mao Mao’s desire to avoid being drawn into drama makes her avoid engaging in things that will unnecessarily land her in trouble. In an iconic and awkward scene, she comes up with a particularly ridiculous explanation for a shocking truth she discovers about Jinshi. These early bits of humor soon give way to disturbing conversations and tragic events, making season 2 much less humorous and much more intense than season 1.

Season 2 also uses poignant flashbacks to provide a deeper understanding of the unusual personalities of the two protagonists. The new season focuses on Jinshi’s thwarted efforts to avoid both his destiny and his political role and also shows him being called to task by multiple characters for hiding his identity. However, we get an intriguing picture of his early childhood in the palace where everything (toys, people, pets) he shows particular love for is intentionally taken away from him to force him (as the potential future emperor) not to get attached to things he cares about. As a result, he grows up with a profound longing for attachment, and, although he is confirmed to be much younger than he purports to be (only nineteen years old), he is also emotionally immature, and at times clingy and jealous in relation to Mao Mao. However, consistent with his sharp intellect and secret royal status, he is also conversely shrewd, manipulative, focused, aggressive, and lethal.

As a servant, Mao Mao aggressively tries to avoid involvement in palace drama by internally denying or externally avoiding dangerous information. However, we also get a glimpse into her early childhood being raised in a busy brothel, where her cries were largely ignored until time permitted someone to attend to her. As a result, she grew to be stoic, self-reliant, and highly distrustful of relationships. In season 1, she is irritated by Jinshi and also annoyed by her gossipy fellow servant girl Xiaolan. However, in season 2, she is decidedly protective of Jinshi (but still distrustful of his advances). She also, ironically and reluctantly, finds herself drawn into an ill-fated friendship with the child-like fellow indentured maid, Xiaolan and the mysterious bug-loving newcomer Shisui. That tragic friendship, the fraught but addictive relationship between Jinshi and Mao Mao, the cruelty of the Shi Clan uprising, and Jinshi’s ascension to power politically and personally, make up the four primary pillars of season 2.

Overall, we have a feast of a fast-paced storytelling adventure with a dizzying array of family secrets, unexpected connections, and lots of revenge. All this intensity is balanced with quiet moments of meaningful character introspection, explorations of identity, and an examination of disturbing themes. In addition to the political intrigue, the show gives us an uncomfortable exploration of sexual power dynamics for those associated with the imperial palace. In one episode, the emperor flippantly suggests taking Mao Mao as a concubine to help him solve a restricted royal maze, which upsets both Mao Mao and Jinshi. Seeing their reaction, the emperor suggests Jinshi to claim her as concubine. As the season progresses, the show presents a disturbing backstory on the old emperor’s abuse of young girls who ultimately end up trapped in the rear palace forever. And we see the way his behavior is finally stopped by another disturbing act of revenge by the empress. The show also addresses war and its effect on the innocent, particularly children.

The slower, less traumatic episodes of an otherwise fast-paced season are not merely fillers but provide context and connections to characters whose lives are about to change dramatically in the subsequent, more intense episodes. Although the show still has elements of humor and avoids very graphic scenes, the themes and topics are clearly aimed at mature viewers. We also learn that many beloved characters are quite capable of harsh acts and violence. It is a fascinating contravention of expectations in a show that has had (and still has) moments of hilarity and classic anime-style humor.

Season 2 asks a lot of hard questions and offers less humor and playfulness than season 1. However, the exploration of difficult themes is worth it for viewers who want to see the intrigue and storytelling of season 1 expand and deepen rather than merely repeat itself. And we see the evolution of Jinshi and Mao Mao’s relationship and learn that, despite Jinshi’s ultimate power, it is Mao Mao who will determine the pace of their interactions. After a bold and clever first season, The Apothecary Diaries continues to push the boundaries of storytelling, identity, and social issues while still maintaining its core of intriguing characters. And, given its expansive source materials from numerous light novels and manga, there should be much more enjoyment and intrigue to come.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Drama, betrayals, and fast-paced adventure
• Disturbing and challenging themes
• Unique and intriguing storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

What if the President of the USA acted more level-headed than the current one?

Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel Night of Camp David has a particular distinction: one of the few novels I’ve ever seen that does not have its title on its cover. The novel is a reissue; Knebel was a novelist of some repute in the ’60s, as well as a famous journalist and liberal firebrand. The reason I’m taking the time to discuss this book, as well as the reason the book was reissued to begin with, can be seen on the cover: “What if the President of the USA went stark raving mad?” Made frustratingly, infuriatingly, and frankly depressingly relevant in the light of the current administration (it was reissued initially during the first Trump term), it has been brought back by Penguin Random House to make more money off of our national dysfunction.

Knebel’s novel has become “retroactive alternate history,” i.e. fiction that was, at the time it was written, a speculation of future events, but has now been surpassed by the inevitable march of time. This type of fiction is often of interest to those of us who are fans of alternate history; it provides insight into just how the past could have changed, if only from the vantage point of people in said past. There have been online works speculating about the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example (I wrote one in high school, and it won an online award). The end result is a sort of genre shift over the course of the work’s existence, one that was probably foreseeable by the author, who wrote a lot of political fiction (by that point, works akin to proto-Tom Clancy had already been written, such as George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands). As such, they have more in common, to the contemporary reader, with modern speculative work.

This novel stars a senator from Iowa with political aspirations who is asked away from the busy hubbub of national politics in Washington to speak with the President late at night at Camp David (the presidential retreat in rural Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Washington) to talk about the upcoming national election. The President asks the Senator if the latter wants to be his running mate, as his current Vice President is under the cloud of scandal. During this meeting, the President voiced his support for a law legalizing the warrantless recording and storage of all telephone calls in the country. That is the first of many erratic, authoritarian things that the President expresses over the course of the novel, leading the senator to look to see if something is amiss.

The 21st-century reader will note that we already have a system of warrantless collection of information that dwarfs anything beyond a simple pile of telephone call transcripts; if anything, this being the sign of looming insanity comes off as quaint, its proponent as rather tame next to the many horrible real-life cases that would follow, and the book's author as somewhat naive. This is one of a number of things that show the limits of Knebel’s imagination: he is that sort of white liberal writer who believed that ‘it’ could not happen here, in America, land of the free and home of the brave. He had an implicit faith in the American people that I don’t think has ever been warranted.

The novel works well as a depiction of the backrooms of high-level Washington politics, and it’s clear that Knebel knew his facts. He’s acutely aware of the wide variety of strange personalities that populate that world, from lawyers to activists, and how they grease the wheels of politics. Here, Knebel does not come off as so naive, as he shows you how even the most virtuous-seeming people in politics have skeletons in their closet (including the bright young senator around whom the narrative revolves). It does, though, show its age in how most of the politicians and indeed people on the Hill are white men, although there are women outside of formal positions who are nevertheless quite influential to the proceedings. There’s also a paucity of nonwhite characters. Knebel does have enough foresight to have a Black man as a major figure in Congress, but he seems to be the only one. Given that this was written in the ’60s, I’m not really sure we could have expected any better, but it’s noticeable.

Knebel is very good at pacing, and the book’s plot ticks along like a metronome. He was an accomplished writer of political thrillers and it shows here. There’s an economy to how this book uses its scenes, and not a single of them feels wasted, even ones that clearly diverge from the main plot. A drive around the country to find evidence feels earned, as does a vacation jaunt to the Bahamas for the senator. There’s an adept combination of different plotlines in the Bahamas, so that an absence never feels like an absence, but rather a suspension of the presence in the main plot that lets you look back at the significance of what has occurred up to that point. Many lesser authors could have made such a detour feel superfluous, but Knebel knew how not to.

Night of Camp David is both a perfectly enjoyable political thriller and a cautionary tale about speculating on the future. Like so many works that came before it, and not a few that came after, the passage of time has only laid bare a certain lack of imagination, less so of the author and more so of the age in which they worked. Knebel’s great weakness was assuming that the ‘normalcy’ of mid-century America would last forever, or indeed that it was ever really a thing to begin with. I absolutely see why the folks at Penguin Random House chose to reissue this novel so recently, but if anything, it serves to emphasize the sheer madness of the current administration, if not in actual mental state, certainly in its outlandishness. We’re living through times that our progeny will write lurid historical novels about, unfortunately, and an actual novel does as good a job as any to lay that truth bare.

Reference: Knebel, Fletcher. Night of Camp David [Penguin Random House, 1965].

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

Microreview: The Mars House, by Natasha Pulley

 A political thriller that suffers from the strictures of science fiction as a genre

Natasha Pulley’s work tends to run to type: Delicately drawn queer relationships, exquisite images evoking the unknowability of (super)natural forces, an unmoored approach to time, and plots focusing on conquest and colonialism that usually involve Britain at one end or the other. The Mars House, a science fiction political thriller set on Mars, would seem like a striking departure from this mold, and yet, at its core, nearly all of Pulley’s key interests are represented. The problem is that what works beautifully in historical fiction tinged with the fantastic does not translate well to science fiction.

The book centers around January Stirling, a ballet dancer from England who must flee a flooded London as a climate refugee. The city of Tharsis, a Martian colony, is always looking for new people, and make a practice of taking in climate refugees like January. But people who have grown up on Earth are three times stronger than natural Martian citizens, due to the gravity differential, and because they do not know how to moderate their strength, they are deadly additions to society. One in 267 Earthborn people kills a Martian by accident every year, on account of their strength—a statistic that takes familiar arguments about immigration and gives them a decidedly fresh twist. It’s one thing to insist that taking in refugees is a humane and decent thing to do, or to show how immigration results in a net positive economic impact. It’s quite another when the cost of such policies is measurable in lives.

Tharsis has coped with this uneasy balance by creating a two-tiered society. At the top are natural or naturalized Martians: those who were born on the planet, or have undergone a grueling and not-entirely-safe medical procedure to render their physiology comparable to more fragile Martian norms. The underclass are the ‘Earthstrong’, people like January, whose comparative robustness makes them valuable workers in jobs like manufacturing, where manual labour and brute strength are valuable, but who are still seen as a peril in shops or on public transit. They are legally required to wear resistance cages, a metal mechanism that resists their movement in a manner evocative of Harrison Bergeron, reducing their strength to Mars-normal. Regulations restrict their movement: they can remove their cages only in certain places, under clearly defined circumstances. Public service messaging reinforces these regulations in dehumanizing language.

This strength-related division between Earthstrong and Tharses is bolstered by a gender-related divide. The Tharsese have done away with social gender entirely. Everyone is ‘they’. To a Martian, gendered language is rude, uncouth. It evoke back-alley thuggery, because on Mars gendered pronouns are only used by Earthstrongers, for Earthstrongers. Oh—and for animals. A Martian cannot be ‘he’ or ‘she’, but a dog or an Earthstronger can be. Again, immigrants are dehumanized.

Within this society, January Stirling makes a home for himself. He wears his cage obediently, works diligently in a factory to manufactor water from biowaste at a molecular level, and struggles to support himself in a grey market economy that runs on energy credits, since unnaturalized Martians are shut out of the currency economy. Then, in an unfortunate example of politics staining everything it touches, he catches the attention of Aubrey Gale, a militantly anti-refugee Tharsese politician on the rise. As a political stunt, Gale invites January to enter into a temporary political marriage, and January—now out of work and unable to support himself---has no other option but to agree. (This is rather typical of Pulley, whose queer relationships almost always feature a decidedly unhealthy imbalance of power.) From there, plottery ensues: explosions and dinner parties, talking mammoths and almost-ghosts, mysteriously missing persons and maybe-murdered marital predecessors, and a great deal of immigration policy and political intrigue in all directions.

The real strength of this book is, I think, the politics of immigration in this Tharsese context. Pulley has always been quite interested in culture clash and colonization, and the interplanetary setting here allows her the freedom to explore familiar ideas in novel ways. By making Earthstrongers genuinely dangerous to indigenous Martians, Pulley neatly balances the two sides of an argument that most left-leaning readers of SFF would see as laughably unbalanced in its real-world incarnation. The world presented here has no good solutions: Earth’s climate crisis is catastrophically bad, and Mars has room. Yet Earthstrong people are genuinely dangerous, and the more of them arrive on Mars, the more they will threaten the Tharsese. Yet on Mars itself, they are an underclass, forced either to physically hamper themselves, or else undergo debilitating, irreversable medical procedures for the sake of reaping the benefits of Tharses citizenship. Integrating the two populations cannot be made safe or equitable. Segregating them into separate settlements would only create two groups who must share limited resources, one of which is vastly stronger than the other—an imbalance that will not end well.

On top of this quite sophisticated political world-building, there are also beautiful references to her earlier books. A reference to the Peruvian Andes is, I think, an Easter egg for readers who read The Bedlam Stacks (the finest of Pulley’s books, in my opinion). At one point a character pulls out a cell phone that is a family heirloom, a Mori cell phone. Mori is the name of the titular character from The Watchmaker of Filligree Street, and the idea that his craft would have evolved from 19th century watchmaking to 21st century cell phone manufacturing is a lovely connector between the very different worlds in Pulley’s books. (It’s also rather a nice touch that a key mark of the quality of Mori craftsmanship is that the cell phones can be easily taken apart so that damaged parts can be swapped out to effect repairs. *coughcoughApplecoughcough*)

Other characteristically Pulleyan touches abound, but with less delicacy or success than in her previous books. The growing intimacy between January and Gale is the core of their character arcs, but it feels a bit forced. Part of that might be the quite tropey marriage-of-convenience plot device. Part of it might be the fact that January has internalized the anti-Earthstrong sentiment to a distressing degree of self-loathing, which makes his growing feelings for Gale—a rabid anti-Earthstronger, remember—seem less like affection and more like another representation of that self-loathing. 

The evocation of the ineffable power of natural forces, too, is present, but less satisfying. For example, water is a scarce commodity on Mars—hence January’s job at the factory manufacturing it—but Gale’s family has made its fortune extracting it from the atmosphere. Several scenes take place among a plantation of solar mirrors, which power Tharsis, while also warming the surrounding air and nurturing a pine forest. The microclimate generates mist, and nearby is a herd of genetically reconstituted mammoths, who can communicate with humans. Some veery evocative imagery, to be sure, but also a little bit silly.

I think that the problem with this book lies almost entirely its use of science fictional devices, rather than fantasy, to generate these otherworldly touches. Because with science fiction things must be explained, and explained in a way that makes sense. And these explanations simply don’t. Take, for example, the misty forest: It’s misty, we’re told, because the air is warmer around the solar collectors. But how can that work? Mist precipitates when the amount of water vapor grows too high for the air to hold. But warm air can hold more water than cold air. This is why dew collects at night: the air cools down, and water precipates out. This is also why winter air is dry: even if the outside air is fully saturated with water, once we warm it up indoors we increase its capacity to hold water, and so its relative humidity will plummet. Now consider Mars: It’s so dry that water must be created at a molecular level in massive solar-powered factories. Warming up the air is going to make the problem worse. So where does the water come from, to saturate this warmed air so completely that mist appears?

Consider, too, the cages that Earthstrongers must wear. Their mechanism, we are told, is to resist muscular movement, which prevents an overly enthusiastic gesture from taking off a Martian’s head. (While we’re at it, I’m a little perplexed at the frequency of limb-removal being attributed to Earthstrongers. Certainly bones and muscles will be weaker, but I have difficulty seeing how life in low-gravity weakens tendons and ligaments enough that someone of typical Earth stature can rip off a Martian’s leg. If you'll forgive a gruesome comparison, I do not believe it is the case that one in 267 preschool teachers accidentally dismembers a toddler every year.) The cages counteract movement; they do not change anything about the internal density or composition of an Earthstronger’s body. So how is it that a fall in Martian gravity is harmless to an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but deadly to an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage? How is it that a crowd-repelling water hose can be shrugged off by an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but will sweep away an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage?  The Earthstrong muscle and bone density are not going anywhere. The narrative purpose of the cages is clear: make Earthstrongers like Martians. But the mechanism that we are given simply doesn’t match the effect that they are intended to generate.

There are lots of examples of this: ideas that are evocative and useful for plotting and pacing and tension and stakes, but which simply don't work if you're trying to come up with a science-fictional type solution for them. With Pulley's approach to fantasy, she can leave it in the misty background, generating spectacular stories that aren’t dragged down by mechanics or unconvincing science. With SF, she can't. 

So, in sum, this is not Pulley's best work. Nevertheless, I devoured it in a day, and will devour her next, because even Pulley's not-best work is still pretty good stuff.

—

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Mars
  

• Politics of immigration and gender
  

• Queer-normal society
  

• Unconvincing SF mechanics
  

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

References: 

Pulley, Natasha. The Mars House. [Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024].

Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

 A thoughtful but plodding reflection on self-determination

 For readers of Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy, or the standalone follow-up Provenance, the setting of Translation State, the new entry in her Imperial Radch universe, is familiar, as, indeed, are some side characters. But this book also stands alone well, so readers looking for a single-book sized entrance into the world of the Radch could do worse than to start here.

The focus of this book is the Presger, a mysterious alien race that commands the power to take apart any ship they encounter, and held in check only by a treaty they’ve struck with humans and other species in their portion of the galaxy. Why they agreed to uphold the treaty in the first place is something of a mystery: clearly the Presger do not require or benefit from its non-aggression provisions, since they are in no danger from anyone. But this treaty is all that keeps non-Presgers safe from Presgers, so everyone is extremely keen to make sure that things go well and no one causes trouble. Now that a new sentient species has demanded recognition under the treaty, a massive Conclave is in progress to renegotiate the terms, and everyone is nervous and keener than ever to keep the Presger happy.

Dominant among humans are the Imperial Radch, a huge empire whose influence and power affect everything that happens in other human polities. Yet the main characters in this book are not Radchaai, but inhabitants of smaller polities and territories, each with their own priorities that do not necessarily align with the Radch. Three intertwining plot threads structure this narrative. First, we have Enae, from Saeness Polity, who upon the death of hir family’s matriarch is kicked out of hir family home and shunted off to a government job where sie is assigned make-work non-tasks. That non-task turns out to be to track down a Presger fugitive who disappeared 200 years ago. No one expects Enae to find anything — the trail went cold centuries ago — but the Presger have requested it, and everyone wants to keep the Presger happy. And Enae—finally free of hir family obligations — is keen to do the job properly. 

Enae's investigation leads hir to Reet, a young man living in the Sovereign Territory of Zeosen. Reet has struggled with strong and perplexing urges since childhood, namely a burning desire to rip people's skin off and see what's underneath. So far, he has not acted on it, but he (understandably) struggles to fit in, and so has spent his life drifting without purpose. This directionlessness finds direction when Reet is adopted by the Siblings of Hikipu, a splinter ethnic group who insist on seeing him as the descendent of a lost leader who disappeared when their ancestral home of Lovehate Station was destroyed and the Hikipu had to flee. 

Finally, we have Qven, a young Presger Translator-in-training. Translators are a population of altered humans, engineered by the Presger to serve as intermediaries between the utterly incomprehensible Presger and everyone else. One alteration is an overpowering instinct toward cannibalism, which leads Translator children to eat each other with distressing casualness. (The urge dissipates with adulthood.)  Qven's problem is the opposite of Reet's: Instead of lacking direction and seeking it out, Qven chafes against their imposed future that they cannot find a way to escape.

The eventual conjunction between these three plot lines was not, in the end, terribly surprising, but it did a lovely job of developing the politics of the Raadchai sphere at both macro and micro levels. This was accomplished most effectively with Reet’s storyline. As he learns, the Hikipu fret against the dominance of another group, the Phen, in Zeosen, and their fretfulness sometimes turns violent. Moreover, the more radical among their number claim that the Presger do not actually exist, that they are a hoax, a bogeyman invented to keep other polities subservient to the Radchaai. This political and ethnic strife is set in counterpart against Reet’s adoptive family, who belong to another minority group, the Chirra, and are perpetually striving to show that they are the ‘good ones’. They counsel all their children to avoid taking too much interest in political causes, because when minority groups start getting political — as the Hikipu do — the response is much harsher than when majority groups start causing trouble. When the Presger and the Radchaai start taking an interest in Reet, his association with the Hikipu naturally becomes problematic. This entire conversation was rich and chewy and well-constructed, showcasing the kind of political world-building that Leckie excels at.

Qven’s storyline offers an eerie look into the upbringing of Presger Translators that I’m sure readers of the Ancillary books have been craving. For all that Translators started out as biological humans, Presger intervention has changed their biology dramatically: beyond the childhood cannibalism thing, adult Translators are impelled to Match with others, a process that creates a single mind spread across multiple bodies. These properties are hinted at in the original Ancillary trilogy with Translators Dlique and Zeiat, and I had to stop at one point and go back to read those bits to remind myself how it worked. But where Dlique's glimpses into this part of Presgerdom were played as a humourous weirdness to highlight the alienness of everything related to the Presger, Qven’s deeper exploration of that part of this universe was grim and sad. 

In particular, the process of Matching is invoked rather awkwardly as a rape metaphor. I can’t quite put my finger on why this parallel bothered me so much. Possibly it was that its treatment seemed too uncomfortably human to fit in to this studiedly inhuman Presger world. Yet, given the later discussion about self-determination and humanness in opposition to Presger alien-ness, that objection seems less a bug than a feature. Possibly the problem was that it was that it was more heavy-handed that Leckie's usually deft touch. Or possibly it was that I’m so sick of sexual assault as a plot element in my fiction that, no matter how disguised and metaphorized it is, I itch when I encounter it. Anyway: content warning there.

This theme of self-determination characterizes much of the book from various angles. Reet looks for a purpose in his life, choosing to align himself with the Hikipu when they offer him a place, even though he doesn't really believe he is what want him to be. Qven has a brief arc in which e chooses a pronoun that is not the typical they used by most Presger Translators (although, to be sure, the use of they might be less about gender identity and more about the fact that adult Translators have Matched with others and so form a single mind composed of multiple sentient beings. For Presgers, it seems, they is not the singular they, but a truly plural one. Pronoun pedants, rejoice!). These small choices are then reflected in a much larger conflict in the second half of the book, revolving around how much freedom Reet and Qven have to declare their own species alignment. Officially, the Presger treaty grants this choice to all sentient beings, but which in practice gets complicated where Presger Translators are involved. (Remember, no one wants to make the Presger angry, and the Translators are very anxious not to let Qven go.) 

If these questions of self-determination had been an undercurrent theme against some other primary plot conflict, it would have worked brilliantly. The Ancillary books accomplished this so, so well, with their intertwining threads that blended together the personal arc of the narrator, the primary conflict with the many-splintered selves of the ruler of the Radch, and the brilliantly envisioned discussion of imperialism and its political and cultural consequences. 

But Translation State did nothing so complex. The focus on self-determination wasn't an undercurrent theme that served as a foundation to enrich an intertwined plot. Rather, it was the entire plot of the second half of the book, and just in case the reader missed its importance, we were treated to an enormous amount of speechifying. When the speechifying paused, we got instead long stretches of soul-searching and hesitation and even a bit of that tiresome trope of two people who want the same thing but don't allow themselves to act on that desire because each thinks the other doesn't want it and why can't they just talk to each other?! I found myself highlighting paragraphs of navel-gazing that re-trod the same ground as previous pages of navel-gazing, writing peevish annotations: ‘Get on with it already!’

This book needed something else. Some other plot element to bulk up the second half. And the potential was there to do that brilliantly. For example: Lovehate station, the ancestral origin of the Hikipu, was destroyed a few hundred years ago under mysterious circumstances. But that's roughly the same time that Presger translator fled. What happened? Is there a connection? (Surely there must be a connection.) Then, the Siblings of Hikipu are particularly eager to find the descendants of the ruling family, the Schans, who had a reputation for being brutal and bloodthirsty. Are the Schans related to the rogue Translator? Is this Schan bloodthirstiness in fact the Presger predilections for cannibalism making its way into the historical record? And why did that 200-years-ago Presger Translator flee, anyway? And why are the Presger so keen to find out what happened to this runaway only now, 200 years later? I also would have liked to know quite a bit more about the workings of Presger Translator politics, which are built around clades and family lines that are claimed to not be important, but which are in fact vitally fundamental in Translator society. Leckie does politics so well; I'm sure she could have done something fascinating with that, rather than leave us with these tantalizing hints.

All of these plot threads could not only have been explored in substantially more detail, but also linked up with the treaty renegotiations in such a way as to lend more urgency and resonance to Qven and Reet’s quest for self-determination. But they're not. They're dropped, and the gaps are filled up with introspection and tedium.

 — 

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6, enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Brilliant political world-building

• Plodding reliance on introspection

•       Properly alien aliens

• Cannibalism and vivisection in scads

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Leckie, Ann. Translation State, [Orbit, 2023].

[Microreview]Novella: The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

 A queernormative story of refugees, oppression and the legacies of empire, against the backdrop of a magical medical mystery.

Cover art by Elizabeth Story

The Bruising of Qilwa follows Firuz-e Jafari, a healer fled to the Free Democratic City State of Qilwa to escape the dangers to their people in their homeland, and particularly for those of their people who practice blood magic. In Qilwa, Firuz has found a clinic that will hire them - Sassanian heritage and all  - and so they masquerade as a practitioner of more acceptable magics, trying to eke out a sufficient existence to feed their family and find them a home outside of the dangerous slums. But when a mysterious new disease starts to show itself, they find themself unable to resist using blood magic to delve into it.

There are three major strands to the plot and themes of the book, the first of which is the medical mystery - Firuz works in a healer's clinic that particularly is willing to cater to those who can't pay in money (or sometimes at all), and so we get to see their daily experience of illness as it affects those on the margins of society, and those who have been forced into the direst of circumstances, many of whom are refugees like Firuz. This in and of itself is well-done, but it gets better when it's intertwined with magic - magic used in small ways, day to day, for small things and as part of a broader set of healing sciences. It's a super effective way of creating a world in which magic is incredibly normalised, and giving space for us to see it as an intrinsic part of Qilwan life, as well as Firuz's life, and that of Kofi (their boss). We don't get to see the schools that teach it, or learn much about it in the abstract, but this is all in favour of seeing it as a part of people's general experience, and how it touches on daily life, rather than magic as something apart. And particularly, in the case of the mystery, it may be the only way the healers will discover exactly what's causing the lethargy, strange bruises and other ailments that seem to be increasingly plaguing the clinic's patients. While the mystery is in many ways the main plot driver, it also dips in and out of focus, as we look at Firuz's life outside of their work, but it never feels forgotten or abandoned - because the plot is so rooted in Firuz's life, and how incredibly busy they are, juggling so many different responsibilities, it feels extremely natural in context for their attention to shift between whatever the current crises are as needed, which gives the story space to put certain things on the back burner for a little while, without seeming to drop them entirely. The work in the clinic is a touchstone the plot always returns to, and the ebb and flow of patients an easy way to introduce and reintroduce themes that affect the healers and their patients.

We also get to see the intersection of the clinic's patients' refugee status and their political position, as the powers that be, and the general populace, in Qilwa, seek to blame them for the spread of plague through the city, and the effect that has on how Qilwa legislates medical care, and tries to protect itself, or the parts of itself it cares about, further.

And this is the second strand, on refugees, and how the world looks at them, treats them and holds them to account for things beyond their control. The precarity of life in a hostile world for those fleeing for their lives. The standards they are held to, the barriers they have to cross. While I can think of many SFF stories in which one could argue that the protagonist or major characters are refugees in their contexts, I cannot think of many that choose to grapple with that as one of their major focusses, and so it is extremely welcome here, doubly so because, as the story progresses, we see that the political issues at play, both in Qilwa itself and in the refugees' homeland of Dilmun, have further complexities and histories to them than we might have seen at first.

Which is the third thread, though one only briefly explored, about empire and its legacy, and how different people experience those histories. About the changing shape of nations, cultures and communities, and how power can shift and change, how people can shape that power, and those changes, based on the histories they've experienced. In their afterword, Jamnia talks about how their background, how their parents were Persians emigrating from Iran to the USA, influenced the world they created - the multidirectional tides of oppression and persecution, pride in the history of one's culture and the awareness of what that culture may have done, the flawed and the good, and how the good cannot be disentangled from the flaws in the society that made it. And this thoughtfulness and awareness constantly shows through in the story, in how they portray the three cultures, Qilwan, Dilmuni and Sassanian, throughout the story. There's very little in the way of big paragraphs of exposition explaining each's relation to each. Instead, we learn their histories primarily through how the people in the story interact with each other in the present, and how those histories have left a mark on them and their own conceptions of the world - and how those can differ, even among those who are friends. Jamnia has the knack for creating a complex world told in short ways and little space, while never sacrificing that complexity, and it is a joy to behold.

All of this is set against a backdrop of an immersive, evocative city, of which we see little, but feel very clearly, even from the first moment. It is also a city, and presumably a world, which is quietly but constantly queer-normative - we see it in the casual mentions of pronouns and terms of address (when being politely introduced, our protagonist is styled "they-Firuz", and another of their colleagues "she-Malika"), in references to people's parents or friends or mentors or past loves. We see a teenager who wants to medically alter their body's gendered characteristics as they go through puberty, and how magic can have an impact on that. None of these are the primary purposes of the plot, but nor are they sidelined or backgrounded - they are an intrinsic part of the world of Qilwa, and again, they are done with a deft hand at creating complexity in swift strokes.

The Bruising of Qilwa manages to marry an interesting medical mystery plot with the feeling of a slice of life view into moving through a fantasy world as a refugee, giving us realistic-feeling politics, sympathetic characters (who have very sympathetic disputes, where both sides have a genuine point) and above all, a protagonist who, run ragged as they are, is striving extremely hard to do good in a world that is making their life as difficult as it can be. It's a fantastic book, and I'd be extremely keen to read more from Naseem Jamnia, whether written in this world or something new.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 tension between protagonist and their brother is really well-managed, with both sides of the argument incredibly sympathetic

+1 being partly based (according to the author) on Anders and his clinic from Dragon Age 2

Penalties: -1 would have enjoyed seeing more of some of the other characters outside of Firuz

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 very high quality

Reference: The Bruising of Qilwa Naseem Jamnia [Tachyon, 2022]

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

Microreview: Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen

Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen presents us a low-magic fantasy world where collective action and the power of revolution are set in a matrix of the story of a missing monarch, a prince opposing his tyrannical father, and a young woman struggling with the needs and costs of opposition to tyranny. 

In an autocratic Age of Enlightement era fantasy kingdom, a Prince and the daughter of a General find common cause against the Prince’s father’s tyrannical rule. Even as a resistance builds and works against the King, the King’s rule becomes more and more unbearable, both for personal as well as societal costs. And the resistance that Anza joins has plans of its own. And haunting the novel like a ghost, in seperate sections, we learn the story of the titular, long ago lost wife to the King. Her story, the heart of the novel even as it takes place years in the past, has an inescapable shadow over present events.

This is the story of Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen.

The story focuses on two characters and you might be forgiven at first for assuming this is a cross-class romance, but while there is attraction between the leads, this novel’s romance beats are few and take a back seat to everything else. Anza is the daughter of a general whose father gets purged by the tyrannical and increasingly erratic King Karolje in an Age of Enlightenment fantasy world. She finds a journal from the mysteriously disappeared Queen Mirantha, and events draw her to use her educated position, a rare thing for a woman, as well as skills learned by her father to join the resistance against the King.

Prince Esvar, on the other hand, has been personally oppressed by his father for years. His autocratic behavior can no longer be tolerated. However, his father keeps him and his brother, the putative heir, Tevin, off balance, and is casually cruel to both. Tevin would make a better king, and Esvar wants to get Tevin into that position and end the tyranny of his father. His father’s cruelty and pitting members of the court against each other leads him to the unthinkable--to make contact with the Resistance, through Anza (whom he meets by accident) to try and pry the King out of power

The resistance, of course, with Anza on the one hand joining their ranks, and Esvar a possible ally, nonetheless have plans and plots and goals of their own. Oppose Karolje as they do, they nonetheless have goals and ambitions beyond just installing another despot on the throne. They are an organic force, and the power of people to rise up against tyranny and try and take power for their own, and not be used as pawns is a palpable and well drawn throughtline for their own efforts.


Finally, by way of a long lost journal, Mirantha, the Vanished Queen of the title, tells her own story of a much more personal struggle against Karolje. His tyrannical and overbearing nature is shown to have deep origins, personally, as she struggles in an abusive relationship with her husband, struggling to keep her heart and mind free and strong, and also to try and ensure the legacy of her beliefs and her personal strength are passed down to her children., The very last thing Mirantha wants, as we find in the excerpts from her journal and from the chapters from her point of view, is the very real possibility of Esvar and Tevin being molded into Mini-me’s, and fighting to prevent that. The use of third person present instead of third person past for her passages not only helps them stand out from Anza and Esvar’s threads, but also gives her plight and struggle a deliberately cultivated immediacy.

I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in the novel as well. This is not a novel about a clash of armies, of a sweeping story to find the MacGuffin of power that will overthrow the dread Karolje, but instead this is the story of a city, it’s people and how it reacts and buckles and responds to tyranny and oppression from an autocratic ruler, and the worldbuilding supports that. Much can be divined about the world from the little details that the author provides here in terms of day to day life in the city and the culture of the society. One understated bit, since the characters in this novel really don’t have time for romance, is the bisexual default of members of the society. It’s not deeply relevant and central to any of the characters, but the fabric of the society is clearly marked as being far less heteronormative than our own.


Without trying to give too much away of how everything fits into place, I do want to say that the plotting and the lining up of the fate of the titular Vanished Queen and her legacy with the present time stories of her son, and also of Anza, all very nicely works together. The thematic resonance of Mirantha dealing with personal tyranny of her husband in her time frame resonates with Esvar’s struggles in the present, and both Esvar and Anza’s struggles with the political wide scale tyranny is real and strong. In addition, the plotting of both time frames, slowly over the course of the novel, intersects very nicely as well. I had wondered if the timelines had more than a thematic connection, and in the end, they most certainly do. It’s excellently written and polished, just like the characterizations.

The author could not have known, or intended it, when she wrote it, but the book’s themes and elements of the plot, in this moment of assessing authority, and the tyranny of that authority, the use of force against civilians, and even in this exact moment, the role of the army in that, makes the book’s author seemingly prescient. A weak leader holding onto power at every moment, a group of people around him of uncertain loyalty, using force or threatening force to put down opposition to his rule, and homegrown reactions to that rule having wide support? To say nothing of the control of information and news and trying to craft narratives, or use events to push a particular agenda.  The Vanished Queen feels like it is right in the cultural and political moment that IS 2020. The book’s nuance about how to respond to such rule, and its deep and sometimes uncomfortable questions about what response to such rule means and the costs of that response only heighten the book’s power and strength.

In short, this is a novel of political intrigue, and revolution, and what that look likes, from within the Palace and from without. The maneuverings of various people, and the personal and physical costs of those actions are where the plotting of the novel sings. This is a novel far more in the tradition of Sherwood Smith, say, than Django Wexler or Brian McClellan. It should also be noted that beyond being a secondary world, this is a fantasy novel with a relative paucity of magic. There is a plot-relevant ability to divine the truth magically, but not much more in terms of magic or supernatural elements to be found.

With engaging and deep writing, the themes presented in the book being relevant and resonant, and strong characterization, The Vanished Queen is a very potent fantasy novel. It’s not always comfortable to read, especially in the passages with Mirantha, and readers who don’t want to read about domestic abuse and sexual assault will do well to give the book a pass for their own mental well being. Mirantha’s story is inextricably woven into the book, and one could very well say is the POINT of the book. The front matter/dedication of the book is “For survivors. #RESIST.”

Other readers interested in a book where there is no one chosen hero, where the power of collective action and resistance are important, and who want their characters front and center in their fantasy fiction will find much to love in this book. Even better in many ways, the story is complete, a concise story told in one volume. (There certainly could be plenty of more books set in this world, but the story in this book is one and done).

---
The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for engaging and deep-dive into character in the midst of a maelstrom.
+1 for its themes fitting very well in the topicality of our times with its story of revolution and the power of people to make change.

Penalties: -1 The darkness and events in Mirantha’s threads, with secual assault, is not for all readers.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 well worth your time and attention

Reference: Campbell, Lisbeth  The Vanished Queen  [Saga,  2020]

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