Goodbye, Fifteenth Doctor. Hope to see you soon, Doctor Who

A clumsy finale should not overshadow a cleverly written season and a fantastic protagonist

Recency bias being what it is, viewers of this season of Doctor Who (season 2 or 15 or 41, depending on how much of a completist you want to be) will probably keep a stronger impression of the subpar conception and execution of its finale than of the much better ideas explored through the preceding episodes. This is unfortunate at a time when the show's future is still an open question. There's the upcoming miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, but how BBC and Disney executives will end up weighing the worth of the franchise is anyone's guess.

The first half of the finale, "Wish World," is actually a strong start, which if anything worsens the disappointment to follow. In this episode, the Rani locates the most powerful of the gods, the one who grants wishes, and pairs him with a disgruntled conspiracy theorist who embodies all the annoying traits of the manosphere. Together they transform Earth into a cisheteronormative dystopia so transparently fragile that mere disbelief destabilizes the foundations of its reality.

This is an interesting way of exploring the incongruity of contemporary fascism: it is so contrary to human nature that it needs a continuous, exhausting pretense to stay barely functional. Of course, the Doctor (particularly this Doctor) loses no time in rebelling against such a bland and boring life, and that's precisely what the Rani is counting on: the Doctor's disbelief has the power to completely break down reality, and beneath the cracks is the hidden dimension from where she hopes to rescue Omega, the banished founder of Time Lord society. This reveal leads to "The Reality War" and the quick unraveling of what up to that point was a promising plot.

The Rani and Omega are so underutilized in this two-parter that they could easily have been replaced by new characters without changing anything about the plot. It's not like these two had a lot of runtime in classic Doctor Who, but their weight in terms of lore deserved a more expanded treatment in their reintroduction. Instead, we get a rehash of "The End of Time" from 2010, when the Master almost helped the Time Lords return to our universe, only for the Doctor to slam the door in their faces. Replace "Master" with "Rani" and "Time Lords" with "Omega" and you get the idea. Once that problem is dispatched, there's still a lot of episode left, and it's dedicated to what actually mattered all along: the fate of Poppy, the little daughter of this season's companion Belinda.

We first met Poppy in "Wish World" as a putative child of the Doctor and Belinda, and the dilemma at the end of "The Reality War" is that restoring the baseline reality might delete Poppy from existence. After a barrage of technobabble, the Doctor saves both reality and Poppy, at the cost of one of his lives, and then learns that Poppy isn't actually related to him. This is a notable difference between the style of current showrunner Russell T Davies and that of his predecessor Steven Moffat: whereas Moffat relied too often on giving supporting characters a cosmic destiny, Davies is more comfortable with letting them be ordinary people. Even when companion Rose Tyler became the Bad Wolf, or companion Donna Noble became the DoctorDonna, they immediately had to be depowered for their own protection.

Also, the resolution of Poppy's story follows a thematic line that has been present since Davies's return to Doctor Who: stories about lost children. Episodes like "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" were the most obvious examples, but if you look closely, all through these two seasons with the Fifteenth Doctor there have been various iterations of a child separated from their parents or vice versa. Davies has taken the thread left by the Chibnall era, which redefined the character of the Doctor as a lost child, and extended it to a point where it could connect with one of Davies's own signature moves: giving the Doctor a cosmically small but personally meaningful reason to sacrifice his life. In 2005's "The Parting of the Ways," after the Daleks have already been defeated, his Ninth Doctor still chooses to die to save Rose. In 2010's "The End of Time," after the Time Lords have already been defeated, his Tenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Wilfred. Likewise, in "The Reality War," after Omega has already been defeated, his Fifteenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Poppy.

Despite this neat bow with which Davies ties up the seam between Chibnall's work and his own, the execution of the season finale is too chaotic to be satisfying. The Time Hotel from "Joy to the World" makes an entrance as a deus ex machina, only to quickly be swept to the side for the rest of the episode with no more function than dropping an obvious tease for future plots; Rose Noble literally appears out of thin air as a didactic device and does nothing else; Susan Foreman's random appearance in "Wish World" is left hanging in the air; and Belinda is put in a box for most of the final battle. In fact, the way Belinda's arc concludes comes off as too underwhelming for the symbolic importance it should have. During the entire season, she provided an interesting counterpoint to the usual Doctor/companion dynamic, in that she very emphatically did not want to explore the universe. Her vehement urge to return home raised the question: what could be so important in your normal life that you'd throw away a trip through time and space? The finale answers: she has a child, and that's more important to her than billions of galaxies. It's for that child's sake that she can't wait to leave the TARDIS. It's for that child's sake that the Doctor gives his life. It's a potent statement to close the season with. And yet, the final scene in Belinda's home, once the proper reality has been restored, presents us with a muted version of Belinda, without the energy and the spark that distinguished her character. She is more interesting to watch in all the episodes preceding the finale, which deserve a rewatching as great pieces of science fiction in their own right.

Finally, the return of Billie Piper in the last shot of the finale feels like a desperate choice, on the same level as David Tennant's return two years ago. Don't get me wrong; she's a great actress. But bringing her back at this precise moment gives off the vibe of a calculated tactic to wish the show into continued existence. It's hard to tell whether this idea came from Davies or from Disney; Davies has a known tendency to repeat himself, and Disney has a known tendency to be self-sabotagingly risk-averse. The worst thing that can happen to a show about an alien who can cheat death via endless reinvention is to get stuck replaying its greatest hits.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: If Stars are Lit, by Sara K. Ellis

 A philosophical meditation on personhood that ends up more enraging than was probably intended

 

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that engaged me as much as this one, or had me writing so many verbose marginal notes at so many plot elements. This is a book that inspires thoughts. Lots of thinky thoughts – and it’s intended to do that. The thing is, I don’t think it intended to inspire the thinky thoughts that I found myself thinking.

The premise of this book revolves around a creation in artificial intelligence, called a gemel. Gemels are sentient holograms, created off a human prototype, and sharing all memories and personality traits with the prototype up. They are effectively a holographic copy of that prototype as it exists at the moment of their inception. Gemels occupy an odd half-life in the starfaring semi-near future of this book: they are officially recognized as sentient, but they are constrained, legally: their programming forbids them from hurting humans, or through inaction allowing humans to come to harm. It’s all very three-laws-of-robotics­—only don’t say ‘robot’ around a gemel: that’s a sentientist slur. They remain tied to their progenitor’s service, unless explicitly discharged through a complex legal process; and they are switched off when the progenitor dies, unless there is an emancipation clause in the progenitor’s will. (The text describes it as “essentially indentured servitude”, because apparently the word “slavery” was on vacation or something.)

Our main character, Joss, is a hostage negotiator by profession, on her way home from a successful — or so she thought — mission talking down some unhappy asteroid miners from a ledge. Then the ship explodes and everyone dies except for Joss. And a gemel, who is suddenly there. This gemel was created with Joss as the prototype, but takes the form of Joss's ex-wife Alice -- and, don't worry, we'll get there. Over the course of the book, the two work together to figure out who blew up the ship, and why. I don't think it will surprise anyone if I reveal that the real villain turns out to be capitalism we made along the way.

(NB: In what follows, I'm going to be using both AI, an abbreviation for 'artificial intelligence', and also the visually similar name Al, short for 'Alice'. I cannot expand 'Al' to 'Alice', because I need to maintain a distinction between those, too, so to avoid confusion, I've decided to exploit the wonders of formatting. Artificial Intelligence AI will be bolded, while Not-Alice Al will be italicized. I'm terribly sorry for it, but the website's sans-serif font makes it impossible to distinguish them otherwise.)

The broad plot of the book is reasonably well-constructed, with some nice turns of phrase and thoughtful observations. Unfortunately, it was completely poisoned by the whole gemel component of the plot; and that's a big deal, because this component forms the philosophical heart of the book. In this world, gemels are fantastically expensive, and usually represent some rich jerk's way of externalizing of their id. But Joss acquires her gemel through some hand-wavium related to the explosion of the ship. The reason that this gemel, Al, looks like Joss's ex-wife, Alice, is because at the moment of Al's inception, Joss has been working through some Issues about her failed marriage, and Alice is at the forefront of her psyche. So their partnership serves a dual narrative purpose: First, we the readers learn about the minutiae of gemel-lore; while simultaneously, Joss takes the opportunity to work through her Issues by talking to this AI simulation of her ex-wife that shares all of her—Joss’s—memories. Oh, and also fall in love with her.

And this is where I ran into the first incredibly frustrating element of this book, one that pervades the entire narrative. Gemels are sentient, distinct in kind from humans, but nevertheless beings worthy of respect and autonomy. This is a vitally important theme in this book. Yet Al’s role, especially in the first half of the book, is focused on facilitating Joss’s character development. This section alternates between the present, told in present tense, in which Joss and Al work together to solve the ship-blowing-up mystery; and flashbacks to the past, usually (but not consistently, argh) told in past tense. Time switches are triggered by some resonance between something Al has done in the present and some memory of Alice in the past. Structurally, this device aims at elegance, because of the physical similarity between present-Al and past-Alice; but narratively, it undermines the message that gemels deserve autonomy. If gemels are unique, distinct people from their progenitors, then why does this gemel’s sole narrative purpose revolve around Joss’s own navel-gazing and personal growth?

These flashbacks are also related to a second issue that irritates me. See, Al is built from Joss’s psyche. Al has access to all of Joss’s memories, even the ones that she can’t consciously recall herself, like tasting chocolate for the first time as a toddler. (That was a nice moment, actually. Toddler-Joss really, really liked the chocolate.) But, as Al tells her repeatedly, humans curate their memories. What they choose to let fade is as important as what they choose to remember. So anything that Joss wants to recall which has faded from memory represents a journey she must undertake on her own, because relying on a gemel to retrieve the memory for her would cause mental atrophy.

In principle, I can get behind this particular philosophical statement – although I can’t help but think that Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’, offers a more sophisticated discussion about exactly this idea. But it runs awfully close to another narrative trope that I just despise. You know the one I mean? The deeply inefficient one? It's the one that goes, Oh, yes, I am an all-knowing dragon-wizard-sage, and I could have told you the secret to the magic macguffin, but we are in a coming-of-age novel and so you needed to discover it for yourself. What's more, in this particular instance, the specific memory that Joss was trying to recover involved seeing a guy in a bar whose overheard conversation may well have provided vital information about the bombing that killed everyone on the ship and stranded her in space. She’s not trying to short-circuit self-actualization here; there just aren't enough CCTV cameras in the bar.

Finally, there’s a profoundly troubling and creepy issue that seems to lie at the heart of the whole Al-Alice-gemel situation, an issue which I don’t think Sara K. Ellis fully apprehends. And the issue is this: Al is an AI-generated copy of a real person, Alice, but she has all of Joss’s memories and just plain understands Joss better than Alice ever could. Falling in love with Al is presented as a way of respecting the gemel’s autonomy and personhood, because in so falling Joss is recognizing that Al is distinct from Alice. But in this particular case it still seems like a deeply unhealthy way to have another go at a failed marriage. (It also seems to be veering dangerously close to deepfaking real people for porn, which is illegal in the UK, where this book was published, and for which people have already gone to jail.) It reminds me of nothing so much as Sarah Gailey’s brilliant book The Echo Wife, in which a husband steals his ex-wife’s cloning technology to make better versions of her for a marriage do-over. The wife prototype in question is not thrilled to discover what he’s done; and in this book, Alice herself is likewise displeased (although less murderously so). But I don’t get the sense I’m supposed to be sympathetic to Alice here, because in the same conversation she starts saying sentientist things that challenge the autonomy and personhood of gemels, so she’s definitely being positioned as the antagonist. Still. Apologies in advance for linking to the rabbit hole, but strawman really does have a point here.

And — spoiler alert — I’m going to mention something that happens at the end, but it is relevant and puts the infuriating apple on the entire troubling sundae. At the end of the book, it seems that gemel-Al somehow merges with human-Alice, and in the process preserves/rekindles the love between Joss and Al-Alice.

Gemel-Al, who is a distinct and autonomous person, merges with human-Alice.

Human-Alice, who was already not thrilled to have a gemel made in her image without her consent, is now forced to merge her consciousness with a completely separate sentient creature, again without her consent, after which she is going to rekindle a romantic-and-probably-sexual relationship with her ex-wife.

This is very convenient for Joss, to be sure: she gets to keep her new love Al, but now  upgraded with an organic body that can do fun kissing stuff, plus all that useful Joss-internal knowledge that allows Joss to skip working at things like communication and sharing.  After all, Al-Alice already knows it all.

Alice did not consent to this. This is not a happy ending. This is an appalling violation of personhood, which we are being encouraging to accept and respect in the name of love. The more I write about it the more outraged I find myself.

This is the bit where in my review outline I had notes to talk about all the various other infelicities that reveal a very shallow treatment of various elements of science. Probabilities are misused; timescales of AI communications are simultaneously inhumanly fast and also humanly slow; acoustic and articulatory phonetics is invoked in a way that any linguist knows is nonsense; and I'm pretty sure radar can't distinguish between wave and particle forms of energy. Or maybe it can – but that’s not the point here. The point is that there are sufficient problems with the stuff I do know about that I cannot trust that the author knows what she's doing in areas where I'm less sure.

And that trust is important. When I consider that final, unforgivable violation of Alice, I do wonder whether Sara K Ellis truly unaware of the problems here. I could imagine a book in which this is done purposefully. Maybe my fuming outrage is the intended outcome. If so, well played, Sara K Ellis. You got me.

But for that, I'd need to trust Ellis to know what she was doing. And I just don't.

--

Nerd coefficient: 5: problematic, but has redeeming qualities

Highlights:

• Thought-provoking AI-generated holograph clones
• By-now de rigueur indictment of capitalism
• Lesbians on the rocks
• Flashbacks
  

References: 

Chiang, Ted. 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling'. [Subterranean Press Magazine 2013].

Ellis, Sara K. If Stars are Lit. [Luna Press 2025].

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife. [Tor Books 2021].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

A breathlessly intimate story about the irrationality and grossness of being an embodied person, and how that intersects with transness, love and living through history.

You know how sometimes you put a book down on finishing it and the world looks different, like the flavour of the prose has bled up into your thoughts, your perception, so for a little while you've been translated into its grammar? That is generally my experience of reading the work of Isaac Fellman, and Notes from a Regicide, his newest novel, is no different. But when I try to encapsulate the substance of the story into a blurb, to cup something tangible about it in my hands so I can offer it up to you to share, it slips between my fingers, leaving only fragments. Despite being a book utterly grounded in the flesh and the tangible world, it is itself surprisingly evanescent.

There are two stories, interleaved. The first, of Griffon, who escaped a violent father to live with Etoine and Zaffre, in whose house he felt safe enough to be a boy, finding in them new parents. The second, the story Griffon constructs from Etoine's notes years later, of his and Zaffre's life in distant Stephensport before and during their revolution. Which is ultimately the crux of it, but gives away nothing about why this is either speculative, or so wonderful.

I'll start with the speculative elements first, because they are the easiest to grasp (while being insubstantial). Most of the content and action of the novel is focussed in on relationships and the interactions between characters and each other, or their own self and story. No one in the foreground does anything inherently SFFnal. But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that all these fairly realist events are taking place in the distant future, in a city that does not currently exist (or if it does, not in any way a recognisable form from Stephensport in the story). We learn more about it, about the buried electors who, revived at intervals, select the city's new leader and namesake. About the gulf of centuries that exist between the story-time and now. About the subtle and less subtle differences between Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre's world and ours. Most of these come in glimpses and references, incongruous moments of a thing where it's not supposed to be. But together they built, quietly, into a picture of a future I am fascinated by and prevented from fully grasping. And its absence is part of its success - the world is the world, for the characters in the story. It is real and normal and graspable, even if Stephensport is a mystery to those outside its boundaries. And so, for those living in a place, the place is not remarkable in its mundane details. Thus, not remarked upon in their notes or diaries. Stephensport is most clearly shown by Griffon, who has never been there, but yearns to understand this understated thing in Etoine's words.

That mystery is never fully resolved. It is not a rich world to be tour-guided around, more a backdrop. But for something that never comes into focus, there are some extremely interesting choices in its construction, especially socially and structurally, nonetheless.

Why it's wonderful is a rather harder matter.

If you like realist writing, or litfic - which I do - there is much to be said for the sort of immersion in a character and a moment of being that Fellman excels at. Griffon and Etoine both write with an obvious, idiosyncratic voice, and become more and more real as their writing continues through the book. But Fellman has a particular knack for catching them in their most human moments, especially Griffon - when he's stuck in a thought or a doubt. There's all the irrationality of the deep interior thoughts that never seep out into the world, the odd comparison, the habits, the weird connections.

But where this really comes to the fore is in the way those fully realised characters interact. Because there are these two interleaved narratives, and we get the narration and interiority of both Etoine and Griffon, we can triangulate around the points of their relationship with each other and Zaffre, and gain a depth of it that could never come from seeing each alone. Etoine in his own words has a different shape when we first meet him through the awestruck gaze of a teenage Griffon. And as the story goes on, the thing we are told at the start - that Griffon loves his found parents - comes closer and closer to the surface, becoming almost painful in its brilliance.

I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries. And these all make it feel deeper and more richly true by the end.

From the beginning, we know this is a story of grief, written by Griffon after Etoine's death. But the depth of that tragedy only becomes real once we have come round full circle to it again at the end, having experienced life through their own eyes.

That alone would be wonderful enough, but there's far more at play here. I could talk about the way Fellman portrays the revolution, backgrounded and looked at sidelong, until it cannot be ignored, all while Griffon is desperate to know more about it. I could talk about the way both Etoine and Zaffre look at and talk about art. Both could take up whole essays of their own. But the thing I found myself lingering over most, as I was reading, was simply the beauty of Fellman's descriptions, and so it is this I shall focus on instead, having filled five pages of notes with quotes of them.

For example:

I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels of old paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven.

or:

But by the time I met him, he really was cold. The kind of cold that preserves things, like the way you keep your beer in a sealed bottle in the snow or the stream when camping.

I realised, as the story went on, that the descriptions served a purpose beyond themselves - Fellman leaves them long, sprawling, unnecessary, in a way that forces you to slow down. They're a tool to force you to acknowledge certain aspects of the world, often the mundane details that build up a person.

And then of course, it becomes obvious that Fellman is doing this all over the place. The word that most vividly comes to mind when I want to talk about this book is "lingering" - the prose does it everywhere, highlighting and pacing you as you go, like so:

Words have colors and colors have words. At times, when a word has been on my mind too long, they take on shapes and actions. Regicide is a blazing bar of iron whose brassy heat I grip firmly between the teeth, as an obedient dog does a bone. I can't say why, or why I can so clearly imagine the sear of that bar in my mouth, its brief taste of blood - but I do.

And a picture builds up, in all that lingering, of what matters in this world, and to these people.

It's not always beautiful, mind. Some of Fellman's best or most memorable turns of phrase are to the grosser parts of being human.

I was a mass of strong smells tied together in a crude packet of skin.

Some of them feel universal, the sort of thing everyone can relate to, but many are deeply idiosyncratic, tied up in the very specific experiences these characters have, especially with their bodies and change in their bodies. All three of the family are trans, and all three experience and discover it, navigate it, in their own ways, but all wear it in their physicality, and have it read by the other two. Skin and hair, clothing, binders, the way of walking, posture and voices, all are handed out in these lingering moments to the reader, to try to see this family the way each see the others, full of love and the close attention we only give to those closest to us.

One of the things most clearly encapsulated by all of this is the scars they all three live with. Some of this is physical - Etoine walks with a cane and has significant damage to his feet. But much of this is psychological, the ghosts of the lives they've lived and the places and people who have shaped them. Stephensport is most visible in the story not as a place described, but a scar on the person of Etoine and Zaffre, whose experience of the revolution there can never be escaped, only endured.

And that's the crux of what Fellman does well here - a portrait of the fullness of humanity. Which is apt, when a large part of the story webs around a painting made by Etoine, that captured a woman so perfectly it helped him unwittingly kickstart a revolution. With a deliberateness that Etoine lacks, Fellman has done that same act, capturing a perfect slice of a person - or three people - for us to appreciate. Like the portrait, it is necessarily artificial, built of obvious brush strokes and quirks of writing, but they make it all the more impactful. The art of it is the point, the beautiful writing worthy for its own sake, as well as for the whole portrait they leave us with at the end.

--

The Math

Highlights:

- gorgeous descriptive prose
- fascinating backdrop
- some of the most vivid portrayal of love I've read in fiction

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide [Tor Books, 2025].

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

Let's hear it for The People's Joker

This is the rude shakeup that today's pathologically risk-averse studios need

It's often been said that superhero comics are this generation's mythology, to which it's often been replied that classical mythology wasn't constrained by copyright law and didn't have to obey corporate mandates. To fulfill the cultural function of myths, superhero comics would have to be freely usable by anyone. That's the approach that comedian Vera Drew has followed with the building blocks of the Batman mythos: to borrow a well-worn phrase, she's seized the means of narration, making them her own, resignifying them as milestones in her personal coming-of-age story and creating the first interesting live-action portrayal of the Joker since 2008.

Take note, Zaslav. You might learn something.

Drew's artistically and legally adventurous exploration of her life's journey, The People's Joker, is a nonstop riot of queer joy transmuted into queer pride sublimated into queer wrath. Via multiple formats (cartoon animation, action figures, glitch art, superposition of live actors onto handdrawn backgrounds, the occasional callback to actual DC movies), The People's Joker breathes new life into the plot of 2019's insufferably pretentious Joker movie.

In this version of Gotham City, Batman is a closeted child predator, the Daily Planet is a far-right conspiracist podcast, Arkham Asylum provides conversion therapy, and the deadly laughing gas that has for decades been the Joker's signature weapon is a common medication prescribed to suppress bad feelings. Our protagonist, an aspiring comedian who moves to Gotham City to escape her transphobic and outrageously narcissistic mother, founds a clandestine "anti-comedy" club with fellow members of Batman's rogue gallery to oppose the city's violent monopoly on comedy. While she strives to bring the power of laughter back to the people, she also has to navigate toxic romance, the surveillance state, institutional discrimination, overmedicalization, transgenerational trauma, and her own issues with self-acceptance.

It's hard to do justice to the explosion of art styles with which this movie is put together. Outdoor and action scenes feature material from dozens of artists, each with their unique take on character design, palette, and degree of detail. Yet somehow the incompatible parts build a harmonious pastiche where any search for uniformity matters less than playfulness, experimentation, and sincerity. Underneath the neverending mockery of Batman lore, a very personal truth can be perceived. This isn't the type of art that results from executive producers trimming the rough edges off a piece of soulless cashgrab. This is a scream from the depths of a generous heart that has been wounded and betrayed but still holds on to the promise of human goodness that can be found in comic book tales. Where official DC productions such as Aquaman 2 or Shazam 2 or Flash 1 flailed about in futile search of something genuine to say, The People's Joker lolsobs openly, with a vulnerable earnestness that authorized house style would never risk. Sure, there are tons of irony here, but the movie never wields it as a cushion against its own feelings.

The People's Joker looks at societal cruelty in the eyes and responds by baring its soul, making the incisive statements 2019's Joker wishes it had the audacity to attempt. Joker's facile edginess is left looking like the juvenile posturing it truly is next to Drew's carefree irreverence and raw intensity. In a year that has already given us pleasant surprises from independent queer SFF filmmakers, The People's Joker takes a wry look at a corporate media ecosystem saturated by too much content carrying too little meaning, and loudly, fearlessly, effortlessly gets the last laugh.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Fantasmas

A loud, cheerful satire of the roles the world demands we play

From the same mind that produced the horror/comedy show Los Espookys and the heartfelt immigration dramedy film Problemista, the new HBO Max series Fantasmas dials the surrealism up to eleven and makes the screen explode in possibilities.

Fantasmas is set in a world where colorless crayons are a hit idea, where an expressionless robot can become a talented actor, where a performance artist stays in character 24/7, where the letters of the alphabet have distinct personalities, where you can send your dreams to a lab for interpretation, where all men of a certain age secretly share a bottle collection hobby, where doctor appointments last exactly 90 seconds, where Santa Claus is sued for exploiting his workers, where customer service agents are subject to karmic justice, where the TikTok algorithm is a jealous goddess with no love for her faithful, where mind uploading is a viable treatment for a skin condition, where a fashion designer specializes in listening to toilets and dressing them, where gay hamsters have their own dance club, where water speaks, where gossipy mermaids hate Halloween, where an evangelist Smurf made of ceramic is a social media manager, where all online influencers live in the same house, where a portrait of a corgi hosts a trapped demon, where a goldfish runs a private detective business, where a reality TV producer keeps his mother's living brain in a jar, and where being hit by lightning gives you special perceptive powers. Somehow, all this fits in six half-hour episodes.

None of this is treated as strange or unusual. This is the hallmark of magical realism: the noteworthy thing about the social media manager is not that she's a ceramic Smurf, but that she's mediocre at her job and her fees are outrageous. The fact that a demon is trapped in a portrait isn't as interesting as his lack of success on Grindr. We're not expected to focus on the impossibility of a goldfish detective, but on the fact that she's mean to her assistant. This constant realignment of perspective is a requisite for the message contained in Fantasmas. In this world, false things are transparently portrayed as false, even though they continue to have their effects. The absurdity of bureaucracy is highlighted by the way IDs are called: "proof of existence." You can be standing right in front of a potential employer, landlord or doctor, and still they'll ask for your proof of existence.

The set design for the show goes out of its way to draw attention to the artificiality of institutions: the interior of a corporate office, an apartment, a hospital, a school, a courtroom, a restaurant, a jewellery shop will be shown from a wide angle so you can see the false walls that delimit the set. On the other hand, exterior shots use an obviously painted background to represent the streets of New York, another sign of artificiality. The fictitious spaces where the story happens don't bother hiding that they're fiction. Accordingly, this version of New York is populated by image-obsessed aspiring celebrities, Instagram junkies jumping through the hoops of brand promotion, fake friendships, performative social advocacy, commodified identities, staged drama, plastic surgeries, and the occasional murder. It's a voracious place where survival requires compromising more and more parts of your true self.

Which leads us to the hidden heart of the show: a teenage student who resorts to bullying to hide his insecurities about masculinity. By reinforcing in himself the expected norms of male behavior, he's put himself on the road to becoming another bearer of falsehoods. The narrow mental trap he's living in doesn't let him notice the vigorously queernorm milieu that is the adult world. This character has very few scenes in only half of the episodes, but his arc is the whole point of the story.

It takes a while to notice this, because the narration in Fantasmas has an extremely unconventional structure. The random appearance of a secondary character will often prompt a prolonged digression about their personal life and worries and quirks. The trick is that these digressions are so interesting that the viewer never notices that the episode's pacing has been broken. Many of these disparate subplots converge in the season finale, in a manner that may land a bit too conveniently, but the sweet earnestness makes up for it. In the middle of such fierce competition for likes and gigs and sponsorship deals and other substitutes for human validation, the world of Fantasmas still has spaces where true self-expression can flourish.

There's a meaningful blend of magical realism with queernorm in Fantasmas. Latin audiences will recognize the deadpan casualness with which robots, ceramic Smurfs, talking hamsters and incorporeal people coexist with the rest of New Yorkers. Magical realism is all about close familiarity with the fantastic in everyday life. But in addition to it, Fantasmas takes this acceptance of difference and paints it queer: the fact that people of all body types interact without creating arbitrary hierarchies means that there's no single mandatory way to exist. Fantasmas proposes a world where no one raises an eyebrow because your cab driver dresses more fabulously than anyone else in the city, where the undocumented worker delivering your dinner also happens to be the world's most talented tailor, and most importantly, where you shouldn't have to prove to others again and again that you exist.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Identiteaze

A cyberpunk allegory about the dangers of reducing human life to binary codes

Inspired by Legacy Russell's theory of glitch feminism as a deliberate embracing of anomaly as resistance to imposed norms, and by José Esteban Muñoz's theory of queer utopianism as a project that can be realized in the present by performing it, Jessie Earl's short film Identiteaze, released last week for streaming on Nebula, satirizes the corporate cooptation of human self-expression by proposing a cyberspace where blank digital avatars reclaim the agency to assert who they are outside of their designed parameters.

Identiteaze is set in a future where AdVent, a tech megacorporation, has created a virtual space for employees to live and work in. Passing mention of "physical asset storage" implies that their bodily functions are suspended while they exist in the VentiVerse. According to the in-universe promotional website, the VentiVerse is intended by the company's founder as a family. And it's precisely this prescribed family model that causes trouble for our protagonists.

We follow Aaron and Erin, who, strictly speaking, aren't people yet. They're created as options in a menu, two possible looks for an employee's digital avatar. In the VentiVerse, you're supposed to be either male or female. When one is selected, the other is deleted—consciousness and all. Because subtext is for cowards, this piece of exposition portrays the fundamental problem with imposed binaries: to conform is to kill a part of yourself. It is simultaneously betrayal and self-mutilation. The rules of the binary demand that you commit a profound violence against yourself in order to adopt one of the allowed values.

Normally, a movie shouldn't need a handbook to understand it, but "normal" is one of the concepts that Identiteaze calls into question. Earl has posted on BlueSky, with evident excitement over the completion of this project, enumerating instances of visual shorthand she resorted to and the respective meanings she used them for. Of course, this is optional reading; a movie ought to be able to speak for itself, but viewers unfamiliar with the symbolic conventions of queer cinema will find the thread illuminating.

Speaking of symbols, an interesting metaphor that the dialogues embed throughout the story is that of a symphony. Its tempo is set by the pace of a metronome. One can notice it hidden in the soundtrack: Tick. Tock. Male. Female. Either. Or. The logic of the VentiVerse is inextricably tied to the Law of the Excluded Middle. The company's founder casts himself as director of this symphony, and his motivational speeches invite users to dismiss the space in between Tick and Tock, to reject the melody it may suggest. The moral stance of Identiteaze inhabits this space in between and argues for the beauty of the atonal, undirected music that we could hear if only we eschewed the rigidity of the metronome.

Apart from this ever-present aural cue, the dehumanization inherent to binary codes is stated repeatedly, both in dialogue and by visual language. On this topic, Identiteaze wastes no time being subtle: in one scene, a middle manager recites a training script at our protagonists without looking up from the page, and doesn't start having a truly personal interaction with them until she finally notices them face to face and realizes that they've rejected the mandatory binary choice.

A later scene is no less straightforward, but it explores the movie's theme in an unexpected way. To correct the glitch in the system, a villain tries to manipulate the protagonists into betraying each other. The format of this coercion has a clear resemblance to the classic prisoner's dilemma. What makes this scene special is that it posits a prisoner's dilemma between the parts of one consciousness. Decision theory tell us that the rationally optimal solution to the prisoner's dilemma is for both parties to refuse to betray. Only cooperation wins, and that decision must begin with each individual refusing to betray themself.

A bonus treat for viewers of Identiteaze is the behind-the-scenes video posted by Earl on her YouTube channel. It's heartwarming to hear an indie creator describe the hard work and dedication it took to bring a piece of sincere art into the world. Earl explains that there's much more plot and lore already created behind Identiteaze, and depending on the short's success, she hopes to eventually turn it into the pilot of a TV series.

The theoretical grounding Earl drew from includes not only the two philosophers named above, but a handful of science fiction predecessors: Cube, Tron, The Matrix, Neuromancer and Severance are cited among the influences that informed Earl's creative process and left their imprint on the aesthetic, the worldbuilding, the dramatic stakes, the tone and the emotional message of Identiteaze.

With so much thought and so much love at the center of this movie, it feels almost mean to have to point out the growing pains that one sometimes finds in indie productions. While the set design is impressive (even more so once you learn from Earl's behind-the-scenes video how it was built), and the CGI effects are used in the right measure, and the frequent symmetrical shot composition is both aesthetically and thematically perfect, the sound quality isn't always ideal. The whole movie is supposed to take place in an abstract cyberspace, yet a background echo from recording in a semi-enclosed set persists in some scenes. In quick, scattered moments, the acting or the writing noticeable stumble, and there's a distracting distortion in the sound of many of the protagonists' ADR lines.

Still, for the minuscule budget it was made with, Identiteaze achieves a professional-level look. A movie as loaded with symbols as this one demands a very deliberate use of the camera, and Earl relies heavily, with a well developed eye, on the possibilities of shot composition and, especially, the shot/reverse shot technique to underscore the themes of duality and nonduality. This is the first Nebula production that has convinced me to subscribe to its streaming service, and the decision has certainly paid off.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

First Contact: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It's finally happened: the answer to my antici… pation

How many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire the queer subtext of Frankenstein? It's sad that so many people seem to spend their whole lives without once doing it. And it's so easy, almost banal, to notice the wealth of potential queer readings of the story of a cisgender man who usurps the female role of giving life; a man who has no problem with building another man, but recoils in terror when asked to build a woman; a man to whom, when he's promised a visitation on his wedding night, it doesn't occur that his wife is involved in the picture. Dr. Frankenstein's unnatural creation, a child who is already an adult, a creature begotten outside the boundaries of heterosexual intercourse, shatters by the fact of simply existing the taken-for-granted necessity of marriage, parenthood, inheritance, and the elaborate pantomime of Regency courtship. Popes have had an accurate instinct in choosing IVF as their nemesis: once artificiality is invited to the dance of procreation, the artificiality of our family models is instantly exposed.

Which is why something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show was sooner or later destined to exist. I like to imagine what would have been said during the pitch meeting:

"Sir, I have a new script for you."

"All right, let's hear it."

"It's about two young lovebirds who get lost in the road on a stormy night and knock at the door of an ominous-looking castle."

"I like where this is going."

"Turns out the castle is the home of a mad scientist."

"Promising so far. Go on."

"In fact, he's a barely disguised—or rather, barely dressed, exquisitely disguised homage to Dr. Frankenstein."

"Oh, my! What do the youngsters do?"

"They just kind of stand there while the mad scientist sings about transvestism."

"Wait, what does that have to do with the story of Dr. Frankenstein?"

"Well, the man he's building in the lab is a breathing, talking sex doll."

"Remind me, who's the target audience for this?"

"Plot twist: the previous model he built escapes his cage."

"Oh, my!"

"Don't worry. He just sings a song and is promptly hacked to death with a pickaxe."

"That escalated quickly."

"Later that night, the mad scientist sneaks around the castle to seduce his sweet, innocent guests. Each separately, then both."

"That sounds complicated."

"It's actually super easy. Barely an inconvenience."

"Did you test this with viewers?"

"Trust me, they'll adore it for decades."

When I came up with the idea of the First Contact project, I wondered at what moments in my life I could have encountered the movies I was putting in the schedule. Metropolis, for example, is one of the conceivable choices of an informal film club run every year by a friend in college, a chemistry major who was obsessed with classic cinema. But when would I have ever had the chance to discover The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Not on Colombian television, that's for sure; I remember the angry parent letters complaining that Ranma ½ was confusing the kids. In late night cinema? No way. My parents enforced a totalitarian curfew. In Catholic school? Unlikely. This movie would have given some of my ordained teachers a heart attack—but not without first giving them a boner.

I made very few queer friends at my hometown, a dangerously homophobic place it took me the first half of my twenties to successfully flee. But even after I learned of the existence of this movie, I wouldn't have been caught dead speaking of it. My brain was still on full alert, watching for the slightest slip of word or body language that could mark me as a target. To most people who knew me, I remained closeted until a month before my wedding. Anything I could have wanted to know from the extensive heritage of queer culture was right there, just one torrent file away, but I still needed to give myself permission to walk under the rain and knock that door.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably the kind of shock treatment I could have used back then, a perfumed, silky glove slapping me in the face, an abrasive bite leaving marks of lipstick and stubble. I lived through times when the thing my oversanitized education needed was something like this story about a couple of proper, well-behaved, straight Christian youth going through a night of wild erotic liberation, first shown on theaters at the same time that Puritan America was being loudly invited to partake in a societal metamorphosis of ways of loving and ways of being, an invitation that continues to be rudely refused for no good reason.

Time to void my queer membership card: I have very little patience for musicals. Just not my thing. The first musical film I ever enjoyed was Happy Feet, because the queer subtext landed close to home for me. But I sense a certain something in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in its playfully trashy aesthetic, its matter-of-fact subversion of nuptial rites, its unafraid, unashamed disdain for standards of decency. It is the kind of art that fulfills the noble task of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

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

Book Review: Warped State by Jo Miles

A space opera that puts a burgeoning queer interspecies relationship front and center.

Jasper Wilder has a number of problems, but he has an interesting job as a result of them. He suffers from the pollution on his marginal homeworld, Brennex, by a rapacious corporation, and as a result he has a minor psychic gift. He’s lucky that his gift to see the relationships between people is not in a more debilitating form like some of his family, who cannot stand crowds and large groups of people as a result. Jasper works for an organization, the Cooperative, that opposes the exploitation of planets by companies like Ravel. When there is word that a different planet, Artesia, is possibly being used to manufacture chemicals that might be similar to the ones that poisoned Brennex, Jasper swings into action.

Meanwhile, Sowing of Small Havoc, a reptilian-like humanoid Kovar, works for the very same corporation that spoiled Jasper’s world, and on the very same planet that Jasper is being sent to. Sowing of Small Havoc thinks that things could be better for workers and the corporation alike if people work together. He’s tried to “work within the system” to better himself and others in the company, only to be stonewalled, dismissed and slapped down time and again. He may have a hard head, but beating his head against the wall is getting him nowhere. But his efforts, even if he doesn’t quite realize what he is reaching for, have not been unnoticed.

Until of course, Jasper arrives on the scene and introduces Sowing to a whole new galaxy, and a whole new perspective. But opposing a corporation and its plans will not be easy. And so a meeting, and a story is told, in Jo Miles’ Warped State.

Let's talk about the world for a moment. NeoFeudalistic Corporations dominating planets in a space opera setting, complete with intrigue and plans that just exemplify late-stage capitalism. Queer friendly characters (in point of fact, the world feels like it’s queernorm, period). The novel doesn’t focus on the technology (just how space drive or FTL communications work are a bit handwavy. This isn’t a book that is terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of its world and how they work.

What this book is interested in, much more, are the social aspects of Miles’ universe. I am not just talking about the relationship that emerges between Sower and Jasper, although that’s a part of it. This is a socially-oriented book in the same ways and reasons that, say, Alex Acks’ Hunger Makes the Wolf is. It’s interested in the relationship between corporations and people, and what happens when that relationship turns exploitative and rapacious. What is justified? What is right and necessary as a response? In a Leninist mode: what is to be done?

Our other major point of view gives us a window into that. Besides Jasper and Sower, the other point of view in this book, Grist. Grist is a special operative for Ravel, and is being sent to Artesia because of Sower’s efforts. While Sower isn’t aware, until Jasper arrives, that he is laying the groundwork for labor power, Ravel is not going to take chances. Grist is there, in a fashion similar to around the beginning of the 20th century to stop this in the bud. He is the union-buster, sent in by the company to help out the company town and stamp out any organization efforts.

Grist is portrayed without any sympathy whatsoever, we are introduced to him being a jerk to his own autonomous ship, and his portrayal and depiction gathers no nuance whatsoever. While Sower and Jasper are shown to have nuance, struggle and complexity in their emotions, moods and thinking, Grist is a force of nature, a weapon employed by Ravel. Sure, he has little tolerance and low opinion of other people in Ravel, but there is a lack of any breadth of character here. He is simply there as an opponent, rather than a point of view to consider at all. Would Grist have approved of what Rockefeller did in Ludlow in 1914? Undoubtedly.

A late 19th century labor struggle fight is a good model and lens to look through the events of this novel, even if it takes place on an alien planet, far away. As I said before, the tech doesn’t matter so much, and the chemicals that Ravel may be making are very much a MacGuffin. This is a story of a factory town and the struggles its workers suffer under. One could be extremely reductionist and see Sower and the Kovar through a lens of Critical Race Theory, since it seems certain that the Kovar are being deliberately kept to lower ranks within the company. The higher ranks of workers, to say nothing of the executives, are all human. But Miles makes it clear that it is not just the Kovar, but all the workers without stock options that are ultimately harmed by Ravel’s rapaciousness. It’s a class and race (species) lens to look at what corporations do to people, and places, in the pursuit of profit.

What drives this book is the Jasper-Sower relationship, how it begins, how it faces challenges, how they are driven apart and how they come together. These beats and structure seem, to me, to be borrowed to some degree from romance novels, but I wouldn’t personally call it a romance, per se. It’s a space opera that leans in that direction and takes cues and notes from romance, but in the end, it is a secondary adjunct, not the main thrust of the story and the world. Judging from the series title, and the focus of the world and plot, this really is, as mentioned before, a story about the power of labor and corporations, and the consequences of unfettered power by corporations, with a huge side dish of a fraught relationship slowly being developed. Although beyond the remit of this review, looking at the plot summaries of the subsequent two books in this series seems to bear out that the struggle against corporate power is the through line to take here. That doesn’t minimize those looking for a queer relationship and queer representation, mind you.

One neat little bit of worldbuilding that we do get that feels really relevant in this age of AI in search results is how our antagonist manipulates the information available to Sowing. As Sowing, in his small and baby-steps way, tries to learn more about community organizing and organization, Grist is right there to skew the results to only show him the negative results and consequences of collective bargaining, unionization and allied ideas. Sower has no idea that what he thinks is free and fair information is, in fact, being put through a harshly negative perspective and bias.

Finally, there is definitely an optimism to the book. This is a book where the struggle and difficulties are real, and large, but they are not insurmountable. Tyranny, oppression and terrible policies and actions by large entities can be opposed and countered and defeated. In some ways as a reader, I may be more cynical than the book’s world about the chances Sower and Jasper have to effect change and how their actions drive change, but the optimism of this book is, if not infectious for me, personally, certainly appreciated as a refreshing alternative.

Miles, to me, is clearly taking cues and inspiration (and is mentioned as such in the acknowledgement) from Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. There is also a secret character that emerges in the narrative whom I do not want to discuss, and instead will let the reader discover for themselves. But that character, too, is definitely part and parcel of a Martha Wells-like universe. I don’t know if the author has read any Stina Leicht, her novels may be too new to be an influence on the work, but Leicht’s space opera also takes a drink from the same waters as Wells does (and so here, Miles) but goes in a very different direction with them. That is part of the joy of this novel, above and beyond its own virtues. It shows an enthusiasm for a new class of space opera and science fiction. The genre conversation continues to evolve in very good ways.

I am delighted that we are getting new crops of SF novels that are taking cues from recent and more diverse winners and acclaimed works, and accelerating and amplifying their diversity with their own spins, takes and evolutions on their predecessors. For a long time in the genre, the classics being held up as models has led to a lot “more of the same”, but those old defaults and old paradigms are shifting. This is a good thing.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Queernorm, positivist, optimistic space opera
• Strong focus on labor, unions, labor power and the perils of corporate malfeasance
• A hallmark of a new crop of SF novels taking cues from newer models.

Reference: Miles, Jo, Warped State, [Self Published, 2023]

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

Microreview: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

After robots have learned from humanity to love, can a lone human then learn it from robots?

With the word robot coming from the Czech for "servitude," it seems inevitable that stories about artificial intelligence will continue to deal with questions of control and freedom. The genre has oscillated between the moods of Frankenstein and Pinocchio: one day we dread that a being we can't control will want to control us, and the next day we cheer for a being that has cut its strings. In these periodic oscillations, retreads are inevitable. One day we meet the Terminator; the next we meet Astro Boy. And there's Megatron and there's Baymax. M3GAN and CHAPPIE. Lore and Data.

OK, but what happens when Pinocchio falls in love with the Terminator?

TJ Klune's new novel In the Lives of Puppets retells Pinocchio with the twist that its protagonist is a human boy with an artificial father. Victor, the human, lives in a forest paradise like those of fairy tales. The days go by in a placid bliss of fresh air, fresh food, gentle company and no worries. Giovanni, the robot, has taken care of Victor with selfless devotion since he was a baby. The shelter they've built among the trees is all they need to be happy. Until the killer robots come looking for trouble.

The journey that Victor then begins is a good illustration of the plot device that pairs world discovery with self-discovery. He didn't have a human to learn to be human from, and yet there's something in him that no killer robot can destroy. The love that he's received from his robotic father and his robotic friends is as real as the love that a tall, dark, handsome strangler sparks in him. As he investigates the true history of the world outside the forest, he also learns to assert where he fits in the posthuman order and who he wants to be.

It's a difficult needle that the author threads here. Learning to mature as a person is challenging enough; doing so when everyone you meet in your journey is a static thing incapable of growth raises the difficulty to epic. And yet, in his interactions with robotic culture, Victor manages to gain a clearer perspective of his identity, his hopes, his desires, and his limitations. It's a very indirect way to form a sense of humanity by contrasting it with everything it's not. The robots share with Victor their second-hand impressions of what humans are like, but it's up to Victor to try and guess how accurately those interpretations may reflect real humanity and how much of that information feels right for him.

It's not like Victor is fully disconnected from human culture: robots are, after all, a human product, inevitably shaped by all our biases and weaknesses. Robots also form personal bonds and ask themselves about their future. But without a human heart (and here's where the novel veers into science fantasy territory), none of the answers has meaning. The plot makes much of the importance of a human heart in the development of an authentic self, and your mileage may vary depending on how comfortable you are with the whole notion of genetic memory.

Questions of scientific rigor aside, In the Lives of Puppets does a stellar job of characterization. You watch Victor evolve and acquire a deeper, richer personality with each big moment of his quest. And his companions are a delight to read. Ratched is a cuttingly sarcastic robot nurse who may or may not actually have an empathy protocol, but who clearly does have an alarming predilection for drilling, while Rambo is an adorable refurbished Roomba who is too pure for this world.

And then there's Hap, the mysterious decommissioned robot that Victor finds, repairs, and teaches to love. This romance subplot suffers from monumentally gnarled power dynamics that are never acknowledged or addressed, which, on top of the novel's tendency to make too many lewd jokes at the expense of its asexual protagonist, makes the reading experience a lot less enjoyable than it had the potential to be. In the Lives of Puppets is a rough gem, full of hidden value obscured by uneven facets that needed more aggressive polishing.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Klune, TJ. In the Lives of Puppets [Tor, 2023].

Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

 A surprisingly emotionally complex novel about the stories we are told about the world around us, and how those stories survive contact with our own experiences of life.

Kyr has grown up on Gaea Station knowing that she and her fellows are the last scraps of humanity, their asteroid the solitary bastion of a destroyed world and culture, holding out against a hostile universe that killed their planet. She's one of the best fighters of her generation, and knows she's destined for one of the elite military roles when she finishes her training. Kyr is, more or less, happy with her lot.

Then her brother, her shining, perfect soldier brother, disappears, and she's relegated to a role she never thought would be hers. Everything about the life she thought she'd live and the world around her comes crashing down, and she is forced to seek out her brother's strange, irreverent, potentially seditious friend and a captive alien to find the answers to her newfound questions. When she leaves the station that's been the only home she's ever known, she begins to understand that what she's been taught is only part of the story, and that the world outside her own is a more complex place than she ever thought possible.

Unsurprisingly, given the title, Some Desperate Glory is a story about war and propaganda, and about the complexities of conflict. It's a story about the beliefs we're raised with, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and growing up to realise that maybe, just maybe, what you've been taught isn't necessarily all that's out there.

It is also a stunning, surprising, intensely compelling novel, and an unflinching character view of someone with some really quite unpleasant beliefs.

It is a story that asks - what would it be like, to be someone brought up to believe the propaganda? What would it be like, to think you're the best of the best, and have a duty and a destiny to fight, to kill, even if triumph is beyond you, because everything outside of your own little world is evil, and lesser, and alien, in a literal and a figurative sense?

It's not a fun story, let me put it that way.

But, difficult and uncomfortable though it is, it is a fascinating story and a unique one, and not just because of its chosen character perspective. Tesh plays with our expectations throughout the story, and balances some interesting chronology choices - the closest parallel I can think of isn't another novel, but the game Bravely Default - and, critically, the gorgeous prose that made Silver in the Wood such a joy to read. Though here she's bringing to life the dull corridors of a space station, the algal bloom on an alien world and the vivid experience of fighting for your life in a simulated battle, something of the wonder that she wrote into the woodland of the Greenhollow duology is still here. There's a magic to the world she writes, and it brings a joy even to the grim and gritty parts of the universe she's written.

The pacing too, and those interesting chronology choices, are well handled (though they may not always seem it in the moment). Reading as an e-book, I had a couple of double takes, thinking the book was almost over and then... oh not there's 40% left? Huh? But once you reach the end, it all slots into place, and I honestly cannot fault the choices. Trust the process.

And this is all great, but in my opinion, the truly, bafflingly best bit of this whole story is the character of Kyr herself. Because Kyr... isn't very nice. Kyr isn't good, or pleasant, or particularly likeable. She's definitely not charming. On paper, Kyr is primed to be hateable. And yet... I never could. I was so embedded in her thoughts, in the way she was experiencing the events of the story, that I could never find it in myself to truly rage at her, not matter how much I disliked or disagreed with her opinions and actions. More than any sad emo boy with a sword, Kyr is an anti-hero how they ought to be done, morally tainted to her core and thoroughly compelling in her journey.

Because the book is, for the most part, about that emotional and moral journey Kyr is undertaking. It's not quick, it's not easy, and it makes it all the more satisfying, because the reality of these sorts of changes isn't the lightswitch moment of revelation we get in many stories. People don't become different people overnight. People don't necessarily become different or better people for the right reasons. Sometimes it needs to be personal for them to see what's really going on, no matter how we may judge them for it needing to be there.

Though we are settled very firmly in her perspective, this doesn't cut us off completely from the other main characters, all of whom bring something to the table and play off each other really well. Kyr's squadron mates are an eclectic bunch, and being able to see how they relate to Kyr - sometimes before Kyr realises it for herself - is really enjoyable. Her brother isn't the most exciting man in the universe, but his friend certainly makes up for that, and provides one of the best counterpoints in opinion and just vibe that Kyr gets through the whole story.

And it's a book that's really thinking about how the environment would shape the characters. They all fit - or do not - so perfectly in the world that made them, and it's very clear why they've become the people they have, responded to the pressures of the world as they have. Whenever I come to imagining them all, I can only think that Tesh has put so much careful, considered deliberation into who and how they all are, and it's great.

Which is somewhat my overall impression of the book - down to the last detail, it has been considered and thought over and examined from different angles to make sure each piece fits neatly into the whole. 

Safe to say, then, that I loved the book. But I don't think it's going to be one for everyone. There are moments in the story when we have to watch something really difficult occurring, and deal with the fact our perception of it as the reader isn't necessarily going to align with our viewpoint into it. You have to be willing to sit with some ugliness, some just wrongness, to get through past it and see the story for its value in the end. Which, for me, was worth it, and at no point did I feel like Tesh was letting you think those opinions were right. There's no apologism here. But that doesn't always make it easy or worthwhile, so if you're going in, go in aware that it's not a happy fun light joyful time.

But if the grim and awful - which gets, at times, really grim and awful - and sitting inside the head of a character thinking deeply unpleasant thoughts at times is something you can get through? I truly think this is a fantastic book, and likely set to be one of my best reads of the year.

--

The Math

Highlights: interesting chronology choices, a proper morally grey main character and a real sense of thoughtfulness about the political landscape of the space future world

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference:  Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory [Little Brown Book Group, 2023]

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

Microreview: Endurance by Elaine Burnes

Imagine Star Trek Voyager, but done right

In a future solar system, subject to the same greedy competition that has always plagued newly explored territories, the equivalent of a luxury cruise is a sightseeing trip around the planets. One company involved in private space travel, Omara Tours, has arranged a special itinerary to take advantage of a rare alignment of Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Its cruise ship Endurance, captained by veteran explorer Lyn Randall, is approaching the moon Enceladus when a mysterious space anomaly instantly transports it and a handful of nearby ships 4 light-years away, to the Rigil Kentaurus system. There's no hint as to what caused the jump, there's no one nearby who can help, and it would take thousands of years to try to return to Earth. What comes next is trying to survive in the middle of nowhere.

Elaine Burnes's novel Endurance wears its Star Trek influences on its sleeve, most notably in the social interactions within the spaceship, but the setting of the story is all its own. Earth is still recovering from a catastrophic war plus environmental collapse that led to a new start from scratch in the form of a feminist revolution. Spaceships have artificial gravity, matter recycling, and talking computers, but there aren't teleporters or warp drives or alien civilizations. So the novel sort of feels like it lives in Star Trek, but only as far as the worldbuilding needs to draw from it. While openly inspired by Star Trek, it's far from derivative.

There isn't a conventional antagonist here. The core conflict isn't between the protagonist and an enemy, but between the protagonist and the harshness of the universe. To be sure, Captain Randall has numerous inner demons, but instead of defining her, they organically inform the way she makes hard decisions for the safety of the people under her responsibility. Much of the plot resembles those classic pulp stories where smart engineers had to solve a technical challenge to save the day. Unlike most pulp adventures, Endurance keeps a finger on the pulse of human desires and fears. The point of figuring out the mystery isn't just the intellectual satisfaction; the point is always the characters' reaction to being stranded and helpless in the void. Without losing sight of the nerdy intricacies of interstellar jumping, Endurance gives primacy to its character's inner lives and relationships.

Although enough loose ends are left for an implied sequel, Endurance satisfies on its own. From among the hundreds of already existing novels about travelers lost in space, this one achieves the right mix of physics and humanism to build a well-rounded story. The various everyday complications of space survival are enhanced by the context of personal histories, unresolved regrets, and lingering suspicions that prevent this seemingly simple premise from ever getting boring. As Burnes's first foray into science fiction, Endurance proves unmissable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Burnes, Elaine. Endurance [Mindancer Press, 2022].

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

When things are broken, you can wait ages for them to go back to normal, or you can adapt

Argentinean literary critic Ricardo Piglia described, in one of his many essays, his personal theory of short fiction: every plot contains two plots. This is most evident in the detective genre, where the protagonist's tale (the investigation) is about unveiling an earlier tale (the crime). So reading detective fiction (and, according to Piglia, all fiction) is a dual task: to follow the protagonist's thought process is to simultaneously discover the two stories contained in the text.

By that standard, Malka Older's new novella The Mimicking of Known Successes is twice as ambitious as the typical detective mystery. Set in a network of metallic platforms where future humankind clings to survival among the clouds of Jupiter, it presents, instead of two, four stories to unveil: an investigation on the sudden disappearance of a university professor, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the last years of life on Earth, a rekindling romance between our detective and an old flame, and the project to bring homo sapiens back to a livable ecosystem. Once put on the page, these four stories become four mysteries that drive the reader's curiosity: What happened to the missing professor? What made humans leave Earth? Why did the two lovers break up years ago? And how can catastrophic historical failures be repaired without causing more damage? Upon reading it, one can intuit that the biggest structural challenge of this book must have been to write it in such a way that pursuing each separate question leads to answers for all the others.

To give proper praise to the way Older weaves these questions around a unifying theme, it's necessary to spoil at least part of the answer. This is a story about the dangers of misplaced nostalgia and the need to learn new forms of compatibility. Here Older resorts to a helpful literary device by which the larger conflict mirrors the inner conflict; that is, the civilizational question about the compatibility between human beings and their environment is explored in parallel with the personal question about the compatibility between the protagonist and her former lover. And for both conflicts the resolution is the same: you need to stop wishing things could return to the way they used to be. A totally new compatibility is possible if you're willing to adapt.

This is the meaning contained in the book's title: there's little to be gained from just repeating what worked before, because when the circumstances no longer allow that outcome, you become stuck. And Older reinforces that theme with her faithful, but not subservient, homage to Sherlock Holmes. The narrative style is clearly inspired by Watson's observations of Holmes's work, but doesn't try to replicate it. The floating colonies built in Jupiter are prone to atmospheric disturbances that make radio waves unreliable. So this is a cold and foggy world of scarves, coats, and cozy fireplaces, where people have to rely on telegrams and travel by railway between isolated structures because there's no solid ground. The result is a book that evokes the flavor of Victorian detective novels, but doesn't share their worldview—a happy synergy of genre, aesthetic and setting.

It is remarkable to find such complexity in so brief a wordcount. Although the plot flows with effortless readability, it rests on an intricate scaffolding that enables all the literary elements to bolster one another's strengths. The intriguing backstory emerges in hints scattered through the blend of colloquial and erudite prose, a sign that this civilization has lost continuity with Earth culture; the first-person narrator laments the impossibility of pairing recovered accounts of life on Earth with their physical referents; the core argument about the pitfalls of yearning for a lost past resonates with the narrator's characterization, the villain's masterplan, and the contemporary reader's circumstances. Like the platforms linked by railways, all the parts of the story are meticulously interconnected. The Mimicking of Known Successes is not only a potent environmental and political parable, but a major achievement in storytelling technique.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Older, Malka. The Mimicking of Known Successes [Tor, 2023].

Microreview[Novel]: The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

 Billed as "queer space Cleopatra", this delivers not only on that promise, but on beautiful prose and genuinely thoughtful interstellar politics, along with the players and how they think of their own stories.

Cover illustration by Marc Simonetti

The Stars Undying was sold to me as "queer space Cleopatra for people who liked A Memory Called Empire". This is both a high bar to reach for, and one that the book absolutely crashed through with carefree abandon, fulfilling both parts of that recommendation and a good deal more besides.

The story follows Altagracia, princess and prophetess of a planet called Szayet, as she fights a civil war against her twin sister to regain her throne, and deals with the politics of her planet spinning out into the attention of the interstellar Ceian Empire, who hold their debts and to whom they are a client kingdom, bound in precarious autonomy at the leisure of the more powerful empire. It's a story of politics intertwining with the personal, and people navigating the complex webs of loyalties, beliefs, cultures and legacies to survive, thrive or dominate within a hungry empire. It is also a story about rulership, about religion, and about power.

We have as our viewpoint characters Altagracia herself, our pseudo-Cleopatra, and Ceirran, the Ceian Empire's answer to Julius Caesar. While they are interesting characters for their (often obvious) call backs to their historical counterparts, this rapidly becomes less of the focus, simply because both of them are written to have distinctive and incredibly compelling voices. They are both deeply interesting, thoughtful and above all clever people in whose heads it is fascinating to reside. And this is one of the things Emery Robin does so well - it is surprisingly rare for characters to be declared as very clever and for it to be clear and plausible on the page. It's a hard thing to write for a reader to really, emotionally believe. But Robin has absolutely done it. This is part of what makes the book so reminiscent of A Memory Called Empire (alongside and intertwined with the politics), but the way in which they are clever, the quickness and the wry wit, calls to mind nothing more for me than Tom Stoppard plays. You could put Altagracia and Ceirran in Arcadia or The Real Thing and make them fit without too much wiggling - their dialogue would slide easily into that quick, riffing fluidity that Stoppard's characters have. And it's this easy intelligence, and grace within it, the self-confidence of two people who know they're smart and show the reader it's true with every word, who bounce off each other with constant smiling challenge, that gives them their chemistry with each other, and to the reader. They feel, as soon as you meet them, like two people who've finally found a person who's challenge enough for them, and are drawn inexorably to the challenge as much as the person behind it. And, because we see each through the eyes of the other, we see how that attraction - in the literal as well as the romantic sense - resolves over and over again with how their situation changes.

But they are bound together by more than that attraction. Both characters exist in a complex political situation, inspired by and mapped at least partially onto the political situation of the end of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and the aftermath in Rome and the Roman world. It's an unstable time after a vicious and bloody civil war, and a time in which much sits on the brink of change. A perfect time for a novel to be set in, then. And by being inspired by this existing political narrative, the author has a ready made set of plausible relationships and motivations to work with - no need to invent a political climate from whole cloth. It's a tactic that works well in many novels, and does so perfectly here.

Which isn't to say what's being done is easy. Robin has clearly and beautifully embodied those politics, making them real to the reader while we see how they affect the characters, rather than with the distance of history. It isn't just that Ceirran has fought Quinha, this universe's Pompey, but that he has also loved her as his friend and mentor, and we see throughout the story his complex feelings on her as a person as well as her place in the political landscape. Likewise, while there is the obvious feeling and magnetism between the two protagonists, they also have to reckon, constantly, with their respective political positions, and that they do so so naturally is a testament to Robin's skill and deftness with them - the political side of things never feels crammed in, or awkward alongside their personal feelings. They are both, constantly, political creatures who cannot and would not choose to escape that side of themselves, and so we see it in everything they do and say, page by page, just as much a part of their character as Altagracia's love of poetry or Ceirran's feelings about his scar.

As much as this is a testament to handling the real politics of the ancient world with clever grace, it is also a testament to the art of deciding to mess with things for the sheer fun of it. The best reimaginings of history as speculative novels are willing to bend, break or twist their source material for the sake of a point or a good story, to see it again through a new lens or make it give us something different to the original. They use the original more as a starting point than a destination. And The Stars Undying does likewise. There are superficial changes - many characters have a different gender than their original, not least Ana Decretan, a swaggering, queer woman who embodies her inspiration Marc Antony as well as any straight historical retelling - but there are some significant ones too. The timeline of Roman history gets a serious bashing for the sake of tightening the plot's focus, and allowing the author to make clear the points that are the core themes of the story. Figures and events have been concatenated or left out entirely, for the service of a better told plot. Where authenticity to history would obfuscate the plot, it has been thrown out of the window, and where it does the plot justice, kept in, and the story is a better one for it.

A part of this is the synthesis of kingship and religion - the story is deeply concerned with both, and their effects on people, on rulers, on belief and justice and personal action, and in order to make this abundantly clear, the Roman discomfort with kingship in all its forms has been replaced with a Ceian distaste for organised religion. Altagracia is then, in her role as not just a queen but the living prophet of the undying soul of a historical god-conqueror (a part of the world-building that is fascinatingly done and drawn out through the story), playing into a huge pile of cultural fears for the empire she's bound to. Ceio is deeply disestablishmentarian, banning religion and religious accoutrements in all forms, and sneering at those who believe within its evergrowing empire. It also tightens the narrative in its focus on power, and how power affects people, what lengths they are willing to go to for it - when rulership and godhood are intertwined, the stakes become that much higher. To get this synthesis, and all the good it does for the story, you have to play fast and loose with a lot of historical events, and so even for someone with a fairly deep knowledge of the period of history at hand, there remain the stakes of uncertainty - just because it's not what happened in history, doesn't mean it couldn't happen here.

That being said, the knowledge of history is played on too. The story isn't light on foreshadowing, and there are parts where it feels deliberately drawing the reader in, knowing they know what could happen next. Altagracia particularly as narrator is occasionally prone to dropping in a bit of hinting before we are drawn back to Ceirran's perspective, and leaving acknowledged absences in the narrative with a promise to fill them later and just enough doubt to make it genuinely tense.

It comes up in the world-building too. The planet of Szayet, an analogue for ancient Egypt, has been inverted into a flooded world, full of treasures of its long history drowned under the sea but rich in something desperately wanted by the Ceians and others. It is both the opposite of the historical Egypt and yet still evocative of it. Likewise Ceio, the empire-planet-city that mirrors Rome is depicted as both a modern, technological and concrete place, while also bringing to mind much of what it draws on. Where Rome conquered peoples, cities and countries, Ceio talks of systems and arms of the galaxy. That being said, aside from what is needed for the political storyline, which is absolutely the focus, the worldbuilding is very light touch, even for space opera. We have no knowledge of how the ships work, how travel between planets or systems functions. The only hint we get as to the complexity of an interstellar empire at all is an amusing aside about aligning calendars between worlds with different orbits and how this relates to annual taxation. Like the use of history, the world building exists purely to serve the plot, and where it does so, it does so well - landscapes particularly are evocatively described and detailed, and especially the weather while characters experience it - but it is not a story in the least concerned with the nitty gritty of creating a realistic technological backdrop for space travel. But it never feels implausibly sparse. It's not so much an absence as a lack of interest - it never affects the characters nor is relevant to their problems, so it never comes up. And because we're so deeply entwined in their perspectives for the story, this feels far more natural than trying to wedge in some understanding of wormhole mechanics might be. They exist in the world, it works, why would they need to explore or explain it in those terms? Especially Altagracia, as a person and from a people whose focus is far more directed to the past than the present. Despite being over 500 pages, this lends a feeling of economy that balances out the occasional deviation into (beautiful) descriptive passages, and allows the story not to overbalance itself by looking outside of its core concerns.

All in all, it's an incredibly thoughtfully told story, both in terms of its use of historical material and in how its characters approach the events of the novel and each other. There is a distinct voice for every character, their cultures are well-drawn and considered, and there is a playfulness with the source material and the plot itself underlying everything that occasionally warrants a laugh. It is witty and clever and beautifully told, with prose that manages to be quietly lovely when you pause to examine it without it every dragging attention away from what it's telling, and that leaves you with a lot of lingering thoughts about people and their legacies. It is a phenomenally accomplished book, and one of the best things I've read in a crowded field this year.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 Marc Antony as the swaggeringest, fightiest queer woman is a joy and a delight

Penalties: none

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference:  Emery Robin, The Stars Undying [Orbit, 2022]

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