Book Review: Alien: Cult, by Gavin G Smith

 The Alien: Earth series we should have got. 

cover artist: Marco Turini and Julia Lloyd

We've been spoilt with new Alien content in the last few years - video games, excellent ttrpgs, movies in the same universe, television shows and novels. Alien: Cult is the latest of these from Titan and written by Gavin G. Smith who has done both original work but also has a track record in IP like this one. 

There are a huge number of Alien novels if you pay attention to these things. However, I'm not one for pay attention so this is the first Alien novel I've read. I like the setting and liked Alien and Aliens (although I've struggled with just about every Alien film since then and have a visceral hatred of Prometheus and Covenant because they require their characters to be dumb for their stories to work). 

I didn't mind Alien Romulus up until it jumped the shark. What I specifically like about Alien is the setting - at its best it's retro locked room SF horror, stuck in a world designed when the Cold War was still an existential boogeyman hovering like a dark cloud with five minutes standing between us and nuclear destruction. The power blocs in Alien are those that existed in the 1980s - The US as corporate haven in which government is for the rich and by the rich, the 3WE which is basically the British Empire, Space Communists and what was, at the time, called the 3rd World making up the remaining power. That these haven't been updated does, I think, speak to its visual origins - one can imagine that if this had originated as a novel or a game first then over the years the setting would have moved with the times. As it is, the Alien's universe is therefore curiously anachronistic, speaking to and about a world that has passed into history.

That it remains relevant is largely because it continues to focus on the one power bloc that persists in an unbroken line since Alien (1979) first hit movie screens more than four decades ago.

The preponderance of Alien material takes place in English speaking parts of the universe and nearly all of that within the US corporate robber baron/tech bro setting specifically. Sure, a corporate ruled world in which the powerful and wealthy get to decide whether ordinary people live or die with no comeback sounds like a pastiche of American society but...

More on point, Alien worked in part because it was space truckers meet a monster and are hampered by their corporate overlords. 

Aliens similarly works because it's jarheads meet the monster and are hampered by their corporate overlords. 

Even Romulus tagged into the working class vibe and it was, without doubt, the most exciting part of the movie. 

Long story, short - Alien works with its audiences where it's about ordinary working class people making do when they're faced with a monster in the flesh and corporate assholes who are probably well aware of what's going on but either don't care or are actively rooting for the monster against their own people. There's very few of us who haven't felt the pressure of trying to please our bosses while the real world attempts to take chunks out of our ability to make ends meet. Alien is, if nothing else, a metaphor for the vicissitudes of modern life with both corporate malfeasance and arbitrary events included in that framework. 

Alien: Cult sits nicely within this category - featuring nefarious corporations, corrupt lawmakers, a Wild West/frontier setting and main characters who are right out of central casting for working class Joes just trying to get by. It seems to me that the Alien setting is one that wants to repeatedly warn us about how people are corrupted, how money and power should be policed vigorously and how the law, if it's any good, needs to apply to the powerful with more alacrity than it does to anyone else. Smith's voice is one that drips with disdain for those who abuse their power and privilege and that lends Alien: Cult a flavour that really works. The setting is bleak but there's no shortage of anger with how things are to remind us that people will hate injustice and act on it if given the chance even as others will allow their characters to be corroded away for the chance to grab a few more dollars.

The pacing is just about perfect, with plenty of tension, action and a nice through line of detective work as our FBI agent main character slowly figures out the conspiracy at the heart of the book. I note that the title kind of gives it away, but if you're at all familiar with Alien then you already know it won't go well for anyone involved - this is sci-fi horror after all and Smith delights in making sure we know absolutely no one is safe.

Smith also brings the action to life by refusing to ignore that getting hit hurts. When his characters are beaten up or shot they feel it, it impairs their capability and after a million action stories where the hero keeps going because the narrative demands it, Alien: Cult does a good job of making you feel the wear and tear.

The tagline for this review is that this is the Alien Earth I wish we'd got. Noah Hawley did a fantastic job of world building but the show couldn't decide what it wanted to be and ended with an outrageous two fingers up at the audience. 

In contrast, Alien: Cult is tightly written with a complete story that deepens what we know of the Alien universe while not requiring any previous knowledge to make sense of what's going on. For those who know it has nods to classic moments from the film franchise without those being gratuitous and there were moments that felt as if they'd have fit quite happily in with Bladerunner. 

--

Highlights:

• Aliens!
• Cults, working class anger, lots of blood and explosions
• Gritty action, nefarious corporations and the corrupt getting their comeuppance

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, a fast paced story set in the Alien Universe. Not doing anything novel but a well executed example of the form.

References: Smith, Gavin G., Alien: Cult. [Titan 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

And That's It for Our First Scare Series

Boo.

Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.

I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.

It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?

For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.

The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

And then there's just the plainly bonkers.

Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.

If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.

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

New Post Series: First Scare

We'll valiantly face the terrors we've been lucky to avoid

Carve your pumpkins and don your trashiest costumes! It's the season of vampires and witches, of demons and werewolves, of haunted houses and walking corpses. It's the season when a strange impulse leads otherwise reasonable people to willingly pay for a ticket so they can sit in a dark room full of strangers to watch two hours of entrails being ripped and/or slashed and/or devoured. Come and make yourself comfortable. The dead will rise, blood will spurt like a fire hose, heads will roll.

A few months ago, Nerds of a Feather ran the First Contact series, where our team caught up with a few of the prominent classics that for whatever reason we hadn't had a chance to get to know. This time, we're repeating the experiment, but with Halloween classics: those ugly, scary, big bad monsters with which we've so far had the good fortune of not crossing paths.

Even as I prepare to push play on this rich history of frightening stories, I keep wondering why I'm doing this to myself. I'm a complete chicken when it comes to horror. To this day I still tremble at the memory of that puppet cyclops bird from the 1986 remake of Babes in Toyland, and that scene in V where the alien ate a whole mouse left permanent scars. My generation spent its budget of screams on Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers; I simply have no stomach for whatever happens in Saw or The Conjuring. In theory, I ought to be the last person to want to go through a crash course in horror.

In pragmatic terms, my main reason for doing the First Scare series is the same reason why I did First Contact: the desire to broaden my knowledge of what is out there. But also, my lifelong aversion to horror could use some challenging. Of course, I'll be doing it under controlled conditions, in the safety of my living room, preferably not at midnight. The popularity of horror has always been a mystery to me, so maybe it's time to test for myself what draws people to want to experience fear for fun.

What with taste being subjective and all, it's a possible outcome that I don't succeed at learning why so many enjoy the self-torture of watching expertly filmed stabbings and slashings and curses and exorcisms. It may very well be the case that there's a certain incommunicable something that naturally gifts you with a high tolerance for the sight of blood and rotting guts. Or the taste may be an acquired one. Hoping that it's the latter, I'm going to start at a prudent pace. I don't want to regret the experiment. The family member who without warning introduced me to Cannibal Holocaust certainly didn't have my sensibilities in mind.

Instead, I'll be watching selections from among the early classics, those that form the baseline education of the average horror fan. My fellow reviewers at Nerds of a Feather will surely be at other positions in that ladder, so they're choosing their own starting points. This is also part of the learning process; I expect horror directors to have very different things to say on the same topic before versus after the Satanic Panic, for example.

I'll also be paying attention to which specific elements of the horror aesthetic are those that frighten us. I love the Doctor Who episode "Blink," but I don't find it particularly spooky. Many years ago, I attended a public showing of a slasher movie at a community center. I went with a blind friend, and as I was narrating the movie to him, I realized how boring it was. "The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her..." On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me that the absolute most terrifying movie I've ever shown him was Idiocracy.

So... who knows. This is the rare kind of experiment where the interesting result is the one that's not replicable. As a kid, I had lots of fun with The Twilight Zone, but one episode of The Pink Panther gave me nightmares, and I waited until adulthood to watch Aliens. Now, from here to Halloween, we'll be subjecting ourselves to all forms of monstrosity and evil. I literally don't know what I'm getting into or what I should expect or what the risks are. I suppose that's the right mood for an innocent newcomer entering the horror realm.

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

Final thoughts from the First Contact project

Or, how we agreed to give ourselves extra homework for a month

There's a risk, for people new to speculative fiction, to stay stuck in the big classics. I've seen it manifest especially among literary types, who at a minimum have heard of Verne and Orwell and Tolkien and Asimov and Dick and Le Guin. The risk consists in becoming satisfied with the classics and therefore exploring no further. I don't warn against this scenario out of a wish to police people's joy; what I wish is to share the very best that our field has to offer, and we're fortunate to live at a time when the very best that we have is not the classics. There's no need to advise newcomers to read I, Robot when there's Murderbot.

I came up with the First Contact project to avert the opposite risk in myself. I'm reasonably familiar with what's going on right now, but I'm very behind in my knowledge of genre classics. And just as one must guard against irrational predilection for the past, one must also notice when the present is given undue weight. If I seriously intend to recommend Murderbot over I, Robot, the intellectually honest course of action is to know I, Robot and to know why I'm declaring it skippable. It's not enough to marvel at the quality of our current Rainbow Age on its own merits; I also need to understand how it improves upon bygone Gold and Silver. My love for The Expanse grows even stronger when I realize how much it's not like Flash Gordon.

Each of us at Nerds of a Feather had specific personal reasons to select the classics we've discussed over these recent weeks. Some of us went into it in the spirit of correcting a personal oversight; some of us wanted to give a new subgenre a long overdue try; some of us decided to heed the popular acclaim for a certain title; some of us stumbled upon something completely new and jumped by instinct. There were many possible posts there simply wasn't enough opportunity to write; in my case, I would have liked to sit and watch a lot more B monster movies. But I'm very satisfied with the list that resulted. I give thanks to my fellow reviewers for their curiosity and their openness to this little experiment. These are the works we've made First Contact with:

Books:

Dragonflight

Foundation

Movies:

Akira

Brazil

Flash Gordon

Labyrinth

Metropolis

Nosferatu

Porco Rosso

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Terminator

Westworld

Video games:

Mass Effect Andromeda

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

Introducing the First Contact Project

What's it like to experience a classic for the first time?

As a very wise person once said, there's no science fiction canon. There's no mandatory reading list, no admission test to join the community of geekdom, and most fortunately, no enforcing authority in charge of declaring who is authorized to speak about works. Someone who has never seen a movie can simply decide one day to try Godzilla and then say how they felt. That's all you need.

That said, some experience with previous works will enrich the repertoire of the things you can say, and the quality of the arguments you can produce. Interstellar is a great movie, but you enjoy it more if you're familiar with 2001. Any discussion of The Matrix will be very limited without considering the ideas introduced in Blade Runner, Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell (at the very minimum). If you haven't seen Ratatouille, a subplot in Everything Everywhere All at Once is almost incomprehensible. And you may be impressed with Ready Player One if you aren't aware of how it misunderstands and betrays The Iron Giant.

So, while knowledge of the classics isn't required (unless you're an academic), it's definitely useful. This puts fans who want to discuss genre works in a curious position. Every time I write an opinion on this blog, I need to remember that I'm entering a conversation that started before me and whose terms are already established. At the same time, contributing my personal perspective depends on maintaining a degree of freshness. I guess someone could write a good dissection of the flaws of monarchy as shown in The Lion King while ignorant that its plot mirrors Hamlet. You can read Don Quixote with no previous contact with the medieval adventure novels it's parodying. But how much of value can one say about the hyper-stylized violence of Kill Bill without bringing up the context of Bruce Lee's career? Is there even any point in analyzing Madoka Magica without taking into account how its mere existence is a reaction to Sailor Moon?

First exculpatory argument: We don't know what we don't know. In Pinky and the Brain, there are jokes, and some entire episodes, that only make sense to devoted fans of black-and-white cinema. I was last month years old when I learned that A Bug's Life tells essentially the same story as Seven Samurai, which means I'll never know whether that bit of trivia would have altered my impression of A Bug's Life. I was eager to watch the first Chicken Run because it was made by the people who made Wallace and Gromit; I would have felt less excited if all I'd known was that it retold The Great Escape. And this brings me to my second exculpatory argument: One viewer's classic is another viewer's meh. I have friends who adore The Mandalorian because it does visual homages to old Westerns, and that bit of trivia makes me even less interested in watching The Mandalorian. Reading that Joker referenced Taxi Driver didn't make me want to check out Taxi Driver, and I doubt anything in it would improve my subterranean opinion of Joker.

In a less snobbish world, we should be free to choose our classics the same way we choose our current obsessions, but sometimes there's no escaping the need to learn the language one is trying to use. I detested every second of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I must admit that having added that crayon to my coloring box makes my picture of Nope more complete. An independent taste is important to have, but one must not let it mutate into incuriosity.

With all this in mind, I've summoned the nerds of our flock to try first contact with classic works with which they haven't had a chance to get acquainted, for whatever reason, until now. Over the next few weeks, we'll be reporting our raw, first impressions of stories that you may have reread or rewatched a hundred times, that have remade in their image the shape of their genres or perhaps even invented those genres.

We embark upon this experiment aware that it cannot replicate the way it felt for those original first viewers. To be a moviegoer in the 1930s and watch the premiere of a Flash Gordon serial was only possible in those specific historical circumstances. Those of us who exist on this shore of time already carry the cultural baggage of everything that was influenced by Flash Gordon and everything that happened in real life since then, which prevents the story from having the same effect and meaning for us that it had upon release. That's my third exculpatory argument: What we can expect to get from art is inescapably tied to the context of reception.

So maybe we'll discover a new passion. Maybe we'll more deeply understand a tradition we had trouble connecting with. Maybe we'll find reasons to reappraise an artist we had underestimated. At the absolute least, we'll become better informed critics, which is what you should never be shy to demand of us.

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

Nanoreviews: In the Watchful City, Flowers for the Sea, The Bone Way

In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu [Tor dot com publishing, 2021]

In his review, Sean has already pointed out what a big scope S. Qiouyi Lu's debut novella takes on, with juicy worldbuilding, a stories-within-stories structure and some big ideas for protagonist Anima to get ær head around. Anima lives in Ora, a city controlled by an extensive - and non-dystopian - surveillance network called The Gleaming. Anima is one of eight Nodes within The Gleaming, which means æ spends much of ær time out of ær body, possessing the minds of local animals or floating as light, responding to what is happening in the city and trying to maintain harmony and safety for the people within. The book switches between Anima's work to maintain Ora; Anima's past, conveyed through verse; and the stories æ is told by Vessel, a traveller with a qíjìtáng, or case of curiosities, about artefacts se carries. Through Vessel's stories, we learn more about the relationship between Ora and Skyland, adding extra nuance to our understanding of Ora and how it has developed itself while literally under the gaze of a more powerful, superiority-claiming neighbour. It also gives Lu an opportunity to switch gears and show off an impressive range: the poetry is one example of this, but in-depth description of a game of skycup, a fictional sports game which is introduced to the reader in a way that makes us immediately understand the rules, the stakes and the action within just a few pages? Now that's some serious skill.

In the Watchful City is an intentionally fragmented narrative, and it doesn't guide the reader to a big story-driven climax (there is a big moment towards the end of the novella, involving a completed suicide, but it's not a culmination of what has come before). Nor does it provide clear answers to the questions the novella raises, about identity and belonging both on the individual or collective scale: Anima ends ær time with Vessel with a different outlook on ær role as a Node and ær relationship with ær physical body, but on a broader scale, nothing has changed. Instead, what makes In the Watchful City cohere are its immaculate bio-cyberpunk vibes and its strong sense of place, and the roles of all the characters as part of that place (bonus: we get to read an Asian-inspired cyberpunk city that isn't just New York with some neon Chinese signs thrown in for set dressing!) It adds up to something that's all quite magical: I'm not quite sure how to summarise it, but In the Watchful City definitely left me feeling like I'd read a much longer book, and the world it creates will stick with me for a while to come.

Rating: 8/10

Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn [Tor dot com publishing, 2021]

From one hard-to-capture but accomplished novella to another! Flowers for the Sea is an intensely visceral experience, one which makes us feel every moment of its protagonist's journey in a way that blends dreamlike horrors and psychological weirdness with a constant grounding in physical sensation. That protagonist, Iraxi is one of a group of survivors who have been at sea for years after their Kingdom flooded, an increasingly desperate voyage made even worse by attacks from supernatural creatures both above and below the water. Iraxi is pregnant, and appears to be the only person on the ship able to carry a child to term, but she's also despised for events in their former kingdom, and the combination of valuing her body while shunning her as a person means Iraxi is kept trapped below decks, in the squalor of a dying vessel. And, just to cap things off, it looks like her baby isn't exactly human.

We follow Iraxi through the navigation of her few remaining relationships on the ship - mostly defined by her pregnancy or sexuality - and through the experiences given to her by her supernatural child - and when I say "experiences", these sort of include the expected things like giving birth and nursing, but the line between Iraxi's physical reality and the world that her baby represents quickly becomes impossible to keep track of, and her baby quickly becomes a conduit for Iraxi to develop new perspectives on her situation and the possible ways out of it. When her journey of pain and isolation and frustration comes to a head, Iraxi finally gets the tools she needs to exert agency over the rest of the boat, and it's impossible not to root for the results even as it brings the story to a grim close. But then, its hard to imagine this ending any other type of way.

Ration: 8/10

The Bone Way by Holly J. Underhill [Nyx Publishing, 2021]

I've been interested in The Bone Way since the pitch of "sapphic Orpheus and Eurydice retelling" reached me, and Holly J. Underhill's version puts two intriguing characters into a secondary world katabasis (side note: did you know "descent into the underworld" has a special word?) scenario. So we follow Teagan, a young woman dying from a slow, fatal poisoning, and her wife Cressidae, who insists on trying every avenue to save her. At the outset of the story, it's Cress who is trapped in the underworld, having left without Teagan to see if she can bargain for her wife's life from the Queen down there. Teagan wasn't willing to descend to save herself, but when it's Cress' life on the line, she's got more than enough courage to make the journey, and to try and negotiate the return - with a trick involved, of course.

There's lots of intriguing elements to The Bone Way: its quest, while quite episodic, is a lot of fun to watch, and the concept of this world's underworld being the result of a terrestrial ruler's decision has a lot of interesting implications. The main story is interspersed with flashbacks from earlier in Teagan and Cress' relationship, showing how they meet and grow close as well as the impact of Teagan's illness. The pair are, perhaps, a bit similar in personality, but it's satisfying to read two women who are both willing to be strong for each other, and the section after Teagan arrives in the underworld, when they're both frustrated and trying to communicate their pain to the other over their respective decisions, makes for a particularly interesting dynamic.

Where The Bone Way struggles is in turning the weight of the source myth into a story with equally weighty implications. It shouldn't be a spoiler to say that The Bone Way isn't a tragedy, and while it makes the journey from the underworld tense (I won't spoil how that's done), by midway through there are enough clues in the tone for a reader to know this isn't going to end with the kind of mistake poor Orphy made. With that cat out of the bag, The Bone Way's route to being a satisfying story is to wrap up its relationship story in a strong way, and it does - but Orpheus and Eurydice is such a powerful and heartbreaking tale, and especially if one has both Hadestown and the side story of Supergiant Games' Hades in one's recent cultural consciousness (as I do), the relatively easy emotional ride of The Bone Way suffers from the comparison. That's a shame, because this is a sweet novella that should be able to stand on its own charms - but its own premise makes that more difficult than it should be.

Rating: 6/10

Nanoreviews: The Silvered Serpents, The Library of the Dead, Fugitive Telemetry

 The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi (Wednesday Books, 2020)

(Warning: there's no way to talk about The Silvered Serpents without spoilers for The Gilded Wolves, so consider yourself warned.)

I'm not sure what it is about Roshani Chokshi's story of a motley, fractious heist crew in magical Belle Époque not-Paris that draws me in so thoroughly when heist-driven stories in general often aren't my thing . The worldbuilding certainly helps: with an intriguing magic system and history, Chokshi creates a version of an imperialist European nation whose genteel facade doesn't in any way obscure its imperialist exploitation of other cultures. The characters themselves are perfectly placed to underscore that: from mixed race Filipino academic and cake enthusiast Enrique, whose dual heritage leaves him distrusted and shut out of his peers' endeavours; to Jewish, neurodiverse engineering prodigy Zofia, all are people who find themselves on the margins of the elite, recognised and occasionally valued for their talents but never truly accepted. Or maybe these books hook me because they're just great, and they also end with heartbreaking cliffhangers every time and I can't help but finish up wanting more.

The Silvered Serpents picks up where The Gilded Wolves left off: with the found-family heist crew put together by disinherited noble and terrible choice-maker Séverin smashed into tiny pieces by the events of the last book, as Séverin attempts to prevent himself from having to grapple again with the kind of loss brought on by its catastophic revelations. However, when an opportunity arises to pursue godhood in the form of a lost text called the Divine Lyrics, Séverin decides to get the band back together - including Laila, his former flame, who he pushed away in a brutal ending scene in The Gilded Wolves (I warned you about those spoilers!) - and the group end up travelling to Russia, working with Séverin's estranged Aunt and another noble House to uncover the artefact's secrets, and to stop the damage being caused by another, considerably more murderous group seeking to harness its power.

Even more than its predecessor, The Silvered Serpents' thematic focus on bloodlines and heritage means that the emphasis is very much on the characters and the relationships between them, and that works perfectly: there's just so much to enjoy. While I did find some elements strained (honestly, I'm sort of done with "neurodiverse person doesn't realise they are experiencing love because they can only analyse their emotions through the detached lens of physical reaction", no matter how much I was rooting for that particular relationship), on the whole this is a great follow-up and (thanks to that cliffhanger!) I'm definitely keen to see where the final book goes.

Rating: 8/10

The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu (Tor Books, 2021)

Tendai Huchu's third full length novel and (I believe) the first published under his Cthulu-anagram penname (I mean, if you could, you would, right?), The Library of the Dead is an urban fantasy in a vaguely post-apocalyptic Edinburgh told through the voice of Ropa, a Scottish-Zimbabwean teenager and speaker to ghosts who ends up embroiled in a mystery involving missing children in her part of the city. As Ropa tries to unravel the case, it draws her into the orbit of the titular Library, whose stuffy regulations and elitism around types of magic and the kind of people who can practice it (i.e. people who can afford hefty membership fees) immediately cast Ropa as an outsider.

The Library of the Dead is another book that excels when it comes to both its place and its characters. Its version of Edinburgh is one where society seems to have basically collapsed for unclear reasons, with grim caravan park slums on the edge of the city, an unrecognisable currency, teenagers who are empowered to drop out of school to join the gig economy as soon as they hit secondary school, a new monarchy and various other indicators that this is not the Edinburgh of our own world - as if the acceptance of ghosts and other supernatural forces weren't enough on that front. (Don't worry, though, podcasts are still a thing). On the character front, Ropa is certainly the main attraction in all her super-smart, code switching, irreverent glory, but there's also plenty of other great supporting cast members, especially Priya, another girl from the library who immediately starts a friendship with Ropa when she finds her way into the institution. What also makes The Library of the Dead strong are the polyphonic voices of its different magic systems, and the way it ties in with Ropa's marginalised identity. In another book, the magic of the Library itself could be the main event, a well-defined anglo-centric "magic system" with alternate magical traditions perhaps getting a sentence or two of flavour to make it seem like part of a wider magical world. Ropa's entry to it, both as a ghosttalker whose profession is not considered to be a "respectable" form of magic and as someone whose family heritage involves magic that isn't part of the Library's interests at all, means the limitations of that tradition within this world are immediately laid bare to us, and it definitely sets up some intriguing material for future books.

The level of set-up vs pay-off is really my only critique here: The Library of the Dead is the start of a series, and as such it spends a lot of time establishing the various forces and elements in Ropa's world, presumably all the better to develop conflicts and unravel deeper mysteries further down the line. Still, if this series gets the time and development it needs, it's set itself up for great things.

Rating: 8/10

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (Tordotcom Publishing, 2021)

Murderbot! Fugitive Telemetry steps back and looks at Murderbot pre-Network Effect, during its time on Preservation Station. It's also a murder mystery, featuring the mysterious death of a traveller which requires Preservation Station security (who don't have to deal with too many murders, seeing as how they're in one of the few places in the Murderbot Universe that places significant, non-monetary value on human life) and Murderbot to work together to untangle it. The problem is, of course, that Station Security aren't too happy about working with a SecUnit, regardless of the assurances made by Mensah and the rest of its adopted family about its trustworthiness. Murderbot, of course, isn't too happy about working with anyone, and it's also trying to navigate the experience of being a known "Rogue SecUnit" in a society that (mostly) wants to ensure its rights and autonomy, but isn't entirely sure how to do so.

What follows is a fun romp through Preservation, with plenty of the action you'd expect from a Murderbot novella. This being the Murderbot Universe, the exploitative corporate practices of the rest of the galaxy naturally come into play, but the immediate stakes feel lower for most of the book, with the mystery wrapped up neatly over the single novella length. (Also there are a lot of sentences in brackets followed by more sentences in brackets.) (This is a thing Murderbot does a lot in its narration, and it felt like it might have happened more here than in any previous story?) (It's fine, I guess, I just noticed it, like, a lot.) (A LOT.)

Anyway, Fugitive Telemetry delivers no less, but no more, than a solid Murderbot adventure. There's nothing disappointing about that - and Preservation Station is a delightful setting for this particular adventure - but after Network Effect ended with a significant change in Murderbot's life path, it means this episode does feel more like a fun diversion than a book that's really driving the series forward, and that leaves me with less to say about it than I have about previous books in the series. It's still an enthusiastic thumbs up from me overall, though: more Murderbot is never a bad thing.

Rating: 7/10

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

Review: MST3K: The Return

Answering the most dangerous question: Does it live up?

Look, ma, no commercials!

Spoiler alert: yes. But let's talk about how, and why.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 exists in a very specific, and special place in media- equal parts satire, social commentary and campy humor. For (I assume) the vast majority of us, the experience was largely similar- one friend had them all recorded (maybe you were that friend!) and the tapes got passed around, frequently at the behest of the show itself. We watched the comedy central run, and reruns. And hoped for an update.

By the time news broke that and update was coming a year or so ago, well, let's be honest: we exist in a post-prequel world and old is new again is not always welcome news, as much as we may want it to be. But there it was, MST3K was coming back. With a new cast.

Gulp.

Like I said, it exists in a special place, largely thanks to the chemistry of the cast and their ability to have chemistry with a quasi-anthropomorphic gumball machine and a... whatever the hell Crow is. It's not easy, is what I'm saying. How does the new cast measure up? Jonah raps about Kaiju-esque monsters- in the first episode. That sentence is, of course, brilliant, stupid and absurd all at once, which sums up the entire show. So, yeah, he fits.

The invention exchange was always dumb, though

In the theater, with the bots, is where it really shines. Or, sort of, doesn't. It feels the same. The voices are different, certainly, but you stop noticing about halfway through the second episode (or, at least, I did). The jokes are great, and it's refreshing for a lazy millennial like myself to hear Harry Potter jokes and other up-to-date references on the show.

For me, that was my biggest concern: would the show feel the same? And, in my semi-humble opinion, it 100% does. The door sequence is still practical and sorta clunky. The space animations are still what they are.

Which brings me to my second biggest concern: The Mads. Look, if the movies are bad, and the jokes are good, the Mads could be terrible for all I care. At the same time, though.... And then it's announced that it's Felicia Day(!) and Patton Oswald(!). And then I worry about the casting. While those two aren't A-list Hollywood stars, they are pretty nerd A-list (and that's the list we're concerned about here at NoaF)- so would their precence overshadow their corny characters and joke set up?

Nope, nope and neeeeewp. They may actually be my favorite part of this. For cheesy, campy characters who essentially exist to set up the fact that a dude is in a theater with two robots, Day and Oswald are brilliant. They have great chemistry, great jokes, and I want a movie just about their hijinks. They have a lot of self-aware jokes (Day's Forrester observes with a sigh "should have just rebooted), are on a quest for ratings ("there aren't ratings on Netflix", Max informs her) and they are as incompetently evil as their forbears.

The Math:

Baseline assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 for actually being an update that holds true

Penalties: -1 because I'm a dick. Look, it's pretty dang perfect. But 10 says outstanding in its field, and this is an update that is congruent, but doesn't soar to new heights. If you want an actual penalty, it's for Episode 3 being one of the worst movies they have done. But that's a bonus, too.

Conclusion:  9/10. You probably already binged it, though.