Book Review: The Feywild Job by C. L. Polk

 A solid piece of D&D tie-in fiction; a missed chance for more

After the heights of 2nd- through 4th-edition Forgotten Realms tie-in fiction, where we got dozens of books across a quarter century, Wizards of the Coast seems to have gone into a bit of a lull in the setting over the decade since 5e bedded in (at least as far as characters not named Drizzt are concerned). That ‘90s TSR fiction is what I cut my fantasy nerd teeth on as a pre-teen and younger teenager; I have very fond memories of it. So I was pleased to see Wizards of the Coast return to tie-in fiction and return to a book set (at least partially) in the Realms. I was equally pleased to see they’ve tapped C. L. Polk, a writer with a great backlist, to write The Feywild Job.

The premise is that two pairs of adventurers are essentially blackmailed by a “client” into a reverse heist: steal a MacGuffin back from someone and return it to its proper place before anyone notices it’s gone. Each pair is led by half of an old duo of thieves—the warlock Saeldian and the bard Kell. That partnership fell apart a decade before the book started, when feelings started to develop between them. This was a problem for Saeldian’s warlock pact (the deal with an Archfey which gives him his powers), which requires him to never fall in love, so he walks out, and the next time he sees Kell is at the start of this heist. The two tagalongs are Kell’s orc druic companion Lorzok and Saeldian’s rogue companion Jubilee. This leads into a heist plot, a potential second-chance romance, and some very of-the-moment cozy-adjacent vibes.

A shift to cozy-adjacent romantasy might seem an odd choice for D&D tie-in fiction, but in a lot of ways I think it actually honours the tradition of the field. The heist-quest plot thread is absolutely classic TSR tie-in stuff. The point of tie-in fiction is at least in part to attract new audiences to the TTRPG product, and romantasy—and its audience—is a potential untapped market for WotC. And to dive into some deep lore, in fact one of the earliest examples of D&D tie-in was what we’d now call romantasy. A spinoff of the early ‘80s Endless Quest Choose Your Own Adventure books was 6 HeartQuest books. Before Drizzt, before the Dragonlance Chronicles, we had CYOA romantasy aimed at teenagers. So the choice of genre seems both perfectly judged for the current moment and a well judged nod to tradition.

And it all works quite well without being a total triumph. If I’d read this as a 13-year-old just realising he was queer at the height of TSR Forgotten Realms fiction, I’d have loved it. And it is a solid, largely well executed example of both a cozy romantasy and a piece of RPG tie-in fiction, but it isn’t more than that, either. I’d certainly put it in the top quartile of D&D fiction ever released, but with the greatest of respect, that isn’t the world’s most searching standard, and I don’t think it quite matches the absolute best of the old 2nd- to 4th-edition tie-ins (notably the best work of Erin Evans and Elaine Cunningham, for example). For the rest of the review I want to talk about why it reaches that upper quartile and why it also doesn’t, in my eyes, extend beyond solidly pretty good.

Polk is a technically excellent writer, and the prose in the book is very well done. A nice eye for imagery, a bit of personality to the narrative voice. One of the risks of D&D fiction is you can sometimes hear the dice rattling in the background, but the integration of spells, combat, and shared world elements is done seamlessly here—this may seem like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. It’s a key element of RPG tie-ins, and it is not often done as smoothly as Polk does it here. A number of the action set pieces are done very well, and the lick of horror imagery in the back half of the narrative is well judged and effective. Our non-binary lead in Saeldian is also written sympathetically and subtly. In a lot of ways The Feywild Job is a really good piece of writing in this genre.

But some of the bigger picture elements are not quite at the level of the sentence-by-sentence work. The major forward plot drive for the book is the heist element, and I really just wanted more of it: the planning, the traps, the complications. The first quarter of the book provides a bit of that, but for a book whose title creates an expectation for heist-heavy narrative, it was a little underdone. If you create the expectation, the reader (or I, at least), wants it to be fulfilled. What fills the narrative space not taken up by the heist is the second-chance romance plot between Saeldian and Kell, and unfortunately it doesn’t really compensate. For a romance of this type, understanding the nature of the first breakup, getting a good grasp on motivations and pining and missed opportunity is in my view essential to the whole thing working. And given the nature of that romance plot, the backstory is a little too thinly sketched to get the full effect. There are also a few misplaced details that just leave the break, and the level of bitterness being carried by both parties, feels a little contrived. Finally, for a book with four main cast members, the two leads’ companions are done a little dirty; both Lorzok and Jubilee have glimmers of real interest and very obvious possibility for more in Polk’s capable hands, but just don’t get the time or page space to be fully developed. The unrealised potential really does frustrate.

There is a place for 3-star fiction that doesn’t push—particularly when I was younger, I read a lot of it, I enjoyed a lot of it, and to a lesser degree I still do now. And The Feywild Job is firmly in that bracket. Perhaps because of the nature of tie-in fiction, perhaps because of the reasonably tropey cozy and romance elements, perhaps because of the combination between all of those and a moderately undercooked heist, it just doesn’t rise above it. It’s not a page count issue—it’s a reasonably typical length for this sort of book—but somehow it does seem to be trying to do a bit too much a bit too briefly.

Ultimately, if this is the quality of D&D tie-in we're going to get in the future, we should all be happy: it sets an enjoyable, highly competent standard. The Feywild Job is exactly what it needs to be. I just found myself the slightest bit disappointed it wasn’t more.

Highlights:

• Well crafted prose and engaging imagery
• Tie-in fiction which speaks to both tradition and the current moment
• Just a whiff of missed opportunity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Reference:  Polk, C. L. The Feywild Job [Random House Worlds, 2026].

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

TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

With much improved visual effects over the 1997 film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, which for better or worse will be the unavoidable point of comparison, the Peacock show The Miniature Wife takes full advantage of its outlandish premise to shed literal and metaphorical light on the ways even a modern, educated, independent career woman can be made to feel small in her marriage.

On one hand we have Leslie, a physicist who studies the miniaturization of matter to boost the potential of world agriculture. The potential of this technology is limitless, but his company has been in financial difficulty after the failure of his earlier project, a variety of transgenic tomato. If he can’t win over a promising new investor, he can lose all he’s been working for. On the other hand we have Leslie’s wife, Lindy, a writer who struck gold with a virally successful novel 20 years ago and has been unable to write anything else since. When a series of misunderstandings results in the misattribution to her of a short story actually written by her student, she has to reckon with the reasons why she wants fame and figure out whether there’s anything that matters to her more than public adoration.

Leslie and Lindy come from less than ideal families that perversely shaped them into a perfect match for each other. Leslie’s mother crafted a bubble of normalcy to counteract his father’s all-controlling tyranny, so he grew up knowing only a glossy, shiny appearance of happiness. Lindy‘s mother basically resents her for existing, so she grew up attached to her father’s tall tales that provide the feeling, but not the substance, of happiness. So here’s where we are today: Leslie is a self-centered manchild who’s never had to stomach hard truths; Lindy is a raw, open wound who’s exhausted of a lifetime of hard truths. What has sustained their marriage this long is that they give each other exactly the excuse they need to not grow.

So it shouldn’t surprise that they view their respective professional advancements as a zero-sum game where only one of them can be successful at a time. Lindy’s novel already won a Pulitzer; now Leslie is hoping for a Nobel, and that impossible quest has sucked all the energy in their relationship and kept Lindy’s writing career in limbo for the last 20 years. The escalating mutual resentments come to a head in a quick comedy of errors that results in Lindy reduced to pocket size and trapped in a dollhouse while public opinion erupts around the new short story wrongly published under her name. Added complication: Leslie hasn’t figured out how to safely bring tiny things back to normal size. Another complication: Lindy has been having an emotional affair with one of Leslie’s employees. Worst complication of all: as soon as Lindy is returned to normal size, she intends to leave Leslie, and it’s clear she’s in the right here. She’s had enough of being ignored, taken for granted, minimized. The plot of the show is a clever way of making her feelings literal and showing what it’s like for a wife to feel small.

What follows for the rest of the season is a hilarious parade of slapstick jokes about surviving life in miniature. Lindy wrestles a fly, befriends a plastic astronaut, seeks refuge in Christmas decorations, turns toothpicks and cotton swabs into versatile weapons, struggles to operate a touchscreen phone, and masters the uses of dental floss as a climbing rope. A recurring gag, that never gets old, is to see her speak into a wireless earbud as a (for her) gigantic phone receiver. Elizabeth Banks as Lindy hits the right notes as simultaneously terrified and exasperated at the injustice of her situation, while the usually more dramatic Matthew Macfadyen as Leslie reveals a charming sense of comedic timing in the role of a clueless genius.

Despite the great performances (watch out for Adam Capriolo’s brief but stellar moments in a fascinatingly amoral tertiary role), the writing of character is where The Miniature Wife came close to losing me. Sometimes it comes off as a stretch that these two are able to wound each other so deeply and still come out stronger (Is that something neurotypicals do? They really get so angry they yell irrevocably hurtful things they didn’t mean? If so, how on Earth do they get any relationship to work?). It’s a truism of scriptwriting that character is revealed by choices made in extreme circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine a more extreme test of the strength of a marriage. Where do you find the maturity to give up the mirage of achievement for a true measure of inner development? What will finally push you to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of your significant other? For most couples, one hopes it doesn’t take molecular reshuffling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Starfleet Academy

A more than worthy successor to Discovery, somewhat undercut by mixed messaging

Starfleet Academy is proof that a six-decade-old ongoing story can still find ways to feel fresh if it dares try the unusual. Prodigy already showed how the same elevated ideals that sustain the Federation can be adapted for child protagonists, and Lower Decks brought much-needed levity to the franchise’s sometimes suffocating self-importance. The newest iteration, set in the 3000s after the United Federation of Planets has been broken apart and reforged, blends the thrill of space adventure with the angst of teen drama. But the most unusual aspect of Starfleet Academy isn’t even the soap opera side of it; it’s that, extremely rarely for a Star Trek series, it’s driven more by the internal exploration of characters than by clever plot-solving. So I think it may be a worthwhile exercise to analyze the show in the same manner: by focusing on the characters.

Caleb. The show’s protagonist had a childhood traumatized by the Federation, after his mother was sentenced way too harshly for having been at worst an accessory to murder. This defining incident shapes all his relationships: he’s learned to expect to end up alone, so he’s reluctant to bond. This is made evident from the big gestures, like the way he lashes out at his new friends each time they get too close, to the small ones, like his habit of hoarding food (which is a real behavior in children who were abandoned). This issue gives him both a clear direction and a weakness: he has a mission to find his mother, but everything else is secondary to it, so he doesn’t allow himself to experience life. He can’t commit to his girlfriend because he feels too emotionally exposed with her (it doesn’t help that she’s a literal mind-reader), and he can’t participate in a Klingon bonding ritual because he’s still waiting for the family he lost. This is interesting characterization, but it gets resolved too neatly by the end of the season.

Genesis. Our favorite obsessive overachiever has a simpler but harder drama to deal with: as the daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she enters the Academy having already a mountain of second-hand expectations dumped onto her. She’s definitely talented, as well as a quick learner and a natural leader, but she can’t bring herself to believing that her successes are her own, even after she’s proven multiple times that she can improvise resourcefully, notice the details that matter in a moment of urgency and somehow always know the right thing to say to comfort a friend. That’s her tragedy: she treats everyone with much more care and understanding than she’s willing to give to herself.

Darem. This one is fascinating to watch evolve. We first meet him as an arrogant child of aristocrats (we eventually learn he’s literally engaged to a princess), used to being the center of attention and not above hurting others to get his way; over the course of the season, he realizes he doesn’t need to keep putting up an image of flawlessness for parents who don’t even care enough to answer his calls. This frees him to start searching for who he is in reality, and it turns out he’s a loyal friend with a bottomless capacity for empathy—that is, unless you’re dating his crush, in which case he can still be a pain to deal with. His newfound willingness to make fun of himself still needs more practice.

SAM. What can I say about this bubbling avalanche of positivity, our beloved Queen Sam Samallina of Samonita? On one hand, she has an unquenchable thirst for life, an earnest curiosity for a universe she can’t get enough of. On the other hand, she has an entire species’ fate in her hands, being an envoy from sentient holograms with the assignment to study us squishy organic beings and report on whether we’re still a danger to artificial lifeforms. That’s a massive responsibility for someone only four months old, which comes back to bite when she suddenly has to deal with violent trauma without having the emotional resources that come from actually having lived. In a beautiful case of metaphor turned literal, she almost dies because she’s literally too pure for this world. After she quickly-but-not-really (there’s some serious time dilation involved) gains the maturity she needs to maintain a stable personality, she becomes an even more compelling character to watch: now she has enough perspective to critically examine both the person she used to be and the way her friends responded to that version of her.

Jay-Den. Once again there’s only one Klingon in Starfleet, and this time he’s a pacifist studying medicine. This is a refreshing change from the repetitive way this species has been portrayed in Star Trek. Of all the colorful and strange cultures we’ve seen across the decades of this franchise, Klingons have been among the ones that make the least sense. I always wondered how their civilization lasted all the way to the space era without exterminating itself. Now that we’re in the 3000s, the Klingons’ situation is much different: they’ve lost their empire, they’re reduced to a handful of clans, and their collective survival is in question. Jay-Den’s family drama (about being a son of hunters who eschews violence) gets resolved fairly early in the season, and from then on he’s relegated to something of a background role, which is a pity because he’s just the sweetest and his romance subplot is adorable.

Tarima. Ah, Tarima. What shall I do with you, you Manic Pixie Dark Phoenix. This was the character I struggled the most to understand. Her backstory is that, in a species of born telepaths, she’s an exceptionally (even alarmingly) gifted one, and the medical treatments she’s had to live with in order to keep her powers within safe limits have prevented her from fully knowing herself. Frustratingly, this also prevents the audience from getting a sense of what her deal is. She’s reserved, but impulsive, but apprehensive, but uninhibited, but distant, but bold. To be fair, her best scenes are those where her directness cuts through Caleb’s tendency to lie to himself.

Captain Ake. As a centuries-old being who has seen everything, it makes sense that she has little patience for Starfleet’s excessive love of formality and protocol. I love the way she commands respect as a captain without bothering to perform the part. Because the show is mainly focused on the younger characters, we learn about Ake’s personal drama late in the season (she once made a tactical decision that cost her son’s life), but the additional fact that it was her fault that Caleb grew up without his mother gives us enough to chew on in the meantime. The only regrettable moment with her is the finale, where it feels like the Federation comes off as too implausibly clean-handed for the times of hardship that followed the Burn.

With equal parts romance, comedy and technobabble, Starfleet Academy is remarkably well directed, acted and written (I want to single out Kirsten Beyer, who is proving to be by far the best writer in New Trek), although it shares with Discovery a questionable plotting choice: in the 3000s, with the Federation in pieces and the galaxy in dire need of new leaders, why try to remake the same old Federation that already failed, instead of coming up with something different and more suited to the new political reality? Aside from that oversight inherited from its predecessor series, this is a laudable step forward for the franchise, especially after recent disappointments like the nostalgia vomit that was Picard season 3, the inconsistent mess that was Strange New Worlds season 3, and the unforgivable calamity that was the Section 31 film. More of this, please.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The Bride!

A smart, visceral, unapologetic cry of rebellion

The rules of the game are ambiguous from the beginning. Speaking from beyond the grave, Mary Shelley addresses the audience directly, bored with the endless void of the afterlife where nothing ever happens, and frustrated at not having had enough time for telling the stories she still had in mind. This theme of a woman’s voice tragically silenced will reoccur through the film. What sets things in motion is Shelley’s impossible feat of self-necromancy, as if applying the forbidden arts of Victor Frankenstein to her own life’s spark to find a way back into the world of the living.

We’re brought to 1930s Chicago, with its blinding lights and its sordid dark corners, its charm and its promise and its disillusions. There Shelley has sensed a spirit that resonates with hers, another woman exhausted of playing appendage to a certain breed of men; and their joining, rather than a possession in the way we’re used to seeing in horror cinema, is a two-hour-long primal scream, a verborrheic burst of irrepressible wrath and ecstasy and dread and revulsion and despondency and grievance all at once. Through this new woman, whom death itself is powerless to silence, Shelley completes the story she confesses to us she’d been meaning to write for centuries: the tale of the Bride of Frankenstein.

A motif keeps playing on a loop across Western myths, a Freudian fixation we can’t seem to outgrow: in one iteration after another, the creation of Man is a worthy end in itself, but the creation of Woman has to satisfy an instrumental justification. When God builds Adam, it’s for his own sake (and my bifid usage of “his” here is fully intended), but when he builds Eve, it’s solely for Adam. So it goes with every artificial woman from Galatea to Alexa: she exists to be put in the service of someone else, to fulfill a function. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature’s curse is that no one is willing to love him, Frankenstein’s creature’s Bride’s curse is that her willingness to love is already assumed. That’s the whole point of her. Whatever she may want for herself isn’t part of the equation.

This Bride, however, won’t play along with the plan. After her death and reanimation, she may be a blank slate with no traces left of her former identity (and that’s exactly how Frankenstein’s Entitled Incel wants her), but she still has Mary Shelley whispering inside her head. Even more dangerously, she carries the names and stories of many other women that 1930s Chicago has killed. She’s bound to attract the wrong kind of attention soon.

The rules of the game are kept ambiguous. The setting of The Bride! never pretends to be our 1930s Chicago; it has the gangsters and the neon signs and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, but it also has clandestine clubs with strobes and modern beats. It’s a world where Mary Shelley lived, wrote and died, but somehow Victor Frankenstein existed too, and his masterwork is known to other researchers of fringe science. So Shelley’s ghost is aware of us in the audience, and on top of that she can access a world where her fictional creation really happened, and there she reenacts Bride of Frankenstein (to the point of adopting its gimmick of casting the same actress as both Shelley and the Bride), with a stint under the false name Penelope, the name of a mythical character whose whole deal consisted in putting her life in pause for a man (and to further highlight the point, The Bride! features a real-life actress by the name of Penélope in the role of a woman who has been denied a career of her own).

To this erudite pile of allusions The Bride! adds a side wink toward the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde plus explicit callbacks to the victim-turned-criminal-turned-revolutionary-symbol strain of social commentary that 2019’s incel hagiography Joker tripped over and fell on its face attempting—which has got to be a deliberate choice, given that writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal once played a woman murdered by the Joker, and then took the Batman from that same film and cast him here as the 120-Year-Old Virgin. The Bride! juggles a dozen flaming daggers of intertextual connections and metafictional layers while tap-dancing backwards in high heels.

Movies have always loved monsters. So it’s only appropriate that this time, the monsters love movies. This version of Frankenstein’s creature is infatuated with a star of musical cinema who has conquered the devotion of the masses despite living with a physical deformity. It’s easy to see how the creature takes the actor as an aspirational symbol, even though the nature of this affection is not appreciated in return. In another of the film’s many tricks that blur the boundaries between levels of fictiveness, we see the creature and his Bride superimposed on the screen within the screen, replacing the protagonists of whatever movie they’re watching. They see a glamorous world of conventionally beautiful people and dare to see themselves in it. The Bride! couldn’t be more unsubtle in its plea to the audience: this story is about you. Try seeing yourself in it. Try letting its spirit possess you.

The Bride! is a movie about the power of movies, and about the trope of the instrumentalized woman, and about the injustice of being robbed of your voice and the exhilaration of seizing it back. It’s the protest against heartless callousness that Joker wished it were. It’s the anthem to unhinged feminine power that Cruella wished it were. It’s supremely uninterested in pleasing everyone. It dances to its own rhythm.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Film Review: Eternity

Someone ought to speak to the manager

According to Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:35, when the Saducees asked Jesus about the eternal legal status of a widow who remarried, he replied that there was no marriage in the afterlife. That was a wise managerial decision; otherwise I suppose Henry VIII’s afterlife welcoming party would have been very awkward.

The movie Eternity illustrates the exact same problem that the Saducees presented before Jesus: a twice widow goes to heaven and meets her dead husbands, and her eternal fate depends on which one she chooses. Standard jealousy jokes ensue.

If this movie aims to convey any message about the nature of love and the value of the prosaic, quiet life, it’s lost amid the tension of its torturedly contrived premise. The version of the afterlife we see in Eternity is an extremely bureaucratized dystopia with rigid rules and arbitrary prohibitions. Our poor lady simply has to make a choice, and she has one week to do it, and after moving to a specific flavor of heaven, she can’t ever change her mind, and if she tries to undo her choice, she’ll be thrown into an eternal abyss of darkness. Because that’s what upper management has decreed. And no, despite all the trappings of corporate culture, you can’t file a complaint, because what passes for customer service makes one suspect that this place is actually hell.

Let’s go into a bit more detail. In the afterlife presented in Eternity, when you die, you’re assigned a handler who will guide you for a week until you pick a flavor of heaven to permanently move to. Competition is fierce: you’re inundated by every manner of advertisement trying to sell you the gardening heaven, the weightlifting heaven, the nail spa heaven, the mountain cabin heaven, the beach resort heaven, the ’70s cocaine party heaven, the aristocratic mansion heaven, the Parisian literary café heaven, and so on. But our lady’s problem isn’t so much which form of eternity to choose, but whom to spend it with.

Her first husband was, as we’re told endless times, perfect in every way (it doesn’t help that for this role they cast Callum Turner, who I can’t bring myself to believe is handsome at all, but the plot requires us to close our eyes and pretend he’s a 10). Alas, he was sent to war and died too soon, and those blissful young memories have stayed with her all this time. Her second husband was rather normal, and she stayed married to him until old age took them. She had a standard family life with him, having children and grandchildren, without much in the way of complaints. But the ghost of that vigorous first love stayed there, overshadowing the ordinary flow of everyday life. Now that they’re all dead and she has the opportunity to choose again, should she remain with the good but unexceptional guy who gave her 65 adequately unobjectionable years, or should she take her chances with the dreamy guy she never stopped missing?

The amount of tweaks that the plot has to make to its idea of heaven in order for the characters to even have this problem in the first place makes it difficult for the story to say anything meaningful to the viewers. If you squint, maybe you can glimpse a stance against naïve nostalgia, but the movie’s happy ending puts our lady in one of the afterlives that were taken out of circulation: the placid suburbia heaven. So it’s not clear how sincerely Eternity is warning us against taking refuge in rosy memories.

Because the afterlife is presented as a top-down system with unquestionable rules, the plot can’t let the characters consider pushing for the rules to be changed. A short line in the script alludes to a solution where our lady gets to live with her two husbands, but the husbands won’t have that. As a result, the completely unnecessary and unjustified constraints of the story lead to a way too narrow range of possible endings. It’s the least useful type of allegory, the one that only works if you accept a thousand artificial caveats.

What does work in this movie is the acting. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller have to speak and move like old people suddenly put in young bodies, and they succeed, with Olsen taking full advantage of the gorgeous ’50s hairstyles and dresses she’s put in, and Teller milking every drop of his naturally raspy voice. Meanwhile, Turner has a unique assignment: his character is a guy from the ’50s who never grew old, so his mannerisms and general outlook on life have to feel like they’re stuck in time, even though he has existed through the years since. We aren’t told whether dead people can learn and grow in this afterlife, but what Olsen’s character eventually discovers about her true desires reveals a maturity in accordance with her actual age.

Eternity seems to know what it wants to say, but it needs to resort to an absurd scenario for that message to begin to make sense. At least next time you’re forced to choose an irrevocable forever, you’ll know what to do.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Anime Review: 7th Time Loop

There's a little bit of everything in this compact time loop/romance/action/adventure

Anime series usually fall into distinct categories: shonen adventure, romance, magic and fantasy, portal adventure, etc. Seventh Time Loop is a fun, compact story that offers a little bit of all the things viewers might want from an anime. Its full title is: The Seventh Time Loop: The Villainess Lives a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy. Although it seems to tell the complete story, the title is intentionally misleading. The protagonist Rishe is not a villain, and her life in her seventh time loop is not at all carefree.

Rishe is a young noblewoman forced into an engagement to her kingdom’s arrogant prince. When false rumors paint Rishe as a villain, the prince denounces her and publicly cancels the engagement. Rishe takes the opportunity to flee and start life anew in an unexpected trade. However, she is eventually killed and reborn into the same moment of the original engagement being broken. In the style of Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, or Source Code, Rishe restarts her life with all the knowledge she amassed from her prior incarnations. In each time loop, Rishe has extended time to build skills, find practical mentors, create friendships, and learn about the world before she dies. Through her various incarnations she learns, with the help of others, to be a maid, a merchant, an herbalist, an academic scientist, a soldier, and other practical tasks, and she becomes stronger and smarter after each life.

In each time loop Rishe’s death is, directly or indirectly, brought about by Arnold, the cruel prince of a neighboring kingdom whose warmongering brings, in various forms, destruction to Rishe. However, in her seventh reincarnation, Rishe has had enough of her fate being controlled by both princes. She tells off her fiancé and jumps from a balcony to escape. She is intercepted by the same prince Arnold, who stabbed her to death when she was a soldier in her last life. Arnold is powerful, sharp-tongued, and stoic, but intrigued by Rishe’s fierce, unladylike behavior. Fascinated, he immediately proposes to her. With several caveats, Rishe decides to accept in the hopes that a closer relationship to her six-time killer may give her insight into him and possibly help her bring peace to the realms.

In many romance anime stories, the protagonist is shy, unpopular, or otherwise insecure, and is constantly dazzled or flustered by the other stronger/more popular/richer person’s attention. In Seventh Time Loop we don’t have that sort of unbalanced dynamic. Rishe is smart, physically strong, and very clever. Arnold is the same. Arnold is confident, although stoic, and he knows Rishe is no ordinary princess. Intellectually, Rishe has the upper hand, since she has relived this existence six times. The cat-and-mouse dynamic is reminiscent of the always entertaining The Apothecary Diaries but without the mystery elements. Both characters call each other out when they detect deception or manipulation.

However, the slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance takes a back seat to explorations of a range of issues, including class oppression, the role of women, using commerce to help build economic stability, and the unending cost of war. Since Rishe has lived life as everything from a scullery maid to a royal to a merchant to a soldier to an academic, she has insight into options other than war and oppression. But these are the options Arnold feels compelled towards. In each episode she uses one of her past experiences to redirect Arnold.

In addition to Rishe’s time looping, we also get insight into Arnold’s backstory, including how his abusive father shaped his bitter personality and led to a toxic relationship with his troubled younger brother. The story also introduces likeable side characters from various aspects of Rishe’s reincarnations. For those who like action and adventure, there is plenty of sword fighting, palace intrigue, war flashbacks, family drama, and political upheaval. For those who like romance, there is plenty of witty parlor banter (in the vibe of Queen Charlotte), ballroom scenes, and swoon-worthy moments between our bold heroine and her morally gray fiancé. The writers do a good job of painting Prince Arnold as a complex and problematic but still potentially redeemable character. In the vibe of Bon Appetit, Your Majesty, the time travel premise provides a perfect device for subtly redirecting a tyrant.

For fans of The Apothecary Diaries, this is an ideal short series to tide you over until the next season finally drops. But, the storytelling is more linear and direct, and lacks mystery elements or extended moments of introspection. The overall tone and animation style is much more simplistic. And the historical setting means there will be plenty of troubling content to wrestle with without resolution because of the short length of the series. However, despite these limitations, Seventh Time Loop packs a lot of entertainment, social commentary, humor, and adventure into twelve very bingeable episodes. With optimistic, brightly colored animation, and a pragmatic point of view, the series provides balanced storytelling with just enough adventure, moral depth, romance, and humor to keep you satisfied.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Slow burn, time travel romance
• Clever exploration of social issues
• Compact, linear storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

The Math

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

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

TV Review: Washington Black

Slavery, steampunk, spirituality and science combine in a unique coming-of-age story about the search for knowledge and family connection

Washington Black is a steampunk-style adventure about Wash, a young Black boy trapped in brutal, violent slavery in 1800s Barbados, whose life is changed by his time with Titch, an idealistic but insecure inventor whose family owns the plantation where Wash is enslaved. The idea of a Disney-esque slave story may give viewers pause, especially with what initially seems to be a guilt savior trope in the premise of the story. However, Sterling K. Brown’s presence (behind and in front of the camera) grounds the story, as does the fact that the series is based on Esi Edugyan's gorgeous Booker Prize finalist novel of the same name. Ultimately, Washington Black is a story of self-determination, community, and creativity in the face of unimaginable odds.

The short, eight-episode series is primarily told in two timelines: childhood flashbacks and adult present in the life of the protagonist. George Washington Black, (wonderfully portrayed by Eddie Karanja), nicknamed Wash, is a ten(-ish)-year-old enslaved child on a brutal plantation in Barbados. He is cared for by Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a sturdy enslaved woman who tells Wash stories of her/their original home in Dahomey. The slavemaster, Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), is particularly brutal in his abuse of the plantation slaves, leading some to commit suicide. But Kit tells Wash that if they die, they will wake up in their old home in the beautiful Dahomey.

Things change for Wash when Erasmus’s brother, Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), arrives at the family’s plantation to work on his invention of a flying machine. He takes an interest in Wash because the child is clever, and is the right size to balance his flying machine. When another plantation family member dies in Wash’s presence, Wash is falsely believed to be the killer, so Titch flees the island with him by using their newly created flying technology. Their journey takes them to many locales and dangerous adventures as Wash grows into a talented engineer and scientist. However, his relationship with Titch struggles under the pressures of their fugitive status and Titch’s own insecurities.

In the present timeline, Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is now a young man living under a different name in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is mentored by Medwin (Sterling K. Brown), an older Black man who helps former slaves get to freedom and find their place in Halifax’s substantial and multicultural Black community, of which Medwin is the de facto leader. Wash meets Tanna (Iola Evans), a biracial young Black woman who is passing as white and traveling with her white scientist father (Rupert Graves). Wash and Tanna share an interest in science and are attracted to each other despite multiple barriers, including Wash being stalked by a relentless Javert-like bounty hunter (Billy Boyd) and Tanna being trapped in a forced engagement to William McGee (Edward Bluemel), a wealthy young British benefactor with his own strange secret.

There is a lot to like about the series, despite some shortcomings. The fantastical flying machines and other devices that propel the characters to their next adventure add a whimsical feel to the story, which is odd, given the grim premise. Throughout the show there is an appealing contrast and overlay of spirituality and scientific exploration, both of which require faith, imagination, and commitment from Wash. Additionally, we have a classic coming-of-age/journey narrative in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Snow Queen, where Wash travels to new locations on his journey (from England to Dahomey, from the Caribbean to the Arctic) and meets interesting and supportive characters along the way. In particular, he encounters a new member of the African diaspora in each adventure, including a West Indian pirate queen and female warriors in Dahomey. Other important side characters include Gaius (in the past) as the observant, well-spoken, seemingly aloof house slave in Barbados who secretly keeps an eye out for the other enslaved people; and Angie (in the present), who is the sharp-tongued but kind maternal figure who runs the restaurant and who acts as an alternative to Wash’s original maternal figure Big Kit. The collection of diverse but connected characters adds to the fantasy folktale feeling of the story, as does Wash’s spiritual visits with the dead in the spiritual realm, and the implied mystical identity of Wash’s father.

On the other hand, many of the more central and grounded characters are introduced and then abandoned in the later episodes. This is particularly true of Medwin, who seems like a central character both in terms of the show’s narrative structure and in terms of his unwavering mentor relationship with Wash, particularly as an alternative to Titch and Titch’s insecurities. Tanna’s fiancé McGee is another key character whose surprising backstory is intriguing and highly entangled with Tanna and Wash’s relationship. However, he soon disappears from the plot with barely a one-sentence explanation. Tanna and Wash’s courtship progresses at a leisurely pace to the detriment of other key story elements, making the overall pacing of the story uneven, especially in the later episodes.

The abrupt and abbreviated treatment of many of Washington Black’s interesting characters and storylines indicates that a longer series might have created a more interesting exploration of the themes of racism, belonging, identity, betrayal, and scientific curiosity. Fortunately, the series has a satisfying ending that brings Wash’s tale full circle. Washington Black acknowledges the harshness of slavery and racism, but also opts to focus on relationships and optimism and to keep the onscreen violence moderate. This is in contrast to the novel, which has graphic content. As a result, the show is an intriguing confluence of adventure, romance, steampunk technology, and social commentary that is unique in contemporary storytelling and is certainly worth the journey.

Highlights:

• Quirky steampunk tech
• Interesting but underused characters
• An exploration of slavery and racism and self-determination through a PG lens

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: The Raven Key by Harper L. Carnes

Can you hope for love if your heart is filled with shadows?

Seth is a troubled high school student. His first boyfriend dumped him without saying why, and his second turned out to be a violent abuser. Maybe his newest crush, a mysterious college student with a melancholic air, will be Mr. Right? The only problem is that his crush is an adult, and Seth won't be for some months, so the legal implications of pursuing that relationship leave everyone looking bad. Choosing lust over good sense, Seth lies about his age, betting that soon enough it won't matter anyway. Spoiler: it does turn out to matter, with heartbreaking results.

But his age isn't the worst secret Seth is keeping. There's a darkness inside him, an ancient power that has remained dormant all his life. The threat he carries moved his mother to try to kill him as a child, and he's been dealing with that trauma ever since. Even with her locked away in a mental hospital, he hasn't gotten rid of the constant nightmares. Of course, he has never believed her desperate claims that he's too dangerous for this world, that the thing that lurks within him must be eliminated. He tells himself she's just hopelessly deluded. She has to be.

Still, strange events seem to follow Seth everywhere. His touch starts giving people small electric shocks. A wolf crosses his path, looking at him like it knows him from somewhere. And no matter where he goes, a flock of ravens is never far behind, watching out for anyone who dares to threaten him. He takes refuge in his new relationship to try to forget about all the weirdness, but his Tall, Dark, Handsome obviously knows more of occult matters than he's letting on, and the way his eyes gleam sometimes hints of something beyond this realm...

The Raven Key is a slow-burn romantasy that takes its sweet time to really get going, but the extended buildup is no less enjoyable than the action. For most of the first half of the book, we follow Seth taking the risk to fall in love again after some awful past attempts, and the hidden encounters with his crush are narrated with the sweetness of youthful yearning. One almost forgets this was supposed to be a fantasy story, with how much space is given to developing this growing relationship, but the author knows how to make the mundane feel compelling and meaningful. Seth just wants to be happy, despite the indelible way his mother hurt him, despite his self-doubts, despite the legally questionable choices he knows he's making. And by the story's midpoint, it almost looks like he's succeded.

But the weirdness only gets worse from there, snowballing into an unstoppable train of awful consequence after awful consequence that starts when his boyfriend finds out about his age. That part is painful enough, but at the same time the presence that lives inside Seth gains more power and starts manifesting its intentions in horrific ways, seizing more and more control over him. He needs to find where this curse came from, even if it means talking to his mother after all these years, because if he doesn't stop what's happening to him, he will lose himself completely, and the whole world will suffer.

The escalating revelations that come during the second half of the book do a good job of rewarding the reader for waiting all through the first half. The truth behind Seth's curse points to a layer of mystical phenomena underlying our reality, giving the reader the right amount of detail to satisfy this book's longstanding mysteries but leaving ample space for further secrets to be explored. The ending, however, comes too abruptly, a cliffhanger at the wrong time that makes the built-up momentum crash against the last page. It's one thing to write your book as the first in a series and leave some events unfinished; it's another to take your climactic scene and rip it with a machete. The misjudged execution of this ending is the only reason I don't give the book a higher score.

The Raven Key is written with impressively polished prose for a debut, and the thorny legal question at the center of its plot is handled with the proper care and nuance. It's clearly conceived as introducing a whole series, and the reader must be prepared for a less than conclusive ending to this first entry. Setting aside that last bit, it's a captivating story with a solidly delineated protagonist and judicious doses of worldbuilding. Recommended with minor reservations.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Reference: Carnes, Harper L. The Raven Key [self-published, 2023].

Film Review: Lost in Starlight

 This Korean animated film on Netflix straddles rom-com and space adventure

Lost in Starlight begins on Mars, with an astronaut in a busy, vibrant housing facility for the team members recording a message to her daughter back on Earth. On the wall of her bunk, she has a small crayon drawing of an astronaut that her daughter made for her, and a vinyl record hanging up. But during the recording, a tremor shatters the entire facility, collapsing it on all of the astronauts inside, killing the entire crew.

Fast-forward some 25 years, and we meet the now-grown daughter who was to receive that message -- Nan-young. Despite losing her mom in that tragedy on Mars, Nan-young has pursued a career at NASA, as well, and she plans on being a member of the crew that will make humanity's first return voyage to the Red Planet since her mom and the others were lost. But her supervisors are worried about her -- not because she seems to emotional, but because she doesn't seem emotional enough.NASA removes her from the mission, believing that she never fully processed the loss of her mother, and that the psychological effects of arriving on Mars might prove overwhelming or unpredictable.

Upset by losing her spot on the team, Nan-young begins going through some of her mother's things, and finds an old, broken record player that she had decorated with crayon drawings as a child. She tries to find a repair shop that can tackle the record player, but has no luck until she literally bumps into Jay as she's going into a store and he's coming out. The record player falls to the ground, and Jay says he repairs machines like that. Some coincidence.

As Nan-young and Jay begin spending more time together, she opens up to him about how much she loves music, and one song in particular really helped get her through the long nights of studying in college. But she got the song off of a file-sharing site, and never knew who the artist was. She begins playing the song, and Jay confesses that he actually wrote the song with his old band, and he never knew anyone had heard it. Again, some coincidence.

As Nan-young continues her scientific work at NASA, she encourages Jay to get back with his old band and explore writing and performing again. He's reluctant to do so, but does reconnect with his old band mates, and agrees to play guitar live. Then suddenly, Nan-young makes a breakthrough involving plant-life on Mars, and earns a spot back on the crew. The public announcement goes out before she can tell Jay, and his feelings are hurt, leading to a rift before the mission.

Once the Mars mission begins, the film begins intercutting between their two narratives. Nan-young has to do a reconnaissance mission on the surface, and a windstorm comes up, seeparating her from the rest of the crew, shorting out her coms, and threatening her oxygen supply. Back on Earth, Jay has agreed to play and sing with the band at a festival date, and since he hasn't sung on stage in years, he's really nervous.So, one character is literally fighting for her life on an alien planet, and the other...has stage fright. 

This is where the movie lost me. The stacking up of coincidences early in the film was a little clunky, but I could get over it. For a good portion of the movie, it does play much more like a romantic comedy with a bit of sci-fi flavor on the periphery, so if it hewed a little more closely to rom-com meet-cute conventions, it didn't feel out of place. And the movie does a couple interesting things with the idea of the bifurcation of self in the face of past trauma, and finding ways out of that. But the climactic juxtaposition of a literal life-or-death, high-drama space adventure vs. taking a deep breath and singing a song in front of what looks to be about 100 people...it just didn't track for me.

In the end, I found myself reminded of movies that plowed similar ground, but which I enjoyed much more. Movies like The Martian or Your Name, where in the former dealt with survival on Mars and the latter with romantic partners trying to communicate across impossible distances, felt like they were big inspirations for a lot of the action of the film, and though I was reminded of them, Lost in Starlight never resonated with me the way those films did. Even First Man, about Neil Armstrong trying to compartmentalize his child's death while embarking on the moon mission, felt a little more emotionally impactful while dealing with very similar material.

--

Nerds coefficient: 6/10

Posted by Vance K - resident cult-film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together 

Review: The Book of Gold by Ruth Frances Long

 The Book of Gold by Ruth Frances Long starts off as seemingly a simple heist novel that evolves into something more complex, especially theologically.

Lyta Cornellis is a thief, and a good one. She loves a good score as much as she loves her younger brother Kit. Kit is a printer and publisher, a new and expanding business in the city of Ambres, hub of commerce in an alternate 16th century Europe.Various powers are always lurking, from the King of Castile, Aragon and Leon to the dread Duchess of Montenbleau. So when Kit is arrested for printing a pamphlet that is declared treasonous, Lyta has to save him. To do so, she makes a deal with the king to steal a magical book from an impregnable fortress. But even with a small god on her side, she is going to need help with her biggest heist yet.

This is the beginning of the story of The Book of Gold, by Ruth Frances Long.

The novel features an interesting set of characters whose alignments, relationships, agreements and more feel three-dimensional.  Lyta is our primary point of view. She runs by her skills, her devotion to the small god Eninn, and her love for her brother.  Also, the knowledge that her husband has been long lost to the very fortress she agreed to break into. We slowly peel back and learn more about her backstory as the novel progresses, further deepening our understanding of how she, and Kit, got to where they are.  Kit, who is also a major point of view, is idealistic and somewhat oblivious to what the power of his printing profession really is.  Add in Sylvian, now the King’s loyal guard, but was Lyta’s first love. Finally, there is Ben, a very noted scholar,  who is needed for the book heist, and has secrets and power of his own.  

The worldbuilding for the most part is fascinating, although a couple of things irked me that I will leave for a footnote because I don’t want to totally detail the review with them.¹.  Ambres is a cognate of 16th century Antwerp, an entrepot if there ever was an entrepot. This is the high age of the low countries mercantile influence, while still being under the control of Spain (here Castile and Leon and Aragon). Power, money and influence pour through the city. Oh, and did I mention the Church Imperial is also potent and has interests and influence here? Add in the paradigm-shattering effects of the early days of the printing press and you can see why Long chose this location to build her not-quite-our Europe and her city of Ambres for the action to take place. This is a book for those who like this sort of historical fantasy, with a lot of period detail particularly on printing and publishing along with the thievery and other hijinks.

The novel is very well paced, with good mixtures of action beats as well as character moments. As a result, Long’s book is extremely readable and goes down easy. The set-piece of the break into the Fortress, with its successes and reversals, is the highlight of the book, but the novel begins with a bang with a heist at a party. The novel as a result is lean and well paced.

So, instead, I want to talk at length now about what I really want to get into in this piece. Not just about The Book of Gold, but its place in terms of its theological fantastical context. The theological setup in Long’s world is of a cognate of the Catholic Church, the Church Imperial. Their stamping out of heresy is not of Calvinists and Lutherans, but rather the older Gods who have been stamped out and suppressed with the rise of the God-Emperor. Long here has merged the idea of the divine Emperor of Rome with the Holy Roman Emperor and made him an off-screen living God. His goal is to be the *one* God and to wipe out the rest, and the efforts of his minions and servants plays a large part of the book.

Thus, as I was reading this, a sheaf of connections came to mind. There seems to be a small cluster of books interested in a spectrum of Gods, some or all of which are under siege or threat.  Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller comes to mind, where small Gods are being hunted by characters such as our titular main character Kissen. Ari Marmell’s Widdershins novels, where she is the sole devotee of a small God. The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson has a set of eight Gods, the Raven being the most seen and active among them, but again, their power and controlling them comes into play. And of course, the Tyrant Philosophers series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.²

All of these works, from Long’s to Tchaikovsky's are interested in the use of theological power of the Gods and how it might be captured, transformed, diffused by man. Gods are not dead in these works, but they certainly are being harnessed, diminished, destroyed or transmogrified at the hands of power-hungry humans. The tyranny of this is consistent, throughout. It is often portrayed as being for the good of everyone, or the good of society, but in the end, it is a road to power, by either removing a rival source, or absorbing that power directly. 

Whatever the portrayal, in the end it is definitely a loss of theological diversity, something that Long’s book and the Tyrant Philosophers novels by Tchaikovsky make absolutely clear. One belief system, one mode of thought, one correct way to mold society. Like any monocultures, though, they are almost always inherently bad and the drive for one distorts and hurts people and society. 

But why is this suddenly a popular topic? Why in this secular age is there a series of novels and stories like this. This crop of limited theologically oriented beings, whose power is sought to be extinguished, or bound or even just drained by larger entities?  Is this all a subconscious metaphor for small companies being eaten up by billionaires and entities like Meta and Amazon? Is it a metaphor or allusion to the rise of fascist-curious or fascist regimes, who reach for power and extinguish dissent, different thinking and rival power centers? Is this some Nietscheian reaction to lots of fantasy novels with Gods and Goddesses running around doing things with and to mortals and against each other? Or is this an echo of superhero novels and stories and movies, which have made up so much of our zeitgeist, which are of course all about ordinary people gaining powers formerly attributable to Gods? 

In The Book of Gold, we get to see a number of these entities, revealed slowly as the perspective and tone of the book goes from simple heist to theological conflict. Eninn, a god of tricksters and thieves, is the first and primary one we meet. He’s small, doesn’t apparently do much, but can escape the grasp of those who might bind him, and he has Lyta as a loyal follower. He corresponds very well with the Fox in The Raven Scholar.  More of these are revealed as the novel progresses. Kyron,a god of soldiers. Ystara, a goddess of love. The aforementioned living God-Emperor himself, too, with his dread plans.  And it makes sense that Ambres, trading and mercantile hub, would have these powers arranged and interested in it. The author’s love of the space and place of 16th century Antwerp really comes through, and it makes sense that this is where Godly powers might come...and might be caught and captured thereby. Or, when the Gods have power, anoint or expouse champions of their interests, either unofficially or officially. There are some nice reveals and power plays that occur in the denouement of the book.

There are also hints of darker, older deities as well afoot. For all of its power, the Church Imperial has made great strides over a millennium but has not extinguished, cowed or bound all of the deities out there. It gives the theocratic landscape of Amberes much more of an late antiquity/early medieval Catholic Church feel.³ 

There are a lot of potential rabbit holes one might go down in this book besides the theological one I just did. The role of the early printing press and the focus on books as treasured items, for example. Or you might focus on the romance dynamics in the interplay of characters (there are past and present romances, heterosexual and queer, and Long makes good use of all of them for character and plot development). And other angles to explore as well. It’s a rich quasi-historical fantasy with a lot to offer a reader interested in these sorts of worlds just next door. 

Highlights:

• Engaging and dynamic inspiration (16th c. Antwerp) used for her fantasy setting

• Strong use of romance and characterization among the protagonists

• Intriguing theological models and Gods. 

Reference: Long, Ruth Frances,  The Book of Gold [Hodderscape, 2024].

¹ Okay, so here we go. So the inconsistency of names of polities and locations irks me. There is a Castile, a Leon, an Aragon, That’s the parts and titles for the rulers of Spain, that’s easy. That’s right from our world. But then why rename England as Albion? And someplace in Scandinavia gets renamed as the Kingdom of Geatland? The use of Brabatine to identify the Spanish Netherlands, where the story takes place, is also a piece of this. It’s not quite wrong, but its not quite our history’s name, either. And there are references to Caput Mundi, which given that is the city of the Church, must be Rome. But then why keep the pieces of Spain with the same names as our history? I get that it would be hard to convey “Spain” without using the real life parts of it, but it still feels a little discordant. 

² Of course this is nothing new. Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, of course. But it seems like there is a boomlet lately in such works, exploring limited divinities and often putting them under strife and danger. 

³ The worldbuilder in me has lots of questions--like, what is happening in North Africa, the Middle East? Is there a cognate of Islam? There is one reference to a “Byzantine coffee shop” --does the Eastern Roman Empire still survive in this version of the universe? What’s going on there, politically and theologically if it is? And given the date in history...what about the Americas?

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