Book Review: Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall

Horny and intellectual by turns, this sapphic, spacefaring adventure is Moby Dick for the digital age.

I'll freely admit that a lot of things in this book are jokes, because I have a very short attention span and like kid myself that facetiousness is the same as satire.

So says I, the cryptically-monikered narrator of Hell's Heart, a sapphic reimagining of the story of Moby Dick, set on a ship out to hunt leviathans in the roaring storms of Jupiter. And on one level, this is a perfectly accurate summation of the novel. It's absolutely jam-packed with jokes. They range from the subtle, the referential (if you can read Latin, there are a number of sometimes apt, sometimes rather less so quotations that you may recognise, more on this later), through a Muppets gag, all the way to a long-running repeated bit about "sperm" being a funny word. It would be very easy to read this book and read it light, to skim across it with the glib, flippant tone the narrator offers, and be content. The narrator, as characterised, often seems to want you to do exactly that. It would be a perfectly good reading, and a great time. And, yes, conceivably both facetious and satire.

But it would be an incomplete one. Because Alex Hall is doing a heck of a lot more in Hell's Heart, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

To be clear before I dig in too deep, I've never read the whole of Moby Dick, and even my partial encounter with it was a time ago best measured in decades. But I have the cultural awareness of it as a novel that many do, so my perspective on it comes from a place of rough familiarity, but without the detail for a full comparison.

To start with the weakness, it's quite a long book. Not as much as its inspiration, but my copy clocks in at 464 pages, which is still relatively chunky, and more to the point long enough to start feeling long. In that time, while Hall packs in a lot of content, a lot of themes, a lot of angles (and less sex than might be expected, but still plenty), by the end, it starts to feel like there are a small number of major pieces that are being proffered up to the reader on rotation. Around page 370 or so, all of these were feeling just that little bit too familiar, so I was very glad once Hall finally got around to the dramatic end piece. And think to some extent the length is a product of doing all those different things all together and at once - they have to keep circling around and getting their various turns to make sure they're all covered off before the big finale. And just for that little while, for a short span of pages... it did get a tiny bit stale. Everything just became that bit too familiar. They hadn't quuuuite paced it right.

Which is a real shame, because in nearly every other way, that packed in variety was what made the book so enjoyable.

Starting with the religion stuff, of which there was quite a lot. In the space future Hall envisages for the setting of Hell's Heart, there are three major and a number of minor churches, but the ones that figure most into the story are the Churches of Liberty and Prosperity, and a cult referred to as the Church of Starry Wisdom, or just Wisdom. The first two are clearly based on Christian textual traditions (based on quotes, names and various pieces of information dropped across the book) but with radically different intents, both to each other and to my (admittedly weak and very Anglican-focussed) understanding of modern Christianity. Living up to their names, they preach a doctrine of radical personal freedom and profit respectively, and how those tenets interact with life in a solar system of dispersed exocolonies and habitats is deeply threaded through much of the story. The protagonist herself is a semi-lapsed Prosperity disciple, and she keeps coming back to her personal upbringing and relationship to money, profit and belief throughout the story. Which makes sense on a voyage where a captain is going to start prioritising vengeance over bringing in the goods that everyone signed on to hunt to earn their pay.

Meanwhile the Church of Starry Wisdom has a very different theology - they believe we're all going to succumb to the great beast, devourer of worlds, but that some are destined to be devoured before others, and those last-to-be-eaten are the chosen. Great beast, you say? In a monster hunting book? Yes, exactly. You see where that's going.

On the one hand, all of the religions are inherently parodic. Not necessarily of real world faiths, but certainly of strands within modern belief. It is hard to read a section in which the rich man and the camel passing through the eye of the needle story of the Bible is canonically interpreted as a mandate to be rich, and not see that this is poking fun at capitalism as we know it right now. And when that sits alongside pay-to-pray church services... well, it's not subtle. But it's also actually quite effective, and a lot of that is because the main character is really ambivalent about the extent to which she believes it all. There's a fair amount of musing on what it means and how it figures into her life, and that doubt makes it more than just a funny poke at the real world.

Instead, it's part of how Hall is drawing a hypercapitalist space future hellscape, from which space-whale hunting is a legitimate escape for those with few means and debts to pay.

Part of this hellscape is a medical one - several characters throughout the book are shown to have biological amendments, upgrades or replacements in their bodies, and a number of them are in perpetual debt to Aphrodite Corp. because of it - healthcare being extremely proprietary. There's even a throwaway line about someone being punished for inheriting copyrighted genes. And yes, this too is obviously satire, but it sits in that good and fuzzy zone of obviously satirical while also real enough to be effective worldbuilding. Because I is one of those characters with debts - hers being for unspecified body mods that I was interpreting as something gender-related but which is never made wholly clear in text - and the way that that is emphasised by her, and by the world around her in text makes her decision to run off to this incredibly dangerous, gross and difficult career make a lot more sense than it might otherwise do.

Another part, and this is something that only comes up in a few small lines but which nontheless made a deep impression on me, is the way Hall envisages art in this horrible vision of the world. This is a world with a divide between human-produced and procedurally generated art, it seems, and that is such a horrible, biting window into a possible future that I had to pause for a minute when I got to it. I've read a number of stories about and full of AIs in the last couple of years, and yet this little tiny glimpse in a book about space whales somehow grasped it all the better.

I suppose it's because the book is very much about, among all the other things, inequality and desperation. And that is so real, so graspable, that all the SFnal trappings around it work all the more.

That desperation is also part of what makes the narrator work so well, because it undercuts and grounds her sometimes... well, as she says, facetious tone. In some ways, she reads very similarly to another Hall narrator, Puck from Mortal Follies and Confounding Oaths. Both of them are incredibly cagey about real names, for one thing. But where Puck starts and ends with that light, mischievous tone they share, that fey nature, I is just as much defined by her wants, her humanity and her seriousness as by her rejection of it. Over 464 pages, the lightness might have worn thin without something substantial to be glimpsed underneath it. It comes in fits and bursts, but it's there, and it turns the lightness into something darker than just a person with a certain approach to life. The humour becomes coping mechanism, tied up into the darkness to which it offers a contrast. I is simultaneously comedic and tragic.

Outside of I, most of the other characters don't get an awful lot of depth. There are short portraits of key figures, but they take something of a sidebar to her main interests - digressions and sex jokes. Some of them are, themselves, jokes. Many of the ones that aren't are obvious parallels to characters from Moby Dick, especially the mates, and the Ahab figure, genderbent and referred to only as A. Her madness - characterised in part by a wholly different register of speech than the rest of the crew, archaic and formal and itself calling back to the source text - is made compelling. We can see why I loves her, just as we can see why that adoration (possibly infatuation is a better word, given how one-sided it all is) is absolutely toxic to her.

The other part of her madness is another thing that made me do a big "oof" and put the book down for a little while, for that sudden face slap of too close, too real. The captain has in her quarters a "networked machine intelligence", a computer programmed to provide advice, data processing and predictions, but in a chatty, colloquial manner. A machine with which she develops an unhealthily codependent relationship as it gives her the information she wants and the answers that best reinforce her existing priorities and intentions. Horribly familiar, isn't it? It's a damnably good take on that kind of obsession, updated to the modern world, and I sort of hate how effective it is.

The other character who gets genuine page time and development is... less easy to sum up. Her name is Q, and she is obviously a reflex of Queequeg from the original. In this multiplanetary (and more) future, however, her home is old earth, rather than Queequeg's South Pacific Island origin. In this future, Terrans, with their strange tattoos, are seen as backwards and barbaric compared to those in the habitats and expoplanet colonies. They are strange, insular and possibly cannibals, and don't have the same religions or priorities as the "exodites".

Given the obvious racial dynamics of the original, this is an interesting choice of update. And one I'm still not entirely sure how to take. Because on the one hand, Hall has taken a number of the stereotypes included in the original text and just shifted them over wholesale, but on the other, he's given them some aspects and accoutrements that point in opposite directions. My understanding (as above, incomplete) of the original text is that Queequeg is heavily othered and given a strong desire to visit "Christendom" which... brings up a whole bunch of associations. So to pivot that othering into a character who is from the most familiar place in this setting for us as readers seems to me a very deliberate choice to engage with the problems of the original.

Likewise, while Q in Hell's Heart speaks mostly in a language none of the other characters understand... that language is Latin, which comes with a bunch of assumptions about prestige and worth for a lot of readers. And if you either can read Latin or fancy googling it as you go through the book, you discover that Hall has cheekily used this as a way to pull in quotations from a wide, wide pool of sources. Some of them are Biblical, which makes a lot of sense for this retelling and the direction they choose to take most of the story. But some are drawn from Classical authors like Cicero and Catullus. Indeed, there is a phenomenally effective sex scene early on where Q speaks to I only in quotes from Catullus' erotic poetry. So again, Hall is taking a racist portrayal and making some very deliberate choices about how to mess with it, how to hold it in conversation with the original.

Q is also one of the very few seemingly altruistic characters in the book. While all the exodites are busy being out for profit (or worshipping an embodiment of entropy that just so happens to have white supremacy baked into its hierarchy of the universe), Q operates on a moral compass more easily comprehensible to the reader (even as it's opaque to I). Which on the one hand reinforces that she is the familiar one, not the Other. But on the other plays into ideas of the noble savage.

Does it work? I'm honestly still not sure. The Latin does, and there are moments where they deploy it brilliantly, where the quotes are exactly perfect for that piece of dialogue, and where I's uncomprehending response is a humorous dissonance. But as a whole thing? Maybe?

Despite my above complaint about length, I think possibly Q needed more page space in order to fully work through her character and its relationship to Queequeg. It's a big thing to grapple with, and while it's clear Hall is grappling with it, I think it's not quite clear what the actual thesis of it all is. It's just sort of all... there, in a jumble, not quite sorted out. And for something so messy, there does need to be some sorting.

Even aside from the Latin, Hall does like to play with language and quotation quite a lot throughout. And that? That is successful.

I mostly speaks a very modern vernacular - and one that screams "excessively online millennial" to me, an excessively online millennial - which is extremely informal and irreverent. Most of the exodites speak a slightly less sex-joke-laden version of the same. But some characters are marked out by their dialogue, and every time Hall does this, it's interesting. In the Captain, it's a sign of increasing madness, as she slips past modern formal right into "hast thou". In one of the Wisdom followers - who suffers an accident that either is making him hallucinate or given him access to the voice of something numinous, depending who you ask - it is likewise a sign of madness, but of a different kind. He speaks in riddles, taken as prophecies, but I think every single one is a Shakespeare quotation. Certainly I spotted a lot of them in his dialogue. Given I's resonance with Puck in a previous Hall work, this felt like a slightly elaborate, subtle joke. But it also worked really well because he feels immediately distinct from all the other speakers, and from the self we met at the beginning of the book. In a sea (so to speak) of mostly indistinct background characters, it gives the reader an instant cue that this one needs attention and that this one is, now, different.

And indeed, offers a stark contrast to I's dick jokes. Because Hall didn't pick the dick jokes bits of Shakespeare.

It's those contrasts, more than anything, which are the heart of Hell's Heart. Between modes of speech, between humour and tragedy, between the old text and the new. So much of the story feels like a homage to or an argument with Moby Dick, even to someone not familiar with the original text. There are long digressions about whale physiology and the logistics of hunting, of the realities of a long journey spent cooped up together with a limited number of people in a small space, surrounded by an environment that wants to kill you, which is itself full of monsters. It feels, in those, stunningly close to its predecessor. And then up comes the irreverence, the absolute refusal to take some of the core premises seriously, and that contrast brings it to life. Just as in real-world whales, the resource being hunted in the gassy seas of Jupiter is "spermaceti", or "sperm" for short. And I did not count how many times I comes back to this, to teehee about it being a funny word, but if I did I would run out of fingers and probably toes as well. And yet it's also doing some serious thinking about capitalism and religion. Hall keeps you coming and going, never quite settled into one thing, one feeling, throughout the whole of the story. I is by turns a philosopher, a slut, a pilot, a girl, a problem - and those in her own words - and it is her effervescent changeability that sustains the story most. She speaks directly to the reader, always chatty, always lively, often metatextual, and creates a sense of conversation and relationship between herself and us for the duration of the story. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the ups and downs of her life and self.

She - this complex, quixotic, messy, terrible, excellent character - is what makes the story sing. And because she, and it, are so many different things, she makes it a rich text. Where I found myself focused on the capitalism, I'm sure someone else would linger elsewhere. That someone else might be me, on a future reread even. Yes, it's a long book, and yes, it might be overstuffed. Yes, that's even a problem. But it is also a strength, and one that makes this book worth reading, despite and because of its faults.

--

The Math

Highlights:

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Alexis Hall, Hell's Heart, [Tor Books 2026]

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

TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Film Review: Rumours

The world is burning. Now pass the canapés

Each time the world's top leaders get together at one of those secretive meetings to discuss the road ahead for humankind, it's inevitable to sense a certain air of Dan Brown-esque conspiracy. A handful of the über-privileged talking in private about the future prospects of eight billion? What could they possibly understand about the struggles of the commonfolk? Whatever it is they're deciding at that exclusive hotel or remote island or private yacht or inaccessible ski resort must be something absurdly removed from the real lives of real people. They may as well inhabit a realm of existence apart from the rest of us.

So what if they really did?

In the acerbic satire film Rumours, what begins as your usual tediously uneventful G7 summit turns into a survival horror adventure where the most powerful decision-makers of the free world are revealed to be pathetically useless when faced with an actual crisis. Our leaders sit for a business lunch in a luxurious castle estate somewhere in the German forest, and after banal pleasantries are exchanged between heads of state, the next item on the agenda is even more banal pleasantries addressed to the media. In a manner that brings to mind sociologist Bruno Latour's 1979 ethnographic study of the practice of science at a molecular biology lab, which concluded with the hilarious pronouncement that the purpose of science was to publish articles, Rumours presents us with a G7 whose sole task, after rounds of vigorous discussion, is to compose a joint press release.

Even when the world outside seems to have vanished, and the forest is suddenly haunted by shambling figures, and a fog descends over the night. Where did everyone go? Did nuclear war break out and destroy civilization? Maybe. They were honestly not paying attention. But damn it, they will write that press release.

The script of Rumours is impressive in its ability to make hollow platitudes sound gravely significant. Diplomatic lingo ends up being the only tool available to these clueless leaders while reality crumbles down around them. The movie doesn't even bother pretending to be subtle; the president of France openly tells us to interpret these events as an allegory of their respective countries' behavior. So we have a Canada that doesn't know who they are without Britain; a Britain that feel embarrassed to be seen next to Canada; an Italy that parrots every nonsensical word that comes out of the United States and whose role is reduced to offering its food to the world; a United States that keeps an eye on everything from afar and likes to talk a big talk about decisive action but falls asleep when it's needed; a France that drops flat on its face when it tries to venture alone and thereafter has to be dragged everywhere by the rest; a Germany that reminisces wistfully about its violent past; a Japan that suspects it's starting to grow old and is just along for the ride. Plus a special cameo from a Scandinavia that is so fascinated by big brains (yes, literally) that it self-destructs in devotion.

While watching Rumours, I was reminded of Don't Look Up: the whole gimmick of this plot is basic and obvious, but the movie comes up with ways to keep milking it for merciless commentary for two hours. The leaders' incongruous fixation on finding the right empty words to describe their present situation in the vaguest, most noncommittal terms is only surpassed in topicality by their extended handwringing over whether they really should risk their public image to run to rescue a child that is crying for help.

Rumours is a cathartic spit in the face of performative caring, a vicarious comeuppance for those in charge of preventing the mess they've thrown us into. Like the statement released by its protagonists, it's just talk, not something meant to change things. But oh boy does it feel good to watch the powerful be the ones trembling in utter horror for once.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Fantasmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Go Go Loser Ranger

Spare a thought for the lowly mooks

Please allow me a bit of ancient history: remember D&D 4e? Maybe one day I'll write at length about D&D 4e and all the features that disappointed me about it. But one of the most salient to me, that has always bothered me in a particularly nagging way, is the rule that minion-type monsters have only 1 hit point. The problem is not just the effect in terms of game mechanics; in this kind of game, the numbers tell a story, and what this number tells the players is that mowing through hordes of minions is a mere formality, a filler scene before facing the boss monster. This rule is a sign that the 4e designers believed, and were very confident that the players shared that same belief, that minions don't really matter to the story. Translating the numbers into narrative themes exposes that, in the universe of 4e (and, frustratingly, in many other games), minions are not people. They are, to borrow a very apt turn of phrase, piñatas full of experience points.

The animated series Go Go Loser Ranger is a clever critique of this narrative convention. As tradition has it, the big bad boss of a typical Power Rangers episode is assisted by a handful of nameless henchmen who keep the heroes occupied while the actual evil plan proceeds. Both in dialogue and in choreography, these henchmen are treated as a temporary nuisance, as one would a swarm of mosquitoes. No one raises questions about how the villain acquired this army, why they agreed to fight for their side, and what kind of lives they have when they're not fighting. Their role in the story is to be killed with sparkling colors. They lack every attribute of personhood: they're interchangeable, disposable, unmournable, tyrannized by their own bosses, and excluded from the humanitarian limitations to warfare, sometimes by means of explicit, literal dehumanization. Once again I must quote N. K. Jemisin's great essay about orcs in fantasy:

Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.

Go Go Loser Ranger asks: who are these supposedly unimportant fighters that generation after generation of Power Rangers have been dispatching without a care? Do they have an inner life? Do they have aspirations? Do they want something more than being cannon fodder? Do they make friends? Do they have their own moral compass? Do they ever get to disobey orders? Do they weep when their teammates die? And also: what does our enjoyment of their slaughter say about us? Because it's one thing to vicariously savor the defeat of a boss monster with openly evil intentions; it's another to ignore the dozens of dead minions who most likely weren't in the villain's army by choice. To make this shift in perspective even more pointed, Go Go Loser Ranger quickly reveals that this version of the Power Rangers actually killed the villains years ago; the fights that still occur every weekend are just for show. With the bosses gone, the minions are now the slaves of the Power Rangers, forced to reenact their defeat on camera, again and again, for the amusement of the masses, who remain unaware that the war is over.

Comparison to The Boys comes readily to mind. The heroes have become narcissistic, short-tempered sociopaths. Staged battles sell thousands of tickets. Human society has been fully reorganized around the alleged threat of alien invasion. Children are not too subtly indoctrinated to worship a farce. As in The Boys, the superheroes in Go Go Loser Ranger demonstrate to what extent (super)power corrupts.

Our point-of-view character is D, one of the minions left over from the aliens' failed attempt to invade Earth. Like his teammates, he's demoralized by the interminable humiliation of having to pretend to fight and pretend to be destroyed, rinse and repeat every weekend. Unlike his teammates, one day he decides he's had enough of this cruel game, and forms a plan to eliminate the Power Rangers for real. He escapes the floating fortress where his kind have been kept confined, and infiltrates one of the junior combat schools where future Rangers are trained. As it turns out, these minions are shapeshifters, which is how they come up with a different Monster of the Week for each staged fight. Disguised as a human, D sees for himself the cutthroat dynamic that pervades all things Ranger. He ends up involved in more secret schemes than he was prepared for, and he discovers that he has to adapt quickly to survive the web of alliances and betrayals he's fallen into.

Besides the usual comedy that happens each time a monster tries to learn to act human, D also gets a chance to reevaluate the cause his bosses always ordered him to fight for, and realizes that minions are just as much beneath empathy in the eyes of humans as in the eyes of his bosses. At the same time, in his assumed identity, he's started to make human friends at the combat school, and he has to deal with new and strange feelings of loyalty and responsibility that he wasn't created for. So D's emotional journey takes him to a place minions very rarely get to experience: the need to decide, for the first time, what he wants for himself.

Season 1 has just finished airing, and there's plenty more manga plot to adapt. D's mission to avenge his kind still has a long road to go, and he's only scratched the surface of the dirty secrets the Power Rangers are hiding. With a pleasantly watchable animation style, catchy music, a careful dosing of mysteries and revelations, and a pitch-perfect sense of comedy, Go Go Loser Ranger is not only surprisingly thought-provoking, but also greatly entertaining.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

First Contact: Brazil

A Kafkaesque fever dream in neon and gray

An unnamed country has been taken over by the Ministry of Information. Now every citizen must be known, catalogued, identifiable. There must be a paper trail for every little thing that happens. Under such a regime, there's no place for a romantic who dreams of flying.

I found it bone-chilling to watch Brazil in 2024. The capabilities of the surveillance state have only grown since 1985, and the resulting paranoia has degraded public debate to the point of making it utterly ineffectual. The digital revolution has made paperwork even more intrusive and frustrating. Brazil presents an all-knowing, all-reaching state as a humorous exaggeration, but that's exactly what we see developing around us. I had a little moment of nervous embarrassment whenever a scene depicted a form of government control that clearly sounded outlandish to the scriptwriters but in my time had become a normal part of life.

As I took note of the resemblances with reality, I also appreciated the art design. Brazil looks much like other famous 1980s dystopias: it shares its urban decay with Robocop, its hostile architecture with Blade Runner, its carceral aesthetic with Escape from New York. But you can immediately recognize Brazil by director Terry Gilliam's signature camera angles and strikingly composed close-ups. Characters seem cornered by our gaze, constrained in their world even as it extends far behind them. Likewise, in some scenes we see a character's attention intentionally turned away from a calamity happening in the background. This is one of many indications that the society of Brazil has replaced empathy with adherence to procedure. The system can't make mistakes (can't even bother to look at them); any wrongful action has to be attributed to hidden enemies of the state.

The influence from 1984 is obvious (one of the film's working titles was 1984 ½). But Orwell didn't live to witness the degree to which the KGB and the Stasi would turn totalitarian control into a sadistic art form. For us, it's hard to imagine an extreme of state intrusion that isn't already happening somewhere and that isn't defended by someone's twisted logic. Consider how discussion of Brazil treats it as comical hyperbole, but after the abuses brought by the Patriot Act and the endless threats to online privacy, we tend to speak of Black Mirror as raw testimony from tomorrow's headlines. Brazil's cartoonish hell has become our normal.

Brazil doesn't even provide the comfort of a hero worth rooting for. Archivist Sam Lowry likes to imagine himself as a knight in shining armor, but he's a willing cog in the machine. When he has to notify a housewife that the government has mistakenly tortured her husband to death, he's more interested in filling the requisite paperwork than in acknowledging her emotional distress. When he becomes infatuated with a woman he's only seen at a distance, he changes jobs for the sole purpose of stalking her. He has never lifted a finger to spare anyone from the government's brutal interrogation methods—until they come for the woman he's obsessed with. That he ultimately fails to escape the government's iron grasp isn't the real tragedy; the tragedy is that this is the kind of hero that this society is capable of producing.

While watching Brazil, I found myself constantly thinking back to the Star Wars series Andor, which seems to have taken inspiration from Sam Lowry when designing the villain Syril Karn, a paper-pusher of no importance with a controlling, overambitious mother and a nearly pathological fixation on a woman he perceives as strong-willed. One could read Andor as criticizing Brazil for choosing the wrong point of view, for inviting us to empathize with the wrong character. In Brazil, we don't get to meet the average inhabitants of this society, those who don't enjoy the perks of a government job and an influential mother. Whoever is detonating all those bombs in public places would have made a more compelling character to follow.

Like with Black Mirror, your experience with Brazil will depend largely on how much cynicism you bring to the table. You'll get massive amounts of validation if you already believe that human beings are horrible and that sufficiently complex social systems naturally tend toward tyranny. As comedy relies on surprise, you may find Brazil less funny, though perhaps scarier, if your view of real society matches what Gilliam imagined. I saw the same effect when I showed Idiocracy to some friends and they declared it not comedy but horror. I, too, felt a wave of horror come over me when I watched Brazil—just not horror at the fiction, but at the reality.

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

Review: The American Society of Magical Negroes

A poignant exploration of racism and appeasement wrapped in sarcastic, quirky, rom-com magic. 

A “magical negro” is a sarcastic artistic term used to describe an inspirational Black side character whose sole purpose is to inspire, comfort, and motivate the story’s protagonist. Although they frequently appear in speculative films and television, they don’t typically have actual magical powers. “Magical” is a sarcastic reference to their ability to help the (not-Black) protagonist find motivation to work through their emotional obstacles. It’s sort of like a mentor but often with more of a folksy / self-deprecating vibe. I won’t list specific films or shows but, if you think for a second, you can probably remember a few examples. The trope of the "magical" Black person is not bad per se, but it becomes exhausting when it’s repeatedly used, especially as a way to give lip service to diversity while keeping diverse characters in background roles and out of leading roles.

The American Society of Magical Negroes parodies this literary and film trope by creating an actual organization of people who problem solve anxiety-causing issues for white people in the real world. If you are expecting some kind of Black version of Hogwarts or Shadowhunter Academy, prepare to be disappointed. The film is a sarcastic deep dive into society’s underlying class systems. It’s much more of a companion film to social commentary stories like American Fiction and Origin than to fantasy pieces like Harry Potter or Shadowhunters. There is some magic on screen but not much. The fantastical moments are meant to be a brief, humorous backdrop, not a primary plot device.

In the film, Aren (Justice Smith) is an extremely polite, young Black man and a struggling visual artist. After a disappointing art show he encounters a drunk woman at night who hands him her purse, causing the woman’s two male friends to accuse Aren of stealing it. Aren is understandably fearful of what will happen next. A kindly older Black man, Roger (David Alan Grier), appears and magically transfers the purse back to the woman. Roger then engages in charming, folksy banter about the delicious food at a nearby restaurant. This de-escalates the situation and the two men who were previously threatening Aren become friendly and leave happily with the woman. Roger then invites Aren to join a society of people who use folksy banter make white people feel more comfortable, then they pivot to inspirational cliches to inspire them. By doing this they help make the world a safer place for people of color. According to Roger, without this surreptitious placating behavior, the violence against Black people will escalate in America.

Obviously there is a lot to unpack in this premise. Aren is led through secret door in an unassuming shop and finds himself in a meeting room of Black people who have been granted minor magical powers in exchange for taking on assignments to be supportive advisors to stressed, non-Black people. Aren has some understandable hesitation about the mission statement (and even the name) of the group but ultimately (due to his dwindling finances) accepts a job inspiring a self-absorbed young man, Jason (Drew Tarver), at a tech company. With Aren’s help, Jason progresses at the firm at the cost of Aren’s own career hopes and at the cost of Aren’s love interest Lizzie (An-Li Bogan). Introverted Aren initially enjoys the opportunity to be accepted in his new workplace and to help  Jason. But Aren grows to resent his artificially subservient role. Additionally, despite her superior work performance, Lizzie finds herself cut out of opportunities because Jason’s louder persona is confused with talent by their bosses. The story has some additional interesting context: Aren is biracial (partly white); Lizzie is a person of color; and, although Jason is self-absorbed, he is not a true villain. In addition to the scenes of Aren’s adventures, we also see snippets of the other Society members working in various timelines and locations, inspiring leading characters. Each scenario references a famous classic film with the “magical negro” trope.

As you can imagine, this film is not for everyone. The title may mislead some into thinking it’s a high fantasy—it’s not. Although the Society members can time travel, teleport, and blink objects into existence, magic is a minor part of the story. On the other hand, the interactions of Aren and Lizzie make the film feel substantially like a rom-com. But the trope of the misguided romantic triangle (between Jason, Lizzie, and Aren)  is not the true message. The real story is about race and classism (and later sexism). The theme of the supportive, inspiring colleague quickly shifts to the more troubling concept of appeasement by those in the minority towards those who are in power in society. These uncomfortable, underlying themes will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider in a space that should equally belong to them. After several mildly humorous and ironic moments, we have a climactic scene where Aren decides to tell Jason the truth about his feelings of fear and erasure. It’s not a universal monologue on all types of racism but rather a specific niche of oppression felt by some people of color in some societal spaces. It rages against both the appeaser and the oppressor.

The ultimate messaging is sharp and meaningful but it may get lost in the rom-com hijinks. Like The Book of Clarence, the story is weighed down by an overload of conflicting film elements. However, for those who can relate to Aren’s dilemma of standing up for himself in a society that will then see him as threatening or alien, the film will truly hit home. The American Society of Magical Negroes is a good companion piece for other recent films on race, such as American Fiction, Origin, and The Book of Clarence. For those who connect with the story, the film will provide a lot to ponder and hopefully create a starting point for meaningful discussions on Black roles in film and in real life.

 

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

·         A poignant exploration of racism and appeasement

·         Conflicting thematic elements

·         Heavy, biting sarcasm that may elude some viewers

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

Film review: El Conde

We need to laugh at the monsters so they'll lose the power to intimidate us

What if Augusto Pinochet were an unholy, blood-drinking abomination excreted from the bowels of hell? Ask any Latin American antifascist, and the likely response will be, "What do you mean, 'if'?" The Chilean dictator, forever accursed be his memory, left a frightening legacy of thousands of assassinated opponents, tens of thousands of torture survivors, and hundreds of thousands of exiles. To this day, the whereabouts of many disappeared Chileans remain unknown. Pinochet's regime boasted a gruesome creativity in devising torture and execution methods, and the nation's collective trauma will take generations to overcome. To imagine him as a vampire whose depravity hungers for the hearts of young Chileans doesn't feel too far from reality.

Pablo Larraín's film El Conde, released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the US-supported coup that threw Chile under military rule, paints the 21st century with a black-and-white palette that warns the viewer: this isn't over. The shadow of the beast hasn't left this realm. With enough hearts in his grasp, he can rise again. In this version of events, Pinochet is revealed to have been a French royalist soldier who escaped the Revolution's guillotine and swore to combat the egalitarian cause wherever he found it. After centuries of cruel predation and countless battles on the side of tyranny, the monster found his way into the Chilean army, where he ascended the ranks until becoming the deadly general known to history.

Fast-forward to the present time. Retired into self-imposed anonymity, having staged a fake death to evade justice, the ex-dictator still emits an all-polluting aura around him. The film refuses to give the viewer a distanced character from whose perspective the villain can be comfortably judged; the general's entire circle is rotten. His wife wants his immortality, his children want his secret fortune, and his butler wants the return of the old days when he was a teacher of torturers. The subtext is close to the surface: for as long as there has been fervor for emancipation, there has been authoritarian reaction, and anyone senseless enough (or soulless enough) to try to use its tainted gifts becomes used by it. El Conde undertakes the delicate challenge of maintaining the audience's investment in a story where every single character is horrible. Even the pious nun sent in a secret mission to cleanse the old vampire from his demonic stain has a secondary agenda to search for any of his undeclared assets that might be of use to the Church. Acting upon the arrogant belief that the Church can profit from evil without becoming one with it, she willingly falls under his corrupting and treacherous curse.

By this point you must be wondering why El Conde is being announced as a comedy.

It's a macabre type of comedy, one where characters have no trouble speaking of the unspeakable with a deadpan shrug. Atrocities worth multiple capital sentences are mentioned in passing, with the casual tone one uses to talk of the weather. The absurdity of listening to these absolutely irredeemable people provokes in the viewer the kind of nervous laughter that is the last resort when no shriek will do. Undead antics aside, the portions of the film that would conventionally be classified as horror are transmuted by the audience's knowledge that each monstrous act described in the dialogues actually happened in real life. This is not the safe viewing experience of your typical slasher romp, where you know it's all props and makeup. Nor is it the comedy of Halloween farces, where the trappings of decay are mere setup for an inoffensive jump scare. This is the sweaty chuckle you blurt out almost involuntarily as a wolf slowly advances toward you.

This incredibly difficult blend of tones is helped by the choice to film in black and white. For one part, it disguises the rather crude visual effects, which instead of cheap look uncanny, in consonance with the forbidden powers they represent. But also, the use of black and white gives the story a somber atmosphere, not only symbolic of how contemporary Chile still hasn't rid itself of Pinochet's spell, but also aesthetically captivating. It's as if this story couldn't be told except in chiaroscuro, with the black void of the vampire's silhouette infusing the world with his pervasive miasma, never letting the light of day reach its full brightness. The world is a dull, gray place because Pinochet has passed through it. And for a few seconds we get a quick scene in color, and we start to believe the nightmare might be over, but it's only to show us with more clarity that we're not safe, that the seeds from which this evil emerged may yet bear more poisoned fruit.

Nerd coefficient: 9/10.

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

On the American nightmare of 'Hello Tomorrow!'

See the 1950s not as they happened, but as they wish they had

Welcome to postwar America, a land of ambition, opportunity, and pie-in-the-sky dreams. Everything is possible if you can affo— erm, imagine it. Why put off until later what you can purchase today? Fortune favors the brave, and today's name for fortune is the free market. At the push of a button, happiness can be yours in affordable installments; all you need to do is believe hard enough. So, what more could you desire in this cornucopia of pastel and chrome? Sign on the dotted line, and you can boast your very own piece of the Moon.

The new Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! is a funhouse mirror version of the mid-century prosperity boom that cemented American world dominance. All the miracles that technology was supposed to bring to our daily lives are made real here: robot waiters, self-heating popcorn, personal jetpacks, smell-o-vision, hovercars, self-adjusting neckties, lunar telephones. The lifestyle of domestic leisure that the Space Age failed to deliver is presented in full, oversaturated color, with a populuxe glee that would make George Jetson nod with pride.

Although daily life in this world is as bright and comfortable as the real 1950s merely hoped to be, it's built on the same soul-crushing cutthroat grind, and the character types created for this story are fascinating examples of the coping strategies required to survive in consumerist utopia. If the production design of Hello Tomorrow! is award-worthy, the casting is pitch-perfect. The roles played by Haneefah Wood and Alison Pill carry the weight of being the only sensible women in a world of excitable manchildren, whereas Susan Heyward and Dagmara Domińczyk play more cynical characters who have learned to game the system in their favor. Hank Azaria as a compulsive gambler with odd Freudian superstitions represents the weary worker who does the exact minimum required by his job while despising every day of it, while Dewshane Williams as a compulsive people-pleaser with a creepy practiced smile represents the fully absorbed worker who has sincerely bought into the myth of self-made success via hard effort. Matthew Maher as a compulsive rule-enforcer who implausibly speaks in misspellings represents the lawful acquiescence that keeps the dehumanizing machinery running, and Billy Crudup as a compulsive fraudster who can't refrain from phrasing everything in ad copy represents, paradoxically, the most honest portrait of how business is actually done.

If marketing, as I've said before, is the Dark Side of rhetoric, Crudup's character has the vilest, most despicable job in the galaxy: he's a salesman. A very skilled one. Even if he weren't a silver-tongued smoke peddler, even if his polished spiel about offworld luxury property were true, his strategy of tugging on people's deepest aspirations to get them to part with their money would suffice to instantly detest his manipulative personality. Crudup does a fantastic job of expressing the layers of pretense that envelop this conniving trickster who always needs to keep in mind which version of the lie he's telling to whom. In the real world, selling real estate on the Moon has no legal basis, but that hasn't stopped many a self-proclaimed entrepreneur from trying, nor will this be the last time shameless speculators point to the Moon to make their case. What this salesman has figured out is that lunar property is the kitschiest form of conspicuous consumption, a mark of distinction for the whole planet to watch with open envy. Something to literally look up to.

It is precisely the concept of "looking up to" that drives the best character dynamic in the show: that between the con man played by Crudup and his son, played by Nicholas Podany, a spectacularly cast role that explores with passionate earnestness the whole range that goes from American optimism to American heartbreak. If every story about the future is actually saying something about the present, every alternate history is actually telling something about reality. The shiny future didn't fail to come because we didn't invent personal jetpacks. The world of Hello Tomorrow! has all the technological delights that industrialized capitalism promised American workers, those same workers who grew up traumatized by the Great Depression and apparently swore to never look poor again. Our fraudster protagonist doesn't want to be an honorable father; he wants to seem one. He doesn't want to do honest business; he wants to be seen performing it.

American mid-century prosperity was real, but it was supported by a gigantic effort in aesthetics. We're currently plagued by nostalgia for the 80s, which in turn dealt with nostalgia for the 50s. But what is remembered about the 50s is what got photographed, filmed, advertised, not the actual experiences of the people on whose backs that prosperity rested.

Carl Sagan is often misquoted as having said, "that which can be destroyed by the truth deserves to be." It's fittingly ironic that the popular attribution of the phrase is likely mistaken. In Hello Tomorrow!, that which can be destroyed by the truth is too shiny and pretty to let go. Success, prestige, glamour is what America promises, what the protagonist of this series trades in. He's not selling plots of land; he's selling a vision of self-realization that consists in vacuum-sealing oneself from the undeserving rabble. Just like he's become isolated from everything that was genuine in his life, he's inviting others to buy the same isolation. His inability to open up to his son is a microcosm of the anxiety that underlied 1950s America, a place where your honesty limits your achievements, where you may have no more than the shirt on your back, but as long as it's sufficiently starched, you can dream of the stars.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

In 'Severance,' the perfect work-life balance is a horrific illusion

This instantly addictive satire lays bare how easily corporate culture turns totalitarian as soon as it gets a chance

It's every manager's dream: employees who can behave 100% professionally and leave their personal problems at the door. Obedient cogs whose entire philosophy of life consists in loyalty to the company. Eager followers who wouldn't dare form close ties with their coworkers and whose aspirations don't aim further than winning a commemorative paperweight. Hyperfocused nonpersons who will never get distracted from their tasks because that's literally the only thing in their minds.

Corporate culture would love nothing more than to achieve that fantasy. Apple TV's new series Severance, created by Dan Erickson and gorgeously directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, explores the nightmare that would result if companies could wield complete control over human beings without interference from the outside world.

Severance takes place in a biomedical corporation that subjects its low-level employees to a surgery that separates their memories and identities between their office selves and their outside selves. Every day, they drive to their jobs, enter an elevator, and forget who they are. They work their shifts without any knowledge of their personal lives; while in that state, all they can remember is life inside the company building. At the end of the day, they enter the same elevator and switch back: out in the street, they have no idea what they do for a living or even who their coworkers are.

Not that their jobs make the least bit of sense, mind you. That workplace couldn't be any more ridiculously shady: with its endless featureless corridors, creepy supervisors who won't stop smiling cheerfully, outlandish teambuilding rituals, an obscure internal mythology around the company's founder, an obsessive degree of surveillance, and punitive reeducation worthy of a North Korean prison camp, the surreal environment of Severance presents a heightened version of worrying trends that already exist in real-world companies.

The dangers of organizational totalitarianism and CEO worship have been raising alarms for quite a while now. Our jobs already dominate a big chunk of our lives. The main reason they don't exert more control is fear of worker solidarity, public opinion, and legal retaliation. But in a scenario where no one outside can know what happens inside, where not even we can know what is done to us for eight hours of the day, the corporation won't hesitate to claim every part of us. Once it has control of our actions, it will gladly morph into its own little dictatorship. Let it get its hands on our brains, and it will become a cult.

The fictional company in Severance devotes an amount of effort and resources to singing the praises of its founder that is only one step away from the cult of personality of real-life CEOs. When we think the show can't get any more bizarre, the next episode reveals even darker depths of how much these workers are expected to bow at the feet of the founder. His sayings are holy scripture, his image is a focus for displays of reverence, and his recreated house is a site of pilgrimage. While inside the office, employees are forbidden from reading any literature except the company manual, which is written with such disturbing solemnity that, toward the middle of the season, a mediocre self-help manual smuggled into the building proves life-changing for our protagonist.

Said protagonist is Mark (Adam Scott), a recent widower who applied for a split-memory job so he could forget about his pain for eight hours every day. He only starts to question his routine when a man claiming to be a former coworker contacts him with confusing revelations about what really goes on inside the company.

Honestly, you don't even need a conspiracy theory to smell that something is very wrong about that place. In the office, social interaction is impersonal to the point of loss of humanity. Mark's department spends the workday classifying meaningless numbers, so personal achievements feel empty, and when supervisors recognize them, any enjoyment is clothed in an artificiality that robs it of value. No one knows what their work means; the board of directors are only present as an ominous silence on the phone; the floor layout is deliberately labyrinthine to discourage employees from joining forces; and for whatever reason, there's a goat farm.

Everything about this series sounds incomprehensible. But the cast does a stellar job of grounding the absurdity in real human emotion. Britt Lower, who fulfills the trope of the new hire through whom we learn the rules of this world, takes the story into deep existential terror as her character learns that she is her own worst enemy. John Turturro plays a bootlicking senior employee who gets radicalized when he realizes that his office crush's retirement implies that that version of him will cease to exist. And Patricia Arquette is deliciously menacing as the tyrannical manager with an agenda of her own.

The impressive talent starring in Severance would suffice to recommend it. But the ace up this show's sleeve is its visual language. Both directors convey the claustrophobic life of cubicle workers with an impeccable eye for shot composition. We frequently see Mark sitting alone with half the frame obscured, symbolizing the missing half of his life that he no longer has access to. Although the story appears to be happening in our present time, the office space is designed with a vaguely retro aesthetic that heightens the incongruity of the situation. The end result is simultaneously funny, intriguing, scary, unsettling, sad, relevant, and at its core, intensely human.

With this kind of premise, Severance could easily have rolled down the hill of shocksploitation. But it manages to never lose hold of the humanity at the center of the story. Severance is about the unfair demands of "professionalism" and the increasing pressure to not let our personal issues affect our performance. It's about the frustrations that continue to drive the Great Resignation. It's about private corporations' ongoing attempt to build their own secluded societies, isolated from scrutiny. It's about a system of social relations that makes us complicit in our own exploitation.

On a more intimate level, Severance is about our willingness to rip ourselves apart if that's what it takes to avoid confronting deep pain (there's a subplot about a woman who undergoes the brain surgery to create a separate self who will only exist for the purpose of experiencing childbirth). And, like all great stories, it's about the search for happiness and the amounts of unhappiness we can inflict upon ourselves along the way. Severance is the most important television show of the year, and it will remain culturally significant beyond this decade.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Nerds on Tour: Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (c. 1940 novel)

Dossier: Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита)

Location: Soviet Union

Package Type: Novel

Itinerary: Once upon a time, there was a weird weird world in the East where you had to be constantly on the lookout for foreign saboteurs, where people could disappear in dark cars during the night without a trace and where writers could not publish their work if they weren't members in an association of proletarian writers. And even then, there were things that were just utterly unpublishable -- such books as Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov, known at the time mainly as a playwright (whose plays were often forbidden), wrote and rewrote the satirical fantasy novel (and burned several drafts of it) for the last twelve years of his life which the Soviet authorities had made increasingly difficult. The novel didn't saw publication until 1966, more than 25 years after Bulgakov's death when it quickly became a cult classic. In addition to the official censored version, a more complete samizdat edition started circling the literary underground and was later smuggled out of the country to be published and cherished.

In the novel, an enigmatic foreign professor Woland who specializes in black magic arrives in Moscow. He first interrupts a discussion between an aspiring poet Ivan and an "editor of a highbrow literary magazine and chairman of the management committee of one of the biggest Moscow literary clubs" about the existence of Jesus. He tells the baffled men a lengthy story of Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judaea who ends up having to order the execution of a curious prophet even if he does not want to. Woland also predicts that the management committee of the literary club will soon lose their chairman because the head of the man he is speaking with will be cut off. Shortly, that indeed happens in a freak tramcar accident.

 

The quirky death sets in motion a series of uncanny events as Woland and his demonic entourage trick and deceive bureaucrats, officials and ordinary Muscovites. First, they manage to get the control of the dead gentleman's apartment (a notable feat during the severe housing shortage). Then they go on to con the managers of the Variety Theatre in which Woland gives a performance of black magic, creating further comic chaos and confusion. Especially the malevolent pig-sized talking cat Behemoth, by far the most memorable character of the novel, is eager to wreak havoc in entertaining ways.

Amidst all the mayhem, the titular master and his broken-hearted lover Margarita are introduced to the reader. The master is a failed writer whose novel on Pontius Pilate will never see the light of day and whose reputation has been demolished by malignant critics. He is locked away in a lunatic asylum next door from Ivan, but Margarita (who only knows that her lover disappeared) is willing to try to get him back by helping Woland organize something of a satanic ball. In the novel, all of it sort of makes sense.

 

Travel Log: Reading The Master and Margarita 80 years after its completion is a disconcerting experience. You have to not only travel to Moscow but to the Moscow at the height of Stalinism in the 1930s, a place as alien as Mars to most of us. At the time, the novel would have been a death sentence for Bulgakov and his family, but for someone not immersed in the historical context it is not easy to pinpoint why exactly. The redactions of the first official publication (often printed in italics in western editions) are quite baffling as well. Was the fact that Margarita was naked when she turned into an invisible witch and flew with a broom really so subversive in the 1966? I guess it was. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, though, science fiction writers were writing stories like Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Bulgakov knew that the work could not be published, but he kept working on it and rewrote it after destroying it several times. The novel within the novel that the master is working on is obviously a reflection on the work that contains it. One of the most oft-cited lines from the novel -- "Manuscripts don't burn" -- comments on this and became the motto of the samizdat underground. Master's novel about Pontius Pilate is burnt as well, but the satanic Woland saves it, and its narrative refuses to stay inside the manuscript. Rather, a big chunk of it is told by Woland in the beginning of the novel, and another segment becomes the dream of Ivan as when he sleeps next to the master in the asylum.

Other elements of the narrative are autobiographical as well. Bulgakov, too, had to suffer unreasonable attacks by the Soviet press and it is easy to consider the militant reviewers who tear the master to shreds as literary payback. His fiercest critics called for an attack on "Bulgakovism" in the same way as the hostile reviewer Lavrovich is propagating for striking hard at "Pilatism" of the master's novel. Most of his plays were forbidden when he was alive and he was able to find work only through the personal intervention by Stalin who reportedly liked some of his plays. 

 

However, the rabbithole of learning more about Bulgakov's life and experiences has so much gravity that it quickly starts to collapse on itself. Master and Margarita is a light, funny and sarcastic book that can be deciphered in a myriad of ways, and even the specialists have not found a consensus on how it should be read. Some have suggested that the character of the master is a reference to Nikolai Gogol who famously burned the second part of Dead Souls while others think he is Maksim Gorky. The devilish Woland can be seen as a stand-in for Stalin, Lenin, Jesus or God, but the most entertaining aspect is that the meanings are shifting and unstable.

Compare it to George Orwell's masterpiece Animal Farm which Orwell wrote not long after Bulgakov had finished Master and Margarita. Both are hallmarks of political fantasy, but whereas Animal Farm offers neat meanings and unambigous anti-Stalinist polemics, Bulgakov's anti-Stalinism is as ambigous as it gets. For example: A bureaucrat has stepped out of his suit and left it sitting on his desk in his stead, going through the papers and making decisions.

Funny as hell, if you can bring yourself to enjoy absurd, nihilistic slapstick. If you can't, the novel is notable for hundreds of pieces of amazing cover art, most featuring cats.

Analytics

The Adventure: 5/5
The Scenery: 5/5
NerdTrip Rating: 10/10

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Review Roundtable: Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett

The escalating havoc and ultraviolence of Vigilance holds an effective, if culturally specific, mirror to violence and fear in the US.

CONTENT WARNING: This review discusses gun violence throughout, and includes references to child death. Also, we're discussing the whole novella, so BEWARE SPOILERS.

Vigilance, the new novella from Robert Jackson Bennett, is out today and it's a searing look at gun violence in the US. In this near future dystopia, John McDean is tasked with running "Vigilance", the nation's favourite reality programme, which releases real shooters are released on unsuspecting locations with military-grade armaments, and the resulting carnage is broadcast as a "lesson" in how to protect oneself. McDean and his crew at ONT station think they have the variables of Vigilance down to a fine art, but in the novella's ensuing escalation find themselves taken down by one of McDean's own blindspots, to dramatic effect.

We've got a lot of Bennett fans on our team here at Nerds of a Feather and when this novella came to our attention, lots of us were interested in reading it to review. That's why, instead of taking it on alone, today I, Adri, am joined by Paul Weimer, Brian, and Joe Sherry to unpack Bennett's highly topical novella and our reactions to it.

Adri: Vigilance is a novella about a near-future America that “from the beginning, … had always been a nation of fear”. In it, the perception of internal and external threats has given rise to a reality TV show (also called Vigilance), where state-sanctioned shooters are let loose in public spaces with the subsequent carnage broadcast for entertainment and “education”. Was Vigilance what you expected going in?

Paul: I want to begin with something I saw on twitter from the author, Robert Jackson Bennett. In talking about the novella, he said:

my novella, VIGILANCE, out in january, is about a cynical entertainment news channel creating its own news to manipulate americans' fears, only to be itself manipulated by a hostile foreign power

it was super hard to make this a satire and im not sure i did

— robert "robert" bennett (@robertjbennett) December 20, 2018

a lot of folks are interpreting this book as a take on gun culture. which is fine. but for me, guns are a symptom to larger culture of fear and insecurity which manifests in all kinds of unpleasant ways - hence the neverending, hysterical need to be *VIGILANT!!* at all times

— robert "robert" bennett (@robertjbennett) December 18, 2018

When I picked up the novella, which was before these tweets, I went in with the expectation that it was aimed at gun violence and gun culture. That's how it had gotten sold to me. That's how the novella overtly sells itself, as judging the book by its cover: full of guns, and with an icon of a gun between the title and tagline and the author name.

As I read it, my mind went to The Running Man (both the novel and the movie) more than anything else. Sure, there are plenty of guns and the insanity of a heavily armed society, but the theme of the entirety of America as a high-ammo Truman Show where at any moment, people might get caught up in gun violence made this a very surreal and uncomfortable experience to read.

Joe: Not at all. Like Paul, my initial assumption was that this was going to skewer (in some capacity) America’s obsession and glorification of guns, gun culture, and violence. I missed Bennett’s comments, so I went into Vigilance with those initial assumptions firmly in place.

Those assumptions were challenged fairly quickly when Bennett pushes the idea that this, all of this, is really about fear. The extended quote from Vigilance is awfully telling.

"The heart of the matter was that, from the beginning, America had always been a nation of fear. Fear of the monarchy. Fear of the elites. Fear of losing your property, to the government or invasion. A fear that, though you had worked damn hard to own your own property, some dumb thug or smug city prick would either find a way to steal it or use the law to steal it. This was what made the beating heart of America: not a sense of civics, not a love of country or people, not respect of the Constitution - but fear.”

Bennett pushes that farther and baldly states that America’s love of guns, America’s mythologizing of guns is directly tied to that fear which is then tied to the monopolizing and capitalizing of that fear. It’s also tied to the idea that a good man with a gun can save the day and that if the bad guys are armed, and you know they will be because by golly, they don’t respect laws, then we’ve all got to be armed, too. It’s irresponsible not to be.

Of course, Vigilance is a novella about fear and complacency, which is also strangely tied together.

brian: No, though, to be honest, all I needed to see were “Robert Jackson Bennett” and “dark science fiction” for me to jump into Vigilance. I went into it almost blind, just a fan of Bennett. I was not expecting Vigilance to be quite so near future, nor so close to a possible reality that I could smell it. It was hard for me to read Vigilance when I sit in an office all day that has a TV set on a cable news station that increasingly resembles ONT. It was hard for me to read when Vigilance’s “Ideal Person” is not only people I’ve met, but people I work with, and people I am related to. I was expecting something grim, but I was not expecting something real.

Adri: And it’s interesting that, from a reader perspective, that fear is so transparently co-opted: something that is ostensibly directed at the elite, is then used by the elite, to put at risk everything but the elite, with just enough confusion over ownership to allow plausible deniability from both the media and the government. On the whole, it’s quite a concept to pack into novella length, although I suspect most of the target audience will be coming pre-invested to the line being taken here.

Even The Hunger Games were hosted by a real human...

Another thing I noticed about Vigilance was how well the characterisation fit with the wider themes of the novella. As you’d expect from the subject matter, there are no heroes here, and almost nobody who is genuinely sympathetic. Beyond that, though, there’s a constant sense of watching “personas” rather than real people. Indeed, the first character we are really introduced to is John McDean’s “Ideal Person”, supposedly the target audience for the Vigilance programme (which is hosted by fabricated CGI personas). From the power fantasies of the “actives” selected to carry out the shootings, to the highly scrutinised survivor role Delyna resists but is ultimately forced to play, to the more overt deceptions that come into play at the end, there’s a pervasive sense of unreality even outside the game world. What did you think of Bennett’s characters - did any leap out for any reason?

Paul: McDean is ostensibly our main character, the one that we use for the majority of the novella in setting up the scenario. He’s hardly sympathetic, I think he is deliberately drawn to be that way. We can look at him as the Richard Dawson's Killian analogue. I am not sure that I hated McDean but I definitely wanted to see him taken down a peg by the end. Comeuppance on a personal level was one the expectations that I had for the story, and we do get that on an emotional level with him, when he sees what he has helped midwife come into fruition.

I am not entirely happy with the blurb on the back, because the promise made there for him is only really paid off at the end, In a sense it gives away the ending.

Adri: I felt that about the blurb too! It sets you up to be looking out for something to happen to McDean and his team from what feels like a too-early point, although the “how” of it did come as a surprise to me. But then, how the does the arc of the “secondary” PoV character, Delyna - a young black woman working in a bar where the Vigilance show is being screened - affected the sense of payoff for McDean’s comeuppance?

Paul: That last scene with Delyna does underscore just how futile the addition of more and more weapons into a charged environment does anything except escalate matters. I do think it’s a “take that!” directed squarely at the “good guy with a gun” and the other narratives here in the US, which promote the idea that the only way to solve gun violence in schools and other places is to arm everyone. As Delyna sees and witnesses, all it does is up the body count. A society where everyone has weapons isn’t a safer and more stable society, it’s a more vulnerable and fragile one.

Joe: I’d argue that Delyna is a sympathetic character and probably the closest to the reader’s “ideal” stand in character. She speaks up and speaks out when the easy and safe answer is to leave the television on. Of course, that’s followed by a Tarantino-esque standoff and then escalation after escalation.

I think you’re on to something with your larger point that we’re watching personas act out their roles rather than following fully realized characters. I don’t know if you’ve read Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, but his skill at characterization is absolutely top notch. I think it’s a deliberate choice here. The game show nature of Vigilance lends itself to that unreality, as if we’re never sure if we’re ever out of the game world.

Paul: Joe, I have read and loved the Divine Cities trilogy, and I think you are right here, Bennett is crafting these characters as roles to deliberate affect. It’s a bold stylistic choice, that goes with the whole unreality of the world.

Adri: Agreed on Divine Cities too.

brian: I’m definitely feeling the roles over characters, particularly since I can more clearly remember the function of each team member in the Vigilance production team over their names.

With that said, the character that stood out the most to me was Ives, the social media wrangler. We know our social media vessels such as Facebook and Twitter are primed and almost designed for spreading misinformation, and here we have ONT using bots and other social media shills to steer the flow of communication and interaction to Vigilance. A lot of words have been typed about how dangerous it is for social media disinformation campaigns to disrupt political power, so it’s almost quaint that ONT is using these tools in the manner they were designed to benefit: advertising. #brands #engagement #howdoiescapethishellihavecreated

Adri: As the token non-American in this group, I also have to ask about the elephant in the room: how US-specific is Vigilance? The idea of citizens living in fear of their own government clearly isn’t tied to a single nation or identity, and neither is the manipulation of crime or fear of the “other”. Yet, perhaps because artificiality is such a running theme through the novella, I found it hard to personally connect to the satirical elements of the text. Many of the points felt either very on-the-nose or too far-fetched, with little in that sweet spot where reality is distorted but all the more recognisable through the satirist’s lens. What were your experiences? Am I just too far away from Bennett’s “Ideal Person” in this case?

brian: Terribly US-specific? Let’s go with terribly. Fear of government is so ingrained into American culture that we wrote the right to give ourselves the means to violently overthrow the government into our constitution. Every year, maybe every month, we suffer a violent outburst that involves someone using a firearm to shoot innocent people. Time after time, we decry the tragedy and refuse to do anything to address the cause, which is the wild proliferation of weapons in the US. Instead, we put bulletproof plates in childrens’ backpacks, drill on what to do during an “active shooter” incident, and wait for our turn at our own Vigilance. I can’t recognize Vigilance as satire. I see the conditions that lead to Vigilance happening too often for it to be anything but a glimpse into our future.

Adri: Wikipedia suggests in 2018, mass shootings happened in the US on an almost daily basis...

Joe: I’d like to be able to say that the main aspect of Vigilance I found too far fetched was the mass shooting competition itself, but even though we joke about how The Running Man and The Hunger Games could never actually happen and would never be broadcast, I’m feeling a little cynical this morning. I’m not so sure. Besides, that mass shooting competition, the “vigilance” of the title, is the hook of the novel. There’s more than enough of a literary and film tradition to hang a story on.

I’d really like to be able to say that Bennett’s commentary on America’s indifference to school shootings and murdered children is far fetched, but that’s just cooked into the fabric of American society right now.

I don’t know if he originated the idea, but British journalist Dan Hodges wrote in 2015:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

Sandy Hook, if you don’t remember, was an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut where twenty students between the ages of 6 and 7 were killed in a 2012 shooting, as were six staff members who died trying to protect the kids. (Also, as the father of a now four year old who is shockingly close to being old enough to go to school, that was honestly one of the most difficult sentences I’ve had to type.)

Hodges was not wrong. America’s legislative response was silence. Thoughts and prayers. Inaction. Indifference.

Also, if you want to really depress yourself about America, spend some time reading through a list of school shootings in the United States. 

But, Adri, you said that you found the satire either too on the nose or too far fetched. Can you expand on that a bit more? For me, the stuff that was on the nose was generally just accurate and perhaps a bit sad / painful in the “it’s painful because it’s true” paraphrase of The Simpsons.

Adri: I might be setting the bar too high, but I think that fully communicating satire across cultures is a challenge for both reader and writer, because it’s inevitably going to be the more subtle elements that are lost. And when a high action story like Vigilance stops communicating its subtlety, it just becomes a relentless gore-fest; incidentally, this is also how I feel about Tarantino films, and there’s definitely similarities here, and also I know lots of mostly-male English friends who who love Tarantino for what are almost certainly very similar reasons to their American counterparts, so this is not some impenetrable cultural barrier in general - perhaps just an aesthetic one.

Paul: Is Vigilance satire or prediction? I think it’s just implausible enough to be firmly satire, but I am very uncomfortable, and was very uncomfortable as I read it, as to just how plausible a US that was sinking lower and lower by the day would turn to fear cannibalizing on itself, and America being okay with it. Fear may be the mindkiller, as Dune taught us, but Fear sells. Fear motivates people to do very terrible things in an effort to placate and ameliorate that fear. I think of Security Theater at airports--restrictions on liquids, and shoes just as simple examples of “being seen to address the fears” is meant for public relation, and oh at the same time reminding people of the danger.. Or the fears stoked up this fall and winter over the migrant caravan. But can we get from here, now to the world of Vigilance two decades hence? I don’t think we can logically and rationally get there from here, but I think we could get disturbingly closer. So Vigilance is still Satire, and not Cautionary Tale. But it’s a close run thing.

Adri, you brought up before the idea of this being a US-specific book. Is there anywhere else in the world that you think a story like this could have been written? Brian, Joe and I swim in this water, and unless one widely travels, it’s hard to escape seeing that water as being anything except “the way things are”.

Adri: My experiences are far from universal, but I don’t think you could write about this particular response to fear -- the state sanctioned libertarian arms race --  in any of the places I’ve lived. It’s interesting that Joe mentions Sandy Hook as a potential turning point above; because I grew up partly in Australia with British parents, I have the massacres in both Dunblane and Port Arthur (which happened within 2 months of each other in Scotland and Tasmania respectively; Dunblane in particular had heartbreaking similarities with Sandy Hook, over a decade later) in my childhood consciousness. Each prompted fundamental changes in gun control and the perception of guns in those countries, which were treated as completely self-evident. Over twenty years later, it means I now live in a city where outrage and grief is directed towards the level of knife crime, which is also awful, but doesn’t create the same level of destruction and collateral damage as guns do. It’s hard to get past my own ingrained bias that safety means fewer machines designed to kill you in close proximity, and that being “vigilant” and “safe” always means de-escalation except where absolutely necessary. And while I’ve also worked in conflict resolution, meaning I’ve met plenty of people for whom that bias isn’t true, that was a very different context to the relationship most Americans - particularly the ones most likely to be vocal about gun ownership - have with their national government.

To me, this loops back to the point about what Vigilance is about: it’s not just a story poking fun at gun-obsession through a lens of ultraviolent absurdity, but one about the fear that brought this society about, and that it feeds back into in turn. While some elements of US national fear and the rhetoric around it do get replicated elsewhere - like the language around the war on terror, or immigration - the context around the Second Amendment, the NRA, the inaction and victim blaming and everything around it is so specific that you could only tell this story in the US. And, while many of us outside that context have news consumption and Twitter feeds that constantly bring us into contact with this debate, I do feel there’s a fundamental gap in what can be understood from an outsider perspective. To me, the ultraviolence and the fear of oppression feel equally speculative, even though I intellectually know they aren’t supposed to be. It means on an emotional level, Vigilance functions much more along the lines of The Hunger Games, a series which also marries both violence and fear to great effect but whose worldbuilding “how did we get there from here” gaps are tricky to intuit, than as the satirical "close to home" text it’s intended as.

Speaking of international influences, I wanted to discuss the very left-field ending to the plot. In a nutshell, the thrust of the story is that McDean's crack team (who have enough power to be targets) spends so long thinking about internal threats that they forgot about external security, and in particular how threatening China is. This is a mistake that proves fatal not just to ONT and company but, apparently, to the entire audience of Vigilance. Again, this is a combination of "frighteningly plausible" - America is taken down by a combination of cyber security leaks and sexual exploitation of interns - and "not going to happen" - China would benefit from the US declining in power relative to itself, but probably not from instigating mass death.

Paul : Was the out-of-left-field meant to be a deliberate writing technique on Bennett’s part to show that people were focusing on the wrong things, so that when “Tabitha” makes her reveal, it is a “Wait, what?” moment for reader and audience alike. The whole bit about Americans not paying attention to the fact that there was an international crisis going on for days--sadly, that’s not really very much satire any more, not here in the US, and the obsessions and blinders of the news media, now.

brian: What I found interesting about the twist was the difference between McDean/ONT and the Chinese. ONT is using high technology to craft their fakes, and the Chinese used actual people. Infiltrating an organization using people isn’t high tech; it’s the oldest, most basic technique available. It still works, and it’s why we’re talking about what impact Marina Butina may have had on the US government by infiltrating a powerful gun advocacy lobby.

But what McDean and ONT do to the American population, the Chinese did to McDean/ONT. They know their “Ideal Person” (McDean) and use his personal taste to manipulate him into doing what they want. He becomes so hyperfocused on sexual release with Tabitha that he installs some unknown phone app that ends up giving the Chinese a backdoor. He’s also so enamored with Bonnan (the Vigilance contestant who is also a literal Nazi) that he has to put him in the next episode. ONT is so focused on the shootings and violence that they don’t even consider that you don’t need a weapon or a threat to manipulate people. You can use something alluring and they will do what you want anyway.

Adri: Any final thoughts before we wrap up this review?

Joe: The comparison is to classic novels like The Running Man, Battle Royale, and The Hunger Games and I think the thing I am most curious about is whether Vigilance will have that sort of staying power or cultural impact. That level of impact is doubtful, but Vigilance does hit those buttons in very accessible terms. It may well surprise us. At the very least, it’s led to a great conversation here and hopefully similar conversations in other spaces.

One thing that I wanted to note, that didn't come up earlier in the conversation is that as much as a primary focus of Vigilance is on the intersection of American gun and fear culture and how that it is monetized and weaponized, Bennett does make a point to very briefly bring race into the conversation. Race comes up in McDean's Ideal Person and it comes up sideways in aspects of how that fear culture is consumed, but it is dealt with firmly with the character of Delyna and in her family background. Delyna is black. I'm not sure how this plays outside the United States, but Black Lives Matter is a major movement inside America and police shootings are woven into the racial fabric of America. In the novella Delyna's father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, but he was killed by a fellow police officer, a white police officer who, instead of seeing another cop, saw a black man with a gun and opened fire. I don't have a larger point in bringing this up, except that I didn't want it to go unmentioned, and it could easily be the spark of another larger conversation. Hell, it could easily have been the spark for an alternate universe version of Vigilance.

Thank you for putting this together, Adri.

Paul: Thank you for putting this together, Adri. I agree with Joe, will this have the long term cultural impact of previous efforts in the genre? Will it be seen as an artifact of our times, or a dark prophecy of what could happen “if this goes on...”. Hard to tell. Bennett’s writing is certainly strong and sharpened toward a goal and social goal. In that, it has a hell of a lot of ambition--more so than The Running Man. It may not completely succeed at entertainment, but I don’t think Bennett wrote the book with that aim. I will be interested in how others view this, both within the SFF genresphere and as a more general conversation.

Adri: You're welcome - thanks for participating, all, and thanks to everyone reading!


The Math

Adri’s Verdict: 6.5, rounded up to 7. I understand what it's trying to accomplish but the particular blend of ultraviolence and satire didn't quite strike me right.

brian’s Verdict: 7. It works for me because it’s a future I can grasp that I do not want. Observations about roles/stereotypes over characters are completely valid though. They’re not quite cardboard cutouts, but not far from it either.

Joe’s Verdict: I’m between a 7 and an 8. Vigilance almost completely worked for me. I get that most of the characters are more outline than breathing, but that’s part of why the story works so well. It’s about the ideas Bennett is playing with. Occasionally didactic, but done so well that it is remarkably effective.

Paul’s Verdict: I’m somewhere on a 7.5. It’s nearly succeeded for me at what it was trying to do, but there were some pulling tensions between having characters as archetypes and a story that don’t quite mesh with the dialectic that Bennett was aiming for all the time. For all that, when it was “on”, it was terrifyingly effective, dark and chilling. If that was Bennett’s intention, then at points he succeeded to very strong effect.