Book Review: Cello's Gate by Maurice Africh

A science fantasy novel that is perhaps not quite greater than the sum of its parts. 

Captain Grey has a problem. He’s a pirate, and a good one, but the local gendarmes are always dangerous and trying to keep his airship, The Trench, flying in the air, costs a lot of money and effort. That’s why when he is offered an extremely lucrative commission to go to an island no one can get to, in order to get a MacGuffin (the first in a series) that he doesn’t think really exists--he is willing to do it. Adventure is afoot on a journey to the island and surviving its dangers, from traps, to wildlife, to an immortal being that might have created all of magic itself.

This is the story of Cello’s Gate, by Maurice Africh. 

For all of the crunchy worldbuilding in the novel, Cello’s Gate is a novel that runs very strongly on vibes. It borrows and slightly modifies a lot of those vibes and those parts and puts them all together, not always in an optimum configuration, leaving some of the interesting parts of the worldbuilding feeling like they don’t quite seem to comfortably work together or sometimes even at all. The book is a patchwork of these elements, sometimes going at cross purposes. 

Let’s go for the high concepts and beats. Our main character, Captain Grey Shimada owns the airship the Trench as the ostensible pirate, although, like nearly all protagonist pirates I find in SFF, he’s not truly a pirate, or not very much so. He has a found family of fighters and rogues and outcasts of various types, including the pilot being married to another crew member.¹ His father, who he is somewhat rebelling against, is an important admiral.² He is hired by a client, Dalia Auber, who insists on coming along with her muscle, to find the seven Stones of Indigo. These seven are the basis of all magic in this science fantasy world, but someone who gets all seven would have unlimited cosmic power³. Once on the island, the group has to deal with a variety of tests, challenges, and traps. Also, there is a rival group after the stones and a confrontation with their superior numbers and firepower is the real enemy.⁴

There’s plenty to this complicated world and the characters and their backstories. Aside from Grey we get a few situations where the backstory of one or other of the characters unspools and the world builds from that. The thing is, it doesn’t all seem to fit together. I can’t make real sense of Grey’s story to begging with, he starts off as a bit of a failson hanging out with childhood friends. An especially harsh punishment for their antics sends him off to military school and away from his friends. We then go to 17 years later, and surprise, not only is Grey now a pirate, his two childhood friends are suddenly on the pirate ship he has, and part of the crew. We don’t see his father on screen except in the prologue, but just how this relationship and world is supposed to work, especially since his father backed him getting a ship, is a little murky. And the book almost feels like it was originally written that there were no holdovers from the prologue to the actual narrative, but suddenly there was a chance and we get two of them. 

Then there is the tech and the magic. The setting might have too much going on here--it’s a steampunk world with firearms, and airships, but also a complicated magic system, and also there are classes of people in that magic system. There are people who are Immortal, and people who are preternatural fights, Knights, and others. A revelation comes that there are even forbidden(?) hybrids of these as well. The author’s favorite must be the Crest Knight, since we have Dot, part of Grey’s crew, Rook, who is the bodyguard to the Immortal client, Dalia, and it turns out one of the antagonists on the island is a Crest Knight as well. Crest Knights fight so fast and so furious, that their fights are described in bullet time terms.⁵ The physical combats, and there are a number of such set pieces of various kinds, are well written and are a highlight of the book. But then there are people like the Immortals, who straight up come back from the dead when killed. It’s a painful and unpleasant process, but that is their magic. Minn, Grey’s childhood friend,and something that is not quite a crush, not quite a relationship (even after knowing her for two decades) is an Oracle and can get precognitive flashes of the future. There are other kinds of magic that we hear about but for the most part do not actually see in this narrative. 

Speaking of science fantasy again, though, a more general thought. Science fantasy is a hard trick to pull off, to make both the science fiction and the fantastic sides of the equation equally interesting, useful, powerful and important. As noted above, there is a lot of magic in this verse, of a wide variety of kinds that seems tied to the stones. As far as science, there are airships, and jamming fields and a variety of technology. Magic, though, with one noticeable and big exception, seems to win any straight up conflicts with science and technology that we see in the book. I suspect maybe the author was doing a bit with this. It does seem that magic is by far the more dominant half of the paradigm. 

Given that the novel is 600 pages, all of this worldbuilding and all of this wide variety of elements to the narrative does help fill up the pages. But for all of the invention in some places, the novels reaches for reference and allusion again and again and again, and the serial numbers aren’t always filed off well enough. 

However, it should be said that novel doesn’t drag, and it does know how to breathe, although the timing of the changes in point of view were sometimes off, and the withholding of information at some points only annoyed me rather than amplified my interest. On the other hand, the novel does well with a queernorm verse, something that is becoming much more the default, and less something I need to highlight except for contra examples. And, of course, this is the first in a planned series, since Grey and his crew only reach the first stone in this novel, and there are six more to go afterwards. 

Will I go on with the series? I am frankly not sure. With a lot of the heavy lifting of stuffing this world with its ideas in the first volume, it's possible that subsequent books will have a lot less of a gear shift issue than in this one. I hope so. Worldbuilding, as much as I love it, needs to flow from and to the plot and characters. The author here seems to have wanted to put in All the Cool Things into their worldbuilding, and many of them are cool, but not all of them, to me, feel like they should be in the same universe as each other. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Thick and chonky science fantasy

• Not quite the sum of its parts

• Good action and adventure beats.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 

Reference: Africh, Maurice, Cello’s Gate, [Saga 2026]

¹ So, in essence, channeling Firefly, even if the Pilot is the wife here. There is also some Guardians of the Galaxy as well. 

² A Number of Anime have this father-son dynamic. It does make Grey more than a Mal Reynolds clone, at least, although I am not sure how it fits all that well. 

³ Despite my Aladdin joke, it’s the Infinity Stones, naturally

⁴ Given all the traps and puzzles, there is an Indiana Jones feel to it all. 

⁵ So the Matrix, with hand weapons. 

⁶ Here is a bonus secret endnote instead of a footnote, since I couldn’t work this into the narrative of the review. I didn’t like the title at all. We don’t find out who or what Cello is until late in the novel, and it doesn’t tie in with the theme or plot of the novel at all. In my view, a book title is important to attracting readers--even today, Netgalley, when requesting a book, has “Book Title” as one of the reasons you are attracted to a book.  And frankly, for me, Cello’s Gate doesn’t do that. The cover is very good, and does tell you what you are getting, right up to Dot’s not-quite light sabers.  But the title? No. It fails for me.  POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin. 

Book Review: The Only Way Out Is Up by Django Wexler

Robot battles, class politics, and numbers going up

 

Django Wexler has had an incredibly consistent career across a wide range of subgenres, ranging from the flintlock military fantasy of The Shadow Campaigns to the excellent YA fantasy of The Wells of Sorcery to the genuinely funny Dark Lord Davi duology and more. Dark Lord Davi was openly an affectionate pastiche of isekai (i.e. a specific Japanese iteration of portal fantasy) anime. This stuff has a huge and increasing fanbase among the anglosphere, well known within anime fandom, though I’m not quite sure how familiar traditional written SFF fandom and much of its attached critical apparatus is with the same.

Wexler takes this mining of popular spaces that are potentially unfamiliar to traditional SFF fandom up a notch with The Only Way Out Is Up. The book is a progression (science) fantasy, where our protagonist, Taj, and his probably sentient robot, Star, fight their way literally up from the bottom of a garbage heap to power and influence. As I will discuss a bit more below, this is another excellent effort from Wexler, engaging and fast-paced without being shallow. But before I turn to the book itself, forgive a digression into definitions here. Having just said I think this is a subgenre many won’t be familiar with, and being greeted with slight bafflement by a number of social media acquaintances when I’ve said “progression fantasy”, I hope this is both useful and potentially interesting.

Progression fantasy is arguably more a collection of subgenres than a single clearly defined thing. Its influences include Xianxia (i.e. Chinese cultivation fiction), manga, anime, light novels, JRPG video games and TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (as an example of how this all comes together, one of the key early influences is Record of Lodoss War, a Japanese series that started as a narrated serialisation of the author’s TTRPG campaign, was converted into a light novel series, and has spawned video game and anime spinoffs). These are in fact quite disparate urtexts, which contain different cultural and literary assumptions. They are united basically by only one single theme: Number Goes Up (i.e. the protagonist grows in power over time). 

Some of these influences are literally games, and at the crunchy end of the field (LitRPG), books have full-on stat screens and dice rolls as part of the action: think Dungeon Crawler Carl or the "trapped in a video game" subgenre of Japanese media, of which Sword Art Online is probably the most famous, though not quite the earliest. But not everything broadly in the progression fantasy realm is quite so literal in its gamification: I'd argue much of Brandon Sanderson's work teeters on the edge of progression fantasy with its focus on exploiting detailed magic systems. And in between those poles is a rich stew of iterations, from Sarah Lin's enjoyable, idiosyncratic, "architecture of a literal house inside your soul dictates power growth" Weirkey Chronicles to Tobias Begley's quantum magic school Journals of Evander Taylor to Will Wight's mega-selling Cradle series (which is clearly heavily Xianxia influenced). There are also a range of themes: outright individual power fantasy is probably the most common, but protagonists using their growing power to support the building of communities with their friends is also a recurring theme, and series with actively revolutionary politics directed at capitalist oppressors are also quite frequent.

The progression fantasy field in English is dominated by self-published authors and web serials published on sites like Royal Road (Indeed, Wexler is currently posting *another* progression fantasy, The Thirteenth God, on Royal Road). The quality is wildly variable: the best is very good fun and occasionally significantly more than that, but a large amount is individualistic power fantasies in leaden prose. In addition, one side effect of this serial fiction publishing context is that often this is the author’s first time writing for an audience. Even for more experienced writers in this space quite often the opening arc takes an absolute age to find its feet in its world, with its narrative, and with its characters. When these are turned into formal volumes for sale, either via self-publishing or when picked up for traditional publication, the first book is very often notably weaker that what follows (this is true even of stuff I overall enjoy, like John Bierce's Mage Errant and the aforementioned Dungeon Crawler Carl). 

This traditional publication pickup is a relatively new thing: SFF publishers failed to pay much attention to this collection of subgenres even though they had absolutely been doing the numbers online for years (For example, Unsouled, the first book in Wight's Cradle series, had 65,576 ratings on Goodreads at time of writing). Alongside republishing existing works, publishers now seem to be actively courting this zeitgeist and putting out original work in the progression fantasy space (the dynamic reminds me of a more male-coded attempt at repeating the flood of cozy fantasy we saw after the success of Legends and Lattes). The Only Way Out Is Up is an early and very good example of major publisher resources being put into such work. Wexler has no problems with a meandering or muddled start: the book begins with immediately engaging action and continues impressively from there. 

As noted above, Taj is a young man (twenty years old) who lives at the bottom of a city built in tiers around a giant hole several hundred metres deep and several kilometres across. There are three main tiers, each containing a city of increasing economic and social status as you go up. Periodically, various construction and electronic junk from the mysterious Above (i.e. the outside world) will drop through the aperture at the top of the hole (dubbed, rather evocatively, "the Asshole"). This forms a giant pile of e-waste—the Heap—at the bottom of the hole, below even the lowest city tier. Taj and his adoptive family make a precarious life around this huge mass of the detritus of those wealthier and more powerful than them.

The progression element here, at least for the first book, focuses on Taj upgrading his robot (called “runics” in-world) to fight in increasingly high stakes battles, both for money and to advantageously position himself and his friends politically. This means that a lot of the action set pieces are these robot battles, which are hugely entertaining, like a souped up science fantasy version of the old BBC programme, Robot Wars. The runics are built from metal and powered and controlled by sigils, seemingly magic runes charged by a person’s life force to make inanimate objects either do something (verb sigils) or change the way it is done (noun and modifier sigils). This is largely understood in-world as a standard programming language with standard operators, though Star, Taj’s runic, seems to be largely self-aware in a way other runics are not, and there are hints that it is possible to create nonstandard sigils. This is not a large feature of this book, but the title of the series (The Sigilist) suggests it may well become so, and may well become Taj’s route to the ever-expanding power and agency that is at the core of progression fantasy’s plot drive. 

Outside the world of sigils and robot battles, the plot focuses on Taj’s attempts to keep his family safe, housed, and fed (no small task in the precarious world of the Heap) and on the political manoeuvering of the deuteragonist we meet early in the novel (Ky, a young woman from the fancy upper tier city). The book is first and foremost hugely entertaining; a pacy romp through a slightly implausible, slightly gamified world. But there is also a bit more going on than pure confection. The character work is operating within generally expected archetypes, but the dialogue and integration with setting is skillful and naturalistic, quickly building rapport between the reader and Taj. Star is a very effective snarky robot sidekick, and Ky, our deuteragonist, has her own motivations and character and is far more than a distressed damsel for Taj to moon over. The gender and class politics of the setting are pretty clearly critiqued; the fact that the system sets up a no-win situation where those at those top pit everyone below them against each laid bare. This is very much a book one, so none of these issues are completely resolved here, but one plot arc is resolved and the board has very effectively been set for the rest to be explored as the series continues. 

Writing this review, one of the things that I struggled with most is how to get across just what it is this book does well beyond "good fun" (which it absolutely is). I'm a sucker for what Wexler serves up, and I think, like his previous work, The Only Way Out Is Up is definitely a cut above merely competent and enjoyable commercial SFF. He's a very good writer. But Wexler is not, to pick another contemporary author I think writes works similarly a cut above, the flashy prose stylist Freya Marske can be. He doesn't play the games with form and narrative the similarly consistent and excellent Jenn Lyons does. Where I think Wexler excels is in between this sentence level and volume-level creativity: he's as good as anyone currently working at conjuring atmosphere and character and plot drive across a paragraph or a scene. 

This mid-level structural mastery makes for a quick, breezy read that still vividly evokes setting and character. This is, I think, very hard to do, but while you're in the middle of it, whipping through a perfectly paced fight scene, it's easy not to notice how much skill is deployed. This is me noticing, and I hope readers of this review and Wexler's work will pay attention and appreciate it. Wexler is a hugely able purveyor of this sort of high-quality commercial SFF, and The Only Way Out is Up is another excellent example. It's also very clearly knowledgeable and respectful of the slightly out of the spotlight traditions it's drawing on, pulling us into the thrill of watching the weak and downtrodden get stronger and stick it to the rich and powerful, without ever veering into the bland, power fantasies of the less impressive examples of those traditions. Bring on book two.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Faced-paced, engaging action
• Appealing, naturalistic character work
• Excellent gateway book for the sometimes impenetrable world of progression fantasy

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Django Wexler, The Only Way Out Is Up [Orbit, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles

A potent anti-colonialist novel that sets its stakes on not just the fate of a planet and a species, but more importantly, the heart and soul of its main character

Ada Quintrall is the heiress to the Dukedom of Corbridge. Her grandfather the Duke has managed the aforementioned dukedom, which is actually on the planet Corbridge, in a future where humans have gone to the stars. The terraforming of the planet has been a harsh affair, and the native life has resisted. But when Ada finds out the long connection between her family and that native life, she is forced to confront what her grandfather and her family have done, and her complicity in it. And what is to be done about it.

This is the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh plays with a number of genres in order to explore its overall themes, which are, unapologetically, anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian in nature. Let’s begin with the most unexpected, and that is portal fantasy. In the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, Ada learns that her ancestor wrote a bestselling fantasy series (The Chronicles of Yeneh, hence the book title). As the novel proceeds in its opening phases, Ada realizes that the native inhabitants of the planet are not mindless “plants,” but rather are the fantasy species from her ancestor’s book. Just how and why this is true, and what it means, puts a portal fantasy frame front and center in the book.

As this is a science fiction novel, the nature of the world, combined with the portal fantasy already alluded to, gives the setting and the story a significant layer of science fantasy. It retains this even as the novel progresses; the novel isn’t as interested in hard SF as it is in the sociological, political and personal stories. You don’t get any sense of what the interstellar drive is or how it works, for example. That’s not the kind of novel this is.

And then we get into the worldbuilding and some more genre-bending. In this future, a portion of a diasporic humanity has decided to reinstitute aristocracy as a social system. It is explained that in a world where some people turn away from merciless post-Capitalism, the appeal of personal rule by means of hereditary aristocracy for some planets was strong. It’s not a new idea¹ to have an aristocratic “feudal” future.² Miles, however, does it a bit differently. Aristocratic nobles like Ada’s family are not the only social system out there; it’s made clear that there are still capitalistic systems, and aristocratic ones, and even socialistic ones. There is a plurality of social systems in Miles’ universe, and while we are under an aristocratic one in this book, a main character, Zamora, is from Luna, which is mainly a socialist state, This does set up some cultural distrust at first between Ada (as an aristocratic heiress) and Zamora, and in general between Zamora and the population of Corbridge.

And then there is the straight-up science fiction as a genre. Ada (and Zamora) understand that the natives of the planet are more than just “plants” (as Zamora already argued); moreover, there is an entire civilization in the toxic and dangerous zones beyond what has been colonized and terraformed by the humans. So we switch up into the novel’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial and pro-ecological themes. With the previous layers to this, this makes The Final Chronicle of Yeneh a science fiction novel with interesting and intriguing underpinnings, providing a fresh story in the process.³

But beyond all that genre-mixing and worldbuilding, this is a very personal story, focused on Ada, who as heiress to her grandfather, is confronted with the ecological, sociological and personal costs of imperialism, colonialism and the rapacious nature of her family and her family’s legacy. It’s a painful story for her in some ways, especially as it puts her on the other side of her grandfather and her legacy once she completely learns those costs and takes a stand. The novel is about those costs, and the difficulty of that change. And as importantly as coming to terms with that legacy, the novel is about taking action, making recompense and taking active steps to do better.

Yes, while Ada herself is in a position of privilege (at least at the outset), the novel’s message is that people can and do make a difference—and indeed must do so in order to effect change. Change is hard and is scary, but it is possible, with action. That is a message that the novel hits home, and it is a very necessary message in this day and age.

In sum, what The Final Chronicle of Yeneh does, brilliantly, is to channel Miles’ excellence in character depth and make the very soul of the main character, Ada, to be as important as the fate of the native Yeheneh and of the planet Corbridge. It stirs a swirl of portal fantasy and a hint of science fantasy into a far-future story that examines and criticizes colonialism, imperialism and exploitative social systems. Miles’ focus remains tight and sympathetic, having us join Ada on her own journey to recognizing, confronting and acting on working on systemic problems on Corbridge and beyond.

Highlights:

• Strong character focus and background
• Interesting space future sketched in and intriguing
• Bold anti-colonial, anti-imperial message, told well

Reference: Miles, Jo. The Final Chronicle of Yeneh [Horned Lark Press, 2026].

¹ Melinda Snodgrass’s Imperials Saga has capitalism evolve into a Spanish-focused monarchy and aristocracy, in space. And of course, there is always The Mote In God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

² Obligatory note that feudalism, as you might think of it, really didn’t exist as you might think of it. The huge variety of local political systems in Western Europe really put paid to that notion. Read the works of David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, among others, to learn more. (e.g. The Bright Ages).

³ The worldbuilding about the local inhabitants of the planet has resonances to many previous works of science fiction. You can certainly look at The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. I also see touchstones to the work of Adrian Tchaikovsky and James Cameron’s Avatar universe.

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

Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

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

Book Review: The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley

 A story of misdirection that refuses to be pinned down, even to the last

A young woman, Elize, stuck in a dreary fortress far from the front of the war, is given a strange task. It's a break in the monotony of her days, but one she doesn't fully understand, and that no one will really explain to her. Each day, she must sit in the tower room as a famous magician and escape artist is interrogated by an equally famous socialite. She herself must not speak, must not draw attention to herself in any way, only observe and report back to the commander of Crag what these two strange visitors discuss. Their conversations are cryptic and unfathomable, relying on a shared history she cannot access, but they all seem to circle around the city of Droad - destroyed by a likewise unfathomable weapon, leaving a ragged chasm and a poisoned earth to which no one can return. They're supposed to be ending the war. But are they?

The Misheard World, Aliya Whiteley's new novel, is a story of misdirections and subversions, where the unfolding of the story pivots the reader's understanding of the world again and again.

While the story begins in a vaguely described alternate world, one with elements that seem potentially fantastical - the magician whose tricks defy understanding, the giant cat of legend befriended by a socialite - as Elize listens to the stories of these two strange people and to the possibly mad pronouncements of her old tutor, it becomes clear that some power is operating on the world beyond her scope of understanding. Eventually, the story moves out of her observations into the world into several other characters narrations of their own perspectives, each of which shows the reader something about the world that upends their previous understanding of it, and its relationship with genre likewise. The story slips between the speculative and fantastical, and between worlds, as well as between points of view.

Those points of view - and how well they're captured - are for me what really sells this novel. The opening section, in Elize's viewpoint, has a clear, direct voice, of someone who knows her own mind but not her purpose. She's a keen observer but not knowledgeable about the wider context of the story. She presents little nuggets of information the reader can pause over because they think they can add something to it to make it make a little more sense - while Elize may not know about radiation, the blinding and sickening of the remains of Droad definitely give some hints to someone in our 21st century. Her life is episodic, constrained by timelines apart from her own, a rhythm of days and duties well captured in her short, to the point chapters.

This contrasts with the second POV, Mondegreen, the magician. His section has no breaks, forming one extremely long run on chapter. His voice too is easily distinguished, more self-assured, more charismatic, more meandering... and yet conversely more purposeful. Where he is now, he knows what he wants to achieve, and the whole of his story bends towards that purpose. It is also one with a much richer set of familiar details.

Well... familiar to the reader. When the narrative shifts back to Elize, we are once again confronted by the difference in levels of knowledge between her and us. And I loved this. It is not uncommon that I read a book in which a character fails to spot some critical piece of information, one that I myself have spotted any number of pages earlier, and find myself frustrated by the artificiality of it, and by the constraints of extra-narrative information weighing down on the plot. I know stories, and apply the metalogic I read into them, so of course I will make assumptions about the direction about the plot, of course I am willing to believe in aliens and magic as a solution easily - I know the parameters of the story and so can intuitively judge in a way the characters are constrained against. Whiteley takes that tension and makes a deliberate plaything of it. The POV shifts back to Elize and reflects on pieces of information provided by Mondegreen - things that are entirely unremarkable to the reader - and renders them once again incomprehensible. By opening a crack in the fourth wall in this way, the frisson of ignorance/knowledge becomes a shared game, rather than a source of frustration.

But it's also entirely the point of the story. The entire crux of it rests on - who correctly understands the parameters at work here? Who has the right meta framing for what's going on? And so by introducing that in the first two sections, Whiteley primes us for what will be one of the primary pillars of the story as a whole.

And then of course, by priming us in this way, she likewise sets us up to ourselves be unsettled, to have our own assumptions subverted. It is not only the characters who don't quite know what's going on, and the clarity of character voice can become a tool just as easily of confusion when deployed unexpectedly out of context. If Elize suddenly no longer sounds like Elize... what are we supposed to think about all the sections that came before, in which we relied on her obvious distinctiveness, her simple forthrightness?

Alongside all of this playing with perspective and framing, there's a parallel set of assumptions about technology, superiority and reality occurring, feeding into the question of exactly which viewpoint is the "real" one. Multiple characters offer their own viewpoint, framing their world, their understanding the be the default one, the one with power to enact upon the others in the story, with the secret knowledge that underlies the flawed understanding others have. First Mondegreen takes this role, viewing Elize as some pseudo-historical bumpkin - never saying it but clearly communicating it in how he narrates his own story to her. But then someone else comes along and sets forth their own stall on exactly who has the power to shape the story, and introduces their own contradictions. Mondegreen is just as ignorant as Elize? Maybe.

Nothing in this story is presented as unimpeachable fact, and that is quite possibly its greatest strength. Whiteley asks the reader to think around the gaps, to compare and contrast multiple flawed approaches to the events we have witnessed or been informed of, and create connection points of our own. The ending is the culmination of this, offering not one but three separate possibilities. Which, if any of them, is right? That is for the reader to decide, based on their own interpretation of the events as presented.

I don't always like ambiguously ended books, but Whiteley has done the groundwork throughout the story to reinforce that ambiguity is the point, at every stage, that it felt not only right but inevitable that it would continue right to the last page. The story is so heavily grounded in different people's telling of their stories - with their own agendas, points of view, prior knowledge and relationships - that to offer something absolute at the last would have been a betrayal of every page that went before. Every chapter asserts: "you do not know the whole story". Why would the story as a whole suggest any different?

It's skillfully done, reminiscent of the careful patience of her previous novel Three Eight One, which likewise used perspective to excellent effect.

But what is it all for? At one point, a character says: 

"When everyone has a story of loss to tell, nothing is worthy of the grand title of tragedy. Each tale contributes only to a mound of sadness: heaped, unclimbable, the stories slowly bleeding into each other until they are impossible to tell apart".

I would argue that this is also the crux of it - it is both an absolutely true statement about the story as a whole, and one that the novel seeks to refute. Because the tragedy of the stories - all of them, however much we choose to believe their narrators - never leaves. This is a story of a war going on for decades, manipulated by those who do not themselves suffer in it. It is a story of lives disrupted by tragedy and death, for a gain we never really see or fully understand. But it is also a story in which a myriad lives are lost off page, where tragedies are blurred together, and where narrators actively do confuse and manipulate the stories, making them harder to distinguish.

Somewhere, under the careful artifice of players who think they know the game, who think they set the rules, there is something deeply, powerless and human going on here. There are moments where we can connect with it. But it is just as human that it is buried deep, inaccessible even to those who are suffering the most in a war whose terms remain incomprehensible. Whiteley crafts a story precisely around this paradox. The argument occupies all levels of the storytelling, right down to chapter length and voice, right up to the title of the book itself, and it is from this totality that it finds its power. When you reach the end, all of them, it becomes clear how thoroughly this has been the point all along. No answers, of course, but a definitive question. Questions are sometimes more fun anyway.

The Misheard World feels, at every moment, intensely carefully crafted, and it is a delight to be left unsettled by it, all the way to the last.

--

The Math

Highlights: absolute mastery of differing character perspectives, superb unsettlement of reader comfort, productive ambiguity

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Aliya Whiteley, The Misheard World, [Solaris, 2026]

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

Book Review: A Song of Legends Lost by M. H. Ayinde

A twisty, kaleidoscope of a science fantasy novel with a set of interesting characters in a world they do not realize they don't understand as well as they think.

I’ve mentioned science fantasy a lot in these reviews, since it is one of the main chords of my SFF upbringing and development. We’ve seen books in this space where the science fantasy was anything but simply fantasy without even a hint of anything beyond that. Other novels have not mentioned explicitly they were science fantasy at all, but in the final analysis, clearly are.

For me, science fantasy works best and makes me happiest when it is essential that the two genres work and mix together. Science fantasy stories that are more than, oh look there is a raygun in this fantasy world. Or, oh look, in this science fictional world, there is the barest hint of something supernatural. But when the story surely can’t work without both elements, where the story feeds on being in this borderland, that’s when science fantasy works the best for me.¹

And so we come to A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde, first in a prospective trilogy.

A Song of Legends Lost is set in a secondary fantasy world that is under constant threat from creatures called greybloods, scavengers and dangerous leftovers from a previous fallen civilization. The society and world of Ayinde’s book respond to this threat by having certain individuals call upon the spirits of their ancestors, being able to manifest them from the beyond, to help fight these threats. One of our main characters, Jinao at the beginning of the book, has tried for years in vain to be chosen to do this, to be allowed and able to invoke one of the warlord ancestors that protect the Nine Lands, his ancestor, Mizito. 

So far, so good. Straight up fantasy. Spirit magic. Invokers. Threats from beyond. But we dig a little deeper. Another major POV character, the first we meet, Temi, brings in the science part of this equation. Her family are bakers, and also have a side business using old “techwork” to make water votives (purifiers) and other small bits of what are at best questionable and otherwise illegal uses of ancient and forbidden technology. So Temi is hip deep in old technology from a lost age that many (and rightly as it turns out in the course of the book) consider hideously dangerous, even as she is trying to help her family scratch out a living at the bottom of society (far different than the noble born Jinao).

What’s more, it quickly becomes clear, although Temi is driven to distraction, that some sort of ancestor spirit has attached themselves to Temi. Just what this spirit is, and why it has done so, and what its own plans and goals are the major throughline and mystery of the book. But the result is that Temi embodies the science fantasy nature of Ayinde’s novel better than any other character. Jinao is all about the ancestor spirit of Mizito and where that leads him (mainly down a road of confrontations with a ferocious greyblooded adversary called the Bearnator). Other POV characters we get are all about the techwork and ancient forbidden technology and only latterly wind up having to deal with spirits themselves.

But Temi? Temi is in these two worlds from the start, and it is her story that embodies the twin science fiction and fantasy narratives that infuse this book. She has to deal with the consequences of her techwork, and also with the spirit attached to her. Add this from a lower-class perspective and you can see why she is the focus, primary protagonist for the novel. She's the anchor everything and everyone else comes around.

The book is also about legacy, and history, and how a society, or a government (very appropriate and timely in our era) shapes the narrative of the past to its own ends. Sometimes, as this book shows, it’s not even done consciously. But the throughline of A Song of Legends Lost shows that a perception, a worldview, a conception of how the world works that is far out of line of reality can stand for a long time, but it cannot stand forever, and when reality finally bites, it can bite rather hard. The people of the Nine Lands think they know their origins, their history, their heritage, their duty. 

It turns out that, in truth, they are wrong about all four. And soon learn that the price of their misconceptions (and outright being lied to) is going to be very high indeed.

So this makes the book a painful (for the protagonists and their society) slow revelation and education as to the true state of affairs. What the greybloods are, where and what the ancestor spirits are, the nature of techwork, and even the fundamentals of the governing society. We the reader (in a excellent use of perspective and information control) learn more and faster than any individual protagonist about what is really going on, but it is an unlocking series of revelations. 

Along the way we get some vivid action sequences. A book where spirits of the ancestors are invoked to face hordes of smaller or sometimes a few large opponents, with named and diverse weapons and skills makes those sequences some of the highlight of the book. Jinao is not prepared for all this and he takes a beating again and again as he tries to learn better against his mysterious opponent. But we also get a city invasion, stand-offs between various factions, and even spirit on spirit combat. The book is rich on the details of the kinetics of these sequences and it is a good testament to the author’s writing skills.

We also get some carefully constructed character arcs (poor, poor Jinao, I really felt for him this entire book in a way even more than Temi, who ostensibly is the more primary protagonist), and a slow unfurling of the true state of the world, and what is going on. The variety of characters we get from all levels of society provides an well considered set of characters from various walks of life as we see them respond to the fractures in society that occur as the novel unfolds. 

I am reminded of Erin Evans’ Empire of Exiles, where the fugitives of a once continent spanning set of cultures are bottlenecked into a small peninsula, the threat of the force that occupies the rest of the land a supposedly containable force outside the peninsula, or is it, really? Intrigue, and adventure inside the lands of the Salt Wall, but the menace of what is lurking outside the Salt Wall threatens everyone and everything.² There are some very hard truths the characters in the duology come to learn about their world, much like the characters in Ayinde’s novel. 

For those particularly interested in such matters, there is some queer representation here, one of the warlord ancestors, for instance, uses nonbinary pronouns. Queerness is not a focus of the book, but it is present. More prominent, and subtler, is the multicultural nature of the Nine Lands society, with names, concepts and even weapons which invoke places from Mesoamerica to regions of Africa to regions of Asia such as China and Japan. This feels like a book that the author decided to entirely take her worldbuilding inspirations outside of the Great Wall of Europe.

This is the first in a trilogy and there really isn’t an off-ramp here. And I get the sense that (like many trilogies) now that some of (but not all, clearly) the blinders are off, the real story of the series can begin. The writing is solid, I love the science fantasy world Ayinde has created, and I am invested in the characters as they face a threat, and really a world they did not grow up to expect. 

--

Highlights:

• Science fantasy goodness
• Layers of misinformation peeled away, showing the dangers of deceiving an entire society and oneself
• Excellent action sequences

Reference: Ayinde, M.H., A Song of Legends Lost [Saga Press, 2025]

¹ So the elephant in the room is Star Wars. And when Star Wars is NOT obsessively interested in the “Skywalker Saga”, and has the Force be much wider (potentially) than just a bloodline, this is when the science fantasy works the best. Episode IV and V (until the Vader revelation). Episode VII and especially VIII (with its subsequently wasted ending). When there is a sense that yes, there is all this high technology, but there is Something Else, and that is important too, even if you don’t believe in it.

² Side note, really but has to be mentioned. Relics of Ruin, the second book in the series, not only has a summary of the first book but it has it in character as a document/missive from a character telling you the events from their perspective. This is one of the best uses of form I’ve ever seen and Evans deserves praise for it. 

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

TV Review: A.A.R.O.

Come for the Paranormal Mystery of the Week, stay for the animist theodicy

To the Western viewer, likely acquainted with The X Files, Fringe, Supernatural and Evil, a show like A.A.R.O. may at first feel like another iteration of the "whodunit, but make it spooky" genre. And the limited series that's been released on Netflix goes for that vibe in its initial episodes: this is a world where people can vanish into thin air, leaving just their empty clothes and bucketfuls of blood; where breaking the shrine of a fox spirit causes a wave of mass faintings; where pieces of an airplane that's been missing for years suddenly fall to the ground out of nowhere; where a shadowy terrorist faction can't succeed at planting bombs across Tokyo because a clairvoyant keeps frustrating their plans.

So far, so standard. But as we gradually get to meet the protagonists, a jaded misanthrope who can cite the classics of Japanese mythology from memory and a wide-eyed newbie with a keen nose for asking the right questions, we discover that the plot lurking under the surface is far more alarming than the occasional unexplained anomaly. It's not just that the monsters and curses from Japanese folklore happen to be real; it's that someone has declared war on the entire spiritual realm and has been extending tentacles at every level of Japanese society. This is a world where someone has been buying mummified mermaids to harvest their flesh; where someone has been running experiments with a spell that causes unending hunger; where someone has created a sound frequency that induces suicide; where someone is scheming to put heaven and hell under new management. What begins as a series of seemingly unconnected cases for a clandestine government agency to investigate turns out to lead to a potentially world-ending conspiracy whose best chance of succeeding is the fact that humans are the worst.

That's a fortunate thing for the viewer's enjoyment, because on the purely police investigation side of the story, A.A.R.O. just isn't very well written. The quiet pleasures of meticulously following the clues and formulating logical deductions are eschewed for impossibly lucky guesses, unprompted confessions, frequent instances of literal deus ex machina, and a tsunami of melodrama that would make Candy Candy blush. Also, the plot plays an increasingly ludicrous game of "guess who's possessing whom" that abuses the bait-and-switch trick with regard to the true identity of the villain four times, including one time it does reveal the actual villain, but still tries to pretend there's a further bigger villain behind. No, this detective/mystery show doesn't stand out because of its detectives or its mysteries. It stands out because of the ideological conflict it dramatizes on the nature of evil and the redeemability of humankind in an era when we've become almost godlike with technology we're too immature for.

It's worth highlighting once more the non-Western nature of this story, because the dynamic between mortals and the supernatural is very unlike what we're used to seeing in Western fantasy. Over here, we're still under the Miltonian spell, conceiving of spiritual power as flowing in a vertical direction, which makes humans either the helpless playthings of omnipotent overlords or the blasphemous rebels who seek to punish heaven for being too harsh on this world. But in the animist mindset, spiritual power flows horizontally, because humans are no less capable than the gods of influencing events in heaven, and if anyone seeks to punish heaven, it's for being too permissive with this world. With enough discipline and study, a determined human may turn into a worthy adversary for the gods.

A.A.R.O. thus twists the formula of the paranormal procedural: this time Earth isn't a means for spiritual factions to play out their eternal battles in; it's an end in itself, where all the spirits are responsible for protecting humans, even as humans grow more and more self-conceited, cruel and treacherous. Instead of fighting demonic incarnations of evil on behalf of humans, the protagonists of A.A.R.O. fight the demonic extremes that human hubris can reach. Instead of treating the gods the way, say, the Greek epics do, as capricious tyrants to fear or to pacify, in A.A.R.O. the gods are long-suffering, overworked benefactors who can only do so much in the face of human self-destructiveness. Whereas a story like God of War treats the quest to dethrone the gods as heroic liberation, A.A.R.O. treats the quest to dethrone the gods as a sad consequence of ignorance.

A case could be made that treating the Shintō gods as the preferrable status quo gives the show a conservative bent, and it would be hard to argue against that interpretation. The story clearly leans toward blaming human hubris for the problems in the world. However, it knows to avoid the extremes of anti-humanism and binary morality. The two protagonists constantly argue for opposite sides about the worth of humans, and a key reason why the good guys (somewhat) win in the end is because a god chose to trust a human. One villain is so strongly convinced that their cause is just that they can fool another character whose superpower is to cast detect evil. Moreover, a spell that reduces a god to human status isn't treated as a profanation every time. A former god reflects on this turn of events with admirable equanimity: yes, dying as a human is horrible, but living as a human can be full of wonders.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Wallace & Gromit Return in Vengeance Most Fowl

The quirky inventor and his trusty four-legged pal are dragged into a rematch

After a brief scare that apparently threatened the end of the business of Aardman Animation, the claymation studio is back with a bang: the treacherous penguin who tormented the adorkable duo Wallace and Gromit in the 1993 episode The Wrong Trousers is now the main villain of his own feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl, streaming now on Netflix. (Hmm, a forgotten enemy from an old episode returns in a film? And it happens to be the second film in the franchise? Yes, the pattern is clear. Vengeance Most Fowl is the Wrath of Khan of the Wallace & Gromit universe.)

The setting where our clay heroes live appears to remain frozen in its vaguely mid-20th-century state, but as an embodiment of the eccentric inventor archetype, Wallace got a big update for the 2020s. The central joke about Wallace, the recurring flaw that reveals his character, has always been that he expends more effort in building an absurdly complicated machine that washes, dresses and feeds him than he'd expend in actually washing, dressing and feeding himself. So he presents a useful case scenario for our ongoing discussion about the tasks that people ought to be doing but prefer to delegate to machines.

This time, long-suffering Gromit's cause for consternation du jour is Wallace's invention of programmable garden gnomes. Whereas Gromit keeps a colorful garden that vibrates with life, the robotic gnome turns it into a geometrically perfect nightmare of topiary sameness. The message isn't subtle or original, but our era needs to be reminded of it: automation and standardization are extremely useful for saving time, but they cannot replace the pleasure of deliberate creative choices. As you may recall, one of Gromit's hobbies is knitting. He may take a whole day to finish one sock, while the robotic gnome spits out an entire suit in seconds, which is the opposite of what making your own clothes is about. Results-oriented methods are a bad fit for tasks where having to do an effort is the whole point. (At the meta level, this is an effective argument for the worth of claymation in a world of digital magic.) To stress the same point, the plot has Wallace introduce still another redundant machine: one that pets his dog for him. One would think people don't need to be reminded that interpersonal connection cannot be replaced with machines, but... alas. Such are the times allotted to us.

However, the film doesn't just tell us what we already know. There are more sides to the issue of dangerous machines. When the evil penguin once again hijacks Wallace's invention to turn it against him, the way Wallace wins is by making another machine. That's who he is; that's how he solves all his problems. Even Gromit learns to love the garden gnomes when they help save the day. What's going on?

To understand what Vengeance Most Fowl seems to be saying, it's worthwhile to look more closely at the subplot with the police officers who are trying to recapture the escaped penguin. In a nutshell, we have an experienced senior who has accumulated a vast repertoire of time-tested heuristics (which he calls trusting one's gut) and an enthusiastic rookie who has the textbook fresh in her head and prefers to solve cases by sticking to procedure. Their disagreement mirrors the film's core conflict between spontaneity and algorithm. And yet, it's the rookie cop who figures out the truth by insisting on following the logical rules of evidence (despite her superior believing she listened to her gut). Again: what's going on?

What I suspect is going on is that the opposition between spontaneity and algorithm doesn't need to be resolved, but dissolved. It was never a real opposition. The two need not be enemies. You can pet your dog by yourself while a robotic gnome assists you with the form of gardening you prefer.

This embrace between passion and technique is visible in the very fact that this film exists. Aardman is known for its very high standards of animation quality with immensely complicated materials. One could use computers to animate Wallace & Gromit in a fraction of the time, but the studio's choice to go for the painstaking effort it takes to make inert clay come alive, and make it look no less eye-catching than today's ubiquitous digital creations, is a beautiful demonstration that the medium is the message. Vengeance Most Fowl excels in overcoming unthinkable technical challenges: a dozen tiny gnomes walking in perfect synchrony to carry a van; a boat chase on a navigable aqueduct; an arsenal of boomeranging boots (it makes sense in context).

And then there is, of course, the brilliant choice to give the villain a malleable face that nonetheless stays expressionless no matter what. It's terrifying how we can always tell when he's angry, when he's content, when he's disappointed, when he's defiant, even though his face doesn't move even once. This is a welcome comeback for one of the best characters ever created by Aardman Animation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

A collection about the infinite, wonderful possibilities contained in intermixture

There's no such thing as a pure culture. Every culture contains blends of various influences. But in Latin America, the blending is taken to a whole new level, as showcased by the spectacularly titled collection of stories The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, by Carlos Hernandez. (Full disclosure: I was a playtester in Hernandez's TTRPG Negocios Infernales.) The very concept of a "quantum santeria" alludes to this hybridity that pervades mestizo identity, a fusion of contrary particles that would be expected to annihilate each other but instead create something richer and marvelous.

The Aphotic Ghost, about a grieving father traveling to Mount Everest to retrieve his son's body, plays overtly with this kind of opposition of extremes. The son, Lazaro, learned from his mother a love for the creatures of the deep sea, but after winning awards for his oceanographic documentaries, he felt the urge to climb the highest mountain, to get as far as humanly possible from the place where he spent most of his youth. The twist is that Lazaro's mother, a biologist who studies the immortal life cycle of jellyfish, is something more than human, so it may be possible to rescue him from the frozen mountain.

The prose style in this story is deceptively simple for the multitude of thematic layers it contains. Lazaro is a clear stand-in for mestizo children of mixed families. The repeated mentions of jellyfish and their powers of regeneration occur first as backstory, then as allegory, and lastly as a central plot point. Although the sections of the story are alternatingly titled "Mountain," "Sea-Level," or "Aphotic Zone," which signals to the reader what degree of reality is involved, the story is a unified, harmonic whole where even the mundane can't happen without the otherworldly working in the background.

It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like
hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling
into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into
rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus,
and strange, ciliated veins circuited throughout its interior.

Homeostasis, about a woman adapting to her husband's subtly changed personality after he receives a brain implant to heal a head injury, does away with the overly abstract concerns that usually accompany this type of digital brain story. Is my husband still the same person? Does he keep the same soul? Is his identity an immutable monolith or an aggregate of attributes? Stop worrying about all that. Instead, hold his hand and feel his warmth. If that's intact, he's still there.

The robber's knife went all the way through his head;
its point poked out from his palate like a shark
tooth. It’s a miracle he didn’t die instantly. It’s a
miracle he didn’t die during the operation to remove
it. It’s a miracle his eyes are open and saccading.

Entanglements, about a Many Worlds researcher in an affair with a married woman, is a cute little comedy where the road not taken should have stayed that way.

I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly
alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousand  of others in
this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself.

The International Studbook of the Giant Panda, about a panda breeding program that uses human-piloted robot pandas to teach the real ones how to mate, explores big questions about the embodied component of identity. If your nervous system is hooked to an artificial body in such a way that you can feel it walk like a panda, breathe like a panda, quack like a panda, how close does that get you to being able to say that you've become a panda?

She brandishes the helmet I’ll be wearing. It looks like a
bear skull made from machined aluminum, with rubbery
black patches holding it together. The eyes are covered
with what reminds me of the metal weave of a microphone.
In all, it looks like the lovechild of a panda and a fly.

The Macrobe Conservation Project, about a future humankind struggling to save an alien ecosystem they'd unwittingly endangered, returns to the same questions about identity, this time in the form of symbionts that invade your nervous system and eventually take over you. Although this premise is very strong, it's executed rather inelegantly. The first-person narrator is a researcher's young son who discovers a cruel secret about his family, but the secret in question is immediately obvious to the reader, and its coverup depends on more spinning plates than one person could believably handle. And the story ends precisely at the point where the really interesting events could begin to happen.

She was like a pillow, a walking talking pillow. But she gave
good hugs and smelled right. They did a good job with her:
sometimes when she hugged me and I closed my eyes it felt like
it’s supposed to feel and I forgot that she’s not my real mom.

Los Simpáticos, about a crime-themed reality TV show derailed by a real-life murder, isn't a speculative story. It's a moderately convoluted whodunit that pits together contrasting notions of getting even.

We weren’t ready for her, but in the reality-TV biz you learn to adjust fast. While
the rest of us hid, Xavier slipped into character: a laconic, efficient sociopath.

More than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give, about a man's quest to recover the soul of his mother, who was executed during the Cuban Revolution, establishes symbolic links between love and pain. For example, the object with the strongest emotional resonance for an old married couple is the wife's false tooth; a widower keeps a knife stuck to his chest to preserve his wife's soul; and the victims of a firing squad still linger in the bullet holes left on the wall.

When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of
his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.

Bone of My Bone, about a man slowly growing a horn on his head, is a brief but effective allegory for the bits of themselves that people leave in us after they leave.

When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he
found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow.

The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory, about an interdimensional migration of unicorns into our universe, reads like a fable with a nuanced position on when truth is necessary and when it can wait.

I don’t want this magnificent creature to die without knowing
some comfort and love in his passing. It’s a girlish, sentimental
thought, I know. That doesn’t make it any less authentic.

American Moat, about alien explorers meeting vigilante enforcers at the US southern border, casts a satirical look at the patriotic impulse and questions what exactly it is that conservatives want to conserve.

Neither Ham nor Alex should have been able to hear her so clearly from
that distance. It was like her voice had emerged from within their own heads.

Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66, about a dead pianist's mind preserved in a brain implant, comes up with a creative way to negotiate the not-really-so-inevitable clash between spiritual beliefs and computer science.

I am not making this music happen, but every time the
glove strikes a key, the music shoots up my fingers and
passes into my body, just as if I were playing this piece
myself. It’s so pleasurable and enchanting to feel the music
course through me that I forget for a moment to hear it.

And finally, the titular story, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, about a child with an overactive curiosity who resorts to untested rituals to help his widowed father find love again, returns to the theme of pain linked to love, this time through sacrifice. In the world of this story, to steer your life into the desired timeline necessitates that you sacrifice all other potential timelines, even those where you would have lived with less sorrow.

This story is framed as an extended flashback; in adulthood, the narrator is simultaneously a quantum physicist and a priest of the Orishas, and has a knack for unusual innovation in both fields. This character is another example of successful mestizo life: the creative acquisition of dual competence in separate traditions that needn't be opposed.

As I got closer, I thought I saw the house … waver. Like a mirage. And
then, like any good mirage, it became solid again, reasserted its reality.

The thread that binds these stories together is, naturally, hybrid identity. All through the book, a case is made for rejecting strict dichotomies. You can both be fully human and also a jellyfish; or be fully human and also a digital pattern; or be fully human and also a robot panda; or be fully human and also an alien symbiote; or be fully human and also a channel for ghosts; or be fully human and also a truck. At the same time that you're assimilated by a dominant culture, you can choose to assimilate it in turn into you. You can be all. You can contain multitudes.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Hernandez, Carlos. The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria [Rosarium Publishing, 2016].

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

Film Review: The Wild Robot

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

With an eye-catching art style reminiscent of its earlier masterpiece Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks' adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot gives off a warm aura that soothes and uplifts the weary soul. This is a surprisingly deep story for such a contained scenario: it begins in the near future, when a shipment of domestic helper robots crashes against the rocky coast of a small island, leaving only one surviving robot. The emotional nucleus of the movie concerns the incompatible values between a creature built to serve and the law of the jungle.

For all the cuteness in its visual design, the island is not a safe place: every creature there seeks its own survival, and that pursuit is often bloody. Inasmuch as the island can be said to constitute a society, it's one built on mutual hostility. It's eat or be eaten. And here's where our protagonist, which doesn't need to eat and cannot be eaten, will try to find a place and a purpose.

In the original novel, the author's note explains, "animal instincts are kind of like computer programs." Both computers and animals have certain core routines that they follow automatically. The relevant instincts/programs in dispute here are, on one side, those of the wildlife, organized around relations of competition and predation; and on the other side, those of an obedient machine, designed for relations of altruism. Will the friendly newcomer succumb to the hierarchy of violence, or will the ubiquitous hostility of nature adapt to accommodate a gentler touch?

What ends up happening is that the two types of programs exchange useful routines. Our protagonist, the stranded robot, acquires a new type of relation: responsibility. After accidentally destroying a goose nest, the next logical task is to take care of the only surviving egg. And the closed environment of the island also acquires a new type of relation: openness. The robot's presence and the way it disrupts the usual flow of the circle of life force the various creatures, big and small, to reconsider the roles they've been unthinkingly performing up to that point.

By the rules of the jungle, that egg ought to have perished. But our robot, without realizing it, introduces love into the cold equations of survival. For their part, the animals in the island do have some inborn notion of emotional attachment, but it's restricted to members of their respective species. It ought to be unthinkable for a goose to love a being that is not-a-goose. And yet, the miracle happens. A piece of machinery with no role to play in the food chain becomes a friend, a mother, a leader, a heroine. What until then had been a battlefield of all against all becomes a home.

One has to allow for a certain measure of poetic license in a story like this. The characters that the movie presents as becoming companions forged in adversity include several natural enemies; while witnessing the formation of a cross-species alliance to defend the island, one isn't meant to think too hard about which of those comrades the bear and the fox will need to eat tomorrow.

No, there are more urgent concerns. Our protagonist has owners, and they're eager to recover their property. Scattered hints indicate that this world has undergone a serious climate catastrophe, and the robot helpers are crucial to maintaining the standard of life of what appears to be a very limited human population. On top of that, this particular robot has learned to communicate with animals and earn their cooperation, making those digital memories valuable beyond measure. The threat left unspoken is that the same humankind that let ecological disaster happen at a global scale wouldn't recoil at the chance to turn the animal kingdom into another tool to control.

The movie doesn't lose sight of these macro events while it aims a finely sharpened scalpel at the audience's heart with its poignant interpersonal drama. The anxieties of sudden parenthood and the insecurities of growing up feeling different don't change substantially when your family is composed of a gosling that can't figure out small talk (let alone swimming and flying), a fox that used to try to eat said gosling multiple times, and a helper robot that inadvertently killed the gosling's family. And these messy, profoundly incompatible, woefully unprepared characters manage to create exactly the kind of unbreakable love bonds that can save a community.

All this is clothed in the most exquisite colors digital cinema is capable of. The Wild Robot is not only a hard punch right in the feels; it's a banquet of textures and shapes and deftly timed movement. One is simultaneously overcome with the personal catharsis evoked by the main family plot (complete with tears of bittersweet self-recognition) and a sense of historic good fortune for being alive at a time when such heights of visual artistry can be reached. Combined with its spectacular soundtrack, the experience of watching this movie is, without exaggeration, unforgettable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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