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.

Book Review: The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

A stunning science fantasy novel with a strong theme and timely and resonant message underpinning a strong character study. 

Science fantasy seems to be having a moment again. The peanut butter and chocolate of the two main halves of speculative fiction are once again meeting in the middle with novels that combine the technological speculation of science fiction with the social structures, and sometimes outright magic and the unexplainable elements of fantasy. Gary K. Wolfe considers science fantasy as an SFF story that you can read as a science fiction story, a fantasy story, or both at the same time, which is as good a definition of science fantasy as you can get. 

So it is with Samantha Mills The Wings Upon Her Back, Mills' first full length novel. If you have read Mills before, it is probably the story "Rabbit Test". This is rather different and shows her range. Here, Mills sets us up in the city state of Radezhda, where all of our action takes place. Long ago, five deities visited the city and uplifted the civilization of the city, ancient aliens style. The power and technology they have given the city are not completely comprehended by the residents but it is enough for them to assert their independence and defense from the rest of the world. Those gods are mostly sleeping now, leaving their mortal Voices to commune with them, occasionally get news or judgments, and contribute to the welfare of the city. 

Our main character is Zenya. Although born under the auspices of the god dedicated to learning and knowledge, she has always dreamed of flying, of being a warrior. We start the novel, then, with her showing a dissident a small act of mercy, for which as a reward for her years of loyal service, both to the warriors and personally to their leader Vodaya, with being stripped of her biomechanical wings, and left to die. It's when she is found by the real revolutionaries that the plot really kicks off, as Zenya has a painful coming to terms of who she is, what she has done.

This comes to us in a narrative set in the present day, following the events of her being cast out, and in a parallel narrative, we get to see how Zenya became Winged Zemolai. Mills cleverly uses the flashback sequences in a threefold sense. First and foremost, we get the full character arc of Zenya, how and why she became the woman she was, who is both a fearless warrior with wings, and yet someone who showed that act of mercy. Second, we get to see how and why the city has strayed and moved from a path of five representatives of the various gods cooperating into the brutal authoritarian rule of Vodaya. This strand of the novel is frankly an out and out blueprint of how fascist and authoritarian societies emerge from innocuous beginnings. And third, mixing the two, we see how the toxic relationship between Zenya and Vodaya came to be, growing and flourishing in its poisonousness. This also serves as a character study of Vodaya herself, showing how a fascist leader can emerge and take power, but also, it shows just how seductive and alluring such a leader and their ideology and methods can be, especially to a young and impressionable youth such as Zenya. Seeing Vodaya use and manipulate the young Zenya is a horrifying masterclass in such psychological techniques. 

The novel can be relentless at times, because in the present day narrative, Zenya has fallen with true and real revolutionaries who are seeking to stop the authoritarian tyranny that Vodaya has instituted. These are not protesters hanging up signs, this is a movement with cells, goals, and that can and will use violence to achieve their ends. Zenya really has gone from the frying pan of being the hand of Vodaya to falling in with a group that trusts her not at all but is willing to to kill and do damage in order to oppose the tyrannical rule, as well as torture, and also manipulate prisoners and those not trusted, including of course, Zenya. 

But I want to go back to the science fantasy nature of this novel and explore briefly, how it fits into that context.

How can one read this in both modes? A city-state where technology-as-magic allows for biomechanical wings, and five sleeping gods whose worshipers squabble and try and interpret what their gods want to do and why, and feeling lost and forgotten, is definitely a fantasy setting if I ever heard one. The novel fits my medium stakes and "city-state fantasy" paradigm rather well - if you read the novel in a fantasy mode.

And yet this is also a science fiction novel. The technobabble of the wings refers to "ports" and there are flying boats, bombs, and even (although not really named as such) an EMP device. There is very heretical thought that the gods aren't gods at all, but rather are ancient aliens who came, gave some technology to the people of the city, but mostly now for reasons unknown, are asleep and not generally reachable on a regular basis. 

There is an additional piece within the novel, a plot point/MacGuffin that becomes extremely important to the unfolding of the plot. I don't want to give it away because it becomes such an important hinge later in the novel, but the fact that it can be read either as technology or as something in a fantasy mode helps solidly that science fantasy is indeed the axis that this novel very deliberately spins around.

In the end, the world of the novel is a world where both sides do very dirty things, and neither side's hands are clean. The Wings Upon Her Back, though, grounds this all in Zenya, and thanks to the dual narratives, we slowly close the loop and fully understand Zenya. Why would she find service to the mecha god instead of "her" scholar god in the first place, how her brutal training, physically and psychologically molded her to be Vodaya's creature, and how the seeds of her (at first) mild disillusionment came to be in the first place. 

But even with Zenya in the rebellion and opposing Vodaya, her toxic and disturbing relationship to her old life and her relationship with Vodaya always comes to the for, and Vodaya, besides Zenya, has staying power as the most memorable and darkly compelling aspect of the novel. Vodaya has spent years molding Zenya, and this novel could be read as a story of deprogramming. The deprogramming is twofold, first of all Zenya herself from Vodaya and her toxic methods, and the deprogramming of an entire society which has been molded to be brutal, uncompromising, fascist, and authoritarian. The novel shows that it is a painful and not easy process, and there are no simple magic bullets or answers for either. I felt strongly for Zenya especially in the flashback scenes, as Mills makes what Vodaya is doing to her plain and unmistakable. 

And again, given the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and those it impacts, what Vodaya goes through feels timely and relevant.

The last part of the book, then, has in the flashback sequences Zenya taking her first flight with her wings, showing her joy at the pinnacle of her triumph as a youth, and in the present, Zenya recreating that journey, without wings, older, wiser, and irrevocably changed by her experiences. It's a potent and strong ending to a potent and strong novel. The novel is complete in one volume and there really isn't, as far as I can see, need or room for a sequel hook. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• A potent and important story of authoritarianism and what it does to a society and people
• A strong science fantasy hybrid
• An unflinching look at a protagonist and the character who manipulates and molds her

You can read more about the book, and Samantha Mills, in my Six Books interview about her.

Reference: Mills, Samantha, The Wings Upon her Back [Tachyon, 2024]

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

Film review: Kalki 2898 AD

A clash of past against future, tyrants against gods, ambition against destiny

The latest blockbuster to come from epic Indian cinema, Kalki 2989 AD is India's most expensive film so far. Set in a far future beset by hunger, despotism and hopelessness, it follows a handful of improbable heroes struggling to bring about a new era of peace.

The background context for this film is the Kurukshetra War, a pivotal moment in epic Indian literature. According to the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata, two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fought each other brutally for eighteen days over control of the Kingdom of Hastinapura. Toward the end of the war, one formidable soldier allied with the Kauravas, Ashwatthama, upon seeing that his side was losing, hurled a weapon of divine might against princess Uttara, who was pregnant with the last surviving heir of the Pandavas. The hero Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, stopped the attack and cursed Ashwatthama to walk the earth for centuries.

The film takes these events and gives them a continuation in our far future. The opening credits, which consist of a digital animation of scenes from the Kurukshetra War, end in a close-up of a CGI shoot of grass that blends into an identical-looking, real shoot of grass. The meaning is clear: the realm of myth extends into the real world. In this future setting, the Kali Yuga, the cosmic era ruled by sin and perversion, is nearing its end, and the hero Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu, who will restore the world and put an end to evil, is about to be born. Unfortunately, the tyrant who controls the last surviving human city has a habit of kidnapping fertile women for horrific experiments to try and extend his own lifespan. It is one of those women who is carrying the foretold savior of humankind.

Kalki 2898 AD does a good job of explaining the basics of its massive lore, but for Western viewers it wouldn't hurt to brush up on their Hindu mythology. Much of the emotional impact of the plot (especially the return of Ashwatthama as an eight-foot-tall badass immortal) relies on the audience's assumed familiarity with and personal investment in Hindu eschatology. This is not like watching a movie about Hercules or Achilles, where we know the relevant myths but don't take them as historical fact. Rather, imagine if the plot of Left Behind happened in the setting of Mad Max, and, more importantly, imagine that you're a devoted believer. The tacit position of the film, and of its intended audience, is that the Mahabaratha narrates actual events that happened in real life. Whereas Western scriptwriters and directors will probably not feel any reverence for the Olympian gods, to a huge portion of the Indian population the Hindu gods are very real. Keep that in mind as you sit to watch.

Once the stakes are defined, the film becomes a series of frantic chase scenes between bad guys and good guys trying to snatch this desperate pregnant woman who never asked to occupy such an important position. Combat scenes are a mixed bag: while Ashwatthama (now tasked with protecting Kalki's mother until he can be born) commands every scene he appears in with his imposing presence and impeccable acting (no surprise there, since he's played by cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan), his sometimes rival, a bounty hunter named Bhairava, is comparably strong, but the visual effects used in his fighting moves are too obviously fake. Nameless mooks get smashed against the walls like bowling pins, making Bhairava's battles (even the all-important one at the end) look more comical than awesome.

Visual effects in general are a problem with this film. Landscape shots look impressive, but the objects moving in the foreground seem copied and pasted from a stock photo archive. Together with the Zack Snyder-style yellowish tint that was applied all over the film, the disorienting editing between sequences and even within the same scene, the ill-advised use of fast motion for dramatic effect, and the cringeworthy sense of humor, these moviemaking choices rob Kalki 2898 AD of the majestic aura it wants to claim.

Your enjoyment of the protagonist, bounty hunter Bhairava, will depend on how much patience you have for the lovable rogue archetype. Take Han Solo, but replace Chewbacca with KITT from Knight Rider, and you'll get the idea. It's interesting that Bhairava starts the movie in opposition to the aims of divine prophecy, but gradually becomes an antiheroic figure who fights the villains for selfish reasons. Alas, the rest of the cast isn't fleshed out at all. The expectant mother of the god Vishnu is treated as a standard-issue damsel in distress; the generic mid-level commander who persecutes our heroes is stuck in the role of generic mid-level commander; the supporting heroes are an interchangeable collection of cool gadgets and catchphrases; and the minor villains are disposable meat. That's a common problem with plots built on prophecy: characters don't need to grow, because victory is already written in stone.

This film is the first entry in a planned Kalki Cinematic Universe that has already produced a prequel series. Accordingly, Kalki 2898 AD ends in a cliffhanger that renders much of its plot moot. In a discouraging imitation of Hollywood's worst habits, the film even has a post-credits scene that teases a bigger battle with the final boss. It's clear that the producers want to go big with this, but the studio needs to hire better scriptwriters, and the visual effects aren't yet at a level capable of delivering a spectacle deserving of awe.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Road to Ruin by Hana Lee

A wild ride science fantasy of magic, motorcycles, and the extremely complicated hearts and maps of human relationships.

It’s a love story between a prince, a princess, and the person delivering the messages between them. You think you know this story, and perhaps you are thinking of Twelfth Night, or Cyrano de Bergerac, or any other number of stories where two individuals and the person conveying messages between them are caught in romantic entanglement with one of the principals.

But this is different. This is a post apocalyptic world of magic and technology, of magic users who fight storms and magical motorcycles. A story of a world facing deep problems that could wipe away the tenuous hold the cities have in this wasteland. Oh, and the love story is polyamorous and queer in that the messenger is secretly in love with both the prince and the princess.

This is the story of Hana Lee’s Road to Ruin.

Road to Ruin is a novel that defies some tropes right from the get go. Classically in a lot of myths, legends, stories and sadly novels to this day, the prince rescues the hapless princess from the tower, and go on off together to a happily ever after. The prince gets to have the powers, abilities and skills and the princess is there to be rescued. Although Jin, our magebike courier sending messages between them is our primary point of view and protagonist, this script is unended right from the start. And Yi-Nereen is a princess trapped in her city state of Kerina Rut, and about to be forced into a marriage she manifestly does not want (even above and beyond her feelings for Kadrin). But she is also a sorceress and has an important role in defending the city as one of the city’s shields against the storms that batter the wastelands. If anything, Kadrin feels like *he* is the one without skills or usefulness, and points this out a couple of times in the narrative. He does, in the end, find value and worth in his skills and abilities and the challenges that they face in the story.

The story runs on two tracks. In the present, we get Jin delivering what turns out to be the last letter Yi-Nereen receives from Kadrinx, even as she is ready to be married against her will and desire, and very soon. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so Jin is recruited by Yi-Nareeen to spirit her away from Kerina Rut to Kerina Sol the home city of our Prince Kadrin. To be charitable, this doesn’t go immediately to plan. And of course, Yi-Nereen’s family does not take this sitting down and soon dispatches forces to retrieve the wayward princess. Oh, and her own fiancee, not satisfied with that, set off on his own. And then there is the prince...

The other track of the story are a series of letters between Kadrin and Yi-Nareen. As much as it shows their burgeoning relationship in an epistolary mode, there is important context and background laid in these letters that helps us to understand what drives both characters, and also Yi-Nareen’s project regarding the heritability of magical talents. This latter feeds right back into the main plot when Jin and Yi-Nareen’s efforts to reach the city of Kerina Sol are foiled by the mother of all storms, and their detour is straight into a hidden community, and, as it turns out, secrets long buried about the world, about magic, and the previous civilization.

For all of the post apocalyptic landscape, this story and its settings and framings are all about societies and groups of people. Yes, the desert landscape and its storm and Jin riding across it are vividly and winningly described. It’s an immersive world that kept my mind going to my limited travels into Utah and the desert southwest, and I had a real urge and desire to go to Utah again after reading this book*. But ultimately the book really pivots and revolves around communities and relationships, and the variety of both that we get. Prince Kadrin’s family and home, especially his relationship with his father, as well as the whole ethos of the city-state. Princess Yi-Nareen’s city state and her family, her betrothed, and others. The desert community that Yi-Nareen and Jin stumble into. The relationship between the three principals. Oh, and if that was not enough, Jin’s ex-lover enters into the scene and plays a major role in events. The plot and worldbuilding really runs off on how these relationships and communities spin off and against each other.

But I do want to talk a bit about worldbuilding and the feel of the science fantasy that we get here in Road to Ruin. The most common way for these sorts of stories to run, especially post apocalypse ones in a wasteland setting like this, is a desperate clawing for survival, as resources dwindle and things become more and more dire for all involved. The whole idea of “the world as an open grave” and ever so steadily spiraling downward is a theme that I see, for example, in the roleplaying game Other Dust, which is all about this feel. And we do get a heaping of this in the novel. Yi-Kareen’s city state of Karina Rut, and the overall feel IS this, trying to keep enough shield capable magicians going to protect the city against storms.

And there are some of the usual sort of tropes you get in societies on the edge. Kerina Rut does not permit women with magic (Talented) to read. Kerina Sol is extremely unforgiving to those (like Kadrin) without Talent at all. Societies under stress often turn to drastic and unforgiving solutions and cultural standards and workarounds in an environment of scarcity.

And yet, all that is not the whole story. The central and defining science fantasy element of Lee’s novel, the Magebike, is in fact, something that was only invented several decades ago (and who and why and what happened to the inventor becomes extremely plot relevant). There are other instances in the novel where there are efforts at innovation, at trying new things, at being curious about the world and doing better with a “bad hand”. A lot of post-apocalyptic stories are all about “raging against the dying of the light” with a lot of trying to shore up the walls. I appreciate that as the standard run of how these stories go. However, Lee shows us that even in an apocalypse and its aftermath, there are people trying to find new ways and new methods (my recent non fiction reading has strongly influenced my thought on these matters.)**

I want to go back to what I mentioned in the beginning and not hide it under a basket. The novel is queer friendly although I am not entirely certain it’s queernorm. Our princess does mention the possibility of romantic entanglements with women (but when it comes husband time, such pursuits are put away, firmly). Jin is as mentioned in love with the prince and princess both, and her ex-lover, a woman features strongly in the plot. Kadrin seems firmly fixated on Yi-Nareen, though. If he is genderqueer, the text does not support it. But the pain and agony of relationships here is all socially based and matters of the heart, not restrictions on gender based on social and societal standards.

As far as the ending of the book, while the main threat and issue is resolved at the end of this book, the book does definitely have a sequel hook given what occurs. While I do feel the ending of this book was somewhat compressed and rushed compared to the rest of the book, I have curiosity as to the fate of Jin, Yi-Kareen, Kadrin and their world. I do want to know more about all of it, the story of these three characters, the world of the ancient Road Builders, and what it all means. I’d definitely be up for a sequel.

* In the acknowledgements, Lee calls out Mad Max Fury Road. That’s the visual feel she is going for in the novel. And I think she hits her marks.

** I seem to be in a Post apocalyptic mood, lately. I recently read Eric Cline’s AFTER 1177 BC, which is about the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse (a followup to his book 1177 BC, which is all about the collapse). This new book is about how societies in the Mediterranean dealt with, or didn’t, with the results for various societies. Some stagnated, some recovered, others slowly declined, some found new horizons, and some did rather well for a time. The other book in this vein is Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations, which looks at a number of civilizations, their heights and collapse, and what happened next for them.

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The Math

Highlights:

• An interesting and vividly seen desert apocalyptic world
• A winning combination of science and fantasy
• Excellent action and emotional beats alike.

Reference: Lee, Hana, Road to Ruin [Saga Press, 2024]

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