Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

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

Book Review: This Is Where The Future Bleeds by Mike Brooks

 Quality fantasy romp with a side of anti-capitalist fury

Mike Brooks is a writer that rarely disappoints. He's one of the most consistently solid writers of Warhammer: 40,000 fiction for The Black Library. He's written hugely entertaining caper-tinged space opera in the form of the Keiko series. And his Godking Chronicles trilogy was one of the very best epic fantasies of recent years. That record of consistency is happily continued here with This Is Where The Future Bleeds; a funny, entertaining standalone romp that's also a pretty effective satire of late-stage capitalism and its response to climate change.

The novel is set in a world where time has literally been stabbed: a god tried to murder the future and only partially succeeded. On the moor where the assault happened, time is frozen and the wound where the future was stabbed drips crystallised destinies as it bleeds. Hold a destiny and concentrate on it and you absorb the future it contains. The rest of the world (a reasonably standard fantasy secondary world which is dominated by humans but also has other sentient races) continues on relatively normally for centuries after the attempted temporal murder, except a new and lucrative trade in destinies has sprung up. Diviners, protected from the frozen moment by chronomancy and dodging the risk of rather nasty temporal monsters, lead expeditions to find raw destinies on the high moor. Soothsayers read the destiny and understand what future it promises. And, of course, brokers sell the destinies to the highest bidders.

The story opens in media res with our protagonist (and diviner), Kitt Carver, mid-expedition, looking for a lucrative destiny to sell to her broker. The dangers of the moor and her profession are quickly established: Kitt finds a destiny but is then immediately attacked by the temporal monsters mentioned above. She miraculously escapes that attack but runs into another after she comes down off the moor, by a street gang with violent moral objections to the destinies trade. Negotiating her way out of that leaves her alive but destiny-less. Just as she is coming out of her funk at that loss of income, Kitt discovers her broker has been murdered and is herself assaulted in the street. It quickly becomes clear that someone powerful has an issue with one of the destinies Kitt has recently sold, and the people who bought it are likely in danger. Thus begins a headlong dash to warn the buyers, that kicks off the plot in earnest.

This book is, before anything else, a boatload of fun. There is good quality action sequences, appealingly shitty villains, and a likeable main cast that is nevertheless not remotely perfect. The tone is irreverent and amusing without descending into Whedonesque quippyness where the snark is a barrier between the reader and the characters. There are well placed, effective jokes that I'm sure will nevertheless irritate some readers. Brooks winks at the fourth wall without quite breaking it, drawing on pop culture references that are funny now but may well date quite badly. One of my favourites is an early reference to a character named “Definitely Human Dirk Hamley, whose nickname tended to prompt questions already answered by his nickname.” This clear reference to the "My ‘Not involved in human trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” meme of the past decade may well break immersion for some readers, but for two reasons, I don't object to this and other jokes like it throughout the book. First, it actually made me laugh. Second—and perhaps more generalisable—the reference to the real world reinforces that the destinies trade in the book is a pretty clear satire of the fossil fuel industry, specifically the capitalist political economy more generally in ours.

Destinies are valued based on how appealing or useful the future they will push their holders towards are. So the poor can't afford any beneficial destinies at all, the middle class are limited to extremely moderate helpful ones, and the rich can buy huge, positive destinies that significantly tilt the future in their favour, allowing them to get richer, buy more destinies, and tip the scales even more towards them. They are literally buying the futures of others to benefit themselves and entrench their privilege. The reference to extractive capitalism is already clear, but becomes moreso when a number of doomsday warnings from seers appear—perhaps the future is not just bleeding but bleeding out. The future potentially dying is of course a problem for everyone, but those that benefit from the status quo both downplay the risk and suggest that, even if it is happening, there's nothing we can do about it, so might as well enjoy their privilege while they can. Those at the top of this pyramid are treated with pretty uncomplicated contempt by the narrative, but it also makes the point that there are a lot of people involved in the trade whose day-to-day lives depend on it and who are just making a living rather than getting rich. It doesn't excuse their complacency, but I think Brooks does understand it: inertia is a hell of a thing to shift if those with the most power are unwilling to contribute.

This level of reasonably on-the-nose satire only works because, as mentioned above, the whole thing is a lot of fun and the cast is appealing. Kitt, the main character, is a slightly reluctant hero. Decent and hardworking, but also out primarily for herself and her friends rather than actively trying to save the world. Her old friend, Derna, is menacing and potentially positioned as an antagonist, but as the narrative goes on, it's clear there's more going on than that. Yes, she is dangerous and remains so, but it's slowly revealed that she is clearly neurodiverse and holds a reliable moral compass and lack of nuance that make neurotypical folks uncomfortable, which is where at least part of the sense of menace comes from. The rest of the support cast is well drawn, with the partial exception of a drunk seer that falls a bit flat. I get what the point of the character is for, and it's not badly written—a seer driven mad by thousands of voices of the fractured future instead of just the one a healthy timeline would have—but it's the closest the book comes to fantasy cliché and I'm not sure it quite works as intended.

The setting is also, in a low key way, extremely queer. Kitt and Derna are both bisexual; Kitt's sibling is enby; there's a binary trans character later in the book. All this is entirely taken in stride by the setting and its characters (including the unsympathetic ones). A number of axes of oppression are explored in the book, but sexuality and gender identity aren't: it's just not a big deal. I do like that we can be presented with a queernorm world that's not remotely cozy and is in fact quite crappy in a lot of other ways; queernorm doesn't have to (and shouldn't) always mean utopia.

Put all this together and you have a very good quality fantasy romp that has rather more to say than might appear on the surface. This Is Where The Future Bleeds won't change the world, but it might make you want to.

Highlights:

• A fun and funny standalone fantasy
• Queernorm without being cozy
• Effective satire of capitalism and climate inertia

Nerd coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Brooks, Mike. This Is Where The Future Bleeds [Titan, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Deep and the Drowned by Ian Green

 The opening volume of an extremely classic-feeling fantasy adventure

Killian is the captain of the Cutlass Hawk, a ship he may or may not have acquired entirely legally, in debt to local crime bosses, and haunted by the his past, both the crimes he's committed and the events that led him to them in the first place. He's charming, violent, clever, impulsive, and has a little bit of access to the skein, the magic of his world. Trying to pay off his debt to some local crime bosses, he's now been shackled with an entirely dubious duo from the culture who killed his mother, and who want to undertake one of the most dangerous sea voyages possible, through the domain of a mad god sea serpent with a penchant for storms and shipwrecking.

If The Deep and the Drowned sounds, from this brief synopsis, like the sort of fantasy story you've read before... well, you'd be right. There is something incredibly old school about it, an familiar too. Its expansive secondary world, its magic that underlies reality, its gods run wild and faded ruins of a once-great civilisation, its hero with a messy past and a yearning for revenge, even its pacing and twist reveals, all of it feels straight out of all the books I devoured as a teenager a couple of decades ago. And straight out of the type of books I haven't read in the last decade at the very least. This is a type of fantasy that just isn't hitting big, and I'm not picking up, these days, and so it was with a strange sense of déjà vu that I ploughed through Ian Green's forthcoming novel.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm honestly not sure.

In the abstract, I absolutely do not think stories need to be timebound to the trends of the moment: there will always be someone who doesn't like the flavour of the month and yearns for what came before, and they deserve books to read just as much as anyone else does. But... but. The problem with writing something that feels quite so familiar as this does, quite so keenly evokes a mode of fantasy I read so very much of as a teenager, is that it feels like the reiteration of the same mode needs to justify itself. When so much of a thing already exists, there's a sense that the new one has to make a statement about what it brings to the party that the pre-existing novels filling the same niche don't provide. That argument can take many forms, and "it's not new but it's phenomenally well-written" could be one of them. It doesn't have to be a twist (though twists, reworkings and reimaginations of the existing corpus are great fun and make their arguments quite plainly enough). But if there's already a plentiful crop of this one type of thing, the work has a lot of crowd to stand out from. I'm not sure "there's not been any new iterations of this one thing" for a while is quite enough, but maybe that's just me.

In any case, and sadly, I'm not sure The Deep and the Drowned succeeds in making such a case. Which isn't to say it's a bad book - the worldbuilding, plotting, prose and characterisation are all competently done, and while there are things to poke at in some of them (more on which shortly), that's true of many books still well worth reading. But when I put it down, I felt a great sense of it missing something. And I think it comes in at the level of theme, or possibly argument; I'm not sure if the book has something to say beyond having a cool story... and I think it might have needed one.

It's interesting to compare to Green's previous novel, Extremophile, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award last year. It was a novel of a type I'm not normally excited by (heists) but which managed to lure me into a heap of enjoyment through a mixture of good writing, the sense of a depth of knowledge on the author's part across several of its topics/settings, and just a strong thread, right at the base, of having something the say. It's a novel I ended up really liking, almost in spite of myself, just out of how well it was put together, at every level.

A lot of that same competence is here too, although translated away from near future climate fiction and into a secondary world. The handwriting of the same creator is visible, so to speak, just in a different font. But without the driving force of Extremophile's anger, or something equally forceful, it's not got quite the same magic to it that made the previous novel sing.

Which sounds like a lot of a downer on the novel, but it's not all that way. Some of the disappointment comes precisely because so many aspects of it are handled with the same skilled hand, that the little hole in the centre is felt that much more keenly. The possibility is visible.

One of the great decisions Green has made is to have his protagonist (and his ship full of crew and associates) be genuinely somewhat criminal. It's an unfortunately common issue in stories containing pirates, thieves and other lawbreakers that they don't... actually do any pirating or lawbreaking. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty is the easiest example that jumps to mind, but is hardly alone in this. Pirates are, to be quite frank, not very nice. They do not very nice things, often to entirely innocent people who just happen to be in possession of cargo. Or people who aren't totally innocent but still don't necessarily deserve to be pirated. If you're going to do a story with pirates in, you should probably accept that they are pirates and embrace it, moral mess and all. And if you can't swallow that... maybe don't write about pirates. Green has not fallen into this trap. His protagonist, Killian, gives plenty of examples of things he's done in his life which are... let's say not great. Certainly not lawful. Quite often not all that moral. But he remains a sympathetic character nonetheless, because people can be complex things. He has a backstory, he has context, that make his crimes make sense, but without feeling the need to constantly excuse and minimise them. It's great, and it gives the story and setting more weight for its premises to be taken seriously in this way.

There's also a sense of stories beyond the one being told, which to my mind is the mark of worldbuilding done right. This especially comes through from several of the secondary characters, with whom there are moments of understanding of their place, and their trajectory, through the world that only intersects with Killian's, rather than being subordinate to it. Whether that's the antagonists Marion and Mournchild, part of two different, temporarily aligned hierarchies, with their own goals and mores, or Silver, who disapproves of some of the plundering but needs Killian for his access to archaeological sites she has an interest in, or Kaikatsu, a member of another species called the Antian, who carries a mysterious creature called a relu in secret, and clearly has goals relating to it that have driven her far from her people. It is, in focus, Killian's story, but Green does enough work on these other threads to make them feel just real enough, just deep enough, to imply the world beyond the borders of the narrative.

It's also a book full of religion. In some ways, religion done much better than in a lot of traditional fantasy: the ones shown on page for any real time definitely give the feel of being institutions that people might actually be part of, which is rarer than it should be. These are religions that make sense as a part of daily life, with rituals and restrictions and hierarchies and internal politics, all hinted at and gestured to, if not explored in detail. It's not the superficial thing of "what if gods, but real", though there are gods walking (and swimming) about in Green's archipelago. Thought has been given to how the metaphysical shapes the societal, and that is so critical to making this kind of worldbuilding work. Religion is never quite enough in the focus to get some moments of real heft, but as a part of the construction in the background, it's pretty well done.

On a plot and pacing level, if we step aside a little from the familiarity problem, there's a lot of skill too. Without going into detail on the specifics, there's a late third act twist which, if you've read a lot of this sort of fantasy is entirely to be expected. But the way Green plots the course towards it, however visible on the horizon, is extremely competent: there's a reveal to the reader just the right amount of time before the reveal to the protagonist, and the gap between them is just right to enjoy the knowledge without getting impatient for the fallout.

But then again, there are some issues in execution too. These predominantly lie in the character of Killian, the hero. Making him have his thirst for blood and vengeance is great, he feels like a genuinely criminal criminal in the grubby mess of the world that it makes sense he'd inhabit. But, at times, he's also... a big softie. And having that genuine criminality puts these two parts of his character at further apart poles. By the end of the novel, I felt there needed to be more work to sell him uniting those contrasts for him to truly make sense to me reading him; the regret he feels for some of his bloody deeds isn't quite enough to make the link work. Likewise, he's clearly meant to be charming, impulsive but persuasive, but I'm not quite sure the writing sells that enough for me to believe in it, especially in his dialogue. He ends up being the thing he needs to be for the story at all points, and doesn't quite succeed in being a character, or not always.

And so, the world is interesting, the writing pretty good, and there's promise for a lot of intersecting lines of adventure in the future installments in what is clearly going to be a series. If you want the sort of secondary world fantasy that was going round in heaps 15-20 years ago, this is doing exactly that, and pretty well. But it's not doing a whole lot more, and after the promise of Extremophile I was hoping for something with a bit more bite to it.

--

The Math

Highlights: fantasy religions that feel like people engage with them; a big, broad world; pirates who actually do crimes

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Ian Green, The Deep and the Drowned, [Head of Zeus, 2026].

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

Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

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

Film Review: Scarlet

Something is rotten in the state of human hearts

If I had known in advance how the anime film Scarlet would handle its topic of obsessive revenge, I would have made this post a Double Feature with Redux Redux, because both stories use the devices of their respective genres in a visceral manner to demonstrate the self-destructive poison that is revenge.

Scarlet is a gender-flipped retelling of Hamlet that sends the princess of Denmark to an endless limbo when she accidentally drinks a cup of poison sent by her treacherous uncle before she had a chance to avenge the late king. In that barren landscape of sorrow and regret, she learns that her uncle has also died, so she embarks on a quest to walk across the vast land of the dead to find him and make him pay.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Prince Hamlet should have been more decisive in carrying out his revenge plan, Scarlet answers that that was never the issue. Being quicker to punish his uncle would still have played into the narrative conventions of a tragedy, and the thing about tragedies is that the only person you succeed at punishing is yourself. In that intermediate realm between Earth and the Great Beyond, Princess Scarlet fights waves of assassins sent to make her spirit dissolve into nothing. By willingly adopting the role of tragic heroine, by refusing to abandon her one-woman war, Scarlet has built her own hell.

Interestingly, there’s an element of cosmic retribution at play too, a remote, speechless character who takes the form of a celestial dragon and imparts punishment without the distortion of human passions. This addition to Hamlet lore makes Scarlet resemble the Greek Oresteia, where the impartial, impersonal judgment of the state is introduced to put an end to the self-perpetuating cycle of bloodshed that always results from private vendettas. However, in the case of Scarlet, this replacement is not associated with the state but with a more universal sense of justice, with death as the great equalizer.

Learning this lesson takes Scarlet a long, painful journey over beautifully designed scenery that almost steals the spotlight from the story’s heavy themes. We follow Scarlet through deserts and mountains and oceans that take the breath away with their sublime immensity. Even if the plot’s structure sometimes feels too streamlined and easy, the level of visual artistry more than makes up.

Because the other side has a loose relationship with time, Scarlet is joined by a random newcomer: a recently dead paramedic from present-day Japan, who strangely insists on bandaging every lost soul he meets, including Scarlet’s enemies. Even as she slashes and stabs her way through the land of the dead, he follows close behind, providing comfort to those you’d think are beyond hope. His example turns out to be crucial to her choices at the end of the film: the thing at stake is not only the punishment for the usurper king, but the fate of Denmark. Through this paramedic, Scarlet gets a glimpse of a time (which from her standpoint is the future) when people no longer butcher each other in eternal spirals of hatred. This being a Japanese production, it’s easy to perceive a subtextual allusion to the discussion on the remilitarization of the Japanese state. Can we have a future without more bloodshed? Can we escape this interminable journey between corpses and vengeful spirits?

We don’t have to renounce the entire idea of justice. But if death comes for all, it doesn’t need our help. We can face evil, even punish evil, without punishing ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Film Review: Zootopia 2

The city of talking animals reveals a wider world in its past and its future

Some movie premises, like “How did Han Solo get his last name?”, can be classified as “Nobody asked for this.” Others, like “How did the rebels get the Death Star schematics?”, are in the smaller category of “Nobody asked for this, but now that you went ahead and made it, it turns out it’s really good.” Zootopia 2 belongs in that latter category. There was no need to explore why we didn’t see reptiles in the first movie, because the class of mammals sufficed for its predator/prey allegory (also, the vast majority of reptiles are predators, so their presence would only have overcomplicated the plot).

(Also also, the talking animals eat fish. Are the fish sentient? Don’t ask.)

The worldbuilding of the first Zootopia was only as detailed as it needed to be, and that’s OK; that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. But now that Disney has decided to answer an unnecessary question, we’re lucky that the result is as good as it is. Zootopia 2 takes the first movie’s points about exclusion and prejudice and weaves a bigger mystery that involves racism, real estate encroachment, and the erasure of the history of marginalized communities.

Our protagonist duo is back: Judy, the overachiever rabbit with a compulsive need to prove herself caused by the mother of all impostor syndromes; and Nick, the socially isolated fox who only became Judy’s coworker because he literally has no other friends. (This is not me roasting them; the script has them explicitly saying this.) So, after a spectacularly disastrous unauthorized mission, they’re quickly ordered to get support group therapy to address the rough edges between them.

As it happens, this is a tense moment for the police department: the city of Zootopia is celebrating the centennial of its climate control walls that allow camels and polar bears to coexist. This is the pivotal invention that makes Zootopia and its marvelous diversity possible, and to highlight their importance, the exclusive gala that commemorates their creation also has a priceless historical document in display: the design notes of the engineer who designed the walls. The notebook has been preserved by a distinguished lynx family that for some reason is hostile to one of its descendants, Pawbert, who seems to not measure up to the patriarch’s expectations.

The plot kicks into gear when a viper crashes the party, steals the notebook, rapidly delivers a speech that convinces Judy of his good intentions, and ends up accidentally envenoming the police chief in a comically contrived set of circumstances that make it look like Judy and Nick were the attackers. So now our heroes have to go on the run from their own colleagues while they try to solve the mystery of why a reptile has showed up in Zootopia after a century of absence, why the lynx family is so suspiciously hostile to him, and what the design notes have to do with it all.

As police investigations go, this one doesn’t rely on brilliant deduction as much as miraculous convenience. For our heroes, clues fall from the sky as needed; the only doubt is whether they’ll survive the next slapstick chase through a swamp or a water pipe or a collapsing house or a Gazelle concert in the desert.

A handful of characters from the first movie make an appearance in the sequel: your favorite criminal sheep, donut-loving cheetah, car racing sloth, hyperanxious rabbit parents, and mobster shrew return for brief yet memorable scenes. The new characters are no less vivid: the new mayor of Zootopia is a former action movie actor horse with a hilarious catchphrase, one of the key informers in the investigation is a plumed basilisk with a perverse sense of humor, and one unlikely ally our heroes meet is a tomboyish beaver with a conspiracy podcast. And of course, the star that steals the show is Gary the viper, voiced with endearing sweetness by a perfectly cast Ke Huy Quan.

The day is saved by generous emotive oversharing, multi-species cooperation, rusty electrical equipment, the magic of snake antivenom, and… the Zootopia patent office? OK, a bit bureaucratic, but I’ll take it. The reveal of why reptiles left Zootopia and why mammals have such a low opinion of them has echoes in the real-world history of forced displacement and the insidious normalization of racism. It’s heartening to learn the true extent of reptile contributions to animal society, but it may deliver a mixed message to have a plot where reptiles are only welcomed back into Zootopia because they contributed to animal society. As a matter of principle, a group of people shouldn’t have to show proof of noble deeds before getting basic dignity and equality.

Zootopia 2 shows us a more complex side of its society, a deeper manifestation of the disguised prejudices that were already evident in the first movie. Even if the specifics of the story could have been planned better, the basic message of joy in diversity resonates loud and clear.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

The story of Kai, Ziede, and the humans and others in Martha Wells’s rich secondary fantasy world continues

Queen Demon drops us right into the action without preamble or prologue or recap.¹ This novel, like its predecessor, is set both in the present and in the past, something that surprised me. However, unlike in the previous novel, the past portions of this one don’t range across the entire life of Kai; rather, they are more narrowly focused, and to thematic effect. In the past, Kai is ramping up to be part of the ultimate struggle against the Hierarchs, the oppressive empire bent on world conquest and conversion to their way of life.² The first book, Witch King, jumped “around” the actual fall of the Hierarchs and how people came together to defeat them. This had the effect of the present day being purely aftermath and the actual rise and fall not as detailed as it might be. This novel takes a look at that portion of Kai’s history. It’s an important and long story of its own, and I see why Wells didn’t even go into it in the first novel, and instead showcased that entire important story here, although I can see how that might have frustrated readers of Witch King.

As for the portions set in the present, it’s about 60 years afterwards. The Hierarchs are beaten, driven away. But their remnants might yet linger, and what of their lost power? Can it be salvaged and used? Does it need to be sealed up even more firmly, like capping an oil well? And what are the costs and risks of doing either of those things? Kai gets caught up in one of his companions’ quest to find the Well, and the consequences of doing so.

So, while Witch King is a variety of things, ranging from a “coming of age” to “coming together to fight an oppressor” combined with a mystery and slow unveiling of Kai and his world, Queen Demon assumes you know all this and are ready for another installment. If we are thinking in musical terms, Witch King was the opening movement in the symphony, introducing us to what Wells is cooking up here. But Queen Demon is different. Queen Demon shows us some nuanced aspects of Kai’s theme, seeing just how difficult it is to get a diverse and often warring group of people to get together to face a common threat. Wells makes this subtext explicit by having Kai and his core companions realize that that is the power of the Hierarchs and their empire—they are counting on the their opponents’ inability to unite their powers effectively. So Past Kai’s goal and mission is to do that. His special focus as the novel progresses are the dust witches, who do not trust the others at all, and are in fact a threat in and of themselves. Kai has a lot of work to do in order to get them on his side. He might have beaten a couple of the Hierarchs already, but it takes more than a village to defeat an authoritarian regime backed by a Power.

In the other part of this movement of the symphony, in the present, Dahin, one of Kai’s oldest friends, is determined to find the source of the Hierarchs’ power. This theme in the symphony is concerned heavily with the costs and needs and necessities of power. One might say that the past narrative thread, as already discussed, is all about political and social power, how to accumulate it, concentrate it, and use it for good. The present-day thread is more concerned with the costs of magical power. We get plenty of detail in both threads, but especially the present day, about Kai’s power and what it costs him to use cantrips and intentions, the two main types of magical “spells”.

There are other ways to get that power, and understanding it and its cost in the case of the Hierarch’s Well is Dahin’s focus, and his obsession is what drags Kai, Ziede and company in a quest to find the Hierarch’s power source. After all, if the Well still exists, someone might resurrect their project. The power from the Well seems bottomless (at perhaps an even higher cost), and the lure and temptation are very real indeed. Kai begins to suspect, as the present-day narrative goes on, that others rather than Dahin might be very interested in getting the power of the Well… and becoming new Hierarchs themselves.³

The past narrative is all about how the band got together to defeat the Hierarchs; there is no doubt that Kai will succeed, only how and what will it cost him and those around him. The present narrative, in a “what’s next?” way of pulling the reader forward, was at times more intriguing from a plotwise perspective—just what the heck is the deal with the Well? Why is Dahin so obsessed? And what are the other agendas in play here? The author does a great job in making the past and present narratives resonate and have their themes speak to each other across time, allowing for a rich, braided story.

This is the point where I pitch the Raksura novels to readers unaware of them. In the time between the end of the Ile-Rien novels and her phoenix-like fulmination and rise with Murderbot, Wells wrote a number of things, some of which are coming back to print. My favorite of those are the novellas (and a couple of novels) of the Raksura sequence. They’re not in the same setting as the Rising World,⁴ but a rich secondary fantasy world of its own. Our main character Moon is a shapeshifting Raksura, who, at the beginning of The Cloud Roads (first in the series), doesn’t even know who or what he really is, only to hide his nature. The story of The Cloud Roads is for Moon to find his people, to uneasily make a place among them. The rest of the stories are their adventures as the Raksura eventually return to their homeland, and the threats, opportunities, friends, enemies, allies and wonders to be found there.

The Rising World novels and the books of the Raksura (or the Three Worlds, as they are called internally) have a lot in common: rich secondary world fantasy, full of characters and relationships (often thorny); a layered universe with a deep history that can come rising to the surface, for good or for ill; a focused point of view on a character who often is, or feels like, an outsider. What’s more, both Kai and Moon are not human, but often have to live among humans, deal with humans, and come to terms with humanity (or humanoids in the case of the Raksura).

Readers of Queen Demon who love the action and adventure against the Hierarchs and their remnants, both past and present, are going to love the Raksura books and stories, the struggles against the Fell, exploring ancient ruins, dealing with dread magics. Readers of these two novels who love the interdynamics of Kai and Ziede, of the cultures where Kai lives throughout his long demonic life, will love the thorny interpersonal relationships of the clans of Raksura, both within and between clans.

As good as the Three Worlds/Raksura series is, and I love it to pieces,⁵ I think that the Rising World books further exercise and strengthen Wells’s secondary world fantasy skills and are even better written. These books are very different from the Murderbot series: even with a narrow point of view, they feel much more expansive than the tight, snarky in-the-mind of Murderbot that we get in their books.⁶ It will take a gear shift for readers who came to Wells for Murderbot to try the Rising World (or the Raksura series), but I sure think it is worthwhile. Wells has a lot of arrows in her quiver, and with Queen Demon, continues to hone the arrow of secondary world fantasy.

The book is a nice and full pair to the first novel, Witch King, but the ending of this one leaves a big open door for further books set in the Rising World. It’s a big setting, there’s a lot out there, and we’ve not explored every inch of Kai’s history. I would love to continue Kai’s story, especially since this post-Hierarch world and its struggles covers something rarely seen: what happens after you defeat the big bad and seal evil back in the can. Happily Ever After takes work to avoid backsliding. Queen Demon, in its present tense, starts to tackle that problem, but it is far from barely beginning. More, please!

Highlights:

• Continues the story of Kai, Ziede and the Rising World ’verse
• Important themes about how to come to together to defeat evil, as well as what happens afterwards, showing an important part of Kai’s life not seen in the first book
• Shows the range of the writer beyond the popular confines of the Murderbot ’verse.

Reference: Wells, Martha. Queen Demon [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve lamented about this before and I do think that this novel could have used it. It had been a minute since I read Witch King, and while Ziede and Kai and the Hierarchs’ threat were fresh and permanent in my mind, the other characters and other setup of the book were less certain. And yes, this means you cannot really start the series here. You will be lost. There are some references dropped in here and there, but the novel assumes you know what Kai and Ziede are, and the geopolitical setup, as well as some basic facts about Demons and Witches. If you don't know who the Saredi are, or that Witches are descended from Demons and humans, then you are going to be lost and miss some important beats.

² The Hierarchs and their methods and structure remind me of a more magically focused Palliseen (from the Adrian Tchaikovsky books): implacable empire, with an ideology, but in this case backed by a Power.

³ Having a Power backing your magic puts me in mind of the Amber diceless roleplaying game (Pattern, Logrus, etc). If that reference is too obscure, consider 5e warlocks and their pact bonds. Now imagine them pacting to a place of power rather than to a being, and you can see how the Hierarchs work.

⁴ I’ve given this serious thought as a worldbuilder, without actually asking Wells. If the Raksura shared the same setting with the Rising World, it’d have to be on the far side of the planet, on another continent, but the magic systems and lines of power do not correspond. I think the history of the Rising World forestalls it being the same setting.

⁵ I’ve mentioned before that I might not be a fanfic writer, but I borrow ideas and things from books to put into my TTRPGs. The Raksura and Fell wound up in a TTRPG scenario I ran, sticking them in the old Forbidden City Module. The PCs wound up getting caught up in their conflict.

⁶ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy is a new novelette that breaks this, and gives us a point of view entirely divorced from Murderbot’s.

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

Book Review: The Outcast Mage by Annabel Campbell

An interestingly crafted world and characters with resonances to today

It is said (well, I have said and paraphrased others) that science fiction doesn’t predict the future, or even reflect a future so much as it talks about today and what is happening today. Secondary World Fantasy has often been very different, and more conservatively looking backward on a past that never really was, more than anything else. You “can’t get there from here in fantasy;” it’s not showing an aspirational place, or usually even our own world as it exists now. Urban or Contemporary Fantasy is one thing, and that is often very topical and political, but secondary world fantasy, not so much.

I feel like that paradigm is being confronted, lately, when it comes to fantasy. Is this due to the decline of science fiction versus fantasy (at least from an anecdotal observation)?¹The Outcast Mage by Annabel Campbell is stepping up to the plate to challenge that paradigm along the way of telling its absorbing story, with interesting characters and immersive worldbuilding. It’s a secondary world fantasy, not even science fantasy, that boldly leverages real-world and contemporary politics today. Let’s dig in.

We have several main characters that the novel revolves around. Our primary POV character is Naila. Naila is a student at a magical academy in the city of Amoria, a city of glass and magic where magicians are dominant and those without magic are second-class citizens. Naila tested as having magical ability, but frustratingly, she has shown absolutely no ability to control her magic, and she can’t leave the academy until she does. She’s a grain in the sand in the oyster of the academy, irritating the establishment all around her. She is the titular Outcast Mage, a magician who can’t even do a single spell. She’s Rincewind, but played straight and to more serious effect.

Naila’s life changes when she runs into Haelius. Haelius is not only a magician, but a wizard, a powerful, idiosyncratic one, whose raw power is unquestionable and his eccentricity undeniable. On paper, he’s one of the most powerful people in the city, if not the world. But he is interestingly complex and sometimes fragile as well.

Their meeting and their efforts to help each other, Haelius very curious about Naila’s untapped talent, and Naila frustrated at being caught between two worlds, would make a pretty solid if not particularly noteworthy fantasy novel. Haelius is a few years older than Naila, but this is not the kind of book that is a romance, or a romance in the making, although the bond that the two develop is a strong and interesting one. Haelius tries to unravel Naila’s true nature, and finds that it is stranger and odder than even he, a premier wizard in Amoria, can possibly guess.

But that’s not all that is going on here, and this is where we start to get into that paradigm challenge. Another POV character is Larinne. Larinne is Consul of Commerce (Amoria is something of a republic, at least at the start). She does have her hands full helping manage trade, but she soon gets into the attention of Oriven, and here is where the novel starts to look at things from a contemporary angle. Oriven is a nakedly ambitious politician who uses the power of demagoguery to sow fear, dissension, anger and intolerance, particularly toward foreigners, and also the residents of the part of the city called the Southern Quarter, reserved, almost like a ghetto, for those that do not have magic. While a Senator with tyrannical ambitions certainly can invoke, say, Star Wars, the rousing of intolerance in the public, and the reactions to it are very much a lens to the rightward yanking of governments in many countries. Oriven’s rhetoric that Amoria is in decline and that people must act, quite frankly, could be rewritten as “Make Amoria Great Again” without missing a beat.

And as the novel goes on, and Oriven’s power grows, the climate of fear and the power that he gathers and wields does feel unnervingly like it is set in the modern day. Like in Samantha Mills’s The Wings Upon Her Back, a science fantasy novel I reviewed in 2024, Oriven’s authoritarianism and efforts at social control are very pointedly resonant with the current state of affairs in a number of countries around the world.

And the political is personal, as Naila comes from non-magical parentage. So her visits to her family in the Southern Quarter become more and more fraught as Oriven’s campaign continues. Campbell does a great job in showing that these systems of control and manipulation, stoking hatred and fear, ultimately hurt people and put strain on their relationships with those they love and trust the most.

On the theme of foreigners and what is directed toward them, another POV character, Entonin, shows us the hazards of that, and the fruit of Oriven’s campaign as well. He is a priest who has come to the city on ostensibly a diplomatic mission. Oriven and his efforts, though, not only blunt Entonin’s efforts, but manage to poison the well and portray his work as an attempt to undermine the city and set up a war. Again, this feels really relevant and important in a world where countries are being poisonous to longstanding allies and ruining once friendly or neutral relationships, stoking the fires of hatred and violence.

Let it be said that, for all the political relevance that is the heart of this piece, and my perspective on it, the novel does have what you’d expect in a rich and interesting fantasy. There’s interesting theories on how magic works (and what is exactly going on with Naila). The city of Amoria itself, underneath its glass dome, in the desert, in a normally inhospitable place, is a wonder of worldbuilding and rich immersion into a fantasy landscape as one could hope for. It reminds me somewhat of Ninavel, a mage-ruled city in a desert in Courtney Schafer’s Shattered Sigil series. Ninavel was far less organized as a polity than Amoria; Amoria may be a republic falling to a demagogue tyrant, but it is a functional polity in a way that Ninavel, ruled by gangs and mages in cutthroat competition, is not. But the vision of a city using magic in an inhospitable place is a good one, especially when the fragility of longtime systems is shown, as well as how they threaten the city when undermined. That, too, is part of the political water of the book.

So one final note on that worldbuilding. For all that is turning into a totalitarian autocracy under Oriven’s ambition, I do want to give Campbell credit for escaping the too often retrograde feudal or monarchical systems of government that many secondary worlds rely upon. While we don’t get any points of view into that government other than Larinne, as above, there is enough shadowplay to feel how Amoria should work and act when not under stress, and that is NOT with a King/Queen and a court. Republics and systems with representation are worthwhile to explore in fantasy, and once again, the book shows what happens when such systems are turned to evil ends.²

With some stunning revelations at the end, the book doesn’t quite end on anything like an potential offramp. I do look forward to more in the series, and I hope Campbell continues to explore this contemporarily resonant space she is engaging in with her world and characters. Secondary world fantasy CAN talk about the contemporary world in an engaging and relevant way, and I hope the author continues to do so.

Highlights:

• Relevant to contemporary politics in a fresh and interesting way
• Strong set of characters with engaging stories and connections
• Immersive and rich worldbuilding

Reference: Campbell, Annabel. The Outcast Mage [Orbit, 2025].

¹ Outside of the scope of this piece, but just looking at what books publicists try to sell me on, and the books in catalogs and the like I am exposed to, Fantasy is Queen. Not even just Romantasy, the new Hierophant of Fantasy’s Court. I think it’s been like that for a long time, perhaps even during the entirety of my fan writing life, but it feels even more lately that science fiction is increasingly a smaller portion of the SFF landscape. Thus, fantasy has an opportunity to pick up some of that slack. Science fantasy as well; see later on when I mention Samantha Mills.

² So, if fantasy is going to pick up the slack (see note ¹), it’s going to have to give up the monarchy as the paradigm of government. Even autocracies, soft and hard, in the modern day really aren’t monarchies. So am I calling for fantasy writers to expand their horizons? Well, yes.

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

Book Review: Kitemaster by Jim C Hines

An appealing protagonist in an interesting and intriguing fantasy world

Nial has a problem. She has, or thought she had, a very minor talent in controlling the wind, one of three so-called Wisps in the village of Allon-li. But when she sets up a spirit kite for the soul of her deceased husband, one year dead, the unexpected happens, especially given that she is now an adult. She gets exalted as a full Kitemaster. While Wisps and their minor talents are common, Kitemasters are rare, with their ability to control the winds, a gift from the Dragons themselves. And a newly exalted Kitemaster is going to be noticed, quite quickly. Nial’s quiet life is not only gone, but she is propelled into conflict, intrigue and adventure that she cannot imagine. And moral quandaries as well.

This is the story of Jim C Hines’s Kitemaster.

Kitemaster’s strength is in the rich world that Hines presents here. I won’t bury the lede: Kitemasters, in this world, have the capacity and ability to sense storms and manipulate wind. As a result of these magically blessed individuals, the setting features kiteships, which basically are galleon-like ships festooned with kites that the kitemasters on board (typically 2-4, depending on size) keep aloft in the air. Kitemasters have some other abilities as well, including some clever uses in hand-to-hand combat as well.

The state monopoly on kitemasters, and the fact that they derive their abilities from dragons put me in mind of the universe of White Wolf’s Exalted, in particular one of the types of the Dragon Blooded: The Air Exalted. There aren’t kiteships like Hines’s creation in the Exalted setting, not exactly, although there are airships of a somewhat different caliber, run by Air Exalted, working for the Empress. The parallels work rather well, although the nature of the dragons in Hines’s world is very different, but to say more of them would be rather spoilery of the back half of the novel.

And we do get a lot of Nial training to be a kitemaster, especially on a kiteship as well as just the general training of her powers. Hines has put a lot of thought into how his kiteships work, and how to live and work upon them. Even more than being at sea, being on a ship high above the ground, sometimes in rather windy conditions, can be a nerve-wracking and dangerous enterprise. And yes, we do get scenes of what happens when kiteships and their kitemasters come into conflict. Some of these action sequences are among the most pulse-pounding, page-turning parts of the novel.

There are some other unusual bits to the worldbuilding that take a little getting used to and coming to terms with compared to more standard fantasy novels. Even with unusual nonhuman creatures, a monarchy, and other elements you might expect from a secondary world fantasy, Hines has much more than just the kiteships up his sleeve to provide a unique world, such as the very variable nature of the night sky. The fact that the night sky is not at all the fixed bowl of stars in our own world is a real indicator that, for all of its similarities, this is very much not a world next door, but one at least a few blocks away, multiversally speaking. The inciting incident, the setup of a spirit kite for Nial’s dead husband, is an opening not just for her exaltation, but reveals an interesting afterlife for souls in this world.

More than the worldbuilding in the importance of the novel is the character of Nial herself. We start off with her at her lowest point; it’s been a year since her beloved husband has passed away. It’s her connection with that, perhaps (it is deliberately mysterious) that causes her exaltation as a kitemaster. And then her story is off and running. Questions of duty, necessity, privilege, and doing what is right with the gifts that one is given fill her story, and the stories of those who become her companions. For all of the aforementioned world we get, this is a very character-focused novel. Nial is already an adult in her early 20s, but in many ways, this feels like a coming-of-age novel, something more akin to YA than anything else. To be absolutely clear, it would not be YA by any standard definition¹. But given her relative youth, and the feel of her story and position in the village and among her family and friends, this is a book whose protagonist is in the “next cohort” past YA and thus shares at least the afterglow of the tropes from that category. Being from an isolated village, and not greatly aware of the greater portion of the three kingdoms, or the world, her journey from the village, and eventually the capital and quite beyond, takes on the form of a Bildungsroman.

This works both in terms of personality as well as growing into the role. Nial learns what it means to be a kitemaster, but more than just the raw power and the abilities and the coolness of that, she learns some rather painful lessons about how other people can and do act when given power, and learns how to step forward, take risks, and when needed, take a stand.

Thus, beyond the worldbuilding, and tied into the character study, are the ethical and social questions that the novel engages with, all centering around power. I had expected a coming-of-age story around Nial’s unexpected gift, and her coming to terms with it, and her changed life. And I hoped for some additional resolution regarding her deceased husband, since his spirit kite is quite literally the inciting incident for the entire novel. We get all that. But when Nial realizes that her hazy glow of respect for the Queen is terribly misplaced, there are some real ethical and social questions here: What is her duty? What is the right thing to do? Nial doesn’t always gets it right, and in fact often gets it wrong. The novel engages with these questions, and Nial’s decisions and the ultimate arc of the story engages with her moral choices, which in the end boil down to her growth and maturation.

I went into Kitemaster expecting a fun, fresh and fascinating world and main character, as I have come to expect in Hines’s work. I was thinking this would just be a coming-of-age story, and would have been satisfied with just that. What I didn’t expect and also got in the bargain was something more: a meditation on war, conflict, autonomy, and the justice and injustices of a ruler.

Highlights:

• Appealing and engaging protagonist
• Immersive and interesting worldbuilding with a highlight on the titular kitemasters
• Interesting social and moral questions around rulership, right action, and more

Reference: Hines, Jim C. Kitemaster [Caezik, 2025].

¹ I acknowledge the Realpolitik of the publishing industry and the prejudices and perceptions by readers. If Jane C. Hines had written this book, Kitemaster would have, without question, been marketed and described as YA, even if it does not fit those boundaries. But that, as they say, is a story for another time. I will also note that the cover feels more like a YA cover with how Nial is depicted.

With the new Avatar series, one has to ask: What do we really want from an adaptation?

This version isn't perfect. It isn't horrible either. The world is at balance again.

Before anyone watched 2005's Batman Begins, one strong argument for its existence was that audiences' definitive memory of that world couldn't be allowed to be 1997's Batman & Robin. Such a lamentable misfire needed to be overwritten with something more dignified. The same reason explains the quasi-reboot of the X-Men films with First Class after the not-quite-beloved The Last Stand, the casting of Tom Holland to replace Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, and the ongoing quest to one day, finally, make a decent Fantastic Four movie.

An even harsher approach is to not restart the timeline, but resume it from a well-liked beginning that was less well served by its sequels: 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate is intended to ignore everything that happened after 1991's T2, while Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a deliberate erasure of the unfairly hated 2016 remake. Although this method is called "soft reboot," it's actually more aggressive, because at least a "hard reboot" doesn't go out of its way to discourage viewers from enjoying previous works if that's what they prefer (e.g. Godzilla, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan). While a "hard reboot" is content to do its own thing, a "soft reboot" executes a hostile takeover of an ongoing storyline and tells viewers to pretend that some portions of it never existed.

All this is necessary context before jumping into the rather complex relationship that viewers have had with the Aang/Korra franchise. The original cartoon show is now acclaimed as an almost perfect classic, but before the ending aired (and even for some time after), fan ships used to launch cannonballs at each other with the ferocity of Twilight subreddits. This situation didn't improve once the sequel series launched: one segment of fans flatly refuses to acknowledge Korra as part of the canon, another segment accepts only season 1, and yet another segment didn't believe the Korrasami pairing was official until the comic books spelled it out.

There ought to be a way for audiences to love a story without getting so petty about it. But one specific portion of such fierce protectiveness isn't totally unjustified: 2010's film adaptation The Last Airbender was so calamitously plagued with incompetence that any substitute was destined to be an improvement by default. And the 14 years fans had to wait for the palate cleanser couldn't pass fast enough.

The new live action adaptation, which just launched on Netflix, condenses the 20 short episodes of the cartoon's first season into 8 long episodes. Some plotlines have been condensed, others have been merged, and a few have been omitted. Whereas the cartoon took its time to explore at leisure the impressively varied and rich setting of its fictional world, the Netflix version focuses on a handful of key locations. This cutting and stitching of material isn't accomplished successfully. Sometimes an entire animated episode's worth of plot is wedged in as an easy-to-miss line of dialogue, and characters that are indispensable to the story but lived in locations that were removed from the adaptation appear now where it doesn't make full sense to find them.

For example, Teo, an inventor's son, no longer lives on a mountain, but he still has his mechanical flying wheelchair. The owl-shaped spirit of knowledge didn't even appear until the cartoon's second season, but here it makes a gratuitous cameo. Koh the Face-Stealer is moved to a completely separate plot in the Spirit World. And the traveling musicians from The Cave of Two Lovers are shunted to a scene of clumsily shoehorned exposition. The inclusion of characters and plot points that the cartoon didn't introduce this early in the story may be due to the fact that any show produced for Netflix exists under the hanging sword of capricious cancelation. Fire Lord Ozai, Princess Azula, Avatar Kuruk and even Fire Lord Sozin are shown much earlier than in the cartoon, consuming precious runtime in really unnecessary scenes that explain too much.

This is the main sin of this version of the story: it doesn't trust viewers' patience. The cartoon didn't  jump at the first chance to explain the backstories of Zuko, Iroh, Katara, or even protagonist Aang. It knew how to set up its mysteries and pay off its reveals at the right dramatic moment. The Netflix adaptation seems afraid of letting any question linger for more than two seconds. Part of this problem is caused by the quicker pacing, another part by the aforementioned risk of cancelation, and no small part by ongoing changes in viewers' preferences, namely the widespread misconceptions about what constitutes a plot hole. By this point in the story, the cartoon hadn't even revealed why the Air Nomads had been singled out for extermination in the first place.

What redeems the Netflix Avatar is the technical side of the storytelling. The combat choreography is flawless, and it takes care to represent the different styles of each elemental discipline. The degree of detail in set design is to be commended, as is the faithfulness of the casting (let it never be forgotten that the 2010 film is the whole reason why we have the word "racebending"). Even when the script leaves little space for emotional development, often replacing it with overstuffed lines of dialogue, the child actors do a fantastic job of portraying the anxieties of living through a world-changing crisis. Gordon Cormier understood the assignment perfectly: in the role of Avatar Aang, he knows how to channel with the same believability the enthusiasm of youth, the grief of absolute loneliness, and the paralyzing cluelessness of someone forced to grow up too soon. His antagonist Dallas Liu expresses the right mix of bravado barely concealing Prince Zuko's profound insecurity. As Katara, actress Kiawentiio displays both the tenderness of a gentle soul and the determination of someone who knows she can be much more. And Ian Ousley nails Sokka's brand of deadpan sarcasm every time.

In general, the visual effects are very good, except for a few acrobatic moves that look too obviously digital. And the makeup for Iroh and Bumi looks fake to the point of self-parody. As well-executed as this production is otherwise, it doesn't manage to justify its existence as something separate from the original cartoon. Unlike most reboots, this one retells exactly the same story viewers already know, which is always a recipe for unreachable expectations. Avatar: The Last Airbender set an incredibly high bar for fantasy animation aimed at children, and the openly confessed Game of Thrones-inspired grittification of this version doesn't make the story any more meaningful or exciting. It does fulfill more than satisfyingly the mandatory mission of giving fans something to show to newcomers that isn't the horrible 2010 film, but beyond that, it can't hope to match the first telling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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