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.

When Charry Met Soggy

Pixar's latest production boasts the usual artistry you know to expect from the studio, but the story it tells is generic and forgettable

As anthropomorphized allegories go, it's hard to do better than Inside Out or Zootopia. Their capable handling of theme, characterization, tone, pacing, worldbuilding, humor, dramatic stakes and background design set a standard of excellence that Disney/Pixar are now cursed with having to live up to every time. Their newest film, Elemental, is the quadrillionth romantic comedy about star-crossed youths from incompatible families, and feels like an unambitious retread of better movies. Although its message of love and unity is sorely needed in these divisive times, the execution fails to satisfy.

It's not impossible for a story to be about many things, but Elemental struggles to integrate the various points it wants to make. It falls into the all-too common trap of focusing on an individual happy ending that makes no difference in the existing social structure. One woman made of fire and one man made of water manage to unlearn the usual stereotypes about each other's people and form a successful couple. But the rest of their community doesn't benefit from their example. Prejudice against fire people stays unchanged, the fire neighborhood is still neglected by the municipal authorities, and the derelict infrastructure that causes massive damages each time a ship sails by is still not fixed. Even more damningly for a movie that wants to address xenophobic segregation, the details of the allegory fall apart. There are very logical reasons why anyone would be wary of people made of fire; a plea for mutual acceptance rings false when one of the parties is an ongoing menace to everything they touch.

Ember, our protagonistic fire lady, might as well have been a redhead for all the tired stereotypes written into her: she's short-tempered, energetic, volatile, and dangerously unstable. Her character arc reduces to admitting that she's lying to herself about her true aspirations, and until she achieves that goal, she'll continue to be a literal walking timebomb. Not a bad concept in general, but we've watched enough romantic comedies with the trope of the overemotional woman who needs to calm down. Her romantic plot, which is sold to us as the focus of the movie, isn't as touching or believable as her relationship with her parents. She's a doting daughter, mindful of her responsibilities and appreciative of the effort her parents have made to rise above hardship. The inner conflict between her sense of duty and her need for fulfillment mirrors every second-generation immigrant story ever made, but would have made for a more interesting movie than the watered-down romance we got.

The emotional flow of the movie is hindered by the very strange rhythm it follows. The first scenes go by at breakneck speed, as if desperate to get past the infodump. This is not like the opening montage in Up, which does cover decades in minutes, but treats each emotional beat with respect. Here the montage is edited as if it were a "previously on" segment that needs to mercilessly cut inessential seconds to get the story proper going. This tendency to avoid lingering, to not let the audience breathe, reoccurs at key moments of the story, causing a whiplash effect when a thoughtful scene is instantly followed by action. On the other hand, the rhythm of quiet but intense scenes is interrupted by badly misplaced flashbacks that hit like a digital glitch in a song. There's no acceptable excuse for a narration done in fits and starts to extend well into the second act.

Although the city where Elemental is set harbors a fabulous variety of creatures, we don't get to know them outside of short, groanworthy gags. The different buildings, streets, houses, public squares, shops, and vehicles hint at fascinating divergences in usability needs depending on whether the user is made of, say, air or earth, but the richness suggested by the setting is relegated to quick glimpses. The animators created a vast, elaborate space that the story has no time to show us. This kind of oversight is a headscratcher, especially coming from the same artists who lovingly boasted every corner of Zootopia.

And yet, the part of the story where the movie focuses the most attention, the boy-meets-girl drama that upends the whole worldview of its society, is the least interesting thing about it. Bland, predictable and shamelessly derivative, this romance has all the spark of water thrown over fire and all the spice of wet ashes. That this civilization took so many centuries until someone finally figured out that personal contact was possible between fire and water people is an unintentional but clear sign of how little thought went into the writing of this story. A much better movie could have been made in the same setting and with the same characters, but the script of Elemental gives them too little to do that is worth watching.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Review: Underland by Maxime J. Durand

A cosmic horror setting without cosmic horror characters is a brilliant combination

You may remember that in 2007, Brandon Sanderson wrote that magic in fantasy stories should have logical rules that make sense, and later, in 2012, N. K. Jemisin wrote that the whole point of fantasy stories is that magic exists beyond all logic and sense. With all due respect to the inimitable quadruple-Hugo-and-quadruple-Locus winner, on this specific topic of fantasy literature the esteemed Ms. Jemisin is totally wrong and Mr. Sanderson is totally right. Magic is more interesting (rather, it's only interesting) when it has rules. And one demonstration of the wonders that can result from a strictly systematic magic system is Maxime J. Durand's dark fantasy novel Underland.

Originally posted as a web serial, Underland follows the quest of multiclass summoner/necromancer Valdemar to find a new world for humankind. Centuries ago, an evil moon blocked out the sun, dooming the world to the terrors of the night. Suddenly overwhelmed by unimaginable monstrosities, civilization quickly collapsed, and humans migrated to underground caverns where they'd be safe from the cold and the ghosts that roam the dead surface. Once resettled, humans discovered the magical potential in their own blood, and used it to rebuild a semblance of the stability they had before. Today the human territories are under the absolute rule of Dark Lords, immensely powerful mages with debatably compatible agendas. But other creatures already lived in the Underland before humans arrived, and some aren't willing to be nice neighbors. To be fair, too often humans haven't shown the noblest behavior toward other sentient creatures. What looks like peace conceals numerous tensions that may snap at any time.

But the worries don't stop at the mundane. In their study of magic, some have unwisely contacted extraplanar powers that can't be trusted, much less controlled. Such spells have been declared illegal, but that hasn't stopped the proliferation of clandestine cults that seek an escape from life underground. One cult in particular involved an entire family, the Verneys, who were exterminated by an order of knights dedicated to keeping those mysterious entities from invading the living world. The only survivor from the Verney family was Valdemar, back then a child, who now secretly experiments with planar travel to find a more inhabitable place for humankind to move to. Suspected of trying to continue his criminal family's loathsome rituals, he's been put under arrest, but one of the Dark Lords has taken an interest in his abnormally strong magical skills and has offered him the tools to finish his research... at an unspecified price.

Web serials are usually friendly bedfellows with fanfiction, and Underland unapologetically bears the marks of its self-published origins. The novel is evidently shaped by Dungeons and Dragons: its setting brings to mind the classic Underdark expansions; it is populated by the usual suspects—dark elves, dark dwarves, troglodytes, golems, and liches; some of the extraplanar locations namedropped in the text resemble those used in the game; and the plot is punctuated by quests, side quests, and downtime training. The rest of the worldbuilding samples liberally from Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the Lovecraftian corpus to depict a setting precariously enveloped by unsuspected powers that are just one wrong incantation away from crossing into material reality.

The prose in Underland is effective at setting a macabre tone. Consider this chapter opening:

He dreamed of rats that night. They crawled in a grotesque pit dug in black oily stone, squeaking and gnawing on the flesh of the innocent.

The author knew to keep the alluring aesthetic of cosmic horror without the worst ingredient of cosmic horror, which is its attitude. This is a world of gory witchcraft, unnatural transformations, painful rituals, obscene ruins, threatening dreams, widespread pestilence, boiling blood, imprisoned demons, moldy tunnels, abhorrent experiments, and costly secrets. And yet, the author is deliberate in his selection of focus characters. Even though the book's setting has all the recognizable signs of cosmic horror, its characters are very emphatically not cosmic horror characters. Even though nothing more than a thin veil separates visible reality from tenebrous chaos, the mages we meet in this novel don't adopt the attitude of helpless desperation that is so annoying in traditional cosmic horror. They don't believe that the hidden forces that control the universe are beyond human comprehension; they don't accept the eternal superiority of the ancient gods; they don't fear the mysterious; they don't tremble in awe at the unearthly. It's like walking through the tired grimness of Black Mirror and finding Ted Lasso living there. With a beautiful, admirable ethos of humanism, these characters approach the unknown and make it known. Instead of submitting to the supernatural, they study it, find its practical applications, deduce its laws. These mages may be gifted with fantastical powers, but their sharpest tool is human reason.

And here we arrive at the greatest pleasure of reading Underland: watching our protagonist use creatively the rules of magic to make up combinations of spells that are wholly surprising yet follow logically from the established facts. It's an irresistible type of nerdy catnip to inhabit the inner thoughts of a smart hero as he reasons his way out of impossible plights. Either with inventive solutions born from a desperate moment of improvisation, or with procedures coldly planned with meticulous care, Valdemar is an inspiring hero who understands the unlimited power of lifelong learning.

His impressive talents notwithstanding, Valdemar is far from a perfect person. The execution of his entire family has stunted his ability to form connections to other people, and in some scenes his unconventional moral intuitions come off as appallingly heartless. At the same time that he makes progress in the challenging techniques of advanced sorcery, he undergoes an equally strenous education in interpersonal contact. It has a moving effect to watch this formidable spellcaster, who is no stranger to commanding demons and transmuting his blood into an interdimensional portal, discover for the first time the simple joy of making true friends who support his dreams without judgment.

Although the text always highlights the moral questions where Valdemar's position has defects, it's worth noting that, as a whole, the society of Underland rests on some surprising assumptions that go against the grain of what fantasy literature has usually considered acceptable. In Underland, to seek immortality is not viewed as inherently evil. Multiple methods exist to cheat death, including soul receptacles, mechanical bodies, youth potions, and even undeath, which causes no scandal. It's actually taken for granted that everyone who can afford it will resort to one of these methods, and that it would be inexcusably foolish not to. This is another manifestation of the novel's underlying humanism: just as mystery is the enemy, and thus shall be overcome, death is the enemy, and shall likewise be overcome.

Underland is the first part of a duology that continues in Underland 2. The reader must be warned that this novel ends in a cliffhanger, but what a howling hell of a cliffhanger it is. Now, it may be argued against this choice of ending, and against the novel in its entirety, that the author relies too much on the fact that Lovecraft's œuvre has become public domain, and such an accusation wouldn't be without merit. The reader may also feel distracted by the repeated appearance of narrative conventions inherited from Dungeons and Dragons, which carry unwelcome baggage in the form of bioessentialism, territorial expansionism, and unquestioned monarchism.

Once these missteps are admitted, there remains plenty to enjoy in Underland. Its unusual treatment of the aesthetic of cosmic horror is a refreshing change of direction from the undue reverence that puny mortals are typically expected to profess for the darkness. Even in the deepest bowels of the earth, the undying flame of human reason lights the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Durand, Maxime J. Underland [Podium Publishing, 2022].

Review: Witch King by Martha Wells

The Murderbot author returns to fantasy with a double-headed story of a freed prisoner’s story forward and backward...who happens to be a powerful demon.

In Witch King, Martha Wells returns to secondary world fantasy. Our main character is Kai. And yes, he is a demon, the Fourth Prince in matter of fact, and is rather powerful and feared. Thus, waking up from an imprisonment he doesn’t remember all that well, Kai is immediately backfooted as it turns out he is not being woken up by the kindness of rescuers.

Once Kai is awake and gets himself back on his feet, the narrative splits into two parts. We follow Kai (and his friend Ziede) as they make their way through a world that has changed for some years since he and Ziede were captured and imprisoned in a tomb they were not meant to ever escape from. Given Kai and Ziede’s powers and natures, killing them would have in fact not worked, and so perpetual entombment was clearly the option of choice by their assailant. But who did this and to what greater purpose? That question is also explored in the other half of the narrative, which gives us not only a backstory for Kai, but soon makes it clear that Kai and Ziede’s journey in the present is similar to one they made years before.

It’s a rather clever and well bit done of writing on Wells' part, to have Kai and Ziede traverse landscapes and sometimes meet characters they met as their earlier selves, carefully and skillfully weaving both narratives, their revelations, and Kai’s observations, into a single story. Questions asked in the past get revealed in the present narrative, the aftereffects of actions taken in the past have to be dealt with in the present. History does not repeat, but it sure does rhyme in Wells’ novel.

Readers who first got on the Martha Wells bandwagon with Murderbot may not be very familiar with her fantasy writing. You might not even be quite aware that Martha Wells, until Murderbot gave her success and attention she’s deserved for a long time, is by output very much more a fantasy writer than a science fiction one¹. Her most recent fantasy, which, again, is years old at this point, is her Books of the Raksura, and my mind went to those time and again as I was reading this novel.

There are similarities in the worldbuilding (it's not the same world though) and the same sort of sense of scale and the feel of the world, as opposed to her Ile-Rien novels or her other fantasy books. Wells’ world in Witch King, like the Raksura books, is a diverse world along several axes. It’s a queer-friendly (maybe even queernorm) universe full of humans of various kinds, the aforementioned demons like Kai, witches, and other beings, some of which have supernatural or quasi-supernatural connections. There is a great sense of lived and past history in the novel, this is a world, like the Raksura-verse, that has a long past to it, and secrets and lies and revelations of that past can come to bite you. Unlike the Raksura novels, though, where we have Moon and his friends and companions exploring a deep past they don’t know much about and only slowly come to understand more of, in Witch King, its a much more personal journey for Kai. Given Kai’s longevity as a demon, he’s been around to see polities and cultures rise and fall. For him, the history is also memory, and is a new and marked difference between Wells’ earlier work and this one. Kai appears to my memory to be the major character with the longest lifespan in any of her works. Kai has seen things, done things, lived experiences and lived and seen the world, and all of it informs him as a character, informs his relationships with his friends and allies, and ultimately informs the narrative.

Kai as a character as a demon resonated especially with me because of recently reading Melissa Caruso’s Obsidian Tower series, where it emerges that the main character is, in fact, a long lived demon (although she doesn’t know this for one and a half books) and has a deep history and past which ultimately filters and informs the narrative, both in the character herself, and her relationships with the characters around her, now. Wells shows the power of that approach with Kai, as we learn Kai’s backstory and history and connections, to his family, to his friends, and yes, to his enemies as well. While we never break Kai’s point of view, we get a good view of the other characters in his orbit and get a rich tapestry of people whose interactions with each other are by turns tender, fierce, and sometimes very funny. Kai in the earlier narrative has a world-wonder about him, being new to so many things, including his own potential and power. Kai in the present day narrative is “too old for this shirt” and not afraid to say so. And this all informs the narrative.

And ultimately, narrative and theme is something for the novel to land on. Yes, there is very interesting worldbuilding, diverse, and with a deep sense of history. There are really good world building beats and interesting characters. But it is in narrative and theme that the novel really shows how excellent Wells is as a writer. The novel’s themes of cooperation, of tolerance, of opposing authoritarianism are all strong and well defined by Kai’s story, past and present. There is also a real evoked theme of “building is harder than destroying, but building and rebuilding what has been destroyed is the better, longer path”. And the novel also explores the dangers of the use of unfettered power and having access to that power and what it does to people, to societies.

In a day and age today, the story of Kai’s world and these themes resonate very strongly with our own, and the worldbuilding and character illuminate those themes and makes them sing. As strong as Wells’ earlier fantasy novels are, I think the Witch King really shows her evolution and development as a writer. The Witch King is a rich Martha Wells novel and a very good example of what she can do in a fantasy setting, so if you are a fantasy reader who has only read Murderbot, here is a perfect chance to get to know the fantasy side of her work.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Interesting Worldbuilding
• Strong Use of Theme
• Engaging "Too old for this..." character   

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Wells, Martha, Witch King [Orbit, 2023]

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

'Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' is just as cheerfully chaotic as your most memorable game sessions

This movie is what you get when your only writing guideline is Rule of Cool

Your average gamer isn't necessarily a professional writer, so an RPG campaign full of clichés is an expected part of the deal. How many times have you created a character whose backstory can be summarized as "marauders burned my village and I had to learn to survive alone"? In keeping with that not so venerable tradition, the D&D movie adaptation Honor Among Thieves draws from la crème de la crème of tired story beats: it starts with a threat of prison rape and soon after reveals that the entire plot rests on a fridged woman (complete with the most generic domestic look and bland under-the-blankets flashback). Not very promising for a fantasy movie produced in this century, but as an adaptation of the game, it's depressingly accurate. Backward storytelling choices aside, Honor Among Thieves is undeniably fun. The action is riveting, the humor is sincere, and the attention to detail is commendable. It will certainly recoup some of the goodwill Hasbro clumsily squandered earlier this year when it tried to squeeze more money out of players and independent game designers.

If each viewer brings their own interpretation to a movie, this death-of-the-author approach applies even moreso to the freeform experience of RPGs. There's a unique appeal to this curious form of interactive improvisational theater with occasional murder and pillaging. Now, the curious thing about adapting D&D to the screen in the era of 5e rules is that the game designers have grown averse to settling on any specific lore. The (very ill-advised) goal of D&D 5e is to be as nondescript as possible, to lend itself to any kind of story, to be all things to all people. In a truly generic system, that design choice can work wonders. In D&D, it detracts from the flavor of the story and punishes the players. Rules alone won't sustain a game that declines to adopt a distinctive identity because, to be brutally honest, 5e is not a terribly well designed system. To be successful, Honor Among Thieves couldn't just be a generic fantasy movie, and definitely couldn't rely too much on game stats.

This need to balance the faithful with the interesting adds difficulties to the adaptation process. As happens with videogame movies, the rules of the fictional world are constrained by very specific expectations that players bring to the viewing experience. The casual viewer of action cinema may not care for the Dificulty Class of item attunement or what it means to give birth to a tiefling, but those are the small details that D&D enthusiasts will be looking for. Can we nitpick this movie with the rules of D&D? Sure we can: the sorcerer's personality has too little Charisma for him to cast any spells; the druid isn't supposed to put on metallic armor; the paladin's ability to detect evil shouldn't be constantly active; the evil wizard casts too many spells per turn of combat; a fiery explosion can't harm a red dragon... but does any of that really matter for your enjoyment of the movie? Absolutely not. (Maybe D&D designers will watch this and finally learn that infinite spell slots don't break the game.) While Honor Among Thieves draws heavily from the geography and fauna of the official Faerûn setting, it isn't written to follow Monster Manual stats. It's written by Rule of Cool. That's what makes it excel above previous, and best forgotten, D&D movies.

One more factor in its favor is the media landscape it's made in. Although the superhero story structure has become exhaustingly ubiquitous these days, it still sells tickets. What this means for a D&D production is that it arrives into a moment in which once obscure geeky obsessions are finally perceived as cool, in which a basic, lazy, predictable Hero's Journey can still sustain an enjoyable blockbuster. Furthermore, where the movie fails to follow the narrative conventions of adventure cinema, RPG fans will know to read those deviations as normal. Plans and backup plans that fail one after another, endless interruptions for backstory infodumps, minor side quests, an ensemble of heroes who just so happen to share compatible motivations, a totally improvised winning strategy... that's just how the game goes. In any other fantasy adventure, those quirks would be marked down as amateur screenwriting mistakes. But they're precisely the quirks that give an RPG campaign that special flavor of constant uncertainty. Where a traditional narrative relies on causal logic and character consistency, RPGs are at the mercy of the dice. Just like when your Dungeon Master allows an action not specified in the manual because your idea is too awesome to care for game balance, Honor Among Thieves gives itself permission to ignore good screenwriting advice and go for what feels cool to do.

The unfortunate result is that you need previous immersion in the specific RPG flavor of collaborative storytelling to fully enjoy the experience. Many viewers will get a sense that the pieces don't quite fit, some cuts are too abrupt, some sequences go by too fast, characterization is implausibly flat, backstory is excessive, choices are too convenient. The thing is, that's exactly how a gaming session is structured: bite-sized chunks of unrelated plot stitched together by authorial fiat. If you're in the niche audience that has been waiting for a decent D&D adaptation for decades, this is finally the movie you were asking for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector

A frank portrayal of the cruelty of class inequality and the poisonous allure of belief in destiny

The world of Elijah Kinch Spector's debut novel Kalyna the Soothsayer isn't a nice one. The royals are more concerned with their banquets and opera galas than in protecting the commonfolk. What nominal justice there is cannot thwart the rule of whoever can hire the most mercenaries. The unstable regime of the Tetrarchia, a federation of four perpetually quarreling kingdoms not quite held together with spit and prayers, hasn't managed to overcome xenophobic prejudice. For Kalyna, the daughter of a penniless family of nomadic fortune-tellers, life is an unceasing barrage of persecution, neglect, abuse, and hunger. Generations of her ancestors have subsisted by using their divinatory powers to help ordinary people improve their sad fortunes a little, and that's the only trade Kalyna knows how to do.

Except Kalyna was born without magic. Unable to see the future, she gets her job done by gossip, hearsay, acute observation, and plain guile. She's a fraud, and her family's precarious livelihood depends on her keeping the pretense that she's an accurate clairvoyant. By paying close attention to the important details, connecting the dots, and making likely guesses, she awes her clientele with her ability to predict what is totally predictable, just unnoticed. So far, these sketchy methods have sufficed to put just enough food on the table for herself, her disabled father, and her violently hostile grandmother. But when a prince from the kingdom of Rotfelsen snatches her from her family and demands predictions of the nation's future, she has to quickly become even more resourceful and conniving to stay in business—and stay alive.

Despite her finely honed talent for careful observation and deduction, Kalyna can't imagine the voracious whirlwind of intrigue, betrayal, hipocrisy, fanaticism, divided loyalties, and decadence she's been thrown into. She's barely prepared for the immensely rich and crafty schemers she's going to have to outwit, but they're no more prepared for the fierceness with which she's willing to oppose rabid nationalism and stand for the masses of low-born. The safety of the four kingdoms is now in the hands of a professional liar set against an entire aristocracy made of liars.

Kalyna the Soothsayer is clear-eyed about the effect that relentless oppression can have on otherwise decent people. This protagonist is still fundamentally well-intentioned, but the brutal harshness of life in the Tetrarchia has forced her to learn to play dirty. Although her conscience is torn by all the tactics of manipulation she's had to rely on to make a living, she can still effortlessly weave more and more lies each time. She doesn't hesitate to use her allies as tools, withhold crucial facts, ruin reputations, threaten, blackmail, and burn bridges to sustain the farce that she has prophetic visions. While she loves her father tenderly and feels sympathy for the plight of the poorest, she's had to navigate the world with a self-imposed indifference to the consequences of her deception.

What these intersecting conditions produce is a brilliantly constructed character, endlessly multilayered and relatably conflicted, with a scarred interior that nonetheless perseveres by sheer survival instinct. Kalyna's inner monologue is a delicious parade of sharp political commentary, pragmatic callousness, reluctant hope, internalized self-loathing, wounded desire, the driest sense of gallows humor, and a drive to independence made of the hardest bedrock. It's an engrossing experience to feel the author lure the reader into rooting for a shameless charlatan, and the key to this trick is in the push and pull of battling impulses in Kalyna's mind. In her impossible situation, she doesn't cease to wish there were a right thing to do, and much of the enjoyment of this novel comes from watching her rationalize which of all the wrong choices is the least catastrophic.

By placing a powerless person at a position of influence among ruthless masterminds, the author also offers a harsh critique of the inner workings of centralized power. The plot threads related to resurgent hyperpatriotism, national mythbuilding, and raw ambition couldn't be more resonant to today's readers. Despite its everyday complications, diverse government comes out victorious, but the story makes a forceful point about the delicate work needed to preserve a civic community built from the strength of the many.

In a setting shaped by magical lineages, ancient mysteries, forgotten world-shaking beasts, and secrets that sleep under the earth, the use of a completely ordinary human as the central focus of the narrative serves to highlight the value of mundane life. Pomp and glory and patriotic pride are mercilessly denounced as the ridiculous folly they are, a fraud more outrageous than Kalyna's daily machinations. Even more than the gift of seeing the coming events, it's fatally dangerous to trust those with absolute power with the gift of believing that fortune smiles upon them.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Reference: Kinch Spector, Elijah. Kalyna the Soothsayer [Erewhon, 2022].

'Dragon Age: Absolution' packs dragon-sized themes in an elf-sized package

Against the common cliché that expects very little quality from videogame adaptations, this miniseries explores the danger of hunger for power with the depth of prestige TV

Across the iterations of the Dragon Age line of videogames, the common message has been about the tragedy of too much ambition. Time after time, someone seeks a quick path to greater power, and soon the repercussions become everyone's problem. Variations on this theme of human hubris range from the cosmic to the quotidian, turning the history of Thedas into a long series of misguided attempts to correct the excesses of the previous misguided attempt.

Any resemblance to actual events, etc.

The new Netflix miniseries Dragon Age: Absolution offers a chilling portrait of the insidious way ambition can seduce and eventually destroy. In a fantasy empire where humans reign and elves are a subjugated underclass, those in positions of power have seemingly never needed to learn that using others is wrong. The practice has taken root so strongly that it's reflected even in the smallest misdeeds: every time a character in the series is revealed to have done something bad, the badness is defined by a choice to use people—sometimes literally. This is consistent with the way the Dragon Age franchise has usually represented evil: humans using demons, demons using humans, humans using elves, Qunari using mages, mages using blood, mage hunters using lobotomized mages, armies using children, the noble families using each other as pawns... it's a very Kantian stance where the hallmark of evil is failing to see other people's autonomy and instead seeing only their usefulness. The main religion of the continent even has as its main precept that magic (i.e. power) should serve us, not be served by us. The fatal mistake of every overconfident mage in this setting is to lose their sense of purpose and become a plaything in the service of power.

What this worldview does for the Absolution miniseries is provide a moral anchoring point for characters' actions. One villain is so controlled by resentment that they plan to make a whole civilization pay for the atrocities committed by their rulers. Another is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary people that they plan to break the laws of nature to keep their former playmates. Even our heroic protagonist is at one point guilty of sacrificing the safety of a child to fulfill a job. And in each case, a plausible-sounding argument might be made for those terrible choices. This is a world that puts people in impossible situations and continues to punish them for desperately trying to break the cycle of mistakes. However, this is not a bleak world. The reason this particular type of moral failing has been represented so many times across Dragon Age continuity is not because the writers want to impart a nihilistic view; it's because multiple examples of the same mistake serve to illustrate how many opportunities people get (and miss) to make the world better. Nothing forces the factions in the setting to mistrust and scheme against each other; it's the unnecessary pattern of paying back revenge with more revenge that keeps the world burning. Underneath every well-written tragedy is this humanistic hope: it's not that the universe is fundamentally tainted; it's that people could choose better but don't.

The starkest metaphor for the way evils works in Dragon Age is blood magic, a route to power literally fueled by the suffering of others. In a neat practical symbolic package, blood magic can stand in for numerous forms of sociopathy, indifference, or exploitation. Quite intentionally, Dragon Age lore is vague enough about the earliest era of its universe that it's debatable whether it was the first demons who used the first humans or vice versa, but what is certain is that the theme of weaponizing others for one's ends is firmly established in the very foundation of the setting.

This is what makes the character of Rezaren, the main antagonist in the Absolution miniseries, so instantly compelling to watch. He is so deeply convinced of his own good intentions that he doesn't notice the incongruity of resorting to blackmail, backstabbing, torture and enslavement in order to regain a distorted idea of childhood harmony. In our times, we're sick of hearing of the ties between totalitarianism and toxic nostalgia, but the boring trope exists for good reasons. Rezaren exemplifies the villain with a motivation disproportionately smaller than his methods. A lifetime of infinite privilege has rendered him incapable of empathy, because, for the pampered nobility he comes from, the pain of growth is not a normal part of life but an embarrassment that must be punished.

Dragon Age: Absolution relies on too many flashbacks, which do the pacing no favors, but one key event in the past of both the heroine Miriam and the villain Rezaren is revisited from their opposite perspectives in a narratively fascinating manner. It's unfortunate that the plot takes so long to get to its actual theme (there's an air of the perfunctory in the boilerplate D&D party adventure of the first two episodes), but once the viewer learns what this series is actually about, once the extent of Rezaren's evil is exposed, the rest of the story goes by in a thrilling breeze. The mage Rezaren is a fantastic achievement of characterization precisely because of how casually appalling he can be. And again, we see an effective use of ambiguity in the portrayal of his backstory: is he a bad person because of the elitism of his upbringing, or was he honestly a good child who only turned bad because he was briefly in contact with a demon?

Be that as it may, Rezaren outshines our heroes in terms of viewer's interest. We've seen D&D campaigns so many times it's difficult to present an interesting group dynamic that doesn't resemble every game we've played. Rezaren is something else. He's so deluded by his privilege, so oblivious to the inherent dignity of others, that he considers the death of a slave as an affront to his property rights. He has lived such a suffocatingly sheltered life that he cannot comprehend why his former enslaved playmate would want nothing to do with him, and he even offers to enslave her again as if he were doing her the greatest favor.

The tragedy of Rezaren is that he knows no way of interacting with people apart from using them. This is nominally supposed to be Miriam's story, the epic journey that reconciles her with herself and heals her inner wounds, but as usually happens in epic stories, the heroine's victory is only as interesting as the villain's villainy.

If the viewer only gets to the first episode, it would be easy to be fooled by the appearance that Dragon Age: Absolution is like every other D&D-adjacent show. Miriam's companions are assorted flavors of generic archetypes and comic relief. But finishing the series (which should have been a single feature-length movie, honestly) is very much worth the less than stellar beginning. The combat scenes are decently animated, and the visual style fulfills its function of catching the eye, but where the show excels is in the moral drama. To be clear, there's never a doubt that Rezaren is in the wrong; there's no possible "other side" to the argument. What nonetheless makes him such an interesting character is how easily self-deceived someone can become when no one dares challenge the proclaimed goodness of their intentions.

Rezaren is a complex, fleshed-out villain on a par with the most wicked that Game of Thrones or its imitators can offer. There's no mystery to his motivation; there's just an incorrigibly warped perspective that no amount of emotional contact can fix. That such a feat of writing was possible in just six half-hour episodes is reason enough to recommend Dragon Age: Absolution. But for fans of fantasy warfare, heist missions gone catastrophically wrong, or gruesome forbidden magic, there's abundant material to sate that hunger. There's also a dragon, if you're into that. But the seriousness with which this story addresses horrifying extremes of pride, ambition and callousness is the true jewel hidden inside the sparkling, colorful exterior.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the touch of genius that was using an imprisoned dragon to symbolize the lingering tensions of a highly unequal society, +1 for creating a villain that is at the same time fully reprehensible and fully understandable.

Penalties: −1 for excessive exposition of world history facts that are foreign to this specific plot.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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