Book Review: Children of Doro by M. L. Clark

Me and the AIs thinking about thinking

On\e of the really nice things about BlueSky is that I got to find so many new writers, especially bloggers. The thing that I find that really attracts me to different writers is humaneness, a sense of ethics that highlights the importance of every single human being on the planet, a sense that does not make exceptions based on political convenience (they are rarer than you think!). One such writer that has brought me no end of intellectual stimulation is M. L. Clark, whose blog Better Worlds Theory I subscribe to. Clark has written a science fiction novel that will be the subject of our review today: Children of Doro, published in May 2023.

The planet Doro is unique by virtue of its governing structure: it is run by an artificial intelligence that is a gestalt of copies of the personalities of its residents, of various species. This is not an attempt to lecture on ideal systems of government, such as Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, for Clark is not so naive to think that simply outsourcing our problems to a machine would solve the human condition. No, this book is a lot of things (clocking in at 475 pages, it would have to be), among them an investigation into what sentience even is, what life even is, what intelligence even is. This is a book that is not afraid to get abstract, in a way that is traditional in the genre.

This is most obvious in Clark’s choice of narrator: an artificial intelligence (no, not the one that governs the planet, but that one is important too), which ends up being both a blessing and a curse for the reader, but maybe a curse that works. The narrator on several occasions talks about how fundamentally different its thought process is from organic life, and how incomprehensible it finds us. The end result was something that I, as an autistic person, found at parts to be very relatable as I feel that I often do not understand the neurotypicals around me particularly well. At its best, it is a form of Brecht’s distancing effect, thrusting you out of the story to consider why things are the way they are. Clark goes even farther than Brecht did with it, as Brecht was concerned with society (being a committed socialist), while Clark is concerned with the basics of thought and of consciousness.

Unfortunately, this does not always work. There are times when the AI can be so detailed in its observations you can lose track of what is being observed. The AI narrator is not the only problem; many of Clark’s characters are incredibly verbose, and very few of them speak in a way that real human beings do. The effect, at its densest, is like the more impenetrably written Victorian or Edwardian novels that induce the 21st-century reader to glaze over, as it can be so hard to figure out what the actual point being made is. There are parts of the plot, more towards the beginning than the end, where there are so many tangents that you can’t tell what characters are actually discussing, and that can pull you out of the story. Clark cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a major influence on this book; maybe this is a borrowing from Dostoyevsky, but not having read that book of his, I found it a bit of a thicket. Fortunately, the plot starts moving faster at about the 2/3 mark, and by that point the paragraphs have a more readable length, and the story is overall more engaging. As such, that last third was my favorite part of the book, where the characters get to be themselves more and avatars of raw ideas less, or perhaps are given a chance to turn their ideas into reality as shocking events upend life on Doro.

I really like what Clark did with the worldbuilding. Every major character is shown to be simultaneously, and contradictorily, both fully formed individuals and deeply products of their environments. This is most interestingly done for an alien whose species is hatched from eggs, and in litters of eggs at that; this character’s first real shock is the fact that one of the eggs is diseased and ultimately does not hatch a sibling. The AI narrator is sufficiently detached to reveal things, but sufficiently close to make them feel like characters.

There are also quite long passages that explain the worldbuilding in a more history-book-like way (although still narrated in-universe by the AI). I for one thought that they were very interesting and made Doro feel more like a real society, one with its contradictions and inefficiencies and a history to showcase that. The narrator talks about a previous AI that had governed Doro, but was ultimately removed from its position over its choice to effectively advise the residents of the planet in the way that King Solomon dealt with the two mothers in the Book of Kings. It’s an elegant solution, one with mechanistic efficiency—and it is something actual living beings could not bring themselves to accept. It was something that felt very real to me, to Clark’s credit.

Children of Doro is not a perfect book. Frankly, had it been pared down to somewhere between 300 and 350 pages, it would have been a far more readable book. But in a more positive sense, this book feels like the best of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction, which for all its paleness and maleness was certainly capable of delivering satisfyingly high-concept romps through assemblages of interesting ideas. Clark succeeds in doing that fantastically (and being ideas-focused is no bad thing—Cixin Liu is another contemporary writer that does it well). I can see what I liked in the blog in this novel.  It is, for all its verbosity, a book that is philosophically curious and deeply moral, both things I deeply admire. I shall conclude this review with the words that Clark uses to conclude every blog post; they are wise words, moral words, for our troubled and miserable times:

Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.

Reference: Clark, M. L. Children of Doro (Self-published, 2023).

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

A secondary science fictional world whose protagonist, and her world, turns on matters of justice and law

Nila is an ambitious student of law in the city of Peruma. And it is an exciting time to be a student on a track to be a full-fledged Guardian, which you might usefully think of as a neutral lawyer and advocate. Nila’s hope, given her high standing in the community of students, is to be selected for the case of the century, to be one of the twelve students chosen to argue one of the two sides of a question that could decide the future of the city. Nila is not selected for that case, but is instead asked to argue to overturn the sentence of a murder... a murder which changed the course of history a century ago.

This is the story of Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence.

The novel takes place in a rather unique setting. It is a completely mundane alternate world that nonetheless appears to be the only world. It’s not a colonized planet. It’s not the far past or far future of Earth. And yet it is a world that has no magic or even the hint or trappings of a fantasy setting, either. It’s just an alternate cradle of humanity, from all the textual evidence.

That said, the history of this world reflects, refracts and rhymes with our own. It takes place on a subcontinent with a number of city states besides Peruma, where all the action takes place. Peruma, once upon a time, was an imperial power and dominated the entire subcontinent before a world with technology slightly ahead of ours. A revolution in the imperial capital, freedom for the other cities, and war left them with a subcontinent of competing and jockeying city states, high in technology. Given the names of the other cities (Chemur, Monara, Lubini, Jharna and Sampi), and other worldbuilding we get, this all gives the subcontinent that Peruma sits on a very Indian flavor. However, this appears to have been a homegrown empire rather than one imposed from without—much more like the Chola empire, rather than the Mughals or the British.

The empire, however, is four centuries in the past (this is the kind of novel that has a timeline up front). After the fall of the empire, the city of Peruma turned into a mercantile republic (republic in theory, anyway) wracked by revolts from the lower classes. Finally, a hundred years ago, Purul, the head of the republic, the Director, had a lethal confrontation with a worker, Jagat R., leading to a revolution within the city and its division into two halves. Jagat R. was found guilty, but in a world where the death penalty had been abandoned, he was instead put into cryosleep.

A hundred years later, it is Jagat R.’s sentence of murder that our protagonist, Nila, is asked to reopen and overturn, rather than what she really wanted: joining the “case of the century”, which is an examination of the treaty signed at the end of that same revolution.

And thus our plot is up and running.

So, while the ostensible plot is Nila trying to work on what is seemingly an open and shut murder case from a century ago, and one that literally is seen to have changed history, the novel is really about the sociological and legal questions that the author poses in the narrative. The Sentence itself, the cryosleep that in a real sense is almost always just a slow-motion death penalty (after about 100 years, someone put into cryosleep cannot be revived) is just one of the base questions. Questions of justice, due process, and equity in sentencing and representation (the Guardians are a fascinating legal idea) are part of the pie.

Even bigger are the sociological and political questions that the novel raises. I didn’t mention that when half of the city broke away from the other after the assassination, that lower city’s revolution took its form of government in a radical direction that went all the way to an anarchic commune. A century later, it is mostly following the precepts of its own revolution, but the upper city still holds a strong hand, and would definitely want to reintegrate it back into its political control. What is more, the commune’s future is already at stake. Someone upsetting the applecart of the fact of a lower city martyr, Jagat R., assassinating the Director could be at best a destabilizing force on its very existence.

And did I mention that Nila’s mother is an important member of the commune?

So The Sentence is The Paper Chase by way of the Paris Commune, set in a secondary science fiction world loosely based on the Indian subcontinent, with aircars, cryosleep, and a few other twenty-minutes-into-the-future-level technologies. It’s a legal thriller, certainly, but even more it is a sociological and societal thriller that poses some not-easily-answered questions about justice, society, government, and the role of personal responsibility to all three.

It makes the book hard to judge with its peers in the SFF community because it takes several uncommon subgenres (a legal thriller, a sociological piece, and a de novo secondary world unconnected even by hint to our own) and alloys them all together. There is definitely DNA of LeGuin here, but the deep study and appreciation and concern over the ideas and use of anarchism are far rarer in science fiction outside of LeGuin, and perhaps Doctorow and to an extent MacLeod, and given the author’s setup here, The Sentence is much more in dialogue with things like The Dispossessed than anything else in terms of the anarchism (which does really feel like the beating heart of the book) but combined with the legal aspects and the sociology of the entire world), and it really is boldly striding into uncharted territory.

How it gets into that territory is, of course, the proof in the pudding. The book is written cleanly, strongly and crisply, but with a lot of overt worldbuilding, necessary because of the nature of the setting (I mentioned the timeline before as just one example). The writing is thus rich with details of all kinds. One particular highlight is Unclean Hands, which is a fictional play that turns into a touchstone for Nila and other characters. It might be inspired by the real Dirty Hands by Sartre, but the two are clearly different.

Another interesting highlight is the historical attitude and viewpoint of this society and it frames itself within it. The society has a theory of history that works on points of potential divergence, where the course of history was shaped, called Inflection Points. The entire society agrees that this is the standard model of how history is currently interpreted, looked at, discussed and debated. The assassination of the Director a century ago is seen as the Fourth Inflection Point in the post-imperial era, and everyone seems convinced that the 100th anniversary of that assassination and the debate between the halves of the city is destined to naturally be the Fifth Inflection Point. And that is even before it is revealed that Nila is going to try and reopen the case of the murder of the Director by Jagat R.

Although the politics are extremely different, the only other recent work that really compares to The Sentence is The Broken Trust (Mazes of Power) series by Juliette Wade. That too takes place in a society that is not our own, and explores some thorny questions about sociology and anthropology as well.

While there is intrigue, and some action sequences intended to dissuade Nila from handling the case get more and more overt and dangerous, the real heart of the book is, in fact, Nila’s heart. She is faced with some very difficult decisions, morally, ethically and personally in the course of her legal investigation, with implications for the city, for society, and most importantly, the author points out, her own soul. It makes The Sentence fascinating reading, and as of the writing of this review, frustratingly only published in India. This seems to be a wasted opportunity by UK and US publishers. The Sentence is the type of science fiction that demands a much wider audience.

Highlights:

• A world not our own, with thorny and interesting sociological questions
• Strong legal framework and centrality to society and main character
• A book that will remain with you long after you read it

Reference: Bhatia, Gautam. The Sentence [Westland IF, 2025].

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

How do you bring fresh material to superhero metaphors?

By explicitly focusing its conflict on a persecuted Black family, Gray Matter goes into themes the X-Men movies haven't addressed in a long time

Once upon a time, mutants were a metaphor that stood in for any oppressed minority. The writerly intention was noble, but for the purposes of a rhetorical device, it's always been a faulty one. Normal people can't oppress the superpowered. Fortunately, this incongruity between the metaphor and the reality it aims to represent opens the way for a different, more narratively and philosophically interesting type of story: that of mutant outcasts persecuted by a faction of their own peers who have internalized the prejudice they've heard from the dominant society. Recently, Sense8 did a fantastic (and undeservedly cut short) job with this type of villain. This month, HBO Max has launched a smaller but no less poignant variation on the same idea: Project Greenlight graduate Gray Matter.

Ayla (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Aurora (Mia Isaac) are a mother/daughter team of perpetual fugitives, changing cities every few months so that their psychic powers are kept out of the radar of a vague, undefined enemy. The plot suffers from slightly too low tension in the first act because we haven't been shown what they're running from; we see Ayla trying to teach Aurora how to control her gifts, but Aurora doesn't feel motivated to learn when she doesn't even know why they're going to so much trouble. Here the plot draws from the old reliable trope of the overprotective parent who keeps secrets that their kid would be better off knowing.

Cue the classic X-Men moment where Aurora accidentally hurts her love interest, and we jump rather abruptly into the second act, where we finally meet our villain. From this point on, it's your standard mad scientist conspiracy thriller, with Aurora stuck trying to figure out how to throw a sinister organization off her family's scent. Superhero problems start to displace the carefully laid out subtext of the first act, until the climax ties the hanging threads a bit faster than the viewer can process the implied message. In general, the action scenes are more restrained, and therefore more dramatically impactful, than the multicolored splashes Marvel has conditioned our eyes to gorge down, and the cinematography makes laudably resourceful choices with the clearly limited budget for set design. Numerous shots have a single bright light in the background (either the sun or a potent lamp) aimed directly at the camera, a trick that shifts the viewer's depth perception and makes the modest sets look more spatially complex.

It's all very superhero-keeps-punching-villain-until-finally-superhero-punches-harder-and-wins, but the particulars of this family add some valuable talking points to the old and recycled conversation on the meaning of superheroes as a persecuted minority. Most obviously, Ayla and Aurora are Black—almost the only Black characters in the movie. Ayla's anxiety about raising her child in a dangerous world is easy to translate into the real-life struggles of Black famlies in the US. In one scene, they rehearse all the safety tips Aurora has memorized, a conversation with specific resonances in our world. Ayla's lessons for Aurora include how to look nonthreatening, how to behave if she's detained, how to keep herself always in check lest she draw attention. Sound familiar? Don't be too visible, don't take up too much space, keep your guard up, don't confess to anything. But also, Aurora needs to learn how to fight back and how to understand the ethical grounding of her fight.

Aurora puts her crash course in superhero ethics to logically pragmatic use at the ending of Gray Matter. In doing so, she blows up decades of pointless discussion about the proper use of superpowers. Even if the way the scene is edited may strike the viewer as too fast and unsatisfying, it shows that this movie takes the trope of persecuted mutants more seriously than the X-Men movies were able to. If the superhero genre is to maintain any relevance as a conversation about power, it needs to become more honest about the poison of internalized shaming that still pushes many into a state of disempowerment. Gray Matter may not ever make Marvel-scale money, but what it has to say about the desperation caused by systemic injustice is more than we've heard in a decade of digital explosions.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

´The Ark' makes a plea for mutual trust to save humankind

This story proves you don't have to be a ruthless cynic to apply game theory to hard survival choices

Future Earth has gone to hell in a stinking, toxic, burning handbasket. Entire continents are up in flames, the atmosphere is either unlivably hot or fatally poisonous, and what's left of human governments is as good as finished. Superstar tech bro Jeff Bezos no, sorry, Elon Musk no, sorry, Steve Jobs no, sorry, Will Trust (really, that's his name) has funded a space colonization project that will send a dozen generation ships in various directions to search for the next home of our species. The first of these ships, the Ark 1, has been traveling for about five years until it suddenly reanimates its frozen occupants. A mysterious accident has killed their commanders and damaged the engines, and the few people left have to figure out what happened, where they are, how they're going to survive for the remainder of their journey, and how they're going to rebuild society from scratch.

With this premise, it sounds like the newest Syfy production The Ark should be a delight to watch. And at times, it is; these characters have to improvise on the fly with every bit of brains they've got in order to deal with brutal life-or-death choices under unforgiving circumstances. But often, especially in the first couple of episodes, it's difficult to get into the tone that the series wants to adopt. The urgency of the stakes, literally the survival of the human species, doesn't quite fit with the light-hearted dialogues, the melodramatic characterizations, and the silly brand of humor that fill the scripts. But if you manage to get used to the tone, you'll be rewarded with a profound demonstration of how civilization can be saved if the ages-old exchange of hostilities is abandoned in favor of an exchange of goodwill.

Unfortunately, there are multiple hiccups to overcome before full enjoyment is possible. The social dynamic between the ship's crew members is too dependent on the needs of each episode, shifting from animosity to camaraderie to resentment to intimacy with little time to let the characters (or the viewers) process the change. Although this uncertainty helps communicate how fragile this new society is in its first steps, it makes it very hard to follow whose loyalties we're supposed to believe. It's like the writers tried to emulate the cutthroat power dispute from Battlestar Galactica but wanted to also keep the ban on crew conflict from Star Trek plus the chaotic management style from Futurama.

This problem is of a kind with the overall tonal mismatch. One gets the impression that one writer was in charge of plotting a heavy drama with constant crises and impending doom, and then another writer was tasked with painting a coat of rom-com whimsy over it. Of the focus characters, the most notable (and hardest to swallow) are Alicia Nevins, the adorkable teen genius with no speech filter and advanced degrees in everything; James Brice, the imprudent pilot and resident eye candy who somehow only seems to own tank tops; Cat Brandice, the dating advice vlogger conscripted as the galaxy's least professional ship counselor; and Spencer Lane, the protagonist's Designated Foil whose entire role in the show consists in whining about having a woman boss.

So, what's actually good about The Ark? The plotting. This series is a brilliant example of how to write an unfolding story with interweaving parts where solving one problem leads to discovering more problems that lead to unexpected solutions that open yet more problems. This is an incredibly solid structure that maintains an unbroken momentum from one episode to the next. The Ark doesn't have the most consistent characters in space opera, but it does boast an expert command of the chains of consequence that make up a story.

The other great achievement of The Ark is its moral stance. Whereas the big space opera franchises seem to have forgotten how to write a thrilling climax that doesn't rely on who pew-pews harder, The Ark is set on a civilian starship with no weapons, so the big resolution has to rely on the decency of human nature, not on brute firepower. In the season finale, the protagonist argues that the dog-eat-dog methods that one can find both in warfare and in corporate competition are exactly what ruined Earth, and the survivors of humankind shouldn't take that habit with them into space. Instead, she's willing to try openness, sincerity, empathy. That's a way more interesting approach to watch, and the writers do it justice by concocting a way more interesting problem to solve. The crisis in the last episode, which our protagonist doesn't overcome with battle tactics but with kindness and generosity, illustrates beautifully how to survive an iterated prisoner's dilemma, a well-known thought experiment in game theory that serves as a microcosm of everyday life in a society. Nonviolent heroes FTW!

Often it seems like these contentious times have made us forget how to live as humans. By every objective measure, the survival strategy of our species is not perpetual hostility, but cooperation. The Ark makes a powerful case for the position that, if we want to found civilization again, our best chance for it to endure is to build it on the recognition of our common vulnerability and the willingness to be vulnerable with each other. Watching that noble message bear fruit is well worth all the cheesy dialogues.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

An extended philosophical dialogue against human supremacy

Ray Nayler's debut novel The Mountain in the Sea employs the techniques and tropes of multiple genres to explore one overarching question. It has corporate espionage, but it's not a spy novel; it has drone warfare, but it's not a military novel; it has killer AIs, but it's not an AI novel. The unifying theme is instead the need to identify the logical flaws in anthropocentrism and in the notion of individual responsibility. What the main characters achieve, more than an immediate victory, is a realization on two levels: a human being is not an island, disconnected from the web of shared responsibilities that make up a community, nor is the human species an island apart from the rest of nature. Fittingly, Nayler's choice of setting for this argument is a literal island, ultimately shown to be indissolubly linked to the events occurring everywhere else. In the world Nayler proposes, not even an island is truly an island.

The plot of the novel concerns the discovery, near the Vietnamese coast, of a species of octopus that has developed symbolic language, a material culture, toolmaking methods, a storytelling tradition, and a complex worldview with rituals and sacred spaces. By every anthropological criterion, this species has formed a society. However, anthropology proves to be of little help when faced with a society that grounds its conceptual repertoire on an environment, an embodied perception and a neural architecture that are fundamentally alien to the human experience. Here the novel reveals its core: although it has a team of experts attempting to crack the code of interspecies communication, most of the page count is dialogue about the moral implications of the research. This is not so much a "solve the puzzle" plot as a "moral illustration" one. Without ever getting didactic or preachy, The Mountain in the Sea addresses thorny questions about greed, negligence, hubris, exploitation, duty, and self-delusion.

Moreover, in keeping with the novel's anti-individualistic stance, the moral failures that set the plot in motion are never ascribed to one character or one faction. Sealife depletion is not caused by this one company's greed; it's humankind's greed. Rights violations are not allowed by this one government's negligence; it's humankind's negligence. Securing a future for all lifeforms is not this one hero's duty; it's humankind's duty. And yet, the individual characters we follow through the story aren't diluted in an all-blurring mass movement. They remain conscious of their uniqueness, but also of their connection to the whole. The novel's message is not one of annulling the individual, just one of expanding the scope of moral analysis.

To bolster this point, Nayler deploys a reoccurring motif, simultaneously a hard fact and a metaphor: the nervous system of an octopus, a distributed network with semiautonomous parts and minimal top-down control. The novel applies this same model to describe the power structure of a multinational corporation, an artificial mind, and the entire biosphere. The human neural structure, with a centralized point of command that all the limbs obey (plus all the political ramifications that result from replicating that model in a society), is the anomalous exception rather than the norm. To solve the enmity between humans and nature, the novel argues, we must shed the top-down way of thinking. We don't rule over nature, and we never did. Of course, this moral position goes directly against the traditional Western Christian anthropology that positions humankind as the pinnacle of creation. In reality, there's no such hierarchy. Whereas Christian anthropology insists that we are in this world, but not of this world, Nayler replies that that's an impossibility. You can't be in this world without instantly becoming of it. You can't form a complete concept of yourself without acknowledging your ties to everything around you.

The structure of the plot mirrors this view of interconnectedness. Three separate threads build the story while barely intersecting, three full protagonists who never meet but end up collaborating toward the goal of preventing the human depredation of the newfound octopus society. Most notably, each of these protagonists becomes a hero when they independently reason that their place as a part in a whole doesn't diminish them, but actually opens an opportunity for them to influence the course of events. You can't save the world if you're not part of it.

This underlying assumption, that a change in conduct requires first a change in perspective, is reinforced by the inclusion of a Buddhist monastery in the Vietnamese island where the researchers live. Not only does Buddhism teach that all sentient beings are equally worthy of dignity; it's a basic Buddhist doctrine that the path to liberation begins with adopting the right view about reality, and the right view according to Buddha is that the endless pursuit of satisfaction only leads to pain. In the novel, this occurs in the form of overfishing, exploitation of workers, and individual ambition. To separate oneself from the world results in a loss of empathy. You don't need to care for ocean life if you see it as just a thing for you to use. When you adopt the right view that you're just another lifeform in a web of relations, the rest of the world ceases to be just a thing.

In the moral landscape of The Mountain in the Sea, the real enemy to defeat is indifference. The biggest cause of pain, the cruelest weapon, the most destructive flaw in the human spirit is the failure to care. Once this problem is identified, the true nature of individualism is exposed: it gives us an excuse to indulge in indifference. This failure mode doesn't even need to be motivated by malice: if you see yourself as too small, too powerless, or too unimportant to change anything, indeed you won't. The type of caring that has a real effect in the world is one where you also care enough about yourself to notice all the threads of relations you can pull. That's how multiple parts acting semiautonomously can move the whole.

More than a science fiction yarn about first contact with another intelligence, The Mountain in the Sea reads like a philosophical dialogue. Characters reflect and contrast their opinions far more than they do things, and somehow, marvelously, that doesn't hurt the pacing. The novel has several moments of exciting action, and yet this is not an action thriller. This is a thought experiment where the essence of humanity is put on trial and the sentence is probation. We still haven't demonstrated that we're capable of behaving responsibly in this world, and we're running out of chances. The novel ends with things pointing toward a happy ending, but happy endings need persistent effort to be maintained. Although this story has elements of a moral fable, it doesn't offer a definitive conclusion to its argument. Protecting a still-incipient octopus society would require a constant series of responsible decisions. To put it in science fiction parlance, the world is never finally saved. And that's OK; just as there isn't a hard boundary between humans and reality, there isn't one between the dark past and the shiny future. Pretending that there's an end date to the task of caring is another form of indifference. That's why The Mountain in the Sea isn't content with finishing its argument and leaving the reader alone. This is the kind of philosophical dialogue that hopes the reader will say something in reply. It is a call to action. It is a proclamation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the hard rigor applied to the biology and linguistics of the octopus society, +1 for the skillful integration of the separate plots.

Penalties: −1 because many sentences in the dialogues could use a bit of trimming.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022].

In 'Extraordinary,' British classism mutates into super-classism

This surreal twist on the "loser roommate" comedy format is a clever metaphor for the ways the same old cutthroat rat race hits even harder for the post-Brexit generation

If superhero stories are metaphors about power, how should we read a fictional world where literally everyone is a superhero? In the new Disney/Hulu comedy series Extraordinary, set in a modern-day Britain where superpowers are a normal part of life, it reads as a satire of the Thatcherite fantasy that insists that everyone has an opportunity and those who don't make it are simply not trying hard enough.

Jen, our protagonist, hasn't gotten her superpower yet, and she's internalized the social consensus that, without a talent that makes her unique, she's stuck in a directionless life. She's going nowhere in her job life, her love life, or her family life, and a medical treatment that would allegedly fix her is just too expensive to consider.  In a particularly biting scene, a friend asks her about her marketable skills, and when she replies she has none, he blurts out, "So what's the point ot you?"

Economic anxiety looms like a ghost over every character in the series, and in a couple scenes, the idea of Margaret Thatcher is cited as a harbinger of everything that is going wrong. The last thing Britain needed after centuries of blatant classism was Thatcherism, and the last thing it needed after half a century of Thatcherism was half a decade of Brexit. The already hypercompetitive, highly divided Britain that entered the 21st century is now clashing against the realization that the Sex Pistols' warning about "No Future" is becoming literally true.

Jen's desperation to feel valued for herself is completely normal, perhaps the only normal response to a world where people are judged based on factors outside of their control. Because she believes that getting a superpower will solve all her problems, she tries to make quick money with a talent show, she tries to make it into the music industry, she tries to sell her eggs. The actual problem is a system that sets up people to be each other's rivals, which is why Jen's quest to find a shortcut to victory is doomed from the start.

Her struggles with the costs of private healthcare aren't the only parallel with reality. Her roommate, whose power is talking to the dead, feels underappreciated at work and taken for granted at home. Her sister, who has just gained super strength, is under the pressures typical of an overachieving family. Her one-time botched date, who has the power to cause orgasms, has no chances for normal human contact until he gives in and uses his power to make a living.

The uncertainty of a Britain that can't imagine a future and looks longingly to the past is explored repeatedly across the series. Jen's roommate who talks to the dead keeps finding that everyone she channels has horrible political opinions. Her other roommate can turn back time, but it hardly solves anything and he finds it exhausting to go back too often. An old classmate can replay memories, but all that does is reveal that the past wasn't as rosy as people remember it. The most literal of these metaphors is Jen's boss, stuck in a too young body that will never grow up. Time and again, Extraordinary makes the point that, whatever our present problems, trying to retreat back isn't helpful.

Alone in mediocrity, surrounded by success, Jen's story isn't unlike post-Brexit Britain, left behind in its isolation while Europe's prospects are looking up. However, the trends that Brexit has exacerbated were already in motion. The disheartening consequence of an economy where common people's best hope is to randomly become an overnight celebrity is a normalized callousness in human relations. With professional respect having taken the place of interpersonal respect, it's hard to focus on what truly makes us worthy of love. The realization that it's OK to be a loser, that you shouldn't have to monetize your joy, that "wanting more" can become an addiction, that life shouldn't be a perpetual talent contest comes almost too late for Jen, but in the end she learns the fundamental lesson that defines Generation Z: you have the option of no longer trying to play an unwinnable game.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Microreview [Book]: Mazes of Power by Juliette Wade

Mazes of Power is a thought provoking and immersive  work of sociological science fiction in the tradition of genre luminaries like Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Jack Vance, and Eleanor Arnason.

In a world where humanity developed along some very different lines, and now, in a spiral of slowly decaying technology lives almost entirely in underground cities, such as Pelismara. The surface world is dangerous, alien, not to be visited if at all possible. In a stratified world riven by class and social status, the conflict over the succession to high office envelops the Grobal Caste, the nobles of this world. Disease, intrigue and assassination are thread to those scions might ascend to that role, as well as the young man who has pledged himself as a servant to that family. The entirety of the Varin, aqll the seven castes, not just the Grobal, not just the servant Imbati, all of them, are on the edge of a knife, and the actions of Tagaret, Nekantor and Aloran will decide which way they will fall.

This is the story of Juliette Wade’s debut as a novelist, Mazes of Power.

Sociological science fiction is a tricky business, especially when you are building a world from scratch with no connection to our own. Building up a unique human society in such a way in a novel, and keep the story moving at the same time, is no mean feat. Wade’s training and previous work is at short story length, and I found those skills served her well here, as she uses careful writing and information density to try and convey the important, plot and character relevant aspects of her world to the reader. The dense reading makes this a slow novel to read, to unfold everything that the author is sharing. Skimming this novel is a good way to miss the richness of the book, or worse, be confused as to what’s going one. This starts at the very first sentence. The very first line of the novel gives us a character beat and tells us something physically fundamental about the world and how it is different than ours. The novel as a whole uses this strategy.

And what a world. A class and race-riven society in a slowly decaying world underground, where the ruling caste struggles from power within, and keeps in mind those who are without. A disease, deadly to the vulnerable ruling class, a horror of contagion and sickness that is positively Victorian. A deep look at social relations, with servants bonded to their masters, and houses and even the city aligned in terms of social roles and standing. The novel’s world feels like Jack Vance decided to team up with Ursula K LeGuin and the result is wonderful. And I didn’t even mention the ornate and clever use of language in the novel. There is an invented language in the novel and the use of language, between social classes and within social classes, also blends into the world that Wade creates here.

There is a lot more than the world here to love. There are the characters and the story. The story centers around two brothers, the reticent seventeen year old Tagaret, who really doesn’t want to get involved in the family’s game of politics. He contrasts with his antagonist and brother Nekantor, younger, more ambitious and definitely interested in promoting the First Family’s bid to become Heir to the Throne. They are a study in contrasts, strengths, weaknesses, and flaws, especially Nekantor. I felt for Nekantor, given Wade’s very careful revelation of his disability and how it is handled is nuanced and skillfully done.

The third of the major characters is the Imbati Aloran, who in a way provides us with the closest thing we have to being the newbie point of view role to help explicate the world. This is only to a limited extent, since its to help build and develop the family and its social circle. Even so, he is far more than just a straight up exposition piece, as his relationship with Tamelera (mother to the brother) is an extremely interesting one. It is here that Wade seems to have the most fun in developing how a different society would work and the nuances, expectations and defied expectations of that society.

Given the iceberg rule, I can’t imagine just how much of the world Wade has that is only inferred and infused into the work indirectly and supports the stuff above the surface and it feeds into these three characters. The characters are passionate, driven and significantly larger than life, and in a good way, one can call them operatic in that full vividness in how they love, hate, strive and act. Readers worried that they will be buried underneath the seas of the world building will find that the character beats not only keep them afloat, they zoom across those seas until the novel’s conclusion. The novel is the start of a series, but it does end at an important pivot point with a resolution that if you wanted to one and done the series, you could. I for one most certainly do not and want to see more with the characters and the world Juliette has created.

The novel’s themes of class and social stratification, and society under stress and what the characters within can or should do resonate very well indeed. If all SF is really about the present instead of the future it depicts, this novel definitely delivers in that regard. It is easier to see our own riven  society, with power and wealth being concentrated into ever fewer hands, with the Varin and their society which formalizes and reifies that sort of thinking and society. Reflected in the world of Aloran, Tagaret and Nekantor...is our own world.

Mazes of Power is a powerful work of sociological science fiction that looks at us, through the lens of a society that is alien, and different, and yet the characters are unmistakably human.


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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for worldbuilding firmly in the wheelhouse of an author known for worldbuilding classes and interviews, +1 for passionate, almost operatic characters

Penalties: -1 for a little bit of roughness in the plotting

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention


Reference:  Wade, Juliette. Mazes of Power [DAW, 2020]


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