Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Festival View: IT'S HARD NOT TO BE ROMANTIC ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

Sometimes, a title hides the way the film you’re about to watch will move. Other times, it says exactly what kind of world you’re about to step into. This latter segment is the realm in which It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel falls into. 

The premise is simple: an ex-con named Swan’s weed-loving best friend Randall has decoded the secret to romantic time-travel that has been hidden in the film Somewhere in Time. To combat this secret information from getting out, the rest of Hollywood has flooded the zone with their constant stream of impossible time-travel films. He’s deduced that the real secret to time-travel hides within copious amounts of marijuana, falling asleep, knowing what someone looks like and where they’ll be at some point in time, and love. This he uses to go back to the party that was taking place in the house where Randall lives at the same time as the robbery Swan was framed for. There, Swan meets an incredibly charming young true crime podcast aficionado who apparently likes ‘em a little scruffy. They flirt and try to “solve” the crime. Well, they mostly flirt and make brief mentions of the crime. Randall spends the time eating edibles and having adventures...and being chased by “the golden girls.”

If this sounds like a lot to pack into twelve minutes, you’re right, but the script by director Michael Charron is just about perfect and hits the beats at every moment. It’s a remarkable act of content stuffing, especially when he’s also able to give things time to land with appropriate impact. The direction is incredibly solid, and the cinematography and editing by Steven Gunter only helps put the entire package together in a way that feels both polished and immediate. That’s a fun realm for a work of fiction that literally dwells in the not-so-distant past. Production wise, it’s a simple series of locations made to feel foreign through character interaction, which probably speaks to the actors ability to play the room. 

Let me explain:

There is a genre-acting theory that a character makes the setting. If a character reacts to the environment in a way that shows the foreignness of what is otherwise a normal situation, it is what’s establishing the setting far more than any prop or piece of set design. Hence an actor can change a romance into a horror film, a science fiction film into a stoner comedy. That’s what’s going on here, because there are elements of romance, stoner comedy and science fiction all roller-up into a single, tight, twist-ended package, and there is a character who is embodying each of those settings with their performance in the piece. Randall provides the stoner comedy with not only the prodigious amount of herb he eats, but by a reaction to the world that is a little bit Cheech and a whole lotta Chong. Swan delivers the romance by his focus on the new woman he’s just met at the expense of the weird, messed up situation he’s in vis a vie his time travel. Liv provides the science fiction by reacting to the world she finds herself in with a happy mix of confusion, disassociation, and utter reaction. They are creating different genre settings within the same visual frame. I love that. 

And I should mention that Liv, played by Alyssia Rivera, is absolutely eye-gluingly perfect in her role. She’s insanely charismatic, and certainly out of Swan’s league, but more importantly, she’s believable in a world where suspension of disbelief is exactly as difficult as the plot it works in. None of this should be easy to accept, but somehow she makes it feel so incredibly natural. We tie into Liv, and her placement in the universe (multiverse?) is one of the most important drivers of the story.  She’s an actress to watch.

I would be remiss to not mention that another film I’ve written of lately, Fireflies at Dusk, dwells in the same cinematic region. In fact, it turns out that the filmmakers know each other. They both reference, obliquely in the case of Fireflies and explicitly here, Somewhere in Time. Both make excellent use of the idea of that long-ago premise to explore contemporary cinematic ideas. Really, there’s just no way an audience who likes to laugh would ever reject either of these. While Fireflies at Dusk is about the class between past and present, It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time-Travel is far more about the actual petty complications of time traveling stoners, a problem that we are certain to encounter as the technology becomes available and decriminalization spreads ever-wider. 

I will also say that this is a film that shows things like Dude, Where’s My Car are valid expressions of science fiction. I have long held that to be not only true, but vital to a genre that often eats its own tail and says that it’s reinventing itself. Science fiction comedy does not always have to be high-brow (like Buckaroo Bonzai) nor even middle brow (like Teenagers from Space) but can comfortably sit among the types of comedy that appeal to smart teens and 50-somethings who occasionally run Pineapple Express-Ted double feature evenings. I love when we still have to think, but might still get a classic He’s so wasted! Laugh out of things. 

Keep an eye out for this one. 

--

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Film Review: Arco

Look up and make a wish

First we have the far future. People live on platforms above the clouds, where they practice subsistence farming. With the help of multicolored robes adorned with pretty diamonds, they routinely travel to the prehistoric past to recover samples of usable species; there are hints that something caused an ecological catastrophe that made the surface unlivable. The family we follow has a girl and a boy, but the boy, Arco, is still too young to join the time-traveling expeditions. Because it’s a human universal, even after the end of civilization, that kids have an instinct for getting in trouble, the boy steals a suit and attempts a time jump on his own. As can be expected, he gets lost, and thus we have a movie.

Then we have the not too far future. The environment is still in the middle of falling apart; one day can bring a killer hurricane and the next a massive forest fire, and the solution of rich people is to have retractable glass domes built around their houses. That way you can have your dinner in peace while nature rages outside. The family we follow in this era has a preteen girl, a baby boy and a robot nanny. The parents are perpetually busy at work in some other city, and the girl, Iris, is tired of feeling lonely. So fate fulfills her wishes one day, when Arco crash-lands in her neighborhood.

The plot of the French animated film Arco brings to mind E.T., with the strange visitor hiding in a child’s house until they can return to their parents. The main difference in this case is that Iris and Arco can talk to each other. She’s excited about showing him all the cool things of her modern life, but he’s rather guarded about how much of his time she can be allowed to know. This dynamic only gets a brief time to develop before we have adult authorities, mysterious stalkers and natural disasters converging to get in the way of this adorable pair.

A curious contrast to the beauty of this moment in the kids’ lives is the stunted development of the trio of stalkers who jump out of nowhere to find Arco and obtain proof that time travel is real. They’re introduced as antagonists, but soon enough their clumsiness neutralizes any threat they may pose, and they spend the rest of the movie looking goofy and obstructing our heroes’ quest for no good reason. I hear many viewers enjoyed these characters; I found them mostly annoying.

One feature that stands out about the overall tone of Arco is how obviously it’s not an American or Japanese cartoon. It’s far too common for children in American cartoons to be overly expressive of their emotions, whereas children in Japanese cartoons can sometimes speak with such deep introspection that believability is stretched. The two lead children in Arco come off as more relaxed in their inner life, which makes the stakes feel starker later, when it’s time to panic. The naturality with which they let themselves feel their emotions ends up being key to the gradual way these two start falling in love without having a clue of what romance is.

There’s an element of irony in the suggestion that Arco’s description of the post-disaster world will inspire Iris to get to work to mitigate the disaster that in her time is still ongoing. But her success is more visible in the personal sphere. Her family life is strained because she almost never gets to see her parents, who work a lot to afford the storm-proof house where she lives. When one looks at the family Arco comes from, and the magnitude of the effort it takes for his parents to find him, the implication is that Iris changed a society where parents rarely spend time with their kids into a society where parents move heaven and earth to see them. This side of the story is more impactful than any environmentalist lesson that could be read in the plot. Viewers probably already know the dangers that surround us, so Arco can just show the full extent of the climate crisis without turning preachy; the images suffice.

The gorgeous animation and the careful balancing of tension and humor highlight the small tragedy at the core of the story: two children having a wonderful, one-in-a-lifetime experience whose full meaning they can’t yet grasp. They just know something special is happening to them, and they don’t have a name for it, and it will take them decades of growth to appreciate those fleeting days of magic. The part of the movie’s ending that is happy gives both Iris and Arco a blunt reminder of the cruelty of time, a hard truth that not even time travel can fix. That’s the thing about growing up: if it tastes bittersweet, you’re doing it right.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Anime Review: 7th Time Loop

There's a little bit of everything in this compact time loop/romance/action/adventure

Anime series usually fall into distinct categories: shonen adventure, romance, magic and fantasy, portal adventure, etc. Seventh Time Loop is a fun, compact story that offers a little bit of all the things viewers might want from an anime. Its full title is: The Seventh Time Loop: The Villainess Lives a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy. Although it seems to tell the complete story, the title is intentionally misleading. The protagonist Rishe is not a villain, and her life in her seventh time loop is not at all carefree.

Rishe is a young noblewoman forced into an engagement to her kingdom’s arrogant prince. When false rumors paint Rishe as a villain, the prince denounces her and publicly cancels the engagement. Rishe takes the opportunity to flee and start life anew in an unexpected trade. However, she is eventually killed and reborn into the same moment of the original engagement being broken. In the style of Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, or Source Code, Rishe restarts her life with all the knowledge she amassed from her prior incarnations. In each time loop, Rishe has extended time to build skills, find practical mentors, create friendships, and learn about the world before she dies. Through her various incarnations she learns, with the help of others, to be a maid, a merchant, an herbalist, an academic scientist, a soldier, and other practical tasks, and she becomes stronger and smarter after each life.

In each time loop Rishe’s death is, directly or indirectly, brought about by Arnold, the cruel prince of a neighboring kingdom whose warmongering brings, in various forms, destruction to Rishe. However, in her seventh reincarnation, Rishe has had enough of her fate being controlled by both princes. She tells off her fiancé and jumps from a balcony to escape. She is intercepted by the same prince Arnold, who stabbed her to death when she was a soldier in her last life. Arnold is powerful, sharp-tongued, and stoic, but intrigued by Rishe’s fierce, unladylike behavior. Fascinated, he immediately proposes to her. With several caveats, Rishe decides to accept in the hopes that a closer relationship to her six-time killer may give her insight into him and possibly help her bring peace to the realms.

In many romance anime stories, the protagonist is shy, unpopular, or otherwise insecure, and is constantly dazzled or flustered by the other stronger/more popular/richer person’s attention. In Seventh Time Loop we don’t have that sort of unbalanced dynamic. Rishe is smart, physically strong, and very clever. Arnold is the same. Arnold is confident, although stoic, and he knows Rishe is no ordinary princess. Intellectually, Rishe has the upper hand, since she has relived this existence six times. The cat-and-mouse dynamic is reminiscent of the always entertaining The Apothecary Diaries but without the mystery elements. Both characters call each other out when they detect deception or manipulation.

However, the slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance takes a back seat to explorations of a range of issues, including class oppression, the role of women, using commerce to help build economic stability, and the unending cost of war. Since Rishe has lived life as everything from a scullery maid to a royal to a merchant to a soldier to an academic, she has insight into options other than war and oppression. But these are the options Arnold feels compelled towards. In each episode she uses one of her past experiences to redirect Arnold.

In addition to Rishe’s time looping, we also get insight into Arnold’s backstory, including how his abusive father shaped his bitter personality and led to a toxic relationship with his troubled younger brother. The story also introduces likeable side characters from various aspects of Rishe’s reincarnations. For those who like action and adventure, there is plenty of sword fighting, palace intrigue, war flashbacks, family drama, and political upheaval. For those who like romance, there is plenty of witty parlor banter (in the vibe of Queen Charlotte), ballroom scenes, and swoon-worthy moments between our bold heroine and her morally gray fiancé. The writers do a good job of painting Prince Arnold as a complex and problematic but still potentially redeemable character. In the vibe of Bon Appetit, Your Majesty, the time travel premise provides a perfect device for subtly redirecting a tyrant.

For fans of The Apothecary Diaries, this is an ideal short series to tide you over until the next season finally drops. But, the storytelling is more linear and direct, and lacks mystery elements or extended moments of introspection. The overall tone and animation style is much more simplistic. And the historical setting means there will be plenty of troubling content to wrestle with without resolution because of the short length of the series. However, despite these limitations, Seventh Time Loop packs a lot of entertainment, social commentary, humor, and adventure into twelve very bingeable episodes. With optimistic, brightly colored animation, and a pragmatic point of view, the series provides balanced storytelling with just enough adventure, moral depth, romance, and humor to keep you satisfied.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Slow burn, time travel romance
• Clever exploration of social issues
• Compact, linear storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: The Everlasting, by Alix E Harrow

 In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.

Do you remember back in, oh, 2017 or so, when a certain variety of shellshocked well-intentioned liberal looked at the news, wrung their hands in distress, and bleated ineffectually, This is not who we are? People are resistant to changing their opinions on the basis of something as unreliable as mere factual evidence, but still, some facts get through, and some opinions do change. It’s been very clear for a while now that yes, this is, in fact, very much who we are; it’s who we’ve always been; and it’s who we’ll always be, without some powerful work to leave that rut and break a new path.

The Everlasting is a story about the stories nations tell themselves about who they are; and what it takes to change the story, in the hopes that changing the story will change the nation. It is deeply embedded in modern times. It responds directly to the creeping, running, leaping, bounding, racing encroachment of fascism, but it drapes the conversation in the costumes and set dressing of historical fantasy, because every message is always more palatable when we have knights in armor acting out the lesson.

The tale is told by Owen Mallory, a historian by training in the nation/republic/empire of Dominion, which is not at all Great Britain. Before returning to academia, he served as a soldier in the not-at-all World War II against the Hinterlanders, who are not-at-all the rest of Europe. Although Dominion won the war, the conflict — the latest in a long series of similar such conflicts — has left lingering wounds in the nation and the people. Owen himself is scarred across the throat from a wound that did not arise from honest combat, and speaks with a rasp in his voice. Owen’s father has been left a drunk, a frustrated pacifist forever getting into trouble. His political agitations, a produce of his own participation in the previous not-at-all World War I have for years brought shame and scorn upon himself and, by association, Owen. Now, he is joining activists for change within the Dominion, whose increasingly vehement demands are causing embarrassment to the government.

The novel opens with Owen, in the proud tradition of academics everywhere, struggling to write a book in his chosen specialism, the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion, and especially the legendary founding figure of Una Everlasting, who is not at all King Arthur. Any resemblance between the name of Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, and our own Owen Mallory, is entirely coincidental. One day Owen receives in the post an inexplicable book: a manuscript entitled The Death of Una Everlasting, an apparently contemporary record of the legend herself, written in the hand of someone who knew her personally, loved her, and watched her die.

Owen throws himself into the work of deciphering the book, and the moment he has finished it, he is summoned to a government office, to meet Minister Vivian Rolfe, whose position is at risk as she absorbs the blame for the civil unrest. The nation must remember what it is, she tells him, and the publication of this new, contemporary account of their founding hero is just what the nation needs. Only Owen Mallory, a lifelong devotee of Una Everlasting, can write the translation that will save the nation from descent into factional violence. Then Vivian stabs Owen’s hand with a letter knife. His blood spills onto the book, and he awakens in the past, under a tree, in the presence of Una herself. The book is in his hand, its pages blank. His task, it turns out, is not to translate an extant manuscript, but to write it himself, in the time and place where Una’s story happened.

The first third of this novel seems straightforward enough: a time-travel tale, a nascent romance, a man struggling to reconcile his view of a myth with the reality of a person. He follows Una on her famous quests: to slay the last dragon in the land, to retrieve from its lair the Grail, which is the sole hope of saving the life of her beloved queen and benefactor, Yvanne. He is with her during the last, final betrayal, in which her comrade, the fabled Ancel the Betrayer, stabs her, so that she dies at Yvanne's feet. 

Una's death seems like a logical stopping place for a story that is. . . simpler than I would have expected from Alix E Harrow. All we need is an epilogue, time enough for Mallory to return to the present, process his adventure, and make some grand decision about whether he will serve as a government propagandist for history, given that he now knows the  reality of the past. Except the book is only a third of the way through, Part 1 is titled The First Death of Una Everlasting (emphasis mine) and things develop in ways that are far from simple. 

I hesitate to write more, because part of the wonder of this book lies in following the timey-wimey twisty turns, the betrayals and revelations, and the long thread of cause-and-effect that makes up the history of a nation. But even in that first third we have a skilled depiction of the parallels between past and present, illustrating the inexorable repetition of historical events. The glorious martial campaigns that Una leads in Queen Yvanne’s name mirror the Dominion’s conquest in modern days against the Hinterlands; and although the historical records and modern newspapers both report heroic victories and cries of welcome from the liberated populaces, the actual mood on the ground is very different from reports. The quest to kill the last dragon is justified with tales of dragons’ dangers to civilians; but evidence of that danger seems scarce when you approach the dragon itself. Still, every story needs a villain; and when there are no more dragons to kill, Ancel the Betrayer steps in to serve that role in the national mythology, just as the Hinterlanders do in the present day.

It is hard to control the flow of history so that the sequence of events arrives at a particular desired present. The whole genre of time travel fiction is one long conversation about the challenge of truly understanding cause and effect. But controlling past events is not the only way to control the present. One of the brilliances of this book is its meditations on the types of stories that a nation uses to serve its interest. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war, says Vivian to Owen, and he thinks, There was no God in Dominion; there was only Vivian Rolfe, telling a story. 

A truly powerful story is not created on the spot, however. It must age. It needs the legitimacy of myth and history behind it. Owen, sent back in the past to tell Una’s story, is given the opportunity not only to affect events, but to affect how they are remembered. I’m not entirely sure his final solution is all that different in method from what Vivian wants him to do; but it is very different in its outcome. Do the ends justify the means? There’s an argument to be made in this book that they do. Or rather, at the end I was unconvinced that this argument was satisfactorily refuted. 

This is not necessarily a criticism of the book. Vivian is an extraordinary character, and I found myself at more than one point musing that her side of the story would make a magnificent tale in its own right, far more sweeping and epic in its scope and deeds than the focused, personal narrative we get from Owen. Owen values the individual; Vivian values the nation. Or her version of the nation. Or, perhaps, her view of what the nation should be. This book is not, I think, discussing whether the ends justify the means, as much as which ends those means are pursuing. And it's a hard question. Vivian's ruthless utilitarianism is not a mere strawman argument here. It's given a chance to make its case; and to the extent that you agree that there is a case to be made for it, you might find yourself, like me, wishing that there were a companion novel telling Vivian's story.

But perhaps cliches about ends and means are not the perspective to take here. Perhaps we should turn our eyes to a different idiom. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Vivian Rolfe does not learn. But Owen Mallory does.

Give this book to your friends, your family, your enemies. Propose it at your book group. It needs to be discussed by people who have read it to the end.

--

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

Highlights:

• Time travel
• National myth-making
• Not-at-all an allegory
• Medieval knights and armor

References:

Harrow, Alix E. The Everlasting [Tor, 2025].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: Time Cut

A weirdly addictive slasher, murder mystery, time travel homage to old-school Disney Channel Movie storytelling

Do you remember what you were doing in 2003? Flip phones, low rise jeans, bright pastels, Kim Possible and Lizzie McGuire. It’s weird to think of 2003 as retro or historical, but for the purposes of this story, it is. Time Cut is a time travel, coming-of-age, slasher drama that takes viewers on a nostalgic tour of the early 2000s while trying to solve a teen’s violent murder by a mysterious serial killer.

The story opens in 2003, with a prologue introduction of the triggering incident: the murder of popular high schooler Summer Field (Antonia Gentry). Summer is at an unauthorized party to de-stress after the murder of three other close friends. While she’s there, a creepily masked killer finds and kills her outside of the gathering. Then the story skips ahead to 2024, when Summer’s younger sister, teen-aged Lucy (Madison Bailey), is living in the shadow of her death. Lucy was conceived after Summer’s death to be a replacement daughter. However, her parents preserve Summer’s room as it was when she was murdered in 2003. Her parents are trapped in twenty years of grief and, as a result, they are simultaneously overprotective and emotionally distant with Lucy.

Lucy stumbles upon a time machine hidden away in the same place her sister was murdered. The time machine is inexplicably just sitting there in a public location, barely out of view. She inadvertently triggers the machine and accidentally ends up in 2003 just a few days before Summer’s murder. Lucy gets a chance to meet her long-dead sister and see the reality of who Summer truly was rather than the idealized version portrayed by her parents. While there Lucy meets brilliant and nerdy Quinn (Griffin Gluck), who becomes her confidant, she meets Summer’s inner circle of obnoxious, self-absorbed bullies, and she gets caught up in the serial killer chase while trying to solve the murder mysteries and trying to get back home. As is often the case in stories like this, viewers will need a willing suspension of disbelief, not for the fantastical elements, but for the practical ones, such as why the time machine is so easily located and how Lucy is surviving financially in the past.

Time Cut feels like an old-school Disney Channel movie (except done as a slasher film with time travel elements). The film leans heavily into the post-Y2K teen drama style of acting and storytelling. Summer is the popular girl with one quiet friend, Quinn, whom she exploits. Summer and Lucy bond over teen angst, and Summer, bewildered by Lucy’s boxy 2024 pants, decides to give her a fashion makeover, complete with upbeat movie montage music. The sweetness of the time-loop sisters’ budding friendship is contrasted with Summer’s intense obsession with remaining popular. As a result, she is complicit in the cruelty of the bullies against Quinn, despite their longtime friendship; she’s willing to use Quinn to cheat on her homework; and she hides her feelings for her friend Emmy. The cutesy teen elements are also deliberately contrasted with the ongoing threat of the serial killer and the succession of violent, on-screen murders. Fortunately for the squeamish, the gore is kept to a minimum, and some (not all) of the scenes are cut away.

The film does a surprisingly good job of keeping viewers guessing until the very twisty ending. Time travel films always ask the same questions about whether we should change the past and what will be the fallout from doing so. Time travel stories, like vampire stories, typically have a universal set of rules that can’t be broken without consequences. Time Cut opts to acknowledge, and then do away with, some of the traditional time travel rules. As a result, we never quite know what to expect as the characters navigate the murder mystery they are trapped in.

Time Cut does not always have the best storytelling. There are plot holes, inconsistencies, and story elements that will require a willing suspension of disbelief. But, despite these shortcomings, it does manage to be confusingly addictive all the way to the end. And it provides a healthy dose of turn-of-the-century nostalgia.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Low gore
• Twisty plot
• Nostalgic appeal

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: To Turn the Tide by S. M. Stirling

An argument about the Roman Empire that masquerades as a time travel into a alternate history novel.

It’s not often that one finds that the end of the book is what a reader might consider reading first. Usually an afterword of a book is best read in the aftermath of the book, when the reader’s thoughts can gel and coalesce and get a peek behind the curtain. It has happened, though, that said peek behind the curtain feels like it is oddly placed, that it should be in a foreword, or if it was a standalone piece altogether. Or, that the afterward and its arguments is the dog, and the book is the tail. 

In this context I want to talk about S.M. Stirling’s To Turn the Tide. 

But let’s go back to the end of the book before we get into the meat and potatoes of the actual book. The title is “For Nerds like Me: Concerning Technological Innovations and Time Travel”. Stirling begins with what is exactly on the tin, talking about works such as Lest Darkness Fall, The Man who Came Early, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and others. What follows is a long essay on the practicalities of what and how history and technology could be changed. There is a lot of discussion (which winds up in the book by the characters themselves) about the practicalities of providing technological innovation, and what kinds of innovation can be brought. There is also a lengthy discussion of the history of the Roman Empire at the time of the Marcomannic Wars in terms of society and technology and its impending fall. Oh, and for good measure, mentions of the mutability of history in general

But the thing is, this afterward is written in a tone and style as if you hadn’t actually just read the book itself, which I found peculiar. The ending of the essay even says “To find out more, you will have to read To Turn the Tide and its sequels”. And while the essay sets a lot of things up, it remains in terms of characters and plot mostly non-spoilery. It’s an academic argument from a non-academic on a number of levels that the book seems to have been written once the afterword was done, to see what it would look like as a story, rather than an essay.

And so we can now actually turn to the book that seems to put its own afterward into practice. 

To Turn the Tide starts in early 2030’s Vienna, where a scientist has invited several Americans to his house. They all have gotten to Vienna and the House before the world has decided to go to hell. As they learn the professor has built a time machine, a global thermonuclear war of the highest and fullest order breaks out, and a fusion bomb dropped on Vienna activates the machine and sends the professor and the Americans to 165 CE. The Americans are not murdered (although the professor does die) thanks to the intervention of a merchant who decides not to rob and kill the stunned mysterious travelers who seemed to fall from the sky. With the merchant’s help, the Americans get themselves on their feet, find that the Professor had packed a lot of money and gear (it was clear he was going to bring them all back before the bomb forced his hand) and now they have to make a life here. Going back or avoiding changing history (à la the concerns in Island in the Sea of Time) are impossible, given the nuclear war. They have to make the best of it. But they know a bunch of the outlines of history, and know in the next couple of years, a massive German invasion is coming (the Marcomannic Wars). Arthur and his friends decide they need to survive, and to prop up Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire... and keep it from sliding downward (they’ve seen Gladiator, they know who Commodus is). And so a story begins as the Americans try to use the money and goods they have (including a lot of seeds, of things like potatoes, chilies and tomatoes) to introduce positive change for the Empire, starting in Pannonia.  And, Arthur knows the formula for gunpowder.

The book is very heavy on its historical and technological arguments, and of course the nuts and bolts of trying to bootstrap technological changes from the wheelbarrow to gunpowder. This means the characterization of the characters is a bit lacking. Arthur Vanderberg, who soon becomes Artorius, gets the most of the book. He’s the veteran, and as the book goes more and more oriented toward the war with the Germanic tribes headed into Pannonia, he gets more and more screen time, he is the hub that the other Americans run around. It’s no surprise that when the Americans’ place in the world goes up, he’s the one that’s considered the leader and rises the farthest and highest. We really understand his deal, but we get lesser and varying degrees of motivation and drive from the others. One of them, Filiipa Chang, gets a same sex relationship that looks like a deliberate inversion of a relationship in another Stirling castaway in time novel, Island in the Sea of Time. Two of the other Americans not very convincingly and later in the book pair off with each other, leaving one unattached completely.  Given that intimate relationships are the major way the book drives character development, the book falls down significantly on that score.

There is a lot of playfulness, though, with the characters even given that thinness here with the Americans making lots of movie and book references and having a mentality that readers can identify with. Unlike a lot of previous time travel castaway novels, this is a novel where the characters come to terms with it immediately, and they have done the reading and viewing, as it were (the aforementioned Lest Darkness Fall gets explicitly talked about by the characters). There are other fun bits too, as when the Americans, now that they have tomatoes and chilies, decide to introduce the Romans to Texas pit style barbecue...and the Romans go gangbusters for it. There is even a cameo by a character from another time travel novel that is set in the same time and place that I will allow the reader to find and discover. I didn’t recognize her at first, but later, when I re-read the section, it's obvious who it is. 

Marcus Aurelius himself becomes a character in the book, with a point of view. The book has, as many people interested in him do, a bit of a crush on the man, as he is clearly more intelligent and clever than many of those around him, and he comes to accept the strangers with their newfangled ideas far more readily than perhaps reason would allow. I get the feeling that out of the “Good Emperors”, Marcus is clearly Stirling’s favorite. And Verus, his co-emperor, is definitely depicted as a slacker nobody remembers (to be fair, even today, most people who know Marcus Aurelius don’t even remember Verus was co-emperor with him until he died of the plague). 

The action sequences, and they get bigger and more prominent as the book goes along, are a draw for readers who like that sort of thing. Are you the kind of person who saw the battle at the beginning of Gladiator (a movie the characters have seen!) and thought “adding a primitive gun barrage to this fight would make it even cooler?” If that is the case, then there is a lot for you to love. There are long stretches of the book that are ticking over technological changes and development, and then there is the sharp shock of war, described in bloody and serious detail. War is definitely hell. Even as Arthur tries to develop primitive gunpowder weapons, he can’t get the Romans to Napoleonic level technology where gunpowder weapons are everything in a battle (the book is heavy on how much things can change and how much materiel can actually be produced; it does a great job in showing the gunpowder weapons as a force multiplier but not the be all of warfare, but Stirling has a great admiration for Romans, and has the characters point out how easily the Romans borrowed technological ideas from rivals and neighbors, and so they take up the gunpowder weapons similarly).

But is the book worth reading? Who is this book for? I think this book is for the kind of people who would read that afterword first, and would be excited to see it in action. It’s a book that, with its afterword in the lead, is making historical arguments about the Roman empire, technology and history, with the fates or even development of the characters as somewhat of a secondary concern. In some ways it is a definite evolution of some of Stirling’s thought given his previous time travel, alternate history books, showing development of his thinking on how things could be changed, but in other ways, there is a bit of a regression on the character front. Arthur and his friends don’t quite stand up to, say, Captain Alston and the islanders of Nantucket in terms of memorability, save for Arthur. 

I personally enjoyed the book, given its focus on alternate history, history, and thinking about a subgenre and the practicalities of time travel, changing history and a reconsideration of the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire. It’s not a book for those who are deeply invested in the characters and their lives and growth and development as much, I am afraid. 

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The Math

Highlights:

• Intensely interesting worldbuilding and piece of life in Pannonia 165 CE as the Americans are dropped into it.

• Deep consideration of the problems of technological change and development and theories of history

• A Baen cover that doesn’t hurt the eyes

• Notably weak on characters, even the lead. 

My rating? That's tough. For me as a writer, it hits a solid 8 out of 10. If the characters had more depth to them, it would be an easy nine. But the characters really drag down the final score a whole point. And if you aren't interested in time travel, the problems of the Roman Empire, et cetera, that 8 score is generous and this book is probably Not For You. (See what I mean?)

Reference: Stirling, S. M.,  To Turn the Tide  [Baen, 2024].

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

Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

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Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

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

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: The Infinite Miles

Meeting your idol can turn out better than expected 

I wonder if the urge to write time travel fiction somehow proceeded from the very act of remembering. Human languages have tenses for the past conditional and moods for the past subjunctive; we have always been able to imagine how things could have gone differently. We all have regrets, and they are painful; the resolution ‘to live life with no regrets’ would not be so common if it weren’t. Today, on the topic of time travel, we shall be discussing Hannah Fergesen’s (who uses they/them pronouns) novel The Infinite Miles, published by Blackstone Publishing in 2023.

The blurbs on this book keep comparing it to Doctor Who; as someone who has never watched Doctor Who, I am not in a position to properly judge that claim (yes, I am going to turn in my nerd card now). What it does have is time travel galore, and a memorably shaped mode of time travel, in this case a spaceship that can assume the form of any vehicle that is germane to its surroundings, such as a car on Earth or a broken-down spaceship on a lawless world where better ships are likely to be stolen (and that isn’t even the most clever of them). But Fergesen goes further than that; they wrote their story to get really, really meta, in a way that feels like a very nerdy twenty-first century take on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Your main character is Harper Starling, a college dropout who, not long before the events of the novel, had a nasty falling out with her oldest friend Peggy. Harper and Peggy bonded over their love of the widely acclaimed science fiction television show Infinite Odyssey, of which they have come to memorize large parts. Harper leaves a promising course of study at Columbia out of the pain that ensued from the breakup, and now lives in misery in a small apartment in New York, until she sees Peggy again. Peggy appears possessed by … something, and Harper doesn’t know what to do. She has to flee, Peggy in hot pursuit, until she stumbles into a series of events that lead her to be thrown back in time to the New York of 1971, not long before Infinite Odyssey premiered on television.

You can tell Fergesen put a lot of research into this book; there’s a way that they immerse you in the grimy reality of New York of 1971 that really gets under your skin, something like if Martin Scorsese was a regular attendee of a science fiction convention. They are attentive to smells and sounds and the differences in the way that people interact with each other, not all of them for the best. You are thrust into this world, with all its differences ripping you out of the twenty-first century, but it’s familiar enough you’re never too lost (it helps, of course, that the seventies are, as of writing, still in living memory). Time travel works don’t often treat the period in the later decades of the twentieth century as a destination for adventures, which gives the whole thing a somewhat jarring undertone that really works. It’s familiar enough to lull you into a false sense of security.

There’s a strong metatextual element here; there is a part of this book set at the world’s first Star Trek fan convention. Much of the book revolves around Harper and Peggy’s love of Infinite Odyssey, what it has meant to each of them, and to both of them collectively, and what they have on some level imposed onto it. This is about what it means to be a creator, and to be a fan, and what the interaction between those two categories mean. But, for everyone except the most shut-in, the media we consume frames how we interact with others, and everything in the plot puts their friendship to the test.

Fergesen is willing to play with the various manifestations of time travel a lot, and to great effect. There is a time when Harper meets the same character at two different times in the past, but two different instances of their travel, which is something that feels logical given the tropes of time travel but I can’t recall ever actually being used. More broadly, there is a willingness to interrogate just how much damage the careless use of time travel can do, be it to the timeline more broadly, or to actual individuals, including oneself. Time travel intersects with immortality in this novel, and it can warp one’s psyche in ways that can be very harmful to everybody.

Another strand of this novel is the idea of escaping. We have all wanted to escape our lives, if only briefly. We have all experienced pain that has brought us to that point. The Infinite Miles asks how possible that truly is, and if it is truly desirable to begin with. Whether you are Harper trying to escape into a television show, or a boy in rural Iowa wanting to go beyond the suffocating atmosphere of his family. In different ways, both characters get to see that, and then they see the consequences of it. Sometimes this is deeply painful, but other times it is awe-inspiring; not wanting to spoil much, but the best scene of this nature is set in a museum. Blended with the very modern concerns is Fergesen’s good grasp on the ingredients of that good old sense of wonder, especially when the novel starts to become a space opera, of sorts (no singing, unfortunately, but the libretto is pretty big).

The Infinite Miles is a book that, by the end, earns the sobriquet of ‘beautiful.’ It is not just the high adventure or the loving paean to being a nerd, but the human factor underlying it. Everyone who reads this will have some sort of loss, some sort of regret, that this novel will tug on. Fergesen takes the universal and clothes it in the garb of science fiction conventions and long hours spent binge-watching genre shows, and the end result is something I found to be very moving. I recommend this book very highly.

Also, the title’s a pun.

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Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Fergesen, Hannah The Infinite Miles [Blackstone, 2023]

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

TV Review: Supacell

The Black Heroes remake you didn’t know you needed—a bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

Superhero movies and television series have saturated theaters and streaming services lately, often making a once magical concept feel ordinary and repetitive. Many viewers still enjoy superhero adventures as a way to provide an escape from the monotony of everyday life. But with the non-stop changes, chaos, and stressors in the ‘real world,’ ironically it is ‘real life’ that seems extraordinary, while superhero tropes may seem cliché. Some may crave something different—something that reflects the reality of the stressors of life rather than providing a traditional, escapist view. Occasionally, we have seen different approaches to the superhero genre, with stories that show a more cynical side of superpowers. Netflix’s Supacell takes a nontraditional approach to the concept of having superpowers by juxtaposing the fantastic into a world filled with real-life stress and chaos. The series follows five unconnected Black Londoners who each suddenly develop a different superhuman power but still have to deal with both the mundane and the overwhelming stressors of their daily lives.

Before we meet the lead characters, the first episode provides a cryptic glimpse of a sinister scheme lurking in the shadows of the city. The series opens in a menagerie-like prison designed with a long hallway of brightly lit rooms, all comfortably furnished with beds, videogames, books, and even piano keyboards. Inside each glass cell is an ordinary-looking person: women, men, mostly young, but all Black. Despite the comfortable-looking interior, it is clear they are distressed and they are prisoners. In contrast to the inmates, we see white people dressed in suits or military gear. Each cell has a glass wall that allows the white captors and the Black captives to see each other. When one of the captives tries to escape, we get a dramatic visual summary of the situation. The symbolism and references to commoditization of human life, as well as the symbolism of external manipulation, are quite overt.

Blissfully unaware of the hidden drama are the five initially unconnected lead characters: Michael, Sabrina, Andre, Rodney, and Tazer. Michael is a busy, working class, package delivery driver who is ready to propose to his social worker girlfriend, Dionne. They are a sweet, hardworking couple, so you know fate is coming for them. Sabrina is a dedicated and overworked young hospital nurse living with her streetwise sister, Sharleen. Andre is a good-hearted but struggling ex-felon and single father trying to keep a steady job and build a relationship with his teenaged son. Rodney is an unapologetic, energetic drug dealer. He is biracial and has a tragic backstory that explains why he is struggling to survive financially. Tazer is a street criminal engaged in various forms of extortion and drug dealing. Tazer is being raised by his beloved grandmother after the disappearance of his mother. At some point, each person’s unique power manifests unexpectedly. Michael can suddenly teleport, time travel, and rewind time; Tazer can become invisible; Sabrina has telekinesis; Andre has superstrength; and Rodney has superspeed and super healing powers. As in the television show Heroes, the lead characters are flawed and struggling and are (for the most part) more annoyed and stressed by the appearance of superpowers than they are excited and motivated. This bit of realism and cynicism is a refreshing change of pace despite the attendant bleakness.

This first season of the show is an origin story of the people who will become a team. Initially, the five main characters are living separate, unconnected, ordinary lives (for better or for worse) when a sudden physical change manifests and each person realizes that something dramatic has occurred. The manifestation of the superpowers is treated as a fearful or amusing aberration which does not immediately change the character’s day to day lives. Supacell is also clearly different from other superhero series because all the superpowered humans are Black. That basic demographic shift already makes the story unique. It is hard to think of another superhero team where all or even most of the characters are Black or people of color. As the story progresses, we discover that the ethnic connection is not an accident. The superpowers are tied to a real-life genetic trait specifically connected to Black people.

The Netflix series has many nostalgic similarities to some classic favorites in the superhero genre. Supacell is most like the first season of Heroes, with its ordinary, flawed, unsuspecting, and unconnected characters. The show also has the gritty edginess of Luke Cage. A primary plotline is Michael’s attempt to change the past to protect Dionne after his future self warns him. The concept is similar to storylines in The Flash. And, in true superhero fashion, each lead character has a loved one who gives them both a motivation and a vulnerability.

In contrast to the thoughtfully created main characters, the ultimate villains and antagonists in the series are, thus far, somewhat two-dimensional. Instead, the focus remains on the five main characters who encompass a range of troubling to morally gray to earnestly good. Michael is the pure heart center, Sabrina is the caretaker, Andre is the strong supporter, Rodney is the quirky comic relief, and Tazer is the violent wild card.

Beyond the journey of the five heroes, the show addresses a range of social issues including predatory healthcare, racism and racial exploitation, sexism and racial stereotyping, economic disparity, and flawed justice systems. None of it is presented as a problem to be solved. Instead, it is a backdrop for the adventures in this brief series. With only six episodes, Supacell is bingeably easy to finish. However, since the season is primarily an origin story (the tale of how the five heroes connected and found their motivation), the overarching plot does not get resolved, and the motivations of the antagonists remain unclear. There is no pressure to find the big answers—at least not yet, and the final episode makes it clear that season one is only the beginning of the journey.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

· Refreshingly cynical approach to the superhero genre
· Vague, two-dimensional villains
· Bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.