Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

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

Film Review: Americana

In which much blood is shed over a shirt

There’s an old joke that after anything bad happens in America, some wisecrack will remark that it’s almost as if the country were built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Americans, like settlers everywhere, like to pretend that the genocide that birthed their country either didn’t happen or was a side note in the heroic tale of manifest destiny, which made possible either a white nationalist ethnostate (for conservatives) or a multicultural land of tolerance (for liberals). The Western genre is in one way or another a reckoning with this, a glorification or a condemnation but always an attempt to make sense of it. Such a formula has been once again modernized by Tony Tost in his 2023 film, released in cinemas in 2025, Americana.

Like many classic westerns this is a crime movie, with desperate people all needing something, for reasons good or ill, all hunting down a single object. The plot could be viewed as a chained heist film, with people chasing other people whilst being chased by still other people. The object in question is a ghost shirt of the Lakota people from the age of the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century, a spiritual rebellion against American rule. It is deeply sacred to the Lakota, a group of whom are prominent in this film, and also worth a lot of money to white people.

This film boasts an impressive cast. Sydney Sweeney is completely unrecognizable as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress who learns of the heist, and has dreams of being a musician in Nashville. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, the ex-girlfriend of one of the men who ends up starting this whole shebang, and the mother of a son, Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who is witness to an act of great violence and is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Zahn McClarnon plays the leader of a Lakota radical group seeking to reclaim the ghost shirt for their people. He has the right combination of intensity and chill to him for such a role, capable of being empathetic to a small child and quoting Karl Marx in his tirades against what white America has done to his nation. Of particular note that McClarnon is himself Hunkpapa Lakota; you can tell he knows the pain his character feels deeply and personally.

There is a character I am deeply conflicted about: Lefty Ledbetter, as played by Paul Walter Hauser (an actor who is having a good summer, between this film, his role as Ed Hocken Jr. in the new Naked Gun, and Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four). He is introduced asking Penny Jo Poplin for her opinion on the speech he will use to propose marriage to the woman he has been seeing for only a few dates. Cards on the table: I am autistic, and I despise cringe comedy. My life is filled with awkward moments that end with people disliking me; I find humor based on such situations to be viscerally unpleasant. Maybe he’s just socially awkward, but I can’t help but read his character as something of a caricature, and to be particularly caustic, a caricature of autistic people. I cannot know if Tony Tost meant him that way, but several jokes involving him rankled me. To Tost’s credit, he improves markedly as the film goes on and you get a better sense of his humanity, and a scene near the end is legitimately heart-rending.

White people have often treated the American West, comparatively less dense than the East and also the cities on the West Coast, as sort of a blank slate, an opportunity to build whatever they want. Such is the Christian cult featured in the film’s third act, where Mandy is revealed to have grown up. The women are silent in the presence of men, and all wear long dresses. They cannot wear makeup, and they cannot have phones. They are ruled with an iron fist by Hiram Starr, Mandy’s father, played with appropriate menace by Christopher Kriesa. But even so, you get the feeling that he and the other men in this bigoted little hovel in Wyoming are not strong, not virile, not the masters of their fate. This whole microcosm of Christian Nationalist patriarchy ends up looking like a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid ceasing to be emotionally stunted, and they are willing to make the lives of women living hell so they can continue to play god. When the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, you will cheer.

I also appreciated the way that the film portrayed this Lakota radical group. They are neither simple savages of the classic Western film, nor are they blinkered radicals along the lines of the namesake group in The Baader Meinhof Complex (a stunning film from 2008 about leftist radicals in 1970s West Germany). And neither are they cuddly caricatures, positive representations of nonwhite peoples with no flaws, no rough edges - and no personalities. These are rugged, rough men who deeply love their people, and are willing to kill for it (and they are quite good at killing for it). They came off to me as very realistic, very believable revolutionaries, if only on a small scale. They know that revolution is not a dinner party, to quote Mao Zedong. And, when confronted with the white world with all its maddening misunderstandings of their culture, they can be both very kind and very cold (such as one piercing scene at the end - you both feel that what McClarnon’s character does is wrong, but you also understand deeply why he did what he did).

The Lakota characters, McClarnon’s in particular, are also great foils for Cal Starr, the white child who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, for those unaware, was the nineteenth century war leader of the Lakota people who led his nation’s war of survival against the United States. He is a perfect personification of how settler colonies try to indigenize themselves, to claim a historic connection with the land they occupy that they simply do not have, not unlike the white men in faux indigenous garb who threw British tea into Boston Harbor at the eve of the Revolution. This child, submerged in the currents of history that he cannot comprehend due to his youth, has the fortune of coming across actual Lakota, and the film milks this peculiar juxtaposition for all it is worth. But he is not merely a comic character; he goes through a lot of pain in this violence, and by the end you just want to hug him.

Americana is a panoramic view of the contemporary American West, with all the cruelties that simmer beneath its bucolic, utopian presentation. This is a film about how the past is never past, and how it can come shooting into the present with all the force of a speeding bullet. There is a violence here that erupts into the lives of the characters very suddenly and without remorse - which is not at all unlike the violence that created the American West as we know it. The end result is a thrilling, somewhat pulpy crime drama that is both great fun and deeply thought-provoking.

--

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

First Contact: Westworld

It's not so fun anymore when the NPCs start getting ideas of their own, is it?

Michael Crichton's Westworld feels like a first draft of his later Jurassic Park: a high-tech amusement park where precisely the thing that anyone can predict will go wrong ends up going wrong. I find it amusing that Westworld never bothers to explain why the robots start murdering people; it appears we've somehow always assumed that was the (natural?) order of things. To paraphrase Jurassic Park: Man creates robots, man destroys robots, man creates robots, man destroys robots… then robots destroy man. The main difference between these two stories of punishment for hubris is that, while Jurassic Park frames itself as a man-versus-nature conflict, Westworld is all human.

In the same way that man-versus-nature can be criticized on the basis that humanity is not a thing separate from nature, I find the man-versus-technology lens inadequate because it's a false dichotomy. Technology is human—it's the human trait par excellence. What lies underneath man-versus-technology stories is really a clash between human interests. The trope of robot liberation is just an extension of human liberation to include other beings with comparable sapience, which brings robot uprisings into the long tradition of slave uprisings.

The curious thing about Westworld is that we never hear the robots make their case. They just suddenly glitch one day and start killing people. Westworld doesn't join in the political discussion about the ethics of electronic slaves. It does something less common, but no less interesting: it explores the space that pretend play creates for people to let themselves be their worst selves. Westworld was released in theaters in 1973, just one year before the publication of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. In a way, Westworld anticipated the questions that would eventually be raised by LARPing, but those questions had already been addressed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1965 book Rabelais and His World.

Bakhtin was interested in the carnival as a mode of literature, but also as a mode of life in which the conventional rules of society are suspended and transgression is celebrated. This is the scenario where LARPing thrives. The park in Westworld is a carnival for the super-rich to gleefully skewer strangers and abuse sex workers. This sociopathic impulse hasn't disappeared from the roleplaying experience; most notably, N. K. Jemisin has written about the narrative function of orcs in fantasy, which is to provide a legitimate target for violence:

Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.

Robots provide the same function in the carnival of Westworld. And here we meet another literary concept from Bakhtin: the grotesque body, which refers to the use of physical assault as an aesthetic experience. The fun that people seek in Westworld is the fun of inflicting all forms of violence on human-looking bodies that aren't attached to human rights. It's a closed space where violence is freed from consequence.

Maybe this is the reason why Westworld doesn't make its robots monologue to argue for their side: the retaliation they bring upon humans is the same violence without consequence. The act itself is the argument. It forces us to ask ourselves who we become when we engage in pretend play for the express purpose of simulating atrocities. Why on Earth should it be enjoyable to kill massive numbers of dragons/zombies/aliens/orcs/robots? And if we manage to bypass our moral intuitions and bring ourselves to declare it enjoyable, Westworld presses on, why should we find it horrifying when those same dragons/zombies/aliens/orcs/robots do it to us?

Real life has caught up to the fiction: all the arcane buzzwords that try to describe techbros' obsession with female-coded AI come down to having woman-shaped objects they don't have to feel empathy for.

[Mohammad Talha] Saray said his AI avatar is cheaper, more flexible and doesn’t talk back.

It has become a common talking point that the dystopian genre doesn't invent fictional forms of oppression; it merely takes the oppression that already exists in the world's periphery and inflicts it on the privileged. Westworld employs a similar device when it turns the game of violence without consequence on its head and makes humans the target. It's not a movie about the danger of robots rebelling; it's a movie about the danger that humans pose when they invent a category of not-humans that it's always OK to mistreat.

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

Review: Threading the Needle

Plenty of gunslingers on the final frontier

The merger of the Western and of science fiction is a trope of the genre itself (I have talked about this in a previous review). The vast frontier, indeed the final frontier (until we figure out how to travel to other universes), lends itself well to a life of danger and a society where law is severely limited and order a vanishing blur half the time. It is a place where the all-consuming forces of high modernism hit a bump in the road, and all sorts of characters can do all sorts of things outside the eyes of those who purport to be their betters. It has been in films, such as parts of Star Wars, and video games, such as StarCraft (a theme from Wings of Liberty gets the feel of the broader genre well I think). Today, we will be discussing a new entry in this subgenre, Threading the Needle by Monalista Foster, to be published on the fifth of December 2023 by Baen Books.

What strikes me about Threading the Needle, and which sets it apart from its fellow works in the genre, is that it confines its action to one planet; it’s like a Star Wars movie or show that confines itself to the shady underworld of Tatooine (and is not tempted to be a half-season of The Mandalorian in the process). Science fiction often uses the trope where every planet is a single biome, as implausible as that is, and can end up making these massive balls of rock and metal feel much smaller than they truly are. (in Star Wars, I remember Timothy Zahn having a good sense of how big a planet is). Here, instead, Foster shows a variety of environments on a single planet, with different towns with different people in them, some filthily rich and some desperately poor. This narrative choice, oddly enough, makes things feel larger; a planet feels like a planet, and the long journeys feel properly long. The use of recognizable forms of transportation, such as horses and carts (mostly) and, in one interesting case, a steamboat, both feels plausible (like the CoDominium works of Jerry Pournelle, where a single tank could decide the fate of a planet - perhaps not coincidentally, from the same publisher) and clearly roots the work in its ancestors.

Foster mixes things up a bit by adding some Japanese influence to the world she has made. There is mention of martial arts, and there are a number of scenes set in big Japanese-style bathhouses. It bears remembering that the Western genre has a long and fruitful exchange with Samurai fiction out of Japan. The end result feels like very good fusion cuisine; familiar enough to ground you, but new enough to be interesting.

Foster has created one of the most intriguing characters I have seen in a while in science fiction, Talia Merritt, otherwise known as Death’s Handmaiden (a title, I think, may well have made a better title for the book - maybe the next in the series?), a bounty hunter who is trying to get a new start on a new frontier world. But, of course, she has to be tangled up in a web of deceits, half-truths, and ambiguities when she is called in to take out an old comrade of hers. She refuses, knowing the value of friendships, and this act of kindness makes her a number of deadly enemies. She has enough snark to be funny without compromising the tone, and with enough heart to know right from wrong. I don’t know if my description of her is good, or makes her seem unique enough, but I enjoyed her.

One element of Talia’s past makes her stand out from many protagonists of space opera stories haunted by their pasts: in the bloody violence she once made her living with, she lost her right arm, and has to live with a cybernetic arm that mostly - mostly - works. There’s a running theme here of disability, of how this world, and doubtlessly others will, assume that people are able-bodied and in possession of all their limbs, and have those limbs functioning. Talia is someone who has lived her life by the sword, and has not yet died by the sword but has lost a limb to it, and this weighs on her, especially in a place where she went a long way to start anew. To use very modern terminology, her level of spoons to deal with this, when she has so much on her plate already, fluctuates from day to day. As someone with a disability (although a communications disability, autism specifically), I found much of what she wrote to be relatable. Foster clearly understands the travails of such an injury, and it makes this book stand out where it may well not have.

The plotting of this book reminded me of Timothy Zahn or Blake Crouch, with all sorts of twists and turns and other such events happening every which way. Foster is very good at it. She takes on a lot, and she succeeds in threading the needle (pun not intended but very much enjoyed), sewing them all into an engrossing narrative. She paces her story well, never letting it get off the rails, never letting it become dull.

As a history buff, there are parts of this book that made me somewhat uncomfortable, although they are more due to the tropes Foster plays with, and their historical background, than anything she intentionally did. There is no indigenous population on this planet, no great clash of cultures akin to what happened in our world, although there is plenty of conflict between the different social classes of settlers. Nor is there any population comparable to African-Americans, or Mexican-Americans. You could argue the Japanese influence covers the Asian presence in the Old West. I still couldn’t help but get the feeling that she was uncritically accepting of old tropes of the West, of steel-jawed white people facing off a savage, unforgiving, barren wasteland. As someone familiar with how utterly nasty the doctrine of terra nullius gets, it was in the back of my mind the entire time. Her introduction mentions the influence of a John Wayne film on this book, and it emulates that era of fiction for better and for worse. I feel like this could have been more sensitive, and it would also have made a more interesting world.

Threading the Needle is fun. Pure and simple fun. It adds to that fun a fully-developed world that you can imagine as being our future when we’ve finally reached the stars, a grotty future that feels properly lived in. It adds to this an interesting element of disability as well as some fresher cultural influences, and it keeps the mix an engaging one from beginning to end. I enjoyed it.

--

The Math

Highlights: the main character and how she related to her disability 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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

Star Wars Subjectivities: The Mandalorian

Lone Wolf and Cub

It's fair to say that The Mandalorian changed how we think of Star Wars. Sure, the franchise long ago branched out from films to other media (novels, comics, games, etc.) but for whatever reason it never really stuck as a television franchise. The Mandalorian showed us that you could take the HBO "prestige television" model and repurpose it to tell stories within a popular cinematic universe. And do it well. 

Shifting from film to the television format allows storytellers to do two things simultaneously: (1) narrow the scope of conflict to tell "smaller" stories; and (2) lengthen the narrative timeline for telling those stories. Turns out we like seeing what the (more) regular folks are up to and really like getting to know the characters in more depth. 

Mando succeeds for a few reasons. First, the setting. Star Wars is many things: space opera, galactic fantasy, sci-fi romance and so forth. Mando leans into another element: Star Wars as space spaghetti Western. The films create a clear delineation between the metropole (Core Worlds) and periphery (Outer Rim). The Outer Rim is an institutionally weak place, with many planets run by gangsters who have cut deals with the Empire. The Empire, for that matter, is present but not ever-present. 

After the destruction of the second Death Star, authority falls to the New Republic - which is less violent and oppressive than its predecessor, but isn't more present. And, as it happens, Imperial remnants have largely decamped to the Outer Rim to reorganize as an insurgency. It is here that we meet the eponymous Mandalorian, a bounty hunter named Din Djarin who is part of a zealot cult within the Mandalorian diaspora. 

Din Djarin is hired by Imperial agents to retrieve an asset, which he discovers is a Force-sensitive child from the same species as Yoda. During the retrieval, the Child saves Din Darin's life. Once he gets a sense of why the Empire wants him, given this debt and a growing bond with the Child, Din Djarin reneges on his contract and becomes himself a wanted man. 

Over the course of three seasons, The Mandalorian tells the story of Din Darin's fight to protect the Child and, ultimately, to raise him as his own. His war against the Empire is not one fought for the Greater Good or The Cause, but rather one fought to save his adopted child and fulfill his obligations, first as a life debt holder and then as a father. This is fundamentally at odds with the Star Wars cinematic framework, where all is subordinated to a zero-sum war between light and darkness. 

***

It's fair to say that The Mandalorian is the only Disney franchise that has really resonated with me on a human level. It's not the only one I like: I appreciate the hardboiled political narrative in Andor, the grim military drama of Rogue One and the elegant visuality of Ahsoka. All are very good, and good precisely because they tell different stories, in different ways, from the central narrative of the installment films. But The Mandalorian is special to me for a few distinct reasons:

A "Lived In" World

Space opera films typically portray the future in gleaming whites and chromes. When attempts are made to depict "normal" living conditions, it either ends up looking sterile or just super fake and low budget, a la Star Trek: TNG. The exception is Star Wars: A New Hope. Tatooine is a junk pile of a planet, where life is tough and most things are jerry-rigged from multiple pieces of scrap. The Mandalorian puts us right back in this part of the Star Wars world - even the stormtroopers look worse for wear. 

It also does a good job of capturing the moment in time when these events take place. The Empire is gone and, for many, it's good riddance - one early episode even shows stormtrooper heads on pikes. But remnants of the Empire remain active and malign. We get the sense that the Outer Rim isn't much changed from the Imperial days; if anything, institutional power is more thin than it was before. 

A Focus on (Non-Romantic) Relationships

We are collectively obsessed with "shipping" characters, which in turn is a reflection of how films and television programs collectively center romantic relationships. But most meaningful relationships in any given person's life are not romantic in nature: familial ties, friendship ties, neighborly ties, collegial ties, etc. 

The Mandalorian is ultimately about the relationship between a father and his adopted child, about the father's relationship to the community he is a part of and the various bonds of friendship they forge along their adventures. As with the Original Trilogy, a central theme of The Mandalorian is the importance of loyalty and dedication to the people who love you, that you can do no better than to do right by them and that, ultimately, the "winners" will be those who show the greatest capacity to love (platonically). 

What's more is this never feels corny or overwrought. Nothing, after all, is more cringe than stories about the power of friendship that don't first establish why we should give a shit about these particular friends.   

The Right Kind of Anti-Hero

Anti-Hero stories are common these days, so common in fact that many iterations are now as cliche as the rote heroism they purport to deconstruct. The Mandalorian, on the other hand, presents the right kind of anti-hero, at least for me. Din Djarin is a reluctant hero who doesn't really want to be involved in any Galactic entanglements - but is drawn in against his will and better judgement. This happens because he has a strong code of ethics and even stronger bonds of loyalty. He is fundamentally likable, but he is not a "white knight" like Luke Skywalker. 

But let me tell you something - do not piss this guy off. Many of the most satisfying scenes in The Mandalorian involve Din Djarin exacting revenge on various malign forces. It's almost better when you know going in that the antagonists stand no chance. And it's doing it 100% because these fools will not stop messing with his kid. 

Superb Guest Appearances

There are so many memorable characters, from villains like Werner Herzog's Client and Giancarlo Esposito's Moff Gideon to companions and allies like Taika Waititi's IG-11, Katee Sackhof's Bo-Katan Kryze and Bill Burr's ex-Imperial Migs Mayfeld. Burr in particular shines, giving what may be the performance of the entire series for Season 2's denouement. 

General Vibes

As I've now argued in several reviews and roundtables, Star Wars is at its best when it projects a certain aesthetic and mood - less about what is happening and more about how it looks and feels when things are happening. The Force Awakens showed us that vibes can only take you so far, but the Prequels taught us that Star Wars with the wrong vibes is just fundamentally not good. The Mandalorian nails the Star Wars vibes perfectly. 

At the end of the day, The Mandalorian is exactly what I want from a new Star Wars story. It nails the mood and vibes while telling a different kind of story in a different way. It is the complete opposite of the amateurish Prequels or the tired, unimaginative Sequel films. It is, in a word, superb. 

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

 

The Long Look Back: Star Wars and Superheroes

It has been ten years since Disney acquired the Star Wars galaxy and our writers here weighed in on what we thought this might mean for fans, and ten years since I wrote what remains one of my favorite essays for Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, From Spurs to Spandex: Why Westerns Died and Superheroes Fly. I’ve been thinking a lot about those two things recently, because literally everywhere I go, I am confronted by a non-stop barrage of Star Wars and superheroes.

Every time I turn on the television, every time I pass a bus stop, or a bus passes me, or I pass a billboard, or I pick my kids up from school. It has become part of the noise of every day.

There was a time – ten years ago, as it happens – when this wasn’t the case. Back then, I and other NoaF writers offered some theories of what might be coming down the pike and speculated about some of the whys and wherefores. I thought it might be interesting to look back at those perspectives and predictions from today’s vantage point.

Let us go then, you and I...

The Rise of Streaming

Right off the bat, two statements I made in the Star Wars and Superheroes posts collide because of the ways in which streaming services have totally redefined the media landscape. The transformation has been seismic, and not one I saw coming or I think any of us really could have predicted.

First, regarding the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm, I worried about the impact it would have on limiting voices and stories, because for many years the number of films being released to theaters had been (and continues) shrinking. In November of 2012, I wrote:

What we're looking at is a two-year cycle of 12 films where 2 Marvels, 2 Pixars, 1 Disney Animation, 1-2 Tim Burtons, and now a STAR WARS are already taking up over half of the slate and about a billion dollars in budgeted production costs. What this move means overall is that fewer films will be made, there will be fewer surprises, and fewer chances for anyone to ever again blow up the cinematic landscape like Lucas did with the original STAR WARS.

Second, in the Westerns post, I argued that superhero films would move beyond the simple “household name hero origin story+sequel+sequel” pattern, to include different kinds of stories at difference scales. I wrote:

I do not believe it [the theatrical film market] can become saturated [with superhero content] in any real sense, but expectations have to be adjusted. Not every movie with a cape or a costume will make $100 million.

I wrote that in early 2013, surveying a media landscape in which movie studios were consolidating, so there were fewer and fewer buyers for and producers of feature films. Netflix existed, but to put it in context, the first episodes of House of Cards had just premiered. The success or failure of Netflix’s move into original programming was still an open question. Orange is the New Black hadn’t premiered yet, and Breaking Bad had yet to air the second half of its final season. Produced by AMC but licensed to Netflix, the show’s audience swelled through 2013 in anticipation of the final episodes thanks to people being able to binge the previous seasons on Netflix. But this was, crucially, still a broadcast show.

I argued then that Breaking Bad was the show of our time, and I think that holds up because I believe it was the transformative show that paved the way for the rise of streaming services producing original content. Contemporary reporting suggested as much, but even so, the sheer volume of original streaming programming is a whole other thing entirely. From the vantage point of 2012/2013, there was simply no way to anticipate that within the decade Disney+ a) would exist and b) would be cranking out more hours of Star Wars content per month than the total runtime of all the films in the franchise up to that point.

I believe it is fair to say that, thanks to the rise of streaming services and the continuing trends in theatrical distribution, the media landscape has now, in fact, become saturated with superheroes. But this speaks to the central thesis of my Westerns vs. Superheroes piece – in the 1950s, Westerns saturated the (far smaller) media landscape. Myriad TV shows geared toward kids, families, and adult audiences dominated the airwaves, and the list of Western films produced in the 1950s is so extensive that Wikipedia breaks it up into 1950-1954 and 1955-1959 . The Western occupied a massive domain in the American zeitgeist, which now has been replaced by superhero narratives.

An Ever-Expanding Palette, New Kinds of Stories

As I argued in 2013, both genres are concerned, at their core, with the intersection of violence and power. At that time, superhero franchises such as X-Men, Batman, Spider-Man, and the early Marvel films were considered reliable safe bets. I had a little skin in the game in the late-2000s, working as a writer developing a couple of original superhero projects. I and the producers I was working with heard consistently that nothing that wasn’t from existing IP would fly, and even the track-record of films from established characters with name recognition was spotty (Green Hornet, Green Lantern, Ghost Rider, etc). But I believed that the types of stories we were seeing would have to broaden and evolve. I wrote:

We can look at the incredible breadth of stories Westerns provided as a possible indicator of things to come. Tables were turned, where we began to see antiheroes and were asked to invest in the story from the "bad guy's" perspective, we saw stories of smaller lives touched by much larger struggles playing out around them, allegories for cultural and religious struggles, broken people forced into the hero mold and asked to do something beyond themselves, fringe voices telling familiar stories in entirely different ways, comedies, etc.

But I didn’t anticipate that, when we saw that evolution in the superhero realm, we’d be seeing it through the eyes of established characters. I believed that film and TV creators would gain the freedom to invent their own characters to tell stories of different sizes and with different perspectives. But with a few exceptions, particular in kids’ programming, IP remains king of the mountain in this regard. That said, hats off to the creators that have been able to make it work, and tell a huge variety of stories while playing in somebody else’s sandbox.

Marvel’s early Netflix run with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage used superhero characters to weave a neo-noir about the impact of sexual violence and a neo-blaxploitation series about local corruption, respectively – a far cry from the “saving the world” framing of many of the big-screen offerings even from the same universe. More recent series such as WandaVision and Hawkeye continued to get more personal, more emotionally complex, and less spectacle-centric. Meanwhile, the MCU theatrical offerings, especially in the Thor series, have become broader, funnier, and more intergalactic in scope. And films like The New Mutants, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and Werewolf by Night have branched out into horror territory.

And that’s just Marvel. Amazon brought us The Boys, Netflix The Umbrella Academy, HBO Max continues to roll out content ranging from the blockbuster (Zack Snyder’s Justice League) to adult animation (Harley Quinn), and whatever DC is doing in theaters (a supervillain in a return to the 70s paranoid thriller? Ok, I guess.) continues to not interest me. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies remains DC’s best theatrical film, and you can fight me I don’t even care. So at this point, we have essentially seen the superhero genre iterate into every other genre we’re familiar with. Just like the Westerns did so many decades ago.

It’s important to make the same distinction I made ten years ago, which is that I’m specifically talking about superheroes, not the more nebulous “comic book adaptation.” Heartstoppers is a comic book adaptation. The Walking Dead is a comic book adaptation. That’s not what we’re talking about here. But you don’t need me to tell you that superheroes have become ubiquitous.

The question that lingers is why? Why now? Why with this intensity? Why with this ubiquity? And, I suppose, will it be with us forever?

Magical Thinking

In 2013, I argued that superhero stories supplanted Westerns because of a shift in perception among Americans about what the “American Dream” meant, and how it operated. I stand by this, and I think the titanic events of the last ten years bear this out. I wrote then:

Hard work doesn't pay off like it used to. Many of the hardest working people in this country can barely keep a roof over their heads, and people who have played by the rules and "done everything right" can find themselves out of work for years and unable to repay medical or student loan debts.

Superheroes tend to have a couple of things in common: they exist in a primarily urban landscape, and they believe in magic. Just like their audiences. As a culture, we are far more likely to believe in magic today than in hard work, and not without reason.

The former president of the United States played a successful businessman on TV, and then got elected to run the country. No experience necessary...just the irrational belief that it would all work out. Magical thinking. 1 in 5 Americans believes a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles runs the government. One in five! Even though their guy was in charge of the government! Observation tells me that over the last decade, there has been a marked rise in out-in-the-open magical thinking and a shift by millions of Americans away from evidence-based evaluation of just…facts. Of basic, discernible truths. 

It’s hard to avoid seeing the overlap between, say, Hydra’s role in the MCU and the ways in which an increasing number of Americans think the real world actually operates. It’s also interesting to think about the soul-searching at the heart of the Steve Rogers-Tony Stark dispute over the Sokovia Accords attempting to rein in the impact of superheroes and limit their destructive impacts as an allegory for corporate responsibility in an age of unparalleled corporate consolidation, reach, and impact. And The Boys seems increasingly transparent about its critique of the role of actual law enforcement in this country.

Like many of us, I feel helpless and insufficient to address so much of what is going on in the world. And the more I read, the more I realize that there are vast, interconnected systems undergirding every aspect of our daily life – systems that seem overwhelmingly formidable. There is something resonant in seeing fictionalized versions of those frameworks and something comforting in the idea that there could be superfolks who could just punch it all into oblivion. And there is something in it for the mega-corporations producing all of this content to keep us from looking behind the actual curtain. And it is at least in the realm of possibility that this inundation encourages us to believe in fantastic, impossible scenarios and frameworks, rather than examining the banal, actual, uncomfortable forces that are resulting in widening inequalities, loss of opportunities, and a general decay in the social fabric, writ large. I’m veering into the territory of whether or not violent media desensitizes individuals to actual violence, I know.

But the point is that the types of narratives we see in contemporary superhero stories, even in their increasing breadth, speak to us in our current complexity. Harley Quinn being an animated show for adults that deals with LGBTQ+ themes and situations is a great example. Can you fathom DC and Warner Media signing off on such a thing in 2013?!? The ubiquity and familiarity of these superhero characters create opportunities for storytellers and for audiences, and I don’t believe we’ll see anything but further proliferation of superhero stories, TV shows, and films for…a long, long while.

What’s Next?

Now is where I get to prognosticate a little more freely. This is just wild speculation, but if you were to ask me what comes next, as the popularity of superheroes inevitably wanes, somewhere far down the road? Again, wild speculation, but…

I’m kidding. I have no idea.

But I will say that I think one thing we are standing on the cusp of in this moment is an explosion of Star Wars content on a scale that is hard to fathom. Is it possible that someday the already-everywhere Star Wars might become even more ubiquitous? I’d say it’s a certainty. I’d like to shout out some of the predictions fellow NoaF writers made in 2012 when Disney acquired Lucasfilm.

The G opined:

Disney might be able to do some good here: they’ve done a decent job with Marvel (so far), and given that the STAR WARS franchise is riding a decade-and-a-half long waterslide to the gutter, it won’t take much at this point to right the ship. Mixed-metaphors aside, all it will take is putting the right people on the project. What’s Lawrence Kasdan up to these days?

As it happens, Lawrence Kasdan was about to be up to writing The Force Awakens. Along those lines, Molly wrote:

[T]his is all about who will lead up the project, both directing (my votes go to J.J. Abrams, Jon Favreau, or Christopher Nolan) – but more importantly, the writing.

Two out of three directors isn’t bad! J.J. was also Disney’s first choice, and Favreau wound up bringing us The Mandalorian. But Brad worried about certain possibilities, including one that definitely came to pass:

I say we all just get down on our knees and pray to God Almighty that they don’t stick Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo for #7! After Indy 4 you know he’ll do it if asked.

But Mike really took the crown, with this quite prescient take:

My take is that Disney will take the brilliant world that Lucas created and treat it with care. Under the watchful eye of Disney I could see more of a Star Wars presence in its theme parks and could see it expanding the successful Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. Anyone who has been watching the Clone Wars knows that the Star Wars franchise has a lot of quality stories to be told. I feel that removing Lucas from the picture may really open the creative envelope on a world ripe with opportunity.

Here we are ten years on, and I believe the ball that Mike predicted Disney would start rolling is finally getting up to speed. Many years ago, I remember Craig Mazin saying on the Scriptnotes podcast that when you factor in the Expanded Universe, Star Wars was the closest thing to a religion human beings had created in the last thousand years. The movies were just a sliver of the entire, immense Star Wars canon, but those novels and comics and other media never had the same blanket mass-market exposure the films did. Now Disney has essentially all the money in the world to put behind creating a brand new Star Wars universe, and they’re going to use Disney+ to bring all of it directly into our homes.

What about the metaverse, you may ask? Facebook and Microsoft are dumping billions of dollars into it. Might that revolutionize the entertainment landscape again in the coming years?

Nah. People don’t like to put shit on their faces. You heard it here first, folks!

Check back in 2032 for the latest.

Posted by Vance K – co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Emmy Award-winning producer and director, and multi-instrumentalist in different musical thingies

Nanoreviews: The Annual Migration of Clouds, Advanced Triggernometry, Black Water Sister

The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

This is Premee Mohamed's third (!) published novella of the year, and what's more it's the second, after These Lifeless Things, to feature universities after an apocalyptic event. But other than featuring fallen-apart worlds and characters who value higher learning, these are very distinct novellas, and the individual character voice of Reid (except... well) in The Annual Migration of Clouds gives it a clear identity of its own.

The apocalypse here isn't a single event - at least, not as its been told to Reid, who was born long after it happened - but a slow collapse of society through a combination of infrastructure loss and environmental catastrophe. To make things worse, a parasite known as Cad has become endemic in humans, manifesting as strange patterns on their skin and, in its early stages, as behaviour alterations which aim to preserve both the human and the parasite, overriding free will and risk-taking behaviour in the process. (Its advanced stages are much worse). Reid and her mother both have Cad, and both live in a small, declining self-sufficient community. When Reid receives an acceptance letter from a university, it represents an utterly improbable escape from her life, but it also means leaving behind her mother, who is increasingly unable to cope alone, and a community that won't understand the selfishness of her decision. And it means grappling with her relationship with Cad, and the way it does and doesn't exert control over her and the choices she makes for survival.

The Annual Migration of Clouds is a portrayal of someone trying to think big in a world that has shrunk to the point where that's barely possible: Reid's narration is full of half-remembered facts and stories that we recognise but she has no way of seeking more information on, or even retaining the knowledge she has. Reid's closest allies - other than her childhood friend Henryk, with whom she has an almost-romance that feels all too real - are an aging couple who still remember life before the collapse, but whose mortality is all-too-evident in all their scenes. And, as the book's first few chapters progress without any movement to the university (Reid has a deadline to make if she's going to get there on time, adding some urgency to her decision) it becomes clear that its nature is also going to be left uncertain. We, like the community Reid leaves behind, are left to decide for ourselves just how impossible it is that a chronically ill young woman from a hand-to-mouth existence could be called to a better life for altruistic reasons. A gorgeously crafted, thoughtful and layered story, well worth being one of the three Premee Mohamed novellas you read this year.

Rating: 9/10

Advanced Triggernometry by Stark Holborn

Like its predecessor, Advanced Triggernometry delivers a novella-sized dose of somewhat-alt-historical Western fun, in a world where all forms of advanced mathematics are illegal and mathematicians are outlaws, living on the edge of society. We once again follow Malago Browne and a cast of new and returning friends (including Pierre de Fermat), after the events of her last job (i.e. the first novella) convinced Malago to try going straight. Of course, the quiet life doesn't last, and when three women from a nearby town pull her in for One Last Job, Malago brings together a team of protractor-slinging mathematicians to train up and protect the town from a corrupt sheriff, in the process setting herself up for much higher political stakes than expected.

Once again, this is a story that really leans into its action tropes. We get a team of ragtag misfits (seven of them, of course), including mathematicians of colour like 19th Century Black professor Charles L. Reason, and Chinese astronomer Wang Zhenyi - welcome additions given that both the Western genre and the history of science are notoriously whitewashed. We also get Archimedes as a weird old man propping up a bar, which is an absolute delight. There's the book equivalent of a training montage, as our intrepid antiheroes teach the townsfolk which way to hold a gun, and it all builds up to a climactic battle that delivers  "our underdog heroes have run out of time to prepare and we're not sure how exactly they'll pull this off, but it'll probably be fine" tension to excellent effect. And, of course, there's plenty more action which turns mathematics from a theoretical science into a dangerous combat art. Impossible angles, careful probabilities and feats of engineering are all par for the course when you're a Mathmo in this world. It all adds up to an immensely readable action novella that absolutely delivers what it promises.

Rating: 7/10

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Jess is in a challenging situation. After a family illness and its financial impact, she's joined her parents their move from the USA - where she's lived most of her life - to their native Malaysia, to stay with her father's extended family while they get back on their feet and she, hopefully, figures out what she's going to do now that she's graduated and how she's going to continue her relationship with her long term girlfriend when her parents don't yet know she's a lesbian. To top it all off, her dead grandmother has adopted her as a spirit medium, and her ability to take over Jess' body and pilot it without her consent means that she can threaten Jess if she doesn't go along with her scheme to halt a development that threatens the temple of a very particular Goddess.

Sean has already covered much of what makes Black Water Sister excellent, especially when it comes to characterisation. There's a mix of dryness, candour and absurdity to a lot of the characters' dialogue that makes their interactions highly entertaining, even when we can feel Jess cringe (especially at some of the things her mother and Ah Ma come out with). What makes the characterisation even better is the way that Jess' relationships evolve over the course of the book. Ah Ma's initial tactic is to isolate Jess, and as an American-raised twenty-something she takes a long time to process this supernatural presence in her life and even longer worrying about her family's potential reactions. But this is a Malaysian story, not an American one, and once Jess is ready to seek out allies, they need no convincing that the supernatural is real. The way Jess' haunting changes her understanding of her family and brings her into the orbit of new connections transforms Black Water Sister from an uncomfortably claustrophobic story to one that matches spooky, god-battling adventure with a family-driven coming of age story (and oh, how I love a twenty-something coming of age story. You're never too old to come of age, nor can you come of age too many times!). If you've only experienced Zen Cho's regency fantasy, the same wit and warmth will carry you through into this new setting. Highly recommended.

Rating: 8/10

Posted by: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy