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.

TV Review: Starfleet Academy

A more than worthy successor to Discovery, somewhat undercut by mixed messaging

Starfleet Academy is proof that a six-decade-old ongoing story can still find ways to feel fresh if it dares try the unusual. Prodigy already showed how the same elevated ideals that sustain the Federation can be adapted for child protagonists, and Lower Decks brought much-needed levity to the franchise’s sometimes suffocating self-importance. The newest iteration, set in the 3000s after the United Federation of Planets has been broken apart and reforged, blends the thrill of space adventure with the angst of teen drama. But the most unusual aspect of Starfleet Academy isn’t even the soap opera side of it; it’s that, extremely rarely for a Star Trek series, it’s driven more by the internal exploration of characters than by clever plot-solving. So I think it may be a worthwhile exercise to analyze the show in the same manner: by focusing on the characters.

Caleb. The show’s protagonist had a childhood traumatized by the Federation, after his mother was sentenced way too harshly for having been at worst an accessory to murder. This defining incident shapes all his relationships: he’s learned to expect to end up alone, so he’s reluctant to bond. This is made evident from the big gestures, like the way he lashes out at his new friends each time they get too close, to the small ones, like his habit of hoarding food (which is a real behavior in children who were abandoned). This issue gives him both a clear direction and a weakness: he has a mission to find his mother, but everything else is secondary to it, so he doesn’t allow himself to experience life. He can’t commit to his girlfriend because he feels too emotionally exposed with her (it doesn’t help that she’s a literal mind-reader), and he can’t participate in a Klingon bonding ritual because he’s still waiting for the family he lost. This is interesting characterization, but it gets resolved too neatly by the end of the season.

Genesis. Our favorite obsessive overachiever has a simpler but harder drama to deal with: as the daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she enters the Academy having already a mountain of second-hand expectations dumped onto her. She’s definitely talented, as well as a quick learner and a natural leader, but she can’t bring herself to believing that her successes are her own, even after she’s proven multiple times that she can improvise resourcefully, notice the details that matter in a moment of urgency and somehow always know the right thing to say to comfort a friend. That’s her tragedy: she treats everyone with much more care and understanding than she’s willing to give to herself.

Darem. This one is fascinating to watch evolve. We first meet him as an arrogant child of aristocrats (we eventually learn he’s literally engaged to a princess), used to being the center of attention and not above hurting others to get his way; over the course of the season, he realizes he doesn’t need to keep putting up an image of flawlessness for parents who don’t even care enough to answer his calls. This frees him to start searching for who he is in reality, and it turns out he’s a loyal friend with a bottomless capacity for empathy—that is, unless you’re dating his crush, in which case he can still be a pain to deal with. His newfound willingness to make fun of himself still needs more practice.

SAM. What can I say about this bubbling avalanche of positivity, our beloved Queen Sam Samallina of Samonita? On one hand, she has an unquenchable thirst for life, an earnest curiosity for a universe she can’t get enough of. On the other hand, she has an entire species’ fate in her hands, being an envoy from sentient holograms with the assignment to study us squishy organic beings and report on whether we’re still a danger to artificial lifeforms. That’s a massive responsibility for someone only four months old, which comes back to bite when she suddenly has to deal with violent trauma without having the emotional resources that come from actually having lived. In a beautiful case of metaphor turned literal, she almost dies because she’s literally too pure for this world. After she quickly-but-not-really (there’s some serious time dilation involved) gains the maturity she needs to maintain a stable personality, she becomes an even more compelling character to watch: now she has enough perspective to critically examine both the person she used to be and the way her friends responded to that version of her.

Jay-Den. Once again there’s only one Klingon in Starfleet, and this time he’s a pacifist studying medicine. This is a refreshing change from the repetitive way this species has been portrayed in Star Trek. Of all the colorful and strange cultures we’ve seen across the decades of this franchise, Klingons have been among the ones that make the least sense. I always wondered how their civilization lasted all the way to the space era without exterminating itself. Now that we’re in the 3000s, the Klingons’ situation is much different: they’ve lost their empire, they’re reduced to a handful of clans, and their collective survival is in question. Jay-Den’s family drama (about being a son of hunters who eschews violence) gets resolved fairly early in the season, and from then on he’s relegated to something of a background role, which is a pity because he’s just the sweetest and his romance subplot is adorable.

Tarima. Ah, Tarima. What shall I do with you, you Manic Pixie Dark Phoenix. This was the character I struggled the most to understand. Her backstory is that, in a species of born telepaths, she’s an exceptionally (even alarmingly) gifted one, and the medical treatments she’s had to live with in order to keep her powers within safe limits have prevented her from fully knowing herself. Frustratingly, this also prevents the audience from getting a sense of what her deal is. She’s reserved, but impulsive, but apprehensive, but uninhibited, but distant, but bold. To be fair, her best scenes are those where her directness cuts through Caleb’s tendency to lie to himself.

Captain Ake. As a centuries-old being who has seen everything, it makes sense that she has little patience for Starfleet’s excessive love of formality and protocol. I love the way she commands respect as a captain without bothering to perform the part. Because the show is mainly focused on the younger characters, we learn about Ake’s personal drama late in the season (she once made a tactical decision that cost her son’s life), but the additional fact that it was her fault that Caleb grew up without his mother gives us enough to chew on in the meantime. The only regrettable moment with her is the finale, where it feels like the Federation comes off as too implausibly clean-handed for the times of hardship that followed the Burn.

With equal parts romance, comedy and technobabble, Starfleet Academy is remarkably well directed, acted and written (I want to single out Kirsten Beyer, who is proving to be by far the best writer in New Trek), although it shares with Discovery a questionable plotting choice: in the 3000s, with the Federation in pieces and the galaxy in dire need of new leaders, why try to remake the same old Federation that already failed, instead of coming up with something different and more suited to the new political reality? Aside from that oversight inherited from its predecessor series, this is a laudable step forward for the franchise, especially after recent disappointments like the nostalgia vomit that was Picard season 3, the inconsistent mess that was Strange New Worlds season 3, and the unforgivable calamity that was the Section 31 film. More of this, please.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Hyo the Hellmaker by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

 Hellmaker? More like anxiety ridden puzzle solving geek. And that's ok.

cover art:Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

Hyo the Hellmaker.

I’m late to this book. In fact I only picked it up because at World Fantasy at the end of 2025 I was browsing the dealer tables and saw this gorgeous physical copy with gold lettering and absolutely filled with illustrations (all done by the author).

For me it’s a classic case of a Young Adult fantasy that embarrasses us all because it highlights just how artificial that genre distinction is. Published in 2024 with a sequel out in April this year (2026) it’s a high fantasy set in an analogue of this world but one which is very definitely secondary and full of magic and ideas and ways of being that aren’t faux medieval European. 

 

Hyo is a Hellmaker. Part detective, part judge and part executioner. Hyo is someone who can make hells for other people in retribution for what they’ve done to others. To do this though, someone has to pay the price and that price is normally right up there.

 

Thing is the ‘world’ as it were brings people willing to pay that price to her door, normally the relatives of the murdered, who want satisfaction for the injustice they have suffered and for which there is no one else to help. 

 

Hyo is, kinda, a one-woman A-team. 

 

In that sense this has all the sensibilities of a great manga and the setting is a reworked version of Shinto turned into a living breathing set of Kami together with their shrines and strong links to their places, elements and lives of origin (because kami can come from places like rivers or mountains but can also be rooted in extraordinary people).

 

What Ikemoto Ghosh does to elevate this is create a world in which Shinto is not just a practiced and living faith but one in which the gods walk the land as physical beings who enjoy Takoyaki as much as the mortal next to them – that extension into a fantastical world is refreshing, innovative and, most importantly, delightfully fun. It allows Ikemoto Ghosh to build an enthralling setting in which Hyo’s story sits like a little pearl to be plucked.

 

There are strong themes of justice and futility in the book, the sense of fighting against the inevitable, that fate is always lurking behind the scenes but that your fate is unknown to you. Your choices are your own even if they serve to deliver the world as it’s meant to be.

 

I like this tension a lot. We often get simplistic ideas about fate (bad) versus free will (good) and that toddler level philosophising irritates the hell out of me. So to see Hyo wrestle with a world in which so much is beyond her control – including her endings – and see her choices remain meaningful and entirely hers is deeply satisfying. 

 

Without wanting to talk as an old man about what ‘young people’ are reading, I am often very conscious that I have two teenagers in my house who read and that I am therefore aware of the stories they’re engaging with and the ones they don’t get through. Hyo is the kind of story they approve of – because it doesn’t treat them as morally simplistic, in need of someone who’s got it together from the beginning or regard adults as a category of idiots to be manipulated, avoided or resisted. 

 

There’s grief too, although it’s in the rearview mirror. Hyo, shaped through it and the anger and metaphor of being manipulated by the hollowness of sorrow and the futility of wishing the past were otherwise, is focused more on the present. There’s a sense of found family alongside actual family here – some of that pretty conventional (young person having to mature, coming of age etc.) but Ikemoto Ghosh handles these tropes with gentle aplomb, serving up a young person who’s basically getting on with life even when that life is far from ideal.

 

More to the point Hyo knows what and who she is – she’s not entirely happy with this sense of self-awareness but she doesn’t let ignorance or self-discovery get in the way of being a normal person. 

 

The cast of secondary characters is brilliantly fleshed out with the many characters quickly establishing themselves on the page and providing motivations, quirks and experiences that help them feel distinctive, which in a large cast feels essential. 

 

I sometimes get frustrated with the idea of YA as a genre purely because I miss books I would otherwise have found earlier and loved wholeheartedly. Hyo the Hellmaker is a great example of that – an ostensibly Young Adult novel (I think by dint of having a young person as the main character) that transcends those fake marketing requirements to be something I suspect will be of interest to readers of any age. 

 

--

Highlights:

• Gods and spirits and demons rubbing shoulders at the noodle bar
• Detective shenanigans
• Fantastic world building leaving me wanting more

Nerd Rating: 7/10, A brilliantly executed secondary world with fun and mysteries with characters who feel distinctive, entertaining and dealing with nuanced themes of justice and retribution.

References: Ikemoto Ghosh, Mina, Hyo the Hellmaker. [Scholastic 2024].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

TV Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (opening episodes)

Gen Z’s Star Trek hits the sweet spot for youthful adventure mixed with Gen X cynicism

Star Trek has grown significantly from the original 1960s adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise. Over the decades, new versions of Star Trek ranged from the bleakness of Enterprise, Picard, and Discovery to the optimism of the original series and Strange New Worlds, to the timely philosophical insights of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, to the very funny humor of Lower Decks.

In the background of the adventures, many of our favorite heroes gave passing references to where it all began, Starfleet Academy. But we seldom got a deep dive into life at the academy. Now, just in time for its sixtieth anniversary, Star Trek is going back to the beginning by showing us the start of the hero’s journey for the next generation of explorers in its latest offering, Starfleet Academy. On the Trek continuum from bleak to hilarious, Starfleet Academy is definitely on the optimistic and humorous end of the spectrum. Those who prefer their Star Trek rather serious will be disappointed, because Starfleet Academy feels much more like a live action version of the always humorous Lower Decks. If you haven’t seen Lower Decks, you should, because Lower Decks is funny, clever, and sharply witty in its references to core Star Trek themes and tropes. Starfleet Academy has a bit more seriousness than Lower Decks, but mostly retains a fun, playful tone that is still in touch with the traditional Trek values of diversity, loyalty, heroic empathy, and scientific curiosity.

[Mild spoilers for the first episode] Set centuries into the Star Trek future, Starfleet Academy begins as the story of a single child. Caleb Mir is six years old, living with his mother Anisha (Tatiana Maslany). In her struggle to find food, Anisha accepts aid from a man (Paul Giamatti), not realizing he is a pirate who ultimately killed a Federation officer. Although she cooperates with the Federation, the commander Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) gives her a cruel punishment, sentencing her to fifteen years in a hard labor camp and putting Caleb in state custody. Feeling betrayed as her son is torn away from her, she warns Caleb not to trust the Federation. As a result, the child tricks Ake and escapes, and grows up as a distrustful street urchin who tries in vain over the years to locate his mother. Meanwhile, Ake is devastated by losing the child she promised to care for, and to whom she promised to bring for visits to the betrayed Anisha. She resigns from Starfleet for fifteen years, but is eventually lured back to lead the newly reopened Starfleet Academy when the long lost Caleb (Sandro Rosta) is caught and incarcerated for stealing. Regretting what happened years ago, she urges Caleb to join the academy instead of being sentenced to prison. Caleb, who is a technology expert, reluctantly accepts enrollment in exchange for Ake’s promise to help locate his mother, who has disappeared from the Federation’s prison system.

Starfleet Academy is being reopened for the first time after a cataclysm known as the Burn. The new cadets will be the first class at the revived academy. Over the past years, officer training had been taken over by the War College, a conflict-focused institution that becomes a rival to the exploration-focused Starfleet Academy. At the academy, Caleb quickly falls in with an eclectic group of new cadets with their own interesting backstories, including Jay-Den (Karim Diané), a gentle-hearted Klingon; SAM (Kerrice Brooks), an earnest and nerdy photonic (hologram); Darem (George Hawkins), an egotistical shapeshifting Khionian; Genesis (Bella Shepard), a clever, success driven Dar-Sha strategist who is Darem’s rival; and later, Betazoid siblings Tarima (Zoë Steiner) and Ocam (Romeo Carere). The young people are supervised by academy instructors, including the eccentric Captain Ake. Ake is a half-Lanthanite who has been alive for centuries and has an attachment to quirky, ancient objects such as old-fashioned eyeglasses and hardback books. She often walks barefoot and helps the kids revenge-prank the neighboring school. Her cranky second in command is the part Klingon, part Jem-Hadar, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). There is also the returned holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Voyager, and the wise and cynical instructor Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) from the time-traveling Discovery. As the young people settle into the structure and adventure of life at the academy, an old villain returns to wreak havoc, and Caleb has to learn a quick lesson about working with his new allies.

Starfleet Academy does a good job of starting with only two perspectives: the young, rebellious Caleb and the ancient, quirky Ake. The story initially focuses on those points of view and then gradually adds new characters. This technique allows viewers to enjoy the dynamics of this new setting before adding too many new perspectives. If viewers don’t remember the Burn, its story starts in season 3 of Discovery [Editor’s Note: If you haven’t seen Discovery, the short version is that all the dilithium in the galaxy exploded and warp travel became impossible for a whole century]. Fortunately, knowledge of the event is not essential to enjoy Starfleet Academy. The series is set in the distant future, which allows lots of creative freedom regarding technical aspects of the traditional Trek lore. Therefore, a willing suspension of disbelief is helpful for enjoying the story. After the destruction from the Burn, the Federation largely fell apart, with many members abandoning the alliance. The reopening of Starfleet Academy offers opportunities to rebuild those connections with the help of the young cadets.

Starfleet Academy is character-focused and youthfully Gen Z, with a healthy counterbalance of Gen X cynicism from the instructors. Ake refers to the cadets as “kids” despite the fact that many of them are adults by our contemporary standards. This is Star Trek for the Fourth Wing, TikTok, Instagram generation. It’s Trek’s addition to academia-based speculative fiction. Starfleet Academy leans into character tropes with a modern take on traditional group dynamics that have been showcased in pop culture since The Breakfast Club. At times, the clichés feel heavy-handed and a bit predictable, and if you’re not in the mood for hijinks, this may not be the best Trek experience. Even for those of us who are older, we probably still remember college days of cramped cozy dorm life, late night conversations, building lifelong relationships, and struggling with both schoolwork and family expectations. Starfleet Academy leans into those awkward dynamics while maintaining the steady leadership from the older generation. Some YA stories paint the adults as clueless or as adversaries, but here they are treated as smart, fully fleshed-out characters whose wisdom and cynicism are amusingly relatable.

Over the years, many Star Trek series have initially struggled to find their footing, including the ultimately beloved The Next Generation. The franchise suffers from the burden of expectations, and each new series feels the pressure of comparison while trying to do something new. Despite some predictable moments, abrupt character arcs, and outright silliness, the show delivers upbeat adventure and likeable characters who each have enough backstory and angst to let viewers know a reckoning is coming for each one as the series progresses. Additionally, the casting is superb with, Oscar Award powerhouses like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, as well as the amazing Tatiana Maslany, the nostalgic return of Robert Picardo as the holographic doctor, and Stephen Colbert as the deadpan funny dean heard over the academy’s public address system. But the most memorable character is Gina Yashere’s Lura Thok, who steals every scene she is in with her hilariously perpetually irritated attitude.

Despite the new generation vibe, Starfleet Academy is full of easter eggs and nods to both major and minor Trek elements. Long-time fans will catch the signage for Boothsby Park named for the former academy groundskeeper (seen in The Next Generation), the presence of a background character who appears to be a descendant of a species whose racism drove themselves into near-extinction in The Original Series episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and the quietly funny presence of an exocomp during a conversation between Lura and Ake.

Starfleet Academy is clearly targeted to a new generation, but it has enough Gen X energy to provide a much needed counterbalance. Besides, the show is filled with many classic Trek references that will appeal to a range of viewers looking for something fun. The pilot episode is called “Kids These Days” and the following episode is called “Beta Test” (also a reference to the arriving Betazoids). Both of these signal that the Starfleet Academy story is a new concept that is just beginning a journey for both a new and older generation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A Gen Z adventure with nods to classic Trek
• Predictable tropes and clichés
• Enjoyably quirky characters and Oscar-caliber actors in a humorous context

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance to find the killer and save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos.

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton) and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.

While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

Highlights:

• Escalating emotions
• Lots of subplots
• Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Uglies

Meaningful messaging wrapped in predictable plotting

Decades ago, the television series The Twilight Zone presented an episode called “Eye of the Beholder” in which a disfigured woman gets a chance to have plastic surgery to become beautiful. Throughout the episode, we never fully see the faces of the characters until the very end. And, in traditional Twilight Zone form, there’s a twist in the reveal. Last year, the film Barbie gave us a thoughtful, poignant exploration of the pressure of unrealistic beauty standards that left women around the world cheering. The new Nexflix film Uglies is the latest story to tackle the concept of beauty. However, unlike its predecessors, the positive messaging in Uglies gets a bit tangled in the execution.

Uglies is based on Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 middle grade novel set in a future dystopian society where children are required to undergo cosmetic surgery to become beautiful (“Pretties”) when they turn sixteen. Until then, teens who have not yet had the surgery are called “Uglies.” Once the surgery occurs, the beautiful ones get to live in a perpetual frat party in the futuristically cool Pretty City (yes, that’s the name). How exactly does this help society? According to the backstory, the old world destroyed itself with overuse of fossil fuel, environmental pollution, and wars. Beautiful people had unfair advantages over ugly people and people had conflicts based on physical appearances. To solve this problem, everyone is made beautiful. This setup comes from the source material, but it’s confusing for appearance-based conflicts to be solved by making everyone look like the primary discriminators. Also, the racial and ethnic differences continue after the surgery, so it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to theoretically create peace by turning everyone into Balenciaga models. Of course, we eventually find out there is more to the surgery than just creating facial symmetry, and eventually the story slides into The Stepford Wives territory.

The film follows protagonist Tally Youngblood (Joey King) as she anxiously awaits her turn to become pretty while she attends the boarding school for Uglies. In flashbacks, we see her long-term, close friendship with her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), who is a few months older than her. The two promise to remain best friends for life, and Peris promises to visit her after his surgery. However, when the story opens, Peris has been transformed and now has cut off communications with Tally. Tally engages in low-stakes shenanigans, like sneaking into New Pretty City to see him, but on a return trip she encounters a new friend: Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an alternative, surgery-free community outside the city (called The Smokes), run by a mysterious leader called David. When Shay disappears, Tally gets caught up in the government’s search, led by the cruel and severe Dr. Calder (Laverne Cox), for David and the Smokes community.

Although the story has several departures from the novel, the film is entertaining in a low-stakes way. The special effects of the hover skateboarding are fun, and the visuals of the dystopian community and the gorgeous scenery of Tally’s journey to the Smokes is appealing. The acting from all the leads is solid and engaging throughout the film. The problem is the plot. There are so many incongruities that eventually they become distracting. For example, except for Peris, the appearance differences between the existing Uglies and the existing Pretties ranges from minimal to non-existent. Tally’s new bestie Shay is supermodel gorgeous despite being an “Ugly.” When Tally gets to the Smoke, outsiders David (Keith Powers) and his best friend Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos) look like they fell out of GQ. A few characters undergo the long-discussed surgery during the film. Again, with the exception of Peris, the big glow-up amounts to an anti-climactic addition of department store makeup and a quick trip to the salon for clip-ins. Anyone who understands the concept of mascara and lipliner will be rolling their eyes at the “change.” If this were a stage play, it would be understandable. But the unwillingness to take visual risks in a big-budget Netflix film is a little disappointing. The only character who stands out as particularly changed or uniquely “pretty” is Peris. Between the makeup and the special effects, he manages to look artificially chiseled, with razor-sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes, and a perpetual William Shatner in Star Trek glow about him. His visual is the best example of what creepy, out of control beauty would look like. The similarity in attractiveness between Pretties and Uglies may be an intentional choice in the film, perhaps designed to be an ironic social commentary on the relativism of beauty. If so, the premise of the story, that universal beauty eliminates societal problems, becomes irrelevant.

In addition to the lackluster visuals, the plot itself is problematic. David, who is a likeable classic hero/prophet/leader archetypal character, falls too suddenly in love with Tally, almost at first sight, and certainly too shortly after meeting her. The acting is fine, but the behavior is inconsistent with both David’s reputation as a sharp, elusive, pragmatist and with their short and relatively meaningless relationship. Tally’s character is also inconsistent. She is initially presented as inquisitive, rebellious, and fierce, but she is simultaneously whiny, cowardly, and indecisive. Teen emotions are complicated, but by the end of the film it was hard to take her character seriously. Joey King’s acting is solid and appealing, but some of the cliché lines she is forced to recite were eyeroll-worthy.

If you are expecting a Barbie-esque discourse into the superficiality of societal standards, or commentary on racism and sexism, this is not that film. Uglies is a traditional middle grade/YA dystopian adventure where the grown-ups are bad, besties betray you, the rebel-boy is boyfriend material, and in the end, you finally find your true self. Depending on what you are in the mood for, this may be the perfect low-stress film for you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights

• Appealing actors
• Incongruous plot and visuals
• Perfectly fine background entertainment

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

Nanoreviews: Unraveller, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Tread of Angels

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge [Macmillan Children's (UK)/Amulet (US)]

Clara's review of Unraveller already covers most of what makes this book so great: Frances Hardinge always brings intriguing magic and thoughtful moral complexity to her particular brand of YA, and her latest is no exception. Set in a world where humans live alongside the otherworldy denizens of the Wilds, Unraveller focuses on Kellan, a boy from a community of weavers who has been cast out after gaining the uncontrollable ability to unravel both fabric and curses, and Nettle, a formerly cursed girl, as they travel the country of Raddith unravelling the various curses that its inhabitants have placed on each other - ranging from mildly inconvenient to the truly horrible. The curses themselves are gifted by the Little Brothers, spider-like fae inhabitants of Raddith who also take a keen interest in ensuring its technology doesn't develop too extensively. When someone is given a "curse egg", they have the ability to lay a curse on someone they feel has wronged them, but the punishment for even having a curse egg - let alone using it - is extremely steep, even before the emotional cost and stigmatisation for the curser is taken into account.

We follow Kellan and Nettle as they try to discover the source of a curse on Kellan, which appears to be making his abilities stronger and more unpredictable. Along the way, Hardinge sketches out the various impacts that living with this particular brand of otherworldly justice has had on Raddith's society, and what, if anything, can be repaired after a curse has come to pass. As tales of fae morality being imposed on humans go, this is a seriously good one, and Kellan and Nettle's mildly prickly friendship forms a wonderful core around which the rest of the narrative unfolds. If you haven't read any Hardinge before, this is a great place to start.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older [Tor dot com Publishing, 2023]

It feels appropriate to be talking about this book (again, following one of my Nerds of a Feather colleagues, this time Arturo) at a point when many of the genre fans I know are grappling with the definitions and purpose of "cosy" fiction. Perhaps this will become an essay for another time, if this fan ever gets her proverbial shit together. The Mimicking of Known Successes, billed as cosy Holmesian fiction, divides much of its time between university campuses and windswept train platforms and comfy carriages, but perhaps not in the location you'd expect: this is the human settlement on Jupiter, to which the survivors of humanity fled after Earth became uninhabitable, with habitats floating in the, uh, clouds of our biggest planetary neighbour and connected by a planet-spanning train network. We follow Mossa, an investigator looking for a missing academic, and her ex-girlfriend and classical geographer Pleiti, who Mossa approaches to help with the investigation into her colleague. Together, the two uncover a deeper conspiracy surrounding this disappearance, with implications for Earth's future and the people who get to decide on it.

Part of the cosiness here is aesthetic: Older does a fantastic job of creating a colony that seems comfortable and interesting and dynamic, even as we see characters grapple with the historic loss of Earth and the limitations of their current home. The novella opens in a remote settlement at the end of the railway line which Mossa refers to as a "piece of grit", but it's a piece of grit with a surprisingly nice pub and pleasant residents, not some desperate, impoverished outpost. People are doing OK for themselves, and for each other, on Jupiter, even if some are more OK than others, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than the gritty "everyone is one step away from a cold, unpleasant death" aesthetic that pervades most colonisation stories.

Beyond that, though, The Mimicking of Known Successes provides a perfect mix of personal stakes with wider implications for humanity's future, with Pleiti and Mossa rekindling their relationship and grappling with what this case means for their respective careers while also piecing together the answer to the mystery, and its full stakes. At the heart of those stakes is the academic debate for Earth's future, which is introduced to us as an interdepartmental war between different geography disciplines (finally, geography gets the respect and centrality it deserves!), and effectively revolves whether recolonisation of Earth should take place with full understanding of Earth's former ecosystem and its recreation, or whether humanity should be trying to build something new and adjust as they go along. I would read an entire Mars Trilogy-style doorstopper featuring characters arguing about the ins and outs of terraforming along these lines, but here it's just one strand in a much shorter narrative. Moreover, it's inextricably tied to Pleiti's position as a classicist (the "understand everything first" position) working in an academic institution alongside colleagues who, for various reasons (such as "being men") do not give her views the respect she feels they deserve.

Mimicking of Known Successes has a great ending to its mystery and its romance, but it also leaves the door open for more stories in this world - which we are getting! I, for one, am very excited.

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse [Saga (US)/Solaris (UK) 2022]

I haven't seen as much about this Weird Western as I'd expect given that it's Rebecca frickin' Roanhorse, but if you're looking for a diverting adventure into a frontier town of angels and demons (hey, "angels and demons" is a bingo square for Reddit's r/fantasy bingo this year!) you could do much worse than this novella. The setting here is a mining town where the ostracised "Fallen", descendants of rebel angels are put to work mining Divinity (created from the body of Abaddon, because what else would it be) under the watch of the virtuous "Elect". Celeste is a Fallen, but she has been raised by her Elect father and only recently reunited with her sister Mariel, who spent her childhood with the pair's mother. Now Celeste is trying to keep her head down, but when Mariel is accused of murdering one of the settlement's leaders, her sister is given just 24 hours to prove her innocent, aided only by her demon ex-lover Abraxas.

Standing between Celeste and her sister's freedom are an entire town's worth of deep secrets, not least those of her own sister, and most of the action here is about one woman coming up against an entire system which is stacked against her, not least because of the baked-in presumption of moral goodness in the angelic Elect (their leaders are literally called Virtues!) and the stigma against the Fallen. The adventure here is firmly in "satisfyingly tropey" territory, and while the end result is a story that didn't make a huge lasting impression on me, it's certainly an enjoyable read, with depths of worldbuilding that would lend themselves to further stories in this setting. 

POSTED BY: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather senior editor, dog owner, aspiring mermaid, having an increasingly weird time about her own biography

Review: Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge

Undoing the curse is only the start.

If you have ever stood by, quietly seething, swallowing down a boiling fury that cannot find an outlet because you are too powerless to express it, then this book will strike you with a deep resonance. It is, fundamentally, a ‘what-if’ for those people who have writhed in the grip of impotent anger: What if you had the power to express it, to defy social strictures, to channel your rage into an outlet that would make them pay? 

In the country of Raddith, which lives in an uneasy equilibrium with the creatures of the Wilds next door, the furious, wronged, indignant, or malevolent among us are granted that outlet. The gift comes from spiderlike creatures from the Wilds, known as Little Brothers because an affectionate, friendly name blunts—however ineffectively—people's fear of their terrible power. Little Brothers find people nursing a deep sense of wrong, and grant them a curse egg, which grows and matures inside the wronged, nurtured by their hurt and indignation, until they let fly, turning the target of their anger to stone, mist, a fishhook, a bat, a sentient harp, a murderous monster who must be cast out and ostracized from all she ever knew and loved. The shape each curse takes is dictated by the nature of the wrong that was committed, because a punishment is all the more satisfying when it fits.

Naturally, a nation plagued by cursers and cursed must develop an infrastructure to handle this. Institutions are constructed to lock up cursers—or indeed, potential cursers, because the best way to prevent a curse is to find the carrier of a curse egg and lock them up before they’ve hurt anyone. After all,

There were telltale signs of a potential curser, if you knew what to look for, so they could be identified. Some showed flashes of uncontainable rage or saw things other people couldn’t. No, it wasn’t fair to lock up an innocent person, but what else could you do? It would be like saying you couldn’t take an arrow from a drawn bow because it hadn’t hurt anyone yet.

Because, you see, everyone knows that if you have a curse egg, you will use it. And if you’ve had one, you will probably get another, because everyone knows that a curser will always curse again. Always. Everyone knows this.

Kellen, a teenage boy cast out from his family of weavers due to his uncanny ability to unravel any woven thing merely by getting too close, also possesses the ability to unravel curses. Together with Nettle, a girl who’d been cursed into a heron until he’d intervened, he travels Raddith, taking commissions from people who want their loved ones released from their curses. 

Unravelling curses is not a simple matter. The first stage of every investigation requires Kellen and Nettle to learn everything about the nature of the curse—who cast it, to be sure, but also why. Which means every investigation must begin with the question, ‘what did you do to deserve this?’ In this world, victims must be blamed, not because they are necessarily culpable (although, to be sure, many are a right piece of work), but because the nature of how curses work requires that the curser feel wronged and hard done by. The work is as much psychology as it is magic.

These psychological causes and consequences of cursing form the real strength of this book. The writing is equally sympathetic to both curser and cursed. Yes, if you’ve spent thirty years as a terrifying monster in the wilderness, luring people with your siren voice to a swamp where you drown them and eat them, you are not okay when the curse is unravelled and you must face what you’ve done as a human. But, similarly, if you’ve been wronged so deeply (or feel that you’ve been wronged so deeply) that you are willing to turn someone into a terrifying swamp monster, you’re equally not okay. Hardinge allows the cursers to speak their bit with their own voices, never losing sight of the harm that they’ve done, but also not glossing over the harm that was done to them that spawned their curse egg in the first place.

Throughout the book, we repeatedly run into the message that you must treat the harm—whether the original wrong that was done, or the aftermath of the unravelled curse—with as much care as you treat the technical unravelling of the magic itself. Kellen’s real skill lies in unravelling the curses, not ministering to the mental health of the uncursed and curser alike, but just because you’re not good at something doesn’t mean you get a free pass to neglect it. 

It’s a dark and difficult message. Indeed, many of Hardinge’s books have quite a grim undertone to them. Although her books are nominally YA, she does not give her young main characters the naivety or impetuousness that so frequently characterizes teenage protagonists of YA books. Kellen and Nettle are persistently distrusting of adults, and their distrust is usually well-founded. It makes for cynical story, but satisfying reading: A too-trusting character who gets duped is just frustrating, and that never happens in Hardinge’s books. Characters must earn Kellen and Nettle’s trust. At the same time, though, their perpetual caution and second-guessing of every decision regarding whom to trust becomes exhausting. Yet that exhaustion, that dilemma, is the very heart of the difficulty of their task, because trust is a key component in treating mental health. And as they learn at the end, the path forward is going to require a substantial amount of that. 

The world-building of this tale supports the story beautifully, starting with one of the finest prologues I’ve ever encountered. The Wilds, which constitute the source of everything dark and magical about the world, are shrouded in a veil of uninterestingness. People’s minds slide right past them; views of them from the sea make them look like a pathetic scrubby bit of nothing, hardly worth the trouble to think about, let alone explore. Yet within them are all sorts of magical beings: the spidery Little Brothers who grant curse eggs; the carnivorous marsh-horses who form bonds with humans at the cost of an eye and—effectively—a life; the Dancing Star, who detaches its hands to form a cage that traps and eat souls; the Bookbearers, who oversee and enforce all agreements, whether or not the speaker realizes that they’re entering into it at the time. (Magically enforced bargains that operate by rigid adherence to the wording, rather than good faith respect for the intention, are my favorite kind of bargain.)

It is a wonderful instantiation of the wild and weird kind of magical realm, filled not with the twee twinkling Tinkerbell fairies, but the magical Other, akin to Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies, to Clarke’s Raven King and Faerie kingdom. It is a realm whose blue and orange morality is so far askew from human dimensions that people who live on the borders of the Wilds shut their doors at night and don’t let anyone in; while people who live within the Wilds themselves welcome everyone to their homes without question, because they vulnerable to terrifying punishment if they give the slightest offense to any of the inhabitants. Indeed, so satisfying is this kind of magic that it is rather disappointing when some of the Wilds creatures turn out to operate according to human standards of kindness. It is, to be sure, a relief to Kellen and Nettle, who have received precious little of it in their wanderings, but it felt unearned here, where kindness, and trust, and goodness, are granted grudgingly, if at all. 

But then, that trust in kindness must be granted if the curses are not just to be unravelled, but fully healed.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention

• An understanding of mental health, without getting bogged down in a Trauma Plot
• Weird and wild magical creatures
• Appropriately suspicious youngsters

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

Reference: Unraveller. Frances Hardinge. [Macmillan Children's Books, 2022].

Rereading The Old Kingdom Series by Garth Nix

 First published 27 years ago, the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix was a big part of many people’s childhoods, but does it still hold up to a reading in 2023? Elizabeth and Roseanna look back at the original three books of Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen, and reflect on how their opinions of the series have changed, and how they’ve stayed the same. 

Sabriel follows a young woman as she leaves school and heads back across the Wall into her mysterious home country, after finding out that something has happened to her father. Who happened to be a necromancer, and has been teaching her to follow in his footsteps - not to raise the dead, as most necromancers do, but to lay them to their final rest. Her journey into the Old Kingdom will reveal to her how little she knows of her craft, the charter magic of her homeland, her father and her heritage, and will test her resolve as she faces an evil far greater than she anticipated.

Roseanna: I first read Sabriel when I would have been about 12 - it came out in Australia in the 90s, but didn’t make it to the UK until 2002 - and I was exactly the right age to fall completely in love with it. There’s a strong memory that still sits with me of some book-selling group coming into my school with a pile of various delights, and of me seeing the UK hardback edition, which was bright white, with an extremely fancy clear plastic dust jacket with a gold illustration on and thinking to myself “ooooooh”. The series was also one of the first I remember reading with female characters I genuinely liked and thought were well done, ones that seemed heroic and exciting and like people whose adventures I wanted to follow. That it was set in a gorgeous world with an interesting magic system was absolutely a bonus, but it was the characters that really did it for me the first time around, and who kept bringing me back to the series over and again.

Elizabeth: Honestly, I’m not sure I can remember exactly how I first came across the series – it seems almost by osmosis. Certainly, I’d read it by 2004 when I started studying Creative Writing at the same university as Garth Nix, where he was something of a hometown hero. Although I was in my early twenties, the mix of adventure and magic drew me in and kept me hooked. I’m not much of a rereader (there are always so many new books!) so the details have faded over the years. But the Abhorsen’s bells remain etched clearly in my memory.

Roseanna: One of the things that really stuck with me after reading the series for the first time was the magic system - particularly the bells. It’s one of the best examples I remember reading as a child of a magic system that manages to be neat, easily comprehensible and fully integrated into the world-building. The bells aren’t just bells, the Abhorsen isn’t just a person, they’re all woven into other parts of the Old Kingdom, and this only gets deepened and deepened as the series goes on - the more we learn, the more we understand how things fit together. And part of how well that worked was the little rhymes that explained parts of it - even years after I first read the books I could recite you segments of them, because they were catchy and exactly the sort of thing that would be taught to children, or memory rhymes, or other bits and bobs - the world-building works in the how, as well as the what, and I love that it captured child-my imagination.

Elizabeth: I love what you said about the bells not being just bells. Not only does each one have a particular purpose – a particular kind of magic it’s used for – but even a personality. Some are serious, others mischievous, and all worthy of caution. They even correspond to a particular Precinct of Death and the way that precinct manifests: whether the river of death comes in tidal waves or looks calm but has hidden potholes.

In addition to mnemonic rhymes, the lore of the world offers a visual language in its heraldry: the silver key of the Abhorsen, the gold tower of the King, the silver trowel of the Wallmakers. We know our heroes by their colours.

That visual language is less well defined when it comes to the magic itself, but is no less evocative for allowing the readers to picture their own Charter Marks. 

Roseanna: And the Charter Marks are such a neat part of how the world is visualised - not least because they’re everywhere. Magic isn’t distant and ethereal in the story as we see it. Important places and objects are spelled, and to those who have been baptised with a Charter Mark are able to see, and read in what they see, the magic in the world around them. It means that our characters – and especially Lirael in the second book, who is a skilled Charter Mage working in a library full of peculiar, old and magical objects – connect us to the lore of the world simply by looking around. 

I love too that this is tied into how the books are presented. The British editions I had as a child were bold, plain hardcovers with a single charter mark each on the cover, while the paperbacks that came after had smaller marks printed all over them in clear gloss, so they were invisible until they caught the light - just as we are told of the marks in the story. For twelve year old me, that felt utterly magical… and still does to my somewhat older self now.

But the magic isn’t just the written symbols - there are links to all sorts of other elements, many of which are older, more folkloric, and so while we learn about one part, the other parts – especially around the Free Magic side of things, or the wardings and bindings – feel already familiar.

Elizabeth: Part of this is because Nix draws on existing folklore to create the Old Kingdom and its magic. For example, when Lirael is researching how to banish a powerful Free Magic creature, the book she finds tells her to use “...an ensorcelled sword or a rowan wand, charged with the first circle of seven marks for binding the elements…” Rowan has long been popular in European folklore for holding protective properties, and rowan growing by stone circles – echoed by the Charter Stones of the Old Kingdom – was believed to be the most potent. This weaving together of old folklore with the unique elements of the world grants it a solid foundation and that feeling of strange familiarity.

It’s also an element of world-building that points to the strong influence of English children’s literature. After all, this is European folklore, European plants, not Australian like the author. While this is a common trend among Australian fantasy, it is by no means a foregone conclusion. For example, Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s Bitterbynde Trilogy (the first book of which was published in the same year as Lirael) subtly weaves in Australian flora and fauna into the background of a tale strongly influenced by English fairy lore. Much more recently, Sam Hawke’s Poison Wars books eschews our world entirely in favour of making up plants and poisons from whole cloth.

In the Old Kingdom Trilogy, we get rowan and Charter Stones. Across the Wall in Ancelstierre, we get boarding schools, bobbed hair and firearms. Although Sabriel isn’t strictly a portal fantasy, the story functions in much the same way. In rereading it, I felt like I had stepped into a world adjacent to the Chronicles of Narnia… although one with rather stronger representation of women.

Roseanna: And this is one of the things that really drew me to the stories as a child - Sabriel herself, despite being young, and often afraid or out of her depth, was the first protagonist I remember reading in a “proper” book who was both female and fighty, and she’s written with a depth and reality that really sells it, rather than just being the pattern of a 90s female action hero, who has to be all machismo and “one of the boys” to fit in. Especially with her all-girls-school, jolly-hockey-sticks background, she feels grounded in a realistic idea of a young woman on a journey, albeit one who has been learning to do necromancy since she was very young and taking fighting arts classes at school.

It isn’t just Sabriel herself though - Lirael too manages a great balance of competence, inner strength and doubt, as well as being the first representation of depression I recall reading. She’s not strong in the same way as Sabriel; her fighting skills aren’t at all her focus. But she’s compelling, willing to go out and achieve what needs achieving, and brave confronting dangers those around her find difficult to face.

What they both contrast beautifully is the men around them too. It seems to be something of a theme in Nix’s work to write competent women who, for all their turmoil, get the job done, alongside men with strong emotional focuses who, for whatever reason, are unwilling or unable to solve the problems of the story alone, or struggle to live up to the roles set out for them. For Sabriel, it’s Touchstone, a man out of time being overcome by guilt over his past actions, to the point of sometimes being unable to act at all. For Lirael, it’s Sam, the man who is supposed to be learning necromancy to follow in his mother’s footsteps, but fears the dead, the bells and Death itself right into his bones. Neither man is weak, both of them are brave at points in the plot and very good at their areas of expertise, but neither have the driving determination and ability to just Get On with things that their female counterparts have. This holds true even among the side characters - the whole series is peopled with various no-nonsense women who just get on with things, including an entire glacier of matriarchal seers.

This isn’t even restricted to just the human women - Lirael’s Disreputable Dog companion epitomises the exact same attitude in her oft-repeated statement of “it’s better to be doing” whenever any of the characters get a little too mopey for her liking.

Elizabeth: Contrast this with Mogget, arguably the most memorable of Nix’s animal companions. This powerful and somewhat malevolent spirit has been forced to take the shape of a white cat for so long that he has taken on many of the traits of that form. The contrast here is not like that between the female and the male characters of the book; Mogget does not by any means have a strong emotional focus and would be perfectly happy to Get Things Done, if this meant burning them to the ground. Instead, he contrasts the Disreputable Dog’s drive to action with pure laziness. For the most part, he rides around in the backpack of his companion and rarely takes initiative, responding only to commands and providing snarky comments.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Mogget does have a driving focus on eating fish.

While Mogget may be the most well-remembered animal companion of not just the Old Kingdom Trilogy, but Nix’s oeuvre, the Disreputable Dog is particularly significant for being the first of Nix’s many canine companions. His middle-grade fantasy adventure Frogkisser! springs to mind. This story has a pack of canine advisers to the royal family. They're presided over by a matriarch, and one of the younger dogs serves as a companion to the main character on her adventures.

Nix’s adult works are less likely to feature canine companions, but are not entirely devoid. For example, his 2006 story “Dog Soldier”, published in Jim Baen’s Universe. In the story, a military engineer on the front of a space war receives a package from R&D containing a robot with the mind of a dog.

However, while canine companions are more prevalent in Nix’s work for younger audiences, one does not need to be young to appreciate them – or, indeed, the themes of the Old Kingdom Trilogy.

Roseanna: Absolutely. And this was something that was particularly obvious to me coming back to reread as an adult - there’s a strong theme in both Sabriel and Lirael of the death of one’s childhood and childhood dreams, and moving past them to becoming the person you’ll be as an adult, which hits really hard in a way it didn’t when I first read them. In many ways, some of the themes become more appropriate to someone reading them looking back, rather than forward, as you have the experiences to really appreciate how well those emotions have been put across on the page. Unsurprisingly for books that centre the experience of death, however fantastically, they are often unflinching in dealing with hard topics in ways that make them both appropriate for a young audience while still poignant to older readers. The darkness and emotionality never overwhelms the more fun aspects of the stories, but neither are they trivialised and sidelined. 

There is a sadness running through so many of the characters’ stories - Touchstone, trapped out of time and away from everyone he ever knew and loved, forced to reckon with the worst of his own experiences alone, at least at first; Sabriel, facing the death of her father right on the cusp of her potential adult opportunity to join him in her homeland; Lirael, constantly reckoning with the idea that she may never achieve the one thing that her family seem to think is worth being, and the loneliness of never being part of the community that surrounds her. There is depression, suicidal ideation and a lot of really sensitively handled big topics that I think just become better and better when you come back to them.

And for me, they are at the heart of what makes these somewhat timelessly good stories. They have a solid emotional core that rewards new perspectives from the reader, and in many ways feels sufficiently universal to be able to touch something in everyone, even if it may not be quite the same something.

Elizabeth: I think you’re right about there being something here for everyone. Even if the reader is not taken in by Lirael’s teenage angst – or her desperate and genuine need for belonging that is so relatable – there’s Sabriel repeating (and, arguably, making worse) her father’s mistakes in raising her own children. 

It may have been the magic and adventure that enchanted us as young readers, but the themes hold wisdom that will have us coming back all our lives.