Book Review: The Witch Roads

The first part of Elliott’s newest fantasy series that hits the power chords of her themes.

Elen is a deputy courier, a position she has gotten by luck, and skill, and a secret she dare not tell. She walks the roads of the province she lives in, delivering messages, scouting the terrain and always looking for the dreaded Spore. But when a prince from the Imperial Palace comes on a quest of his own, Elen, and her ward are caught up in intrigue, magic, adventure, and the revelation of long buried secrets on all sides.

Her story, the story of Kem, and of the prince are the heart of The Witch Roads, the newest fantasy novel from Kate Elliott.

The Witch Roads is a novel that I could spend an entire goodly sized review discussing just the plot and setup of the world that Elliott builds here. I am not going to focus so much on the plot on this one and after explaining the world, instead explore the book from a broader, thematic angle If you’ve read Elliott’s previous work, just about any of her previous work, you know that she likes complicated, intricate plots that a reader can sink into. Complicated characters. Intricate worldbuilding. But as much as I could tell you about the characters and plots, I want to tackle this a little differently.

So let me tell you about this world. Elliott has put us in the outer ring of an empire that has seen rises and falls, a stratified realm with strong class and social divisions and expectations of duty. We’re not quite at the borders of the Empire at our starting place of Orledder Halt, but we’re well removed from the center of power (that comes in the form of the prince and his entourage). This is a world that is rightly afraid and is fighting a battle against an incursion of something magical, dreadful and dangerous. It takes two forms--the Pall, which are whole areas covered by a dangerous fog, and the Spore, a magical corrupting power that can corrupt and control plants, animals... and people. The Spore is mostly found in the Pall, but can and does irrupt randomly in places and those irruptions must be dealt with quickly, or else whole communities are at risk from the Spore.

The titular Witch Roads are roads that the empire has built that resist the power of the Pall and the Spore alike. These are what allows the empire to still be an empire, although going off road is dangerous and that’s where people like Elen as deputy courier come in, as well as higher ranked people such as Wardens and Surveyors. This is thus an Empire trying its best to hold together and hold on against an implacable threat, as well as incursions from the aivar, who are non humans who are a threat at the Empire’s borders.

There is a richness to the world and its features that readers of previous Elliott novels will love. There are Griffin riders (a distant call to the Eagle Riders of the Crossroads universe). Strange ancient ruins. Cuisine, drink and food. The layout of officials residences. Heart Temples. Elliott packs a lot of story into her worldbuilding, it’s not only immersive, but it tells a lot about the story she is trying to tell. And there are funny and delightful bits in the worldbuilding too. When you read this book, read carefully how Halts are described in terms of name, setting and location. When you get it... you will get it. I was most amused.

But even more important than this world are the themes that Elliott hits. These are her power chords, you have seen these in other works of hers, but here she is...unleashed in a way few of her other books have really tried to grab. This is a platonic ideal of Elliott laying out themes she cares about on the table, all the while wrapping it up in that aforementioned worldbuilding, complicated characters and intricate plotting. When I think about this world, I think about the worldbuilding, sure but I think, more than in previous Kate Elliott’s books, about the themes she explores here.

Elliott’s first theme is bodily autonomy and choice. She tackles this in all of her main characters and many of the minor ones at all. Elen and Kem’s origins, which are slowly revealed throughout the book (until a Octavia Butler Wild Seed-like part at the end where all is revealed) are shown as a narrative of Elen, Kem and her late partner Ao’s desire to be able to control their destiny and fate and autonomy. Multiple times, it is revealed, they have been on the run in a search for that, fighting against worlds, places, people, who would take it away from them. Elen’s time in Orledder Halt where we meet here has been the longest time of peace for her...a peace disrupted by the arrival of the prince.

Kem fits into this because, and it is a spoiler, we learn that Kem has been seeking choices of their own, and in fact, although born female in body, has chosen to be a man. This choice, although a right, is challenged, and Kem’s seeking of his own path and autonomy is right from the first pages, when Elen is taking him on his rounds, seeking to offer him the path she had as a Courier. What Kem actually wants for himself finally becomes clear, and it is a constant struggle for the young man to find and hold his place and find his own autonomy of body and place in a society that is very much stratified and resists that. Elen’s concerns for Kem and her wardship (you could call it motherhood) and her hopes and fears for Kem run smack into Kem’s own desires and needs and it is a great source of conflict, drama and story.

And then there is the prince. The prince comes from privilege, power and people acceding to his power...except when it seems that others are scheming against him, in quite deadly fashion. But when he encounters a Haunt, and is possessed by the Haunt, we are once again set on questions of autonomy and power. The Haunt claims that he can’t possess someone unwillingly, but his possession of the prince seems like a borderline rule-skirting case at *best*. While the OG prince is an unsympathetic character at best, and the Haunt-prince very much more appealing (there are even sparks between Elen and him), we are always reminded of the autonomy problem--did the prince, who is, according to the Haunt, sleeping while the Haunt possesses him for his own ends, really a consenting party to this arrangement?

And then there are of course questions of loyalty, duty, sacrifice and honor that I’ve noticed in Elliott’s work at least since the Crown of Stars series. With Elen, the Haunted prince and everyone else on the road, the plotting and worldbuilding collide with that duty as the Haunted prince seeks his own end, the Prince’s retinue must be kept from knowing what happened, and Elen and Kem caught in the middle of it all. Intrigues and betrayals and tangled loyalties rise up in the minor characters, as Elliott expertly gives them their own arcs, minor spotlights, and story backgrounds. Like many of her works, the minor characters of Elliott’s work get more character building than some (to remain nameless) authors' primary characters.

There are also minor themes here and there, especially regarding the nature of history and what is recorded, and even a touch of exploring the consequences of colonialism and xenophobia as well.

I have enjoyed the shorter works that Elliott has offered lately (The Keeper’s Six, Servant Mage) and hope for more in those worlds, especially The Keeper’s Six (longtime readers know that I am all about multiverses, thank you very much). The Witch Roads is Elliott in full on fat fantasy (although this is not as long as some of her other fantasy and SF novels) mode. It's the first in a duology, and the ending is a stopping point, not an offramp point. But my nature as a Elliott stan is well known, and so I know what I am signing up for. And there is such richness in this story, that I can commend the book to you even if the story is not yet complete.

One thing, and its not Elliott’s fault, is that the Amazon page for the book gives away what turns out to be a tremendous spoiler that I am glad I did not read before reading the arc of this book. Caveat lector.

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Highlights:

• Big fat Kate Elliott fantasy in the Kate Elliott style. 
• Strong and immersive Worldbuilding
• Power chords of classic Elliott themes, unvarnished and in full force
• Beautiful and evocative cover.

Reference: Elliott, Kate, The Witch Roads, [Tor Books, 2025]

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

Film Review: The Electric State

It's almost admirable how completely this film wastes a great concept

In an alternate 1990s, after an almost-successful robot rebellion was crushed with the last-minute help of human-operated telepresence drones, the defeated robots have been exiled to a huge secluded area in the southwestern US, and it's declared illegal for robots to be anywhere else. For some unexplained reason, this blatant act of forced displacement is called a peace treaty. Anyway, the plot proper begins when a runaway robot sneaks into a teenage girl's house and claims to be remotely operated by the little brother she thought had died years before. So she runs away with the robot, since she doesn't like her foster family anyway, and teams up with a smuggler who can get her into the zone where the surviving robots are confined, because that's where her brother's body is being kept. During this rescue mission, they uncover the evil secrets of the company that provides the world with telepresence drones, and create a new state of affairs where robots have a better chance of being free.

This rather average-sounding summary doesn't do justice to how aggressively generic the new Netflix film The Electric State is. Its cardboard characterizations, absolutely predictable beats, self-sabotaging style of humor, uninspired action sequences, unforgivably misjudged casting, overwritten dialogues, and toothless politics would suffice to render it just another forgettably mediocre Netflix production. What sets this disappointing exhibit of laziness apart is the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of the far more interesting illustrated novel of the same title published in 2018 by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. While the Netflix version goes out of its way to sand down its own themes and confine itself to family-friendly palatability, the source material was a scathing portrait of American modern vices: ubiquitous advertisements, irrational consumerism, and self-absorbed numbness. None of that commentary survives the adaptation process, because God forbid a Russo brothers character feel a true emotion or express a controversial viewpoint. The version of The Electric State they deliver is an empty carcass painted over with a cartoon smile.

Instead of its paint-by-numbers attempts at comedy or pathos, what actually reaches into the viewer's soul about this film is the unbelievably expert degree to which it avoids sparking any interest or empathy. Its happy scenes feel bland, its sad scenes come off as glib, its surprises are derivative, its scary bits are more deserving of embarrassment, and its appeal to righteous indignation doesn't know which value to care about. It's as if the Russo brothers had deliberately designed an experiment to craft a film that leaves every human emotion untouched. It doesn't even manage to provoke a memorable negative reaction: it should be boring, but it's too absurd for that; so it should be irritating, but it's too insecure for that; so it should be tiresome, but it's too scattershot for that; so it should be confusing, but it's too preachy for that; so it should be offensive, but it's too insincere for that. This production so fundamentally misunderstands what makes movies work that it may as well have been made by its robot characters.

To mention just one of many missed opportunities: in 2005's The Island, a universally and justly disliked movie, the villain has a henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, until the henchman has a moment of reflection and realizes that he, as a Black man, has a common cause with the targets he's chasing. He rebels against the villain explicitly because he knows what happens when a category of people is treated as less than people. As it happens, The Electric State also has a Black henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, and he also ends up rebelling against the villain, but somehow the movie never makes the obvious connection. The reason given for this plot point is the least imaginative possible. It should be cause for alarm for any movie that The Island has a clearer sense of its own stance than you.

Even with the mangled plot that was used instead of the original, The Electric State could have made urgently relevant points about the evils of inventing separate categories of personhood, the possibilities of resistance under total oppression, the temptation to replace the harshness of real life with a soothing fantasy, or the danger of inputting profit and human life in the same equation. This could have been a strong story, both by its own merits and in relation to our times. But perhaps it's an even more telling reflection of our times that the duo of the most successful directors in the history of cinema have settled for building the appearance, rather than the intention, of having something to say.

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Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

TV Review: Paradise

We all have our ways of coping with death. Unfortunately, this lady has all the money in the world

Stop me if you've heard this one: after a worldwide disaster destroys the modern world as we know it, a few lucky survivors have moved to a secluded underground habitat to ensure that humankind will endure. However, some years later, the assassination of this small community's leader will risk exposing the secrets of the people who actually run the place, and it will be a random nobody's mission to pursue the leads while still dealing with grief over a lost love, a death our protagonist blames the authorities for. Whom can you trust after the world has ended? How do you even get away with murder in a secluded panopticon? And what's really going on outside the shelter?

The Hulu series Paradise isn't entirely unoriginal. It does a fine job of turning post-apocalyptic drama into a meditation on the various ways we learn to keep living after a loved one dies. Each of the few thousand survivors who live in this underground city has someone to mourn, and the extensive flashbacks that take up a good portion of each episode's runtime provide the necessary context for the main cast's seemingly extravagant choices. The viewer ends with a complete idea of what makes these characters tick, even if sometimes it's a broken moral compass.

All through this first season, characters remind each other (and the viewer) that the placid, uneventful imitation of American suburbia they live in doesn't make up for the billions of deaths that happened on the surface on a single, horrific day. If they were ever on their way to getting too comfortable, the loss of their leader is a shocking reminder that death still exists, and no shelter will ward it off. That realization hits especially hard for the billionaire who funded the entire project, a grieving mother who has embarked on a Quixotic mission to keep death away from her remaining child, the world be damned.

This is the most interesting character in Paradise. Normal people understand that death is a thing that happens and our efforts against it can only succeed so many times. But the founder of this underground city is the world's richest woman, and having so much unchallenged power tends to warp your idea of what's possible. One flashback reveals that, when she heard that environmental devastation was imminent, her first thought wasn't to look for ways to use her fortune to save the world; she looked for ways to use her fortune to save the one person who matters to her. She's already lost one child, and now she lives in permanent alert mode. To keep her living child safe, she'll let civilization go to hell if it comes to that. And as the season progresses, the viewer discovers how many deaths she'll consider acceptable for this monomaniacal goal.

When you believe you're prepared for the end of the world, but one day it takes you by surprise, whatever life you manage to build afterwards will be defined by your actions at the moment of crisis. Paradise builds on that idea, and it traces a few parallel plots that mirror each other: parents who make ugly choices for their children's sake, brokenhearted widowers with survivor guilt looking for absolution, desperate people pushed into impossible dilemmas. Although several characters are already dead by the start of the show, their presence haunts every episode. This is a story that relies very heavily on flashbacks, because the way the living characters are written requires the viewer to keep in mind the details of their past in order to make sense of their current actions. The screenwriters seem to be making an argument that every person, even the ones you dislike, is carrying some burden that explains who they are, and empathy for your fellow human requires that you acknowledge how their pain molded them.

Then again, how do you feel empathy for an unfathomably wealthy person who manipulates several scientific geniuses, hundreds of unsuspecting construction workers, and her own government into indulging her fantasy of safety? We've all heard (and some of us have been) parents who say they'd do anything to protect their children. That sentiment looks quite different when it touches someone who is actually able to do anything.

For a show about an entire underground city, Paradise doesn't look particularly impressive. Part of the reason is that the community is intended to remind people of home. Still, the set design is so lacking in an identity of its own (*cough* Silo *cough*) that some of the flashbacks in the outside world are easy to misread as taking place in the underground present. The show also suffers at times from clumsy dialogues and characterization, with some plot developments transparently contrived for the sake of drama. The songs selected as thematic summaries of each episode come too close to the cringey side of in-your-nose-ness. And again, the overuse of flashbacks is a sledgehammer against any hope of maintaining a sense of cohesive pacing.

The draw, despite these failings, is to be found in the performances. As our protagonist, Sterling K. Brown does a solid job of portraying barely contained fury under a face of professional equanimity. Krys Marshall, who has been fantastic in For All Mankind, is here a complex player in the murder investigation, struggling to balance her conflicting loyalties with her sense of justice. Gerald McRaney is positively frightening as the type of domineering patriarch who can bend a nation's fate. And pay close attention to Nicole Brydon Bloom's meticulously controlled performance. Just saying.

This first season ends in the right cliffhanger that was reasonable to expect, and I wouldn't object to seeing more episodes set in this strange, messy, delusional last hope of humankind. But let's say I won't exactly jump in exhilaration if it comes to happen.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: In The Lost Lands

Based on a George R.R. Martin short story, In the Lost Lands feels like a dystopian video game that's all style and no substance

As as sci-fi fan, I will forever be chasing the high of taking a chance on a film like The Fifth Element and being rewarded. It's rare that a standalone, non-franchise movie delivers these days, and I love supporting new ideas, however absurd they may seem. I wanted so badly for Jupiter Ascending, for example, to be great. (It is, but in a terribly silly way.)

Thus, when In The Lost Lands appeared on my radar, I was excited. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of video game movie renown, it tells the story of a decaying future civilization and a witch's journey. And like The Fifth Element (and all of Anderson's Resident Evil movies), it features Milla Jovovich, who is absolutely breathtaking on screen. She is Grey Alys, a sort of Jessica-from-Dune-type witch who also, for some curious reason, can never refuse a job. She teams up with Dave Bautista, who plays what is essentially the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Which brings to me the setting, arguably the most interesting part of the movie. I'm a sucker for a wasteland, and this movie seamlessly creates a world that is equal parts Mad Max: Fury Road, Fallout, and the aforementioned Dark Tower. The biggest debt is to Mad Max, as the looming citadel structure even features a craggy skull-shaped entrance and a fleet of black-smudged faces à la warboys. Everything is dusty, dirty, and church bells ring out in slagged iron cathedrals.

My favorite (and most interesting) part revolved around the clearly evil post-capitalist and christo-mechanical church faction—sort of a post-apocalyptic Templar deal. Their motivations and machinations aren't ever clearly explained, but the vibes are high. They're the bad guys, and they have on Templar smocks, have dirty faces, and wear aviator sunglasses.

Overall, the movie trucks along fine. There are a few interesting battles and fights, and the sweeping shots give "crumbling civilization" in some visually epic ways. At the end of the day, though, it's a movie cigarette—probably bad for you, but entertaining for a few brief moments. Folks familiar with Anderson will probably already know this.

The most unbelievable part of the movie for me wasn't the unexplained character motivations or gravity-defying stunts: It was the fact that three different women are attracted to Dave Bautista, the main gunslinger character. I've only really ever noticed him as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy, so it was wild seeing him as a leading man. 

Unless you're an Anderson head, you'll probably skip this one. But if you have some to kill, it's a perfectly fine movie to watch on a rainy Saturday and enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Review: Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

Jordan Carroll uncomfortably probes the connections between the field and the right wing of America

Jordan Carroll’s academic book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right sets out to do what it says on the tin. His thesis is that the alt-right, as constituted, has undeniable links to the science fiction field, which go back to its earliest eras, and whose consequences and ties remain to this day. He explores how the alt-right’s antisemitism, racism, sexism, queerphobia and other toxic beliefs have manifested, been encouraged, and grown in the soil of science fiction from its inception.

His thesis:

Science fiction serves as more than just a pop culture reference in fascist discourse
[...] the alt-right has interpreted science fiction to say that a fascist world is possible.

It was unfortunately inevitable. Some of the same impulses, ideas, beliefs and interests in the early part of the 20th century bore fruit in a number of, as it turns out, rather interconnected loci. The interest in space exploration (and colonization) bore fruit not only in the stories shepherded by Hugo Gernsback and, more importantly, John C. Campbell, but in the whole strain of the work of Wernher von Braun and his rocket program, first for Nazi Germany, and later, for the United States.

This interchange of conscious and subconscious ideas has had consequences for science fiction as a field, and that is what Carroll examines here. He varies between the historical perspective and that of more recent events. He leans on Alec Nevala-Lee’s book on John C. Campbell (Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction) to show how Campbellian science fiction has had some of these toxic themes and ideas right from the start, and that the alt-right has been looking at science fiction for models of a fascist future for a long time.

As Carroll notes, this pervasive toxicity has led to some very strange results. He notes The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, an out-and-out satire and a strike against the technocratic fascist impulses of science fiction that, quite frankly, probably wouldn’t get a publisher today. The book is not subtle with its points (or even in its cover). And yet, as Carroll points out, there are those on the right who take it as a model to emulate. Carroll also brings up authors like Pournelle and Niven, focusing on Lucifer’s Hammer and its rather lurid racial politics (just as one prominent example, the PoC cannibal army) as mainstreaming the ideas of the alt-right, all the worse because of its blockbuster bestseller status. The darker connections of racial and eugenic politics in science fiction (again, Campbell, but not just Campbell, that’s the point of this book) were kickstarted and encouraged by books like this.

And so, yes, he also naturally tackles Dune. Dune probably could have an entire book written on just its role in politics and science fiction—positive, negative, and neutral. Carroll focuses on how, despite Herbert’s attempt to show the horror and hell of Paul’s life and his role, the whole idea of a “God-Emperor” has been enthusiastically taken up as a role model by elements of the alt-right. They ignore the non-Western elements of the culture of Paul’s society (from the Emperor all the way to the Fremen) and delight in the power of Paul as God-Emperor with his Führerprinzip as something to wish for. And yes, Carroll drags in Warhammer 40K and how, for all that it is overtly a criticism of this grimdark future, like Dune, it is seen as an aspirational future by the alt-right.

Naturally, he also goes on to tackle The Turner Diaries, which is perhaps the most poisonous science fiction or science-fiction-adjacent book of them all. With its explicitly racist and fascist politics, Caroll calls it as a Bible of the white nationalist movement, and I think he’s absolutely right. This is the future the alt-right has always wanted. It’s a manifesto of the darkest order. I am myself reminded of “From my Nightmare 1995 to my Utopian 2050” by William S Lind as being absolutely in this terrible tradition. There is a whole strain of post-apocalyptic novels and stories that Carroll could have gone into that could come in for criticism or at least discussion in interrogating these ideas. Consider the underground city society of A Boy and His Dog and how the girls (and some of the men as well) all wear heavy white makeup.

In the more modern and recent context, Carroll looks at people like Richard Spencer, and also at people like Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day) and the whole saga of the Rabid and Sad Puppies (once again, relying on an excellent source, this time Camestros Felapton) to show how, in more recent times, this mixture of far-right politics and science fiction has been wrapped around each other. In this era, we don’t just get odious books by authors such as Tom Kratman; we get political action and activity in a direct fashion.

It’s not all doom and gloom, as he highlights authors such as N. K. Jemisin and her award-winning Broken Earth trilogy as countervailing reactions to the alt-right’s attempts to go from simmering beneath the surface to fuller control of science fiction. But in that, I think that Carroll missed a few tricks. The Rabid and Sad Puppies were a fulmination, a fungal bloom of these right, alt-right, far-right movements. But while that tide, as of the writing of the book, and as of the writing of this review, has receded, there is still a strain of writers and authors who attempt to, to various degrees, mainstream reactionary politics. Yes, I could drag Baen Books here, and I already mentioned Kratman, but there are less odious authors who are not quite as overt in these fascist-friendly futures, or futures that the alt-right can wish for.

And to that point, unaddressed and undiscussed in this book (it’s a slim volume, to be fair), some of those currents are present in a greater total mass as subtext (perhaps, to be fair, probably subconsciously) in much more mainstream science fiction. Carroll doesn’t consider or interrogate the problems that this subtext has had in the main run of science fiction. The emphasis on technocracy über alles, the devaluing (or just not even a consideration) of the importance and power of labor, a general rightward bent to the prevailing politics of societies, the overwhelming white-maleness of characters, even today, are all echoing consequences of the Speculative Whiteness. Admittedly, again, to dive into the vast pool of science fiction and try and disentangle even one of these particular fruits would make the book many times its size, and perhaps Carroll did not want to handwave in that particular direction without going into a deep dive. But even as he says that his book is a historical study, I think that not talking about this is precisely part of the problem. I spoke earlier of the soil of science fiction leading to alt-right science fiction blooming, but really, the soil itself has a taint in it. It takes effort for writers to try and detoxify their own work as best they can.¹

That said, and returning to a more positive bent, this is a slim, powerful, and sometimes rather damning look at science fiction and the poisonous and destructive politics of the alt-right. I’ve been aware of these issues for a long time, in a sometimes direct fashion (cf. my own small speaking role in the Sad and Rabid Puppies drama) and an indirect fashion (cf. my engagement and reengagement with Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, Anderson, et cetera, as well as reading the aforementioned book by Nevala-Lee). This academic work puts it all together, and then some, and presents it with the receipts, as it were.

This is an important book (and I don’t use that phrase lightly). Is it going on my Hugo nomination ballot this year for Best Related Work? Unquestionably yes. And even if you aren't the Hugo-nominating type, if you are at all interested in the field of science fiction and want to experience a more critical analysis of how it has proven to be a fertile soil for the alt-right and their fascist dreams, I strongly recommend Carroll's work.

Reference: Carroll, Jordan. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right [University of Minnesota Press, 2024].

¹ To give one example: take a look at the Expanse novels by James S. A. Corey... but then look at the TV adaptation, which took visible pains to address some of the problems of the novels. In many ways, it is superior to the source material for the changes and detoxification that it has done. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the books? Yes. But it takes a lot of capital (in all senses) to not only recognize the problem, but even try to address it.

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

Review: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

What if the President of the USA acted more level-headed than the current one?

Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel Night of Camp David has a particular distinction: one of the few novels I’ve ever seen that does not have its title on its cover. The novel is a reissue; Knebel was a novelist of some repute in the ’60s, as well as a famous journalist and liberal firebrand. The reason I’m taking the time to discuss this book, as well as the reason the book was reissued to begin with, can be seen on the cover: “What if the President of the USA went stark raving mad?” Made frustratingly, infuriatingly, and frankly depressingly relevant in the light of the current administration (it was reissued initially during the first Trump term), it has been brought back by Penguin Random House to make more money off of our national dysfunction.

Knebel’s novel has become “retroactive alternate history,” i.e. fiction that was, at the time it was written, a speculation of future events, but has now been surpassed by the inevitable march of time. This type of fiction is often of interest to those of us who are fans of alternate history; it provides insight into just how the past could have changed, if only from the vantage point of people in said past. There have been online works speculating about the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example (I wrote one in high school, and it won an online award). The end result is a sort of genre shift over the course of the work’s existence, one that was probably foreseeable by the author, who wrote a lot of political fiction (by that point, works akin to proto-Tom Clancy had already been written, such as George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands). As such, they have more in common, to the contemporary reader, with modern speculative work.

This novel stars a senator from Iowa with political aspirations who is asked away from the busy hubbub of national politics in Washington to speak with the President late at night at Camp David (the presidential retreat in rural Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Washington) to talk about the upcoming national election. The President asks the Senator if the latter wants to be his running mate, as his current Vice President is under the cloud of scandal. During this meeting, the President voiced his support for a law legalizing the warrantless recording and storage of all telephone calls in the country. That is the first of many erratic, authoritarian things that the President expresses over the course of the novel, leading the senator to look to see if something is amiss.

The 21st-century reader will note that we already have a system of warrantless collection of information that dwarfs anything beyond a simple pile of telephone call transcripts; if anything, this being the sign of looming insanity comes off as quaint, its proponent as rather tame next to the many horrible real-life cases that would follow, and the book's author as somewhat naive. This is one of a number of things that show the limits of Knebel’s imagination: he is that sort of white liberal writer who believed that ‘it’ could not happen here, in America, land of the free and home of the brave. He had an implicit faith in the American people that I don’t think has ever been warranted.

The novel works well as a depiction of the backrooms of high-level Washington politics, and it’s clear that Knebel knew his facts. He’s acutely aware of the wide variety of strange personalities that populate that world, from lawyers to activists, and how they grease the wheels of politics. Here, Knebel does not come off as so naive, as he shows you how even the most virtuous-seeming people in politics have skeletons in their closet (including the bright young senator around whom the narrative revolves). It does, though, show its age in how most of the politicians and indeed people on the Hill are white men, although there are women outside of formal positions who are nevertheless quite influential to the proceedings. There’s also a paucity of nonwhite characters. Knebel does have enough foresight to have a Black man as a major figure in Congress, but he seems to be the only one. Given that this was written in the ’60s, I’m not really sure we could have expected any better, but it’s noticeable.

Knebel is very good at pacing, and the book’s plot ticks along like a metronome. He was an accomplished writer of political thrillers and it shows here. There’s an economy to how this book uses its scenes, and not a single of them feels wasted, even ones that clearly diverge from the main plot. A drive around the country to find evidence feels earned, as does a vacation jaunt to the Bahamas for the senator. There’s an adept combination of different plotlines in the Bahamas, so that an absence never feels like an absence, but rather a suspension of the presence in the main plot that lets you look back at the significance of what has occurred up to that point. Many lesser authors could have made such a detour feel superfluous, but Knebel knew how not to.

Night of Camp David is both a perfectly enjoyable political thriller and a cautionary tale about speculating on the future. Like so many works that came before it, and not a few that came after, the passage of time has only laid bare a certain lack of imagination, less so of the author and more so of the age in which they worked. Knebel’s great weakness was assuming that the ‘normalcy’ of mid-century America would last forever, or indeed that it was ever really a thing to begin with. I absolutely see why the folks at Penguin Random House chose to reissue this novel so recently, but if anything, it serves to emphasize the sheer madness of the current administration, if not in actual mental state, certainly in its outlandishness. We’re living through times that our progeny will write lurid historical novels about, unfortunately, and an actual novel does as good a job as any to lay that truth bare.

Reference: Knebel, Fletcher. Night of Camp David [Penguin Random House, 1965].

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