Festival View: The 1 Up Fever

Sometimes, filmmakers really do manage to see the future

Film festival programming can be a vicious vocation.

It’s true, a lot of us fight, hard, for premieres. It’s a sad thing for me, as I’d love it if every film could show everywhere, but it’s usually the big players that end up with the big films, and the tiny folks, they get the the crumbs, usually a year or two old by the time they fall into our laps.

Now, there are few festivals smaller than the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival. In fact, we don’t have a full-time home. We tour, showing shorts wherever we can. Mostly, it’s at cons, sometimes at libraries, we’ve even projected on a sheet hung on a prominent Silicon Valley engineer’s garage door! We don’t do every year, in fact there’ve only been 8 editions since I founded it in 1999. Luckily, I get shorts from film friends I know through Cinequest or have met on the circuit, and those have buoyed us through the years.

So, it wouldn’t be the place you’d expect a North American primiere for a short that ends up playing around the world and making a buzz again a couple of years later when the world had moved along the path it envisioned and made it seem even more like the documentary it proposed to be! The film, The 1 Up Fever by director Silvia Dal Dosso was our one big win.

So, let us go back to the far-off year of 2013. It was a year like many others, only more so. The world had yet to experience the hellscape that begun in 2016, and Prince and David Bowie were both still alive.  I remember sitting down to work on screening for the festival and coming across a film that had graphics that harkened back to the 8-bit graphics of my all-time favorite gaming system. This film had hit the exact right set of eyes.

Honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered who’d seen it; it’s just so good it can’t be denied.

The film was delivered as a documentary, and not played for knowing laughs as in Arrested Development, The Office, or What We Do in the Shadows sort of way. It was played straight, a series of interviews inter-cut with action scenes of people, out in the world, playing an Augmented Reality game.

In the first segment of the film, a bunch of folks were running around Berlin which had been turned into a giant level of Super Mario Brothers. The graphics are straight out of the NES text-interludes. We see coins, just like those found in the Mario franchise, hanging in the air.

The concept that the ‘documentary’ was pitching was that a game added a layer of false reality where you could go through Berlin collecting coins by hitting the coins, which were virtual representations of literal amounts of the virtual currency Bitcoin. They would collect these by hitting them with their smartphones. If you got your phone taken away by a security guard after trespassing to collect coins, you lost your entire stash. They told the story largely through interviews that seemed 100% legitimate.

And that was the brilliant part, and why so many people were brought into the idea that this was an actual documentary. They spend a fair amount of time going over the mysterious origin of the game and make direct connections to the mysterious origins of the game. Those of us in the know about Bitcoin, and at that point cryptocurrency wasn’t a thing that made headlines, nor were there real cryptobros, though a few of the folks ‘interviewed’ for The 1 Up Fever would certain qualify as such before the term was coined.

What may be the most fascinating part of the piece – it’s all come to pass!

Several AR experiences existed at the time, though nothing at the level that the film presented. Things like the fascinating but glitchy Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary existed as a real-world based mobile AR experience, but they were few and far between, and technologically The 1 Up Fever was worlds ahead of any of the significant platforms. It showed a phone-based game, while many of the real world examples were based around special glasses (and I can’t be the only one who remembers and loved GoogleGlass, right?) or head-mounted helmet-style displays. The idea of using a phone for a real-world-based augmented reality game would become the standard following Niantic’s Ingress. It was still a teeny-tiny segment of the gaming world until a little game called Pokemon GO was released in 2015.

That’s when The 1 Up Fever got a massive up-tick in attention.

The short played various festivals in 2013 and 2014, then showed once in a while until about 2017, when it played not only fests, but also conferences. You latch on to that presentation model and you’re likely to play for a lot longer than the average festival run a short might enjoy. There was a renewed series of debates over the reality of the short, just as we had at our festival when we showed it at BayCon 2014. They played it brilliantly down the line, and it’s only been helped by the real world catching up to their vision. Even today, you’ll find folks asking what the name of the game is and wondering if it’s available in the App Store.

You can still see The 1 Up Fever on Vimeo, and if you’ve got the time, you really should. It’s the kind of sly, prescient sci-fi you really can enjoy while fitting it in with the world around you. Just like in the game...

 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Review: Tales of the Ketty Jay, by Chris Wooding

 Found family sure can get on your nerves sometimes.

A rag tag team of misfits, found family, swashbuckling heists and shenanigans in airships in the sky---what’s not to like? Chris Wooding’s series of four rip-roaring yarns was a delightful discovery to me this spring, and I raced through them with sometimes open-mouthed, full-bellied laughter and delight as each new development further proved that Wooding is a master of pacing, plotting, characterization, and world-building.

The series starts with the origin story of what will become our found family. They aren’t family yet, though. They’re just crew, serving under Darien Frey, the captain of a cruddy little airship named the Ketty Jay. Frey specializes in small-time trade, smuggling, and the occasional act of petty piracy in the air above the country of Vardia. He'll rob an orphanage by preference because they're less likely to fight back (and still gets spanked, because he's not terribly good at piracy). He has no particular ties or loyalties to anyone, including his crew, and so when he hears of a possible heist that could set him up for life, he jumps on it, with no plans to share the full scope of the bounty with anyone but himself. In what will become something of a repeating theme in this whole series, the heist blows up in his face and in short order he is on the run from the whole strength of the Vardian government, wanted for a crime he had no idea he was doing, but which he undeniably is guilty of committing. 

Things only get worse from there: Over the course of four books we have demon possessions, golems, secret pirate hide-outs, train heists, museum heists, vortices in the sky spewing demon dreadnoughts, mighty juggernauts protecting lost cities, races, prophecies, civil-religious war, heroic last stands, true love, and a very fierce cat.  Wooding is a genius at constructing incredibly entertaining set-pieces that also serve to advance the plot in tightly paced progression, rather than feeling like side quests. 

So far, so fun, but what makes this series sing is the wonderful characterization of Frey’s crew. Silo, Frey’s oldest companion, is a Murthian, one of a race of people who have been enslaved for centuries, and so for all the loyalty he might hold for Frey by virtue of their friendship, it is also enforced by circumstances: he cannot make it on his own, and so must stick by Frey’s side. His story and character arc as he works through his role on the ship and in the broader world is very satisfying, and one of the slower burns, taking three books to really kick off.

Crake, a demonist (i.e., a magic worker), is an aristocrat by birth, and would normally have nothing to do with such dirty, scruffy low-down rabble as the crew of the Ketty Jay, except that he is running from a terrible mistake, the result as much of sheer bad luck as hubris, and the people who pursue him will have their work cut out to punish him more than he punishes himself. Malvery, the ship’s doctor, also hides from a past error of his own, a result of same combination of hubris and bad luck that struck down Crake. (This combination is distressingly common on the Ketty Jay.) But rather than turning maudlin and self-hating, Malvery has an avuncular charm to him, which is a welcome relief from Crake's---to be honest, rather tiresome---broody suffering.

We also have Harkins and Pinn, who serve as pilots of maneuverable single-person fighter crafts that support the Ketty Jay during air battles. They are mostly comic relief, but not entirely. Their personalities carry a sharp-edged tinge of their own. Harkins, a veteran of the most recent war with Samarla, has become an ageing, permanent coward, terrified of everything---even the ship’s cat---comfortable nowhere but when flying. Pinn is young and incredibly stupid, a bully at heart, born too late to fight in the war that so wrecked Harkins, and perpetually looking for the opportunity to accrue wealth and fame in a world that he is far too dense to understand. Yet Harkins is more than just a jiggling jelly, and by the third and especially fourth books his character arc acquires a certain poignancy to it that is all the more touching for how much he has been the butt of the joke in the previous two volumes. And Pinn—well, he never gets any smarter, but he does have a talent for managing to be in the right place at the right time, protected by his own stupidity from fully experiencing the consequences of his mistakes.

This feels very male, doesn’t it? It’s extremely male, especially in the first two books, when the only female crew member is Jez, newly hired as the ship’s navigator. She also hides a secret trauma in her past, but whatever it is it seems to have left her cursed with awesome: she has preternatural acuity of sight and hearing, and heals quickly from injuries that would leave others dead. Further, as the daughter of an airship maker, she also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the ins and outs of all makes and models of airships. Indeed, for the first two books she suffers more than a little from token girl syndrome: she the only female character, and it seems that Wooding is afraid to give her any flaws. Combined with Frey’s perpetual scumbaggery with respect to women, the first book feels particularly bro-ey, and is the weakest of the series.

But the glory of this series is that it fixes its problems. Frey’s behavior with women is deplorable, but the narrative is aware of this. It is not presented as a good thing. The sections from Frey's perspective harp on about how he's super good-looking and has never had any difficulty attracting and seducing the ladies, but whenever we actually meet said ladies on the page they tend to do things like kick him in the face, steal his cargo, and double-cross him in deals, which he heartily deserves. A rival pirate captain, and a Vardian knight—both women—develop uneasy truces with the Ketty Jay as their respective goals occasionally align, which gives us lots of time with powerful women who are substantially more competent and good at their jobs than Frey and his crew. And in the third book a young street rat named Ashua joins the crew—as so many of the others did—more through necessity and self-interest than any particular loyalty or desire. She livens things up enormously, and develops quite a touching bond with Malvery.

And Jez’s story, as it unfolds, turns out to be substantially less awesome and more cursed than it feels at first, which fixes, to an extent her token girl problem. Her arc also ties into the broader escalating tensions between Vardia and Samarla, and also the growing conflict between the Vardian government and the dominant religion in the country, known as the Awakeners. These tensions implicate Silo, because of his status as a refugee from Samarla; and Crake, because the Awakeners, among their other tenets, like to hang demonists. They implicate Frey and Malvery and Hawkins, too, by virtue of their service during the last war between Vardia and Samarla; and they ensnare Pinn, who wanted so badly to fight in the last war, and is thrilled as tensions rise and the prospect of a new war that he can actually take part in looms. The political and social worldbuilding is as rich and well-constructed as the character arcs, and the developments of all the Ketty Jay’s misadventures, as they entwine personal  goals of the crew with the fate of entire nations, is a masterclass in plot construction.

By the end of the series, the crew of the Ketty Jay are fully family. But they feel like a real family, in the worst as well as the best senses of the word. They did not choose each other, not really; they get on each other’s nerves; they betray each other and disappoint each other; they can be unspeakably cruel, leading others stalk off in a huff vowing never to return; they are tempted by other paths in life which might take them away from the Ketty Jay, and sometimes they need to just strike out on their own. It is a rare family that lives together, at home, forever, but that doesn’t make the bonds any less real.

--

Highlights

• Swashbuckling heists

• Rich, chewy, well-developed characters and worldbuilding

• Terrific plotting and pacing

• A bit weak on representation, but improves

Nerd coefficient: 8, well worth your time and attention

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

References:

Wooding, Chris. Retribution Falls. [Gollancz 2009]
Wooding, Chris. The Black Lung Captain. [Gollancz 2010]
Wooding, Chris. The Iron Jackal. [Gollancz 2011]
Wooding, Chris. The Ace of Skulls. [Gollancz 2013]

Thank You

The finalists for the 2023 Hugo Awards have been announced and for a staggering sixth time nerds of a feather, flock together is among the shortlisted fanzines.

Friends, we do not have to tell you just how big of an honor this is but this is an immense honor. Nerds of a Feather was so incredibly fortunate to have won the Hugo for Best Fanzine two years ago and to be considered once more is just unbelievable. We know that we are just one small part of an extraordinary community of fans who carry our genre's conversation across blogs, zines, newsletters and all forms of social media, and we're incredibly honored to have our contribution recognized in this way.

Nerds of a Feather exists and is what it is because of the work of our flock of editors and writers: Adri Joy, Arturo Serrano, Dean Richard, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Joe Del Franco, Joe Sherry, Michael Newhouse-Bailey, Paul Weimer, Phoebe Wagner, Roseanna Pendlebury, Sean Dowie, The G, and Vance Kotrla. This collective has, day in and day out, delivered excellence in genre writing and we could not be prouder of this team (and of our new writers introduced in 2023 - Alex Wallace, Ann Michelle Harris, Chris Garcia, Clara Cohen, and Haley Zapal).

We would like to give a special thanks to our readers and supporters within the community. Without you, we never make it here - not even once. We would certainly never have received a Hugo Award without you. Thank you. Thank you for nominating nerds of a feather, flock together. It means so much more than we can possibly express. It means everything.


We would also like to take this time to congratulate Haley Zapal for being a second time finalist for Best Fancast as part of Hugo, Girl. It is well deserved and we are so happy for her as well as for Lori, Amy, and Kevin. Likewise, congratulations to Chris Garcia and our friends at Journey Planet for their fanzine nomination - as always, we are honoured to share a category with you all.

-Joe, Adri, Roseanna, Arturo, Paul, Vance, & The G

Nanoreview: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, or, Who Ordered These Reheated Leftovers?

The true monster is whoever stole the corpses of other movies to stitch them together into this

Remember that surreal period from the late 90s to the mid 00s, when inexplicably Disney and Dreamworks happened to release variations on the same premise? Well, guess what Dreamworks has launched mere weeks after the remake of Disney's The Little Mermaid: a spiteful diatribe against the very idea of mermaids. In this uninspired purée of finely chopped pieces of Luca, Turning Red and Aquaman, we learn that mermaids are actually bad. They're jealous, treacherous divas who only have a good reputation thanks to their manipulative skills. Because subtext is for cowards, the mermaid we meet in this movie has abundant, gorgeous red hair, like a certain other mermaid of better fame. The marketing didn't bother hiding the reveal that this little mermaid is the movie's villain, and upon watching it, one can tell how much fun Dreamworks derived from punching her in the face.

OK, Dreamworks, you had your moment of inconsequential revenge. But are you telling me an interesting story? Let's see: awkward girl trying to fit in, love interest with the power to befuddle the heroine, anxious mother with communication issues, hyperactive little brother with no concern for personal safety, eccentric uncle who feels left out, improbably intelligent pet, circle of friends replaceable with cardboard cutouts, obviously false new friend, secret royal lineage, training montage, excessive reliance on pop songs that will make the movie feel dated in two days, MacGuffin quest followed by MacGuffin switcheroo, impending school prom where the story's climax occurs, kaiju fight won with the power of teamwork, obligatory dance scene at the ending. There isn't a single original idea in this movie. It's like the producers told the animators, "make us a mermaid to punch" and left them with vague instructions to fill the rest of the runtime with a laundry list of tropes.

The quality of Dreamworks films has been, let's say, not uniform. Their record contains almost as many successes (Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Puss in Boots 2) as misfires (Shark Tale, Bee Movie, Turbo, The Boss Baby). At some point during the production of Ruby Gillman, someone should have warned the studio that hiring, of all people, the director of Space Chimps and one of the writers of the South Park movie was not only a sign that the producers were cheap, but also that they had alarmingly questionable taste. It appears to be the curse of Dreamworks to play second fiddle to Disney, but this curse of mediocrity is one they've willingly inflicted on themselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Asteroid City lays bare the scaffolding of narration

It's an outstanding magic trick to expose the inherent insubstantiality of storytelling by means of such a solid, heavy-hitting story

Onto this Earth has landed an otherworldly fabulation: a film by Wes Anderson, which tells a [fictional] documentary filmed as monologue, which reenacts [allegedly real] events in the life of a writer, who writes a play with a troubled production, which narrates a short quarantine in a tiny town in the US southwestern desert, where an actress rehearses her upcoming movie. That's at least five layers of stories within stories. Asteroid City not only boasts Anderson's signature punctiliousness in set design, shot composition and character blocking, but also extends that deliberate artificiality beyond the look of the screen, reshaping its authorial relation from a single straight line to a segmented chain of railwagons, one leading to the next, serving as yet another form of expression of Anderson's artistic and personal fascination with trains.

In this Cold War-set multi-story, ironically structured as an Old West satirical paean to American achievements that is contained inside a set of Russian dolls, visitors to the town of Asteroid City, whose children are competing in a hilariously advanced science fair, are suddenly forced to stay at their motel for several days, overseen by the army, because the prehistoric meteorite that is the town's only tourist attraction has been stolen by aliens. This plot by itself is fertile ground for drama, and the film more than delivers on that front. However, in a reverse manner compared to a movie made by literally any other director (except for maybe Christopher Nolan), where the formal choices are a vehicle to deliver the message contained in the story, in Asteroid City the story is a vehicle to deliver the message contained in the form. Marshall McLuhan would approve.

The multi-story device that Anderson had already used in The Grand Budapest Hotel is here blown up to the stratosphere: the theater play is shown to us as a movie, set in a desert that extends to the far horizon, shot from several angles (always straight angles, mind you), with digital visual effects, with titles superimposed—you know, what any movie does. But there's the catch: that's the story that is supposed to be a play, but you experience it the way its supposed audience in the theater never could. You're not watching the play; you're watching what the play represents. For extra mind-blown-ness, at one point the perspective is reversed and we see the backstage as one of the actors leaves the play. And for a brief second, in a shot worthy of Las Meninas, we get a glimpse of the audience. We see us. Not literally us, because the function of images on the screen isn't being, but representing; that's what makes the trick possible. The best stories are those about stories, and Asteroid City achieves a Sierpińskian level of structural beauty in the way it folds upon itself. Even the dialogues are self-referential, with frequent use of easily missable constructions such as "He said that he said," "I believe that I think," "I wonder if I wish."

Every level of the production is influenced by this self-folding. In your typical Anderson shot, a main event happens in the foreground while equally important events are simultaneously happening at one or two degrees of separation in the background. The difficulty of reading an Anderson movie lies in the fact that each shot has a main focus, but you have to be fully aware of the entire screen all the time. Asteroid City takes the basic design of that multilayered space (three dimensions flattened into two) and uses it to create a multilayered plot (parallel lines converging into one). An actress rehearses her movie in a motel room; the play where she exists is shown to us as a movie; its author's life is shown to us as a play; and all those layers of fiction are shown to us as a documentary (that is, the genre of truth), but the documentary itself exists inside Anderson's scripted movie (the genre of lies). For super extra mind-blown-ness, the three acts signaled by the title cards inside the play-shown-as-movie contain some scenes of the upper levels, as if the documentary were part of the play that is mentioned in the documentary. This referential loop ends up eating itself when the layers start blurring together and the most significant emotional beat is revealed to take place offscreen, in a deleted scene, set in a dream, performed by an actress who was removed from the play. The secrets that explain the story rest on a moment that doubly doesn't exist, that its audience will never know.

In a tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale that contains a [tale]]]], where does the innermost level lie? In English, folk tales start with "Once upon a time..." In Tamil, it's "Having been said and said and said..." In Arabic, it's "There was and there was not..." The complex relationship between recursively referenced layers of reality and unreality reaches a hard limit when one considers that, although some characters in the play-shown-as-movie seem aware of the audience, none of them show any awareness that they're in a larger movie, the one made by Anderson. In the first level, the narrator of the documentary talks to the camera, but he's addressing an imagined audience, not us. For mega super extra mind-blown-ness, Asteroid City ends where the play ends, but we don't return to the upper layers to see how they end. For all we know, they're still happening. (Another possible explanation, which closes the referential loop, is that we occupy the same layer of the play, and the upper layers contain us.)

So let's look more closely at that play. It contains several signifiers of quintessential Americana: cowboys, UFOs, absurd military guys, the Space Race, a roadside diner, vending machines, summer flings, overconfident teenagers, oblivious parents. This microcosm of US life is bordered on one side by a perpetual police car chase and on the other side by perpetual nuclear weapon tests. The script barely acknowledges them. Small and big violence are so commonplace that they've become part of the landscape, while the army looks with greed upon the children's fantastical futuristic inventions that prove completely useless to defend one coconut-sized rock. One marvels that the screen doesn't melt with how caustic the sarcasm is here.

Wes Anderson's distinctive style has recently been repurposed for hundreds of insultingly superficial, horrific, lifeless imitations. Asteroid City should come as a relief for artists worried that an algorithm may one day do their job. A machine that scoops up image files and regurgitates their rearranged bits can't express the intimate experience of solitude, regret, self-doubt, and compassion that you get from Asteroid City, nor can it design the web of narrative threads that support the plot, nor can it think of drawing from the influences and the context that complete the movie's meaning. Anderson is in every sense a human being and in every sense an artist if either has ever existed in Hollywood.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Review: Silo, Season 1

Inaugural season delivers incredible world-building and thought-provoking questions that leave you wondering about the silo dwellers long after the episodes end. (Spoiler-free review)

Apple+'s adaptation of Hugh Howey's Wool series scratches a lot of itches: It's about a post-apocalyptic society that lives underground, but it's also a TV mystery in the vein of Lost. It's got a Big Brother shadow government that keeps the populace in line, and it's also a murder whodunnit that eventually swallows up multiple high-ranking officials.

It's got social stratification based on where you live in the silo, from the "up top" elites to the bottom-dwelling "down deep" blue collar mechanical crew like High Rise or Snowpiercer. 

Finally, it reminded me of my time playing the mobile game Fallout Shelter, which puts you in charge of deciding how to build and form a new society of humans.

Let's start with the world building

Imagine an entirely self-contained society living in an underground silo/bunker. It's got 144 levels that produce everything this group of 10,000 humans needs, from fields of corn and doctors offices to recycling centers and halls of justice. No one knows exactly why they're in this silo, but they do know that the outside world is ravaged and unsafe. A live video stream of a patch of land directly outside the silo shows a gray and diseased world, a warning to keep away.

"The Founders" left behind a sort of constitution called The Pact, which governs life in the silo. There are also strange rules that everyone must abide by. For example, it's illegal to possess "relics," which are old objects from the before times, like a Pez dispenser or a watch. There can be no elevators, which means that there is one large spiral staircase that serves as the main hallway and form of transportation between all 144 levels. The Founders also decreed that no one can use magnifying glasses, and apparently videos do not exist.

Cleaning as punishment

One of the most illegal things a denizen of the bunker can do is state out loud that they wish to leave the silo. Once said, it's considered a mortal sin, and it can't be taken back. The person gets formally banished from the silo to the poisonous outside. They are asked to clean the camera that is broadcasting their view of the world 24/7. Everyone sent to clean says they will not, but everyone always does. Within a matter of minutes, the people sent to clean die from the toxic outside atmosphere, their decaying bodies on camera a perpetual reminder to those underground that the outside world is unsafe.

What Silo is About

The plot of Silo revolves around characters that begin to question why they're in the silo, and what exactly is being kept from them and why. At the heart of everything is Jules, a mechanic-turned-sheriff bent on untangling all of the clues presented throughout the show. She's played with incredible star power by Rebecca Ferguson, aka Lady Jessica in Villeneuve's Dune movies.

Ferguson is joined by an amazing ensemble cast that includes Tim Robbins, Common, Will Patton, Rashida Jones, and Chinaza Uche. Because none of the main characters know the gory details of the silo, you're along for the ride with them as you gradually learn clues about what's going on in this world. 

Questions that get you thinking

Part of what keeps the populace in line in Silo is that there are no records from the past. There is no history of America. There's isn't an exact reason of what happened that caused them to move underground. There's not even discussion of what stars are — they simply call them "lights in the sky." When you deprive humans of knowledge, you're starving them of stories — and their humanity. 

But as Joan Didion says, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Every culture on earth has its creation myths. The people in the silo have mysterious parables left behind by even more mysterious Founders. What did they know? Why did they think they know better than hundreds of years of their descendants? And what's the harm in magnifying glasses?!?

The season ends on a mind-blowing reveal that sets up season 2 perfectly, and I can't wait to see where it goes. I'm also going to read the books because there's apparently even more minute world-building and I want all the details, stat.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8.5/10 This show is fantastic and unlike anything else on TV right now. The pacing can be a little slow through episodes 3-5, but then ramps up and more than makes up for the lull. 

Bonuses: +2 Incredible world building. Rebecca Ferguson is an absolute delight. Chekov's Heat Tape plays a crucial role in the plot.

Penalties: -3 Rapper/Actor Common plays a bad guy in this and man, he cannot act. He tries, but he just isn't very convincing. 

Nerd Coefficient: +2 If you've played Fallout or read literally any dystopian fiction, you'll find your niche in this series.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of 2x Hugo-nominated podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker. 

6 Books with CJ Leede

CJ Leede is a horror writer, hiker, and Trekkie. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a BA from NYU's Gallatin School, where she studied Mythology and the Middle Ages. When she is not driving around the country, she can be found in LA with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I usually am reading five to six books at a time. I like to have a few paperbacks on rotation, and a few audiobooks, so I can go with whatever suits my mood. BUT you’ve caught me in a rare moment in which I’ve finished everything I was reading except one:

Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore. It’s really fantastic, so fun!

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Burn the Negative by Josh Winning. He’s a killer writer, and while I’m generally very hyperbolic, I really mean it when I say it’s one of my favorite book covers I’ve ever seen. I love a book cover that looks like it’s from another time!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Starship Troopers, Robert A Heinlein. I haven’t read it in many years, but I love his writing (SO much!), and the movie is of course a classic. I think military scifi is up there for best genres for me, and so many of my favorite books have been in this space (pun not intended)! I just reread Forever War, and it never gets any less good. They’re fast-paced, sexy, thrilling, mind-expanding, and delve into the darkest aspects of war and the human psyche. I think they’re very important.






4. A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

Library at Mount Char. It’s incredible, I’ve read it eleven times at least. He just tapped into something amazing there, and I am totally blown away every time I read it. I think David is one of the best characters ever, and I’m terrified of him, and also a small part of me has a sort of very big crush on him??









5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Clan of the Cave Bear series, Jean Auel. (Valley of Horses is my favorite!) My grandmother loved these books, and then my mom loved them, and then she gave them to me. They are so special. When I sold Maeve, I went and bought a first edition set of them I’d been eyeing for a very long time at a rare bookstore here in LA. And while kids are not for me, I’ve always thought if I did have one, I’d name a daughter after Ayla.






6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

Maeve Fly is my novel coming out this summer (and my debut!). I like to think of it as just a raise of the glass to anyone who loves hard, indulges in the strangeness, and lets the freak flag fly. She’s gross, and she’s gnarly, and she loves to spin in her pretty princess dress. Prepare for chaos.









Thank you!

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