Review: Harold and the Purple Crayon

A character who can create anything goes in search of his creator

Think of the character Harold in Stranger than Fiction, who learns his life has a narrator, and is desperate to go on living. Think of the character Augusto in Miguel de Unamuno's 1914 novel Mist, who learns that his life has a narrator, and is desperate to not go on living. Think of Daffy Duck in the short Duck Amuck, shocked at the revelation that an artist armed with a pencil can freely create or destroy his existence.

But also: think of the NPC Guy in the film Free Guy, who learns that his life is scripted by computer code, and decides to seize independence. Think of Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, who learns that his face and his voice belong to an actor, and decides to fulfill his mission no matter what. Think of Douglas in the film The Thirteenth Floor, who learns that his life is a digital simulation, and decides to go out into the real world. Think of Giselle in Enchanted, thrown out of a fairy tale into the endless whirlwind of modern urban life, and decides to search for happiness.

But also: think of Akira Kurosawa turning Van Gogh's paintings into whole worlds to get lost in. Think of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel that becomes real and traversable. Think of Cursor in Automan, able to create any object by drawing its outline. Think of Sphere and the cursed power to make imagination real.

Breaks in the boundary between fiction and reality have a long tradition going from Pygmalion and Galatea to Deadpool and She-Hulk. The classic children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson is, like The Thirteenth Floor and Wile E. Coyote, a two-layered instance: it shows a drawn child who is able to draw things into existence. Its recently released film adaptation adds one more level: the child, now grown up, reasons that, if he can interact with the things he draws, he should be able to interact with the one who drew him. What ensues is an understated but deep exploration of the possibilities of fantasy.

In the movie, soon after Harold emerges from the world of the book into the real world, he runs into an aspiring fantasy writer whose style is the polar opposite of Harold's. Harold comes from a cute, whimsical picture book meant to inspire little kids. His nemesis in the film writes edgy grimdark with world-shattering weapons and unpronounceable names. In a literal case of the pen being mightier than the sword, Harold's sweet imagination proves capable of defeating the most twisted creations of a would-be tyrant sorcerer.

The genius part of the movie, however, isn't even in this unsubtle commentary on fantasy subgenres: it's in Harold's quest to meet his author. As it happens, Crockett Johnson has passed away. At first, this news leaves Harold feeling without purpose or direction. But he eventually learns that he doesn't need a creator when he has his own power of creation. In other words, the movie is presenting us with the provocative argument that to live under existentialism is basically to apply Death of the Author to reality. You are your own giver of meaning and your own interpreter.

Harold and the Purple Crayon coats these philosophical insights under shiny layers of common slapstick and fish-out-of-water misunderstandings. But even allowing for the contrivances of a fantasy for kids, this one is so full of them that one is tempted to suspect that the movie is deliberately drawing attention to the fictional quality of its setting, a version of Providence RI that seems to consist of just half a dozen blocks, judging by how frequently the characters run into each other when it's convenient for the plot. More care is employed in handling the parallel between Harold's sense of cosmic abandonment and his human friend's grief over his dead father. It's not only picture book characters who need to learn how to live by their own guidance.

It's a fortunate authorial choice to keep the plot at the right scale for human-sized drama. Other authors might have made Harold's all-powerful crayon end up in the hands of military tech researchers or something like that. It's a mistake that can happen in live-action adaptations. Instead, to stage the climactic conflict between tonally incompatible versions of fantasy keeps the ideas of the film at the right level of abstraction. It's not about what you'd do if you had a magical item that could create anything. It's what you'd do if you removed the restraints of your imagination. Some come up with gritty worlds of endless battle and hypermuscular champions. Others think beyond those limitations and come up with purple ice cream. I know which one I prefer.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: Batman: Caped Crusader

A clever reinvention of the costumed crimefighter for the Defund the Police era

If you loved Bruce Timm's legendary Batman: The Animated Series (and since you're human and alive, you definitely did), his new show Batman: Caped Crusader scratches the persistent itch you've carried all these years. The series adopts a retro look similar to the earlier one, although sometimes it looks too clean in digital animation compared to the grainy, almost tactile surfaces that could be achieved by drawing by hand. What does remain unchanged from the original show is the grounded, human-sized evil that Batman fights every night (while occasionally venturing into the occult). Far from the intergalactic conquerors and alien/mutant/robot/demigods that are the staple of Justice League plots, Caped Crusader explores instead the thorny struggle to redeem the soul of Gotham City while the powers that rule it and are supposed to protect it become hard to distinguish from its colorful gallery of rogues.

The terms of Batman's relationship with the Gotham City Police Department are remarkably variable across incarnations. From a chummy partnership in the Adam West era to bloody hostility in the Ben Affleck one, this element of Batman's mythology has served, whether intentionally or not, as indirect commentary on the assumed effectiveness and desirability of a police force. In the 2016 animated film Return of the Caped Crusaders, the dynamic of the 1966 live action TV show is deconstructed to hilarious effect as it lampshades the fact that Adam West's Bruce Wayne exists in a Gotham City where the police is mind-bogglingly inept. At the other end of the scale of cynicism, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne becomes a vigilante in part because the criminal justice system is no longer trustworthy. In this kind of story, e.g. the Nolanverse or the Gotham show, Jim Gordon is typically singled out as the only honorable cop in a corrupt institution. This "good apple in a spoiled barrel" approach has the advantage of being a tiny bit more believable than the standard bad apples in a good barrel. But sometimes the intended message gets muddled: Jim Gordon is fundamentally decent, but the police department is fundamentally rotten, but the people of Gotham City are fundamentally decent, but the streets of Gotham City tend to make you rotten. In a way, the Dark Knight trilogy is about whether Gothamites are even worthy of being saved. The question sounds scandalous, but the thing with the Batman franchise is that its moral stance hasn't been able to escape the shadow of The Killing Joke and its thesis that every decent person hides a barely contained sinister side.

Which leads us to the character of Harvey Dent and the interesting twist on his villain origin story in Batman: Caped Crusader. In several versions of Dent's arc, it's been a common trope that the trauma of his disfigurement was what gave rise to his split personality. Caped Crusader proposes something less sensationalist: he's always had a sinister side. His all too flexible morals have led him to become a two-faced hypocrite for whom disfigurement is merely incidental; it only makes evident a duplicity that was already there. To reinforce this point, Caped Crusader has him suffer his accident on the right side of his face, whereas the standard versions of Dent have traditionally been scarred on the left side. By subtle use of camera angles, the show implies that the left, intact side is the evil one, and the right, scarred one is his true self.

Cape Crusader's choice to make Dent's pretty face be the false one provides a useful mirror (heh) of Bruce Wayne's situation. A running subplot has him attending court-mandated therapy sessions with Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who is quick to notice the flimsy façade that hides Wayne's unprocessed pain. Their scenes together are fascinating to watch: two characters pretending to seek total openness while guarding the most important truth about themselves.

With so much focus on Batman's psyche and the moral stakes involved in saving Gotham, it's a welcome surprise that the show doesn't avoid the issue of how Bruce Wayne's immense economic privilege is a sign of what's wrong with the city. In one episode, the ritual that exorcizes an undead landlord requires performing a sacrifice of aristocratic blood and burning the original deed to his property; in another, corrupt policemen let a pyromaniac loose in a poor neighborhood as expendable bait to capture Batman. In a later episode, a planned snoburb being built by Wayne Enterprises becomes the literal battleground for control of the city.

You'd think it would be self-defeating for a Batman story to address the frequent criticism that Batman spends his time kicking working-class henchmen instead of challenging robber barons, but somehow Caped Crusader succeeds at it. Underneath that discussion is the unstated question: What would you have Batman do? Terrorize the rich into giving away their fortune? Because that's what this version of Dr. Quinzel does in her spare time, dressed up as the jester who mocks kings, and her brutal methods don't bring Gotham any closer to justice. Sorry, Joker movie, but breaking things is a terrible way of fixing things.

Still, Caped Crusader is honest about the complicity of law enforcement. The mayor of Gotham wants to Serve and Protect only himself, and even in this retro setting without online media, public perception overrules reality. On top of keeping tabs on mob bosses, child kidnappers and hired assassins, Batman also has to fight police brutality, extrajudicial punishment and institutional decay. But he especially has to fight the darkness within himself, the insatiable rage that keeps his inner child from maturing. It's the same darkness that he perceives in Harvey Dent after his accident, and his failure to save Dent from succumbing to his demons is the turning point in the show's emotional journey. There's no inherent heroic destiny in Bruce Wayne; with his horrific origin story, he could easily have become another one of Gotham City's murderous madmen. What makes him heroic is that he wakes up every morning night and chooses not to.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Video Game Review: Pentiment by Obsidian Entertainment

A beautifully painted Renaissance whodunit.

I heard a positive, albeit quiet, buzz surrounding the release of Pentiment and was intrigued by its very existence. A new Obsidian story-based murder mystery game set in the Renaissance era with a story-book art style? Yes, please. Unfortunately, I didn’t own either of the platforms on which it launched, but thankfully that has been fixed by the kind folks over at Xbox Publishing. The first in a new wave of Xbox-published games on PlayStation has been happily received, and I have to say, Pentiment is a treat.

Andreas Maler, like the paintings he creates, is an intricate canvas of possibilities, fleshed out by the player. The character has certain staples to his personality that transcend the options given to the player, but on the whole, player choice feels like just the right touch of impact for a game this size. Choosing between rapscallion and bookworm will open very different dialogue choices. His areas of study at university and previous locations also open up even more dialogue and problem-solving decisions. Particular problems, like reading script in Italian for instance, become simple if Andreas knows how to read Italian. Otherwise, Andreas must hunt someone down who could help with his specific problem. This adds a bit of replay value to this little gem, and even better yet, keeps the dialogue fun. I’ve almost completed Pentiment twice and can see these small tweaks affecting each playthrough.

The visual aspect of this game is a breath of fresh air. A unique storybook style paints characters in vibrant hues, bringing life to these two-dimensional theists. Almost every character is memorable, a combination of brilliant artwork and writing. The animations are clean and simple, and the game always looks fantastic. Pentiment is a treat for the eyes.

On par with the artwork, the dialogue is king here. With witty writing, the characters pop off the page. Especially Andreas. His ability to thread his way between pious and respectful or sacrilegious and scandalous always created engaging options. I loved the sarcastic lines, and loved it even more when other characters picked up on my sarcasm and called me out (much respect to the ever-intuitive Father Thomas). The game lives by the dialogue, as there isn’t anything else here. Players looking for anything outside of the narrative need to look elsewhere. There are small mini-games throughout that bring in a bit of a distraction (a card game, fixing horseshoes, etc.), but they are ever only distractions and don’t add much to the game. Thankfully the writing is strong enough to hold the rest of the title upon its shoulders. Sitting around and having dinner with the townsfolk is just as engrossing as solving murders (well, almost).

All is not perfect in this picturesque storybook though. The game begins at a dawdling pace, creating a bit of a slog. It’s unfortunate because the game isn’t particularly long. I can see how the absence of a varied list of sound effects and music in combination with a slow start could turn people off. Stick with it and you'll be rewarded, but I admit some of the gameplay choices create a monotonous air. For instance, the entire game sees the player backtracking to find out more information or spend time with specific people.

Pausing the game brings up a book-like menu that allows the player to view the town/abbey and what is available to do in these areas, but it’s not always accurate and doesn’t always show who is currently available to have a discussion. What follows (if you want to be thorough in investigating the murder) is that I found myself going into every house in every area of the game to see if the townspeople or clergy members had something to say. Sure I could have just talked to a few people and gone off of inconclusive evidence, but how could I condemn an innocent person to death without as much information as possible? The system for traversal was inconvenient, even if it didn’t take long to get from place to place.

As dialogue exits characters’ mouths in Pentiment, a quill scratching paper makes a sound. It’s a nice touch, but over time I desired more. The music is lacking, and as much as I enjoy the silent aspect, the game’s clever writing had me hoping for some fantastic voice acting. The music is so ambient as to be absent (though it does flare up during important revelations). A more prominent soundtrack or voiced dialogue would have elevated the experience for this reviewer.

Regardless of these annoyances, Pentiment paints a brilliant picture of life in a small town connected to an abbey in the 1500s. Taxes raised on the peasants create cruel times that force bold action. Most characters are fleshed out and are worth learning more about. Deciding who to accuse when the time comes feels like a hefty decision and actions taken in Act I play out in Acts II and III, so the player must choose wisely. Will you ignore the abbot and investigate the abbey against his wishes, thus drawing his ire in Act II? Would you accuse a character you didn’t have enough evidence to convict but simply didn’t like them? The choices are in the player’s hands, and regardless of how the story goes, Obsidian manages to make the hefty decisions feel incomplete. Reminiscent of the actual convictions cast in the Renaissance era with insufficient data, the weight of a character’s life is in the balance, whether you have enough information or not. Spoiler: you never do, and that makes the game all the more brilliant.

When the credits roll on Pentiment, it is easy to consider pressing New Game right away to see the other options. To see how the peasants and townsfolk react to the accusations of different characters. And to see how your choices will play out differently through the acts. The beauty of Pentiment, despite my issues with its traversal and sound, is that it isn’t a long game, so experiencing it more than once is a feasible option. Any fan of a highly story-focused game should give this a look-over. Clever writing and beautiful artwork steal the show and is a great example of what an established developer could do with a smaller side-project. Pentiment is a polished, highly memorable experience.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 8/10

Bonus: +1 for witty dialogue. +1 for the beautiful storybook art style.

Penalties: -1 for endless backtracking. -1 for lacking some sound effects.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

The pain of ages haunts this house

Old homes can be unnerving. You know that people have spent years, even decades, in such places, and some part of your brain finds it plausible that the stories they lived in these walls could still, somehow, have resonances today. One may even come to believe that the people themselves still walk those halls long after they may have passed onto another world. All of this has been ample fodder for haunted house myths all over the world, from fairy tales to horror movies. Here, we shall be discussing another take on such a concept: Shubnum Khan’s 2024 novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, published by Viking.

This novel takes place in South Africa, in an aging apartment complex on an island near Durban, overlooking the Indian Ocean. Its characters are mostly Indian Muslims who either came to India themselves, or their descendants who made their living in this foreign country. The novel divides itself temporally into two alternating settings. The first is in the 1930s, involving the arrival of the man who came from India to build this house, as well as the wife he brought with him and stayed under more than a little duress. The second is in the twenty-first century, as a father and teenage daughter move into the house, now filled with neighbors who are peculiar and yet somehow endearing.

Both the house and the main character, Sana, the aforementioned teenage daughter, are haunted by their pasts. Sana has her own personal tragedies weighing heavily over her, events that have stained her very being, the long shadow of trauma never letting her go. The house, also, has had many awful things happen in it over the decades, and those linger here. As one may expect from the very title, there is a djinn here, locked away, waiting to find someone to hear its tales. All of this takes place among people who are, in one way or another, trapped in the past; you almost begin to wonder if the house has a pull on such people, wanting to share the misery and the unsettledness.

Those who are looking for a tale of magic and intrigue may be disappointed here. This is not like the Arab-inflected romps of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn universe (a series I love by an author whose works I adore, for the record); this is a far more subdued, moodier sort of story that takes clear influence from Gothic fiction. The environment is dark, claustrophobic, and suffocating as you, with Sana, have to learn to figure out what is making this place so wound up, and what can be done to relieve the pain.

This is a story about migration. Sana and her father have moved here after their own family tragedy from another part of South Africa. In the segments set earlier, an ambitious impresario from India comes to stake out his fortunes in South Africa. He and his wife have also been chafing under the British yoke in India, and they bring their own traumas from that. There, the businessman tries to create a small utopia on this island near Durban, creating a massive house with its own menagerie of animals, as well as its own staff of servants, allowing him to become something akin to the sort of colonial overlord that he had to serve in India. His story reminds me of what Paulo Freire says in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.”

This businessman came to South Africa to be master of his own domain, and he very much intended to be a master. Much of the story is told from the vantage point of his wife, or more accurately his first wife. She is the one who has to deal with his flights of fancy that can change her life on a whim. He treats her as an object, and like all people who have been treated as such, can only endure it for so long. Her husband has interiorized what Tyler Stovall called ‘white freedom’ in his book of that name: to be free is to be white, and to be white is to experience freedom. To free himself, he becomes like the white lords of the Raj he had served in India, and that pain has consequences for himself, his family, and future generations that live in this house.

This is a novel with a very strong sense of place. Almost all of it is set within the confines of this house-turned-apartment-complex, with some digressions elsewhere. In making this choice, Khan zooms in on this particular location, making the effects of all this change feel very personal, sometimes painfully so. You can hear every creak and echo in this house, and each and every one of them tells part of the long and painful story.

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is an odyssey of sorts, albeit a mostly stationary one; it reminds me of the monastery whose website I read that talked of how its monks may not travel physically, but they travel great distances in the spirit. That’s what Sana does here, and that’s what the reader does as they follow her through the novel. You feel the weight of decades here, and you wonder if that weight can be cast off. That is a question that applies to all of us, no matter where in the world we are, and Khan has given us an adroit exploration of that theme.

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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, [Magpie, 2024]

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

Book Review: The Mercy of Gods, by James S. A. Corey

Academic politics are finally given the respect they deserve, and all it took was aliens conquering the galaxy.

As an old canard goes, academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so small; and as an academic in my day job, I can attest to the truth of this. So when a book comes along in which the future of not just humanity, but the whole-ass galaxy depends upon the combined skills of a lab-based research group I am ready to eat it up with a spoon. And my goodness, what a tasty meal it was!

The setting of James S. A. Corey’s new series is a far-future galaxy in which humanity has completed (at least one) colonization effort on the planet of Anjiin. This effort nearly failed, however, and the intervening struggles between then and now have wiped out all records of what happened. Humans only know they are not native to Anjiin through inference: there are biological dissimilarities between their biology and indigenous biology; and there is archaeological evidence showing that humans arrived some thousands of years ago, and nearly died out before managing to spread and flourish. (And isn’t that a prequel saga that I’d like to read!) At the time of this book, humans on Anjiin have developed to roughly the same technology and population spread as humans on present-day earth, with a similar lack of evidence of other extraterrestrial (extra-Anjiinian) life in their astronomical research. But, of course, there is a profoundly different foundation to this lack of evidence. They know there must be extra-Anjiinian life in the universe, because, after, all, they are it.

Our core cast of characters are an elite university research group, who have just completed a brilliant biochemical study. Although humans and human-based biospheres—the plants and animals that (presumably) arrived on Anjiin with the humans—are incompatible with a crystalline-based biosphere indigenous to the planet, this group that has managed to bridge that divide that divide, so that the two biological systems can now interact. It’s a planet-wide triumph, but hot on its heels comes institutional conflict. Funding pressures, politics, and disputes based in status and hierarchy led by rival academics mean that the research group is at risk of being dispersed; its project placed under external control, and its members reassigned to different labs.

Then things get worse. Aliens attack! It is first contact with non-Anjiin based life, and it is  the worst possible kind. The aliens are governed by Borg-like creatures called the Carryx, who have conquered uncounted species around the galaxy and forced them to submit, allowed to survive on sufferance as long as they can make themselves useful. (The huge, imaginative variety of aliens encountered under the Carryx aegis is very entertaining, and reminds me a bit of Julie Czerneda's inventiveness.) The Carryx skim humans from Anjiin, taking only the most successful in their various fields—including our biochemical research group--and bring them to Carryx-controlled planet. There, the researchers are given a task: take a berry-like life-form from one planet, and make it edible to a turtle-like creature from another planet. It’s a direct continuation of their most recent discovery: take two distinct biologies, and make them compatible.

This narrative has exactly the same feel and pacing as Corey’s previous epic space opera, The Expanse. Fans of the Expanse books will feel right at home here. The POV shifts across the many characters—including Carryx and other alien entities—in a way that, at first, I found a little disorienting. But given the large number of core characters in the research group, on reflection it worked well to keep them all distinct. Jessyn is plagued with chronic depression and reliant on medication and her brother Jellit to keep her stable enough to work. Rickar stands to come out of the pending institutional reorganization very well, and is for that reason seen as a traitor to the group. Synnia, whose husband died when the Carryx first arrived, refuses to participate in the assigned task, but is open to making trouble for the Carryx when the opportunity arises. Tonner, the leader of the research group, is brilliant at the science and fully devoted to solving the problem, but not terribly skilled at people. Dafyd, a young research assistant, won his position largely by virtue of nepotism (his aunt is well placed in institutional funding circles) and is stronger with people skills than science. Else is the project co-leader, and also sleeping with Tonner, but Dafyd is sweet on her.

(I feel I must add here, however, that Corey scorns to employ such an overused trope as romantic rivalry to build tension between Dafyd and Tonner. Multiple times characters will think of their situation dismissively as ‘bullshit sexual politics’ and the like; and the significance of these relations turns out to be much more interesting then the stupid contrived drama that could never have hoped to rise above the level of boring tedium that is a love triangle.)

This rich cast of characters, combined with other secondary characters, is a crucial part of filling out what would otherwise be a slightly sterile environment. There are not many locations outside the transport ship and lab building. Much of the book is character work—and very good character work. The interests and motivations that characterized all of the players in this drama before the arrival of the Carryx end up structuring their decisions and relations during transit and after arrival in believable and sympathetic ways. 

Indeed, this link between Before and After can be seen everywhere in the book structure, not just in the characters. The transport from Anjiin to the Carryx planet is a fascinating study of humans in captivity, a crucible in which people's essential natures are distilled and revealed---and one which not everyone survives. It echoes in a sort of nebulous way the inferred struggle to survive that had taken place when humans first arrived on Anjiin, and almost died before taking over. 

On a more local level, the Before and After links can be seen within the events of the book. And since this more immediate Before was an academic institutional drama, the After can be read in that way too. When the research group is abducted and given the berry-turtle task, they are being reassigned to a different lab, exactly as they were afraid would happen at the start. On the Carryx planet, further parallels abound: rival labs, side projects, interdisciplinary endeavours, and squabbles about research credit. The difference, of course, is that the consequences of failure are deadly. ‘Publish or perish’ is literal here, because in Carryx society, if you are not useful, you are dead.

But what really puts the bow on this extremely satisfying power fantasy of lab biochemists fighting the enemy through the power of SCIENCE is the recognition that a huge part of successful science is not the science, but the people. Schmoozing. Networking. Figuring out who wants what, why, and what they’ll do to get it. Navigating institutional politics is a huge component of successful science, and when the institutions and politics are formed of aliens whose worldview, values, and social structures are unthinkably different from everything you’ve ever known, you can Andy Weir your way through the science with the brilliance of a thousand Einsteins, and still get caught out if you don’t know how to figure out what the upper administration actually want and how to give it to them.

Or, if you’re planning a rebellion, how to take it away and crush it into dust.

I mean, I assume. I infer. This is book 1 of a series, but there’s a lot of foreshadowing, and I am here for it.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Academic politics
• Many inventive aliens
• Strong character work

Nerd coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention

Reference: Corey, James S. A. The Mercy of Gods [Orbit, 2024].

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

Book Review: The Naming Song

An innovative and intriguing post-apocalyptic fantasy exploring the power of words

Our narrator does not have a name. This is somewhat unusual, but this is an unusual world. Our narrator and main character is a courier. In this society, clawing back from the apocalypse of what seems to be our own modern one, things are different. Many things, places, and ideas are no longer known or not defined. The courier “delivers” a word to express a thing, an action, an idea and make it firm into the world. In a very real way, in this brave new world, it makes it real and defined. Our courier protagonist without a name, though, in the course of being asked to deliver a new concept, soon runs afoul of powers who want to define the world for their own ends and power.

The courier's story is the story of Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song.

Imagine a world where the concept of something doesn’t have a name until a committee of people decide to define it, that it needs a name. Gob. Gibbous. Velocity. Tedium. They perform divinations to come up with and find these words, and then it is the task of people like the courier, our protagonist, to deliver them. Only people with the right talent to hold a word in their heads can deliver a word; there is a nuance here. So, for example, if you wanted to punish a courier such as our protagonist, you might have her deliver unpleasant words, words whose communication is a nasty experience. Bruise. Trouble. Muck. Bleary. Toil.

And therein the story gets going. The novel takes a good while to actually move forward on the plot, since it has a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of things that the reader needs to at least be exposed to, if not quite understand and completely comprehend. In some ways that’s okay, because our characters themselves are in a story, a myth, a passion play, and they know it. We are hit pretty hard and quickly with just how strange and different this world is. There are ghosts, but not quite as you might expect them to be. There are monsters in this world too, created by people, and again the circumstances of what a monster is and where it comes from are not all entirely clear. This is a story that often runs on myth and the sharing of stories.

And the whole concept of named and nameless things. The nameless things and people outside the borders of what has been named and known are a nebulous threat and a problem for the named, for the unstable society of the committees trying to push back the boundaries of the undefined and unnamed, to name and categorize people, places and, of course, words. While our protagonist doesn’t see it, a clever reader can notice immediately the abuse an ambitious committee or its leader might put in such power, should they turn their minds to it. And so we have a world and an overarching metaplot to lay down our nameless courier’s own personal-plot.

Once we get the story in motion, it proceeds relatively straightforward, or at least it seems deceptively so. Our unnamed protagonist’s drive and desire is to reunite with her long lost sister, Ticket. Just where Ticket is, what she has been doing, and how this all connects with the machinations of a committee member seeking power, therein lies the tale. But that’s the ultimate backbone of the plot, and this is, as I said, more myth and shared story than an actual plot of events.

Post-apocalypse stories are extremely common, of course, but the idea of such a break as to how the universe actually works is somewhat less common. I’ve mentioned the roleplaying game Apocalypse World before in this space and it works very well here. The world broke, and now the rules are somewhat different. It’s clear that in the world of Apocalypse World, the Psychic Maelstrom did not exist before civilization fell, but now it is a fact of life. In the world of The Naming Song, now words have to be divined before they can be used, and the nameless and ghosts and the consequences of the Silence have to be dealt with.

In a fictional vein, I am reminded somewhat of Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East. In that series and ‘verse, the start of a nuclear war is stopped by the actions of a supercomputer which changes the laws of reality. As a result, nuclear weapons no longer work (but one has been turned into a demon), the supercomputer is a distant God, and magic indisputably now works. There is science and trying to recapture the knowledge of the ancients, but the world is now fundamentally different. So, too, S. M. Stirling’s The Change novels start with the laws of the universe around Earth altering, to very drastic results. That series takes a while to reveal that magic now works in the world (a sort of shamanistic magic), and not all characters believe or accept it, but it is now there, a fact of life. And as the timeline of the novel goes on, and there are no more characters who remember the Change itself, the world becomes very different very quickly.

One other way to think about this novel and its world is to consider the works of Matthew Hughes. Hughes’s work is very much the heir to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, but a number of his stories and novels take place “before” the switchover to the magic-laden next world. One of the novels, The Spiral Labyrinth, has its protagonist temporarily get catapulted into the next world, where science is gone and magic rules, and we the reader, as well as the protagonist, now have to deal with a world whose operating system is now very different and not at all intuitively so.

The Naming Song short-circuits and accelerates this process of adaptation to the new operating rules of the universe by having the Silence, its own version of the Change, be so complete and so full that there is really no continuity of society and social structures from our modern world and the world that we get here. As a result, we wind up with a world where some things are used and barely understood, such as the trains themselves. It’s mentioned that not every aspect of the trains that make up such a big part of the novel are completely comprehended, which is, to forgive the pun, no way to run a railroad.

This makes the novel an interesting case of a world and a society that on reductionist terms and from first principles probably does not hold up under scrutiny. A world where the Silence happened probably can’t and doesn’t recover from such a calamity and civilization; it simply falls into irreversible anarchy. When you don’t even have the name for some basic concepts and ideas, how do you keep a train moving, or start one in the first place? Or guns? Or basic farming? So believing that humanity and society could be rebuilt from such a tremendous shock is definitely a “gimmie” in the novel, and it is an important one, given how, even hundreds of years later, society and the world are still evolving and changing.

This is a story about that liminality, of the borders between the defined and the undefined, and the consequences of trying to define things, and the fear of not defining them, of the borders between the known and the unknown, all told through the lens of a nameless courier in a very different future world. It’s a highwire act that I am not sure always succeeds, but there is no lack of its ambition and reach.

The heart of the book, in a story about stories and the way they can and do change the world, is that of “Hand and Moon.” We get glimpses, allusions and references to it throughout the book; it is a fundamental story to the people of this world, and in some ways, it is their monomyth (in the Campbellian sense). It is a story about naming, and love; and the heart of the book is when the Black Square players put on a performance of this story, even as the forces of tyranny come down upon them and everyone. It is no strange thing to have a performance of a story be the central axis of a story, but that is ultimately what this novel is. The Story of Hand and Moon sets the template of this world, and this performance, and how the players change it, ultimately changes the world. And thus The Naming Song is a story about the creation of stories and how the creation of stories and changing the way we tell them can create and change the world. Berry has created a world where that is most literally true, but like most SFF, it’s a theme to be applied to our place and time. The novel’s storytelling style, dreamlike and full of imagery and magic, lends itself ultimately in service to that theme.

Highlights:

• A unique and intriguing future post-apocalypse world.
• A compelling and well explored theme of liminality.
• Strong and vivid, mythic storytelling. A Passion Play.

Reference: Berry, Jedediah. The Naming Song [Tor Books, 2024].

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

Book Review: A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon (translated by Anton Hur)

Magical girl manga meets millennial angst

CW: discussion of character experiencing suicidal thoughts.

I can't decide if this book is very deep or just very odd. It's quite possibly both.

A Magical Girl Retires follows an unnamed young Korean girl struggling with debt and a difficult job market, unable to live up to the promise she showed in her grandfather's jewellery shop, never having become the watch designer she dreamed she would be. At the start of the story, this drives her to a bridge in the night, contemplating jumping into the water below and hoping no one notices or is inconvenienced by her. Just as she finds herself unable to do it, a stranger appears to tell her that she is destined for greatness, not this, and to come away immediately. She is thus drawn into the world of magical girls, real-life magic-wielders like the figures from manga, who use their skills to make the world a better place.

Which sounds... well, there are some obvious places that story can go, and this isn't quite any of them, though it does follow some of their themes some of the time. But the narrative never quite sticks to any of the expected paths, winding in between them but never fully committing, and what you get at the end is instead a strange, dreamy and meandering study of a character reassessing her place in the world and her relationship to her self-image, to her abilities, and to what power means. The depth of it all sort of sneaks up on you on the way, presenting itself gently, subtly.

And that approach bears out in other aspects too—especially the worldbuilding, such as it is. It's a story that very much assumes you know what magical girls in manga are, how they transform, and approximately what they do, because it has little interest in spelling out the basics for you. If you've ever watched a few episodes of Sailor Moon, that's more than enough, but in the actual text of the book there's very limited interest in drawing that picture for you then and there. The focus instead is far more on the mundane sides of the job —because it is, in this story, very much a job— from conferences and job fairs to unions and international co-operation and jurisdictions. Without going full ham with it, Park does a lot of work to undermine the sparkle of it all, tying it back to the most uninteresting basics of life, money, food, housing, the day-to-day grind and what do you actually do. This becomes especially true through the protagonist's perspective, as her precarity, her knowledge of how precipitous her own situation is, casts a shadow of realism over everything she encounters. Her fridge —the source of a good deal of her debt at the start of the story— recurs at several points as a touchstone for these themes, constantly bringing the reader back to the realities of the story.

And in this lies its strength: it is, by and large, a story about all that angst, that daily life stuff, with the magic... not exactly sprinkled on top, because it's fundamental to how the story is being told, but ultimately in service to the angst rather than the other way around. It's not about magical girls, not really; they're just the way Park is making the key points.

And those key points live or die on how relatable —distressing to use this particular word, but needs must— you find the unnamed protagonist. If you've ever been stuck at a pointless, rubbish job with a ridiculous boss because you need the pittance it pays, if you've ever been stuck at a point where the basics you assumed everyone have start to seem more luxurious than you'd ever have expected —like a fridge, for example— then her motivations and her journey are incredibly effective. It's a story calling out to lost twenty-somethings who feel adrift in the world, no longer steered by the guidance provided in childhood, not yet acquainted with the more self-assured situation of the thirties and beyond.

And by using a framework intrinsically tied to childhood, as magical girl stories so often are, it really dials up the pathos, even as it twists those girls into something more mundane and adult. Only magic can bring you unionisation, a good credit score, and a well-paying job with long term prospects, it seems to say.

This is before we even get into the climate crisis part of the narrative, which is... well, it's blunt, let's say that. The magical girls are all well aware that the planet is doomed at its current rate, and are doing everything they can to fix it. As part of this, they know they need the magical girl with the power to control time, as only she can prevent the inevitable planetary apocalypse that's coming to us all.

Wow, that sounds miserable when I type it out. And I won't lie; it is, by turns, quite a depressing book. But those other turns more than make up for it.

Because the other main thread running through it is that of relationships, the need for people in one's life, and what they can bring, even to someone right down in the pits of it all. There are two that figure most strongly: that of the protagonist with her deceased grandfather, and his memory, and with the magical girl who finds her on the bridge, Ah Roa. Ah Roa has the gift of prophecy, and is our protagonist's cheerful, knowledgeable guide into the world of magical-girling. But she is also, instantly but quite understandably, very fond of her too. And throughout the story, that fondness, alongside the often-prompted memories of a loving, nurturing and proud grandfather, serve as a balm to all the grimness, and slowly, very slowly, pull our main character out of her hole and back into the world again.

Against the background of climate change and an unexpected, rather more immediate, magical threat to all of humanity, that's what this story is about: surviving precarity day by day, the solace we take in those around us, and one person steadily pulling herself out of a hole and remembering to dream of the things she can do with her tomorrows. Despite the glittery transformations and mirrors that see the future, it is a story about a little life, finding little steps into progress, in ways many of us will find something comforting, familiar or recognisable. It uses the trappings of childhood magic to highlight some very grown-up problems, and the delicacy of that contrast is beautifully handled throughout, ending up packing far bigger a punch than its short size might suggest.

Highlights: meaningful character relationships; intensely likeable main character; lovely art pages

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Park Seolyeon. A Magical Girl Retires [HarperVia, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social