Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle (tr. Barbara Haveland)

 A lingering, thoughtful take on the human experience of living through a time loop

Published in 2024 in the US but 2025 in the UK, the first installation of Solvej Balle's series, translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland, is a strange old book. The protagonist, Tara Selter, is trapped in a time loop. She relives the 18th of November over and over again, recording in her notes - which appear to be the text we are reading - the events of the many iterations that only she remembers, over the course of a full year of experiential time.

It is not a particularly unusual day. Tara works - with her husband - in the antique books trade, and in the first iteration of the day, before anything unusual happens, she spends the day in Paris buying books, chatting to other buyers and sellers, and meeting up with an old friend and his new girlfriend. It is a good day, but not a strange one, with no precipitating incident or obvious inception point. We only read about this unextraordinary day after knowing about the premise - Tara is up front with her situation in her notes before looping back to what led to her predicament, because why wouldn't she be? These are her notes, and she already knows what she experienced. But even when looking back at the original 18th of November, with the benefit of hindsight, there is no foreshadowing, no suggestion of some malevolent force that has brought about this unthinkable intrusion of unreality into Tara's world.

And that is, in many ways, the core of the story I want to linger on. This is not a book about an easily solvable problem. It doesn't follow Tara as she pulls together the clues and the science to reverse this and make her way back to the normal flow of time. She tries - of course she tries - to figure out a pattern to the events. But she's no scientist, and there is no pattern she can see. Her attempts to understand the problem slowly turn into - very human - irrational pattern seeking and superstitious belief by the end of the volume. This is not a story about a grand adventure against the odds. Instead, it's a story about her experience of this inexplicable event.

On the face of it, that experience is a whole lot of not very much. It's the day to day of surviving. It's the progression of the decision of whether she tells her husband every day what's happened, and pulls him into trying to solve it or not. It's the slow decrease in available food in the house and nearby supermarket as she continues through her year. It's looking up at the vastness of the sky at night and feeling like your smallness in the world means that all this - whatever it is - can't be permanent in unsolvable. It's bird song and peeing in the garden and walking and just the very granular daily experience of her life in this situation. And, as such, it is full of her feelings and musings, more than anything else. No, however much you're thinking, more than that. This is a phenomenally insular, introspective book.

Luckily, Tara is an interesting character in whose mind to sit, and more critically, Balle and Haveland have a really good line in prose that makes those mundane moments sing. I've already mentioned the stars, but I think that scene really does epitomise what this book is truly good at. Tara has been feeling very concerned about her impact on the world around her, and about how utterly unsolvable this problem seems. She worries, as she realises her repeated trips to the supermarket are depleting the food stocks despite the recurrence of the day, that over time she is just going to deplete a wider and wider field of resources, becoming some awful monster - her word - that impacts the world around her without its knowledge. Then one night she goes out into the garden in the dark, wrapped in her duvet, and looks up at the night sky. In her musing on the vastness of it all, she finds some measure of peace in her insignificance, and a quiet belief that it can't all be irreparable, if she is so small.

As it happens, that feeling doesn't last, but that doesn't even really matter. Its significance is in the experience of it, the zooming into a small moment of time and sitting with a person and their very real feelings about an impossible thing they're living through.

I find this is an under-represented approach in SFF - at least in the mainstream modern SFF I mostly consume - to its detriment. We are rich in stories about solving problems, action and plot driven explorations of what if. But there have been a few stories I've come across recently that take those what ifs and those ideas, and ask instead - what would it really be like to live through them? It comes through in Julia Armfield's Private Rites, it is a strong aspect of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time and it is deeply embedded here. The core idea at their heart may not be new - climate change, time travel and time loops are all established SFF tropes - but what makes them feel fresh is their approach from the experiential end. As someone very interested in people, and in seeing human experience at a granular level in fiction, this is so refreshing. Because it would be absolutely boggling to live through any of the events in any of those books. How would one cope? Asking that question is, to me, just as critical as asking about the science, the ideas, the solution to the puzzle, and if anything more so for its relative absence in the field.

The answer, here at least, is that Tara increasingly doesn't cope. She initially is pulled towards her husband, wanting to work with him to face this, but over the passage of her experiential time, finds the gap between them widening too far for her to cross day after day. She hides from him but stays close, at first, and then widens the gap between them as she feels their psychological gap widening. Fewer and fewer other people make themselves known in the narrative as the number of days of the time loop rack up, and as she pulls in tighter and tighter to herself, losing her sense of the normal rhythms of the world. And all of this, she notices and narrates; she is nothing if not a self-aware protagonist. But this too feels a reflex of the situation she finds herself in - she has no one to talk to about this but herself, in her notes, and so all of that ruminative approach is her act of trying to deal with the inexplicable bearing down on her.

There's a lot in here about isolation, and how that would affect a person, done with realism and sensitivity. It is impossible not to feel for her, not to pause in those cold, empty rooms, in those quiet days, and feel the very mundane but real melancholy of it. The great tragedy of this temporal incident is how much it cuts her off from the people closest to her, quite literally. For a day whose first iteration is full of warmth and friendship, it becomes incredibly stark and bleak.

This isolation also plays into something that feels a little underexplored in SF texts - at least in my experience - the realities of how much someone would or would not believe the fantastical when it happens to them in their life. Often, a character will accept easily because it is simply expedient to the story that they do so - if it's a plot and action driven narrative, you need to get the character past the blocker that impedes the narrative from happening. Or perhaps it's a story that wants to subvert that, and has a character refusing to believe what's in front of them while it continues to unfold. Tara is neither of these. She believes relatively easily, and based off the smallest of details. The first time the repetition unfolded, the thing that caught her attention was a fellow traveller at her Paris hotel dropping a croissant at breakfast in just precisely the same way as the previous day. Alone, it wasn't enough for her to fully understand and believe, but it sparked the thought that leads her to finally understanding. Does that seem too easy? Maybe... except when you are so embedded in the narration of her experience. It turns out, the speed of her acceptance isn't the thing, it's instead being able to fully grasp the little emotional pieces that go into it. Because the narrative is so concerned with her interiority, with narrating her thoughts in detail, it becomes very easy to see why she accepts it when she does, because we effectively experience that thought process with her.

By not just blurring but removing - as much as possible - the boundary between the reader and the character, Balle has created an incredibly moving and rich text that addresses key emotional questions about the experience of the impossible. If your calculus works that way, yes it comes at the cost of plot (and indeed, resolution - this is the first volume of a planned seven, the first sequel of which is already available in English) - this is not a story in which a great deal of significant events happen - but I believe that what it offers instead is not only worth that sacrifice, but sidesteps the idea of it as a sacrifice entirely. It is a wholly different text, with different concerns, approaching an SFnal problem from an unusual angle, and enriching the genre as a whole by so doing. If you are interested in human experience, in character, and in the quiet melancholy of a single person's thought, this is a book that will absolutely deliver that, along with a thoughtful approach to an SFnal problem. 

Balle sings an ode to the intimate quiet of personal reflection in the hardest of times, and to the pain of isolation. I would definitely encourage you to listen.

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The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose and translation, interesting approach to the human aspect of the SFnal, granular and poignant interiority

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume [Faber & Faber, 2025]. Translated by Barbara Haveland. 

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

6 Books with Olivia Waite

Olivia Waite writes queer historical romance, sff, and essays. She is the romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Today, she is here to tell us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses — been saving this as a post-deadline treat! Sci-fi and mystery and delicate relationship beats, my favorite combination.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Enchanting the Fae Queen by Stephanie Burgis — the sequel teased at the end of Wooing the Witch Queen, starring my favorite terrifying character from that book. Burgis ranges from super-light supernatural romances (Austen plus dragons in Scales and Sensibility) to dark political supernatural romances (Congress of Secrets with its shadowy horrors and secret police), but her books are always a wonderful time.

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

Prince of Midnight by Laura Kinsale — a washed-up highwayman in exile is brought back to England for revenge by a furious young woman whose family was murdered by a cult. I’ve been rereading a lot of Kinsale lately — some for the first time, like the exquisite For My Lady’s Heart — and this one was my favorite of hers from back when, so I’m dying to find out how it works for me now.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively
or negatively?

Two series: I recently reread both the full Hitchhiker’s Guide series and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Raadch trilogy back to back, and was very surprised to find that Adams’ comedy now feels nihilistically bleak, while Leckie’s far-future imperial civil war leaves breathing room for hope and resilience.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

Growing up as a kid, I never lost an opportunity to check a bookstore or library shelf for anything new or reprinted by Diana Wynne Jones — but the one I reread until it fell to pieces was A Tale of Time City. A bit of mystery, a bit of fantasy, incredible characters, and the impossibly delicious-sounding dessert 42-Century Butter-Pie.

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

My latest book is Murder by Memory — on a generation ship where you’re issued a new body every time your old one wears out, and your memories are saved in book form in the Library, ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers just as a murder is committed. It’s my love letter to classic mysteries, sapphic sci-fi, and utopias with problems because people are still people even if they have everything they need.

Thank you, Olivia!

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

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3

Intense action, flawed characters, nostalgia, and just enough humor as Strange New Worlds enters its third season.
 

Fast pacing, jump scares, messy emotions, wry witty humor, questionable choices from beautifully flawed characters, and likeable new members of the ensemble cast. All of this composes the opening four episodes of Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Historically, the third season of a Star Trek series is often when the show leans into bold awesomeness after an uncertain, exploratory start in the first season and a second season of settling into the characters and storytelling. However, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds benefitted from being a spin-off of another strong Star Trek show, Discovery. As a result, Strange New Worlds began in comfortable awesomeness from season one, telling the story of the earlier crew of the legendary starship Enterprise, and reimagining iconic characters (Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and even James Kirk) and presenting new (La’an, Ortegas) or underused pre-existing (Pike, Una, M’Benga) characters, who are all shown in their early, uncertain, but much more fully explored selves. Season 2 added a range of clever quirky storytelling devices, including a hilarious partial animation crossover (with Star Trek: Lower Decks) and song-filled musical episode. However, the second season ended on a more serious note in “Hegemony I,” with a return of the Gorn, the human eating, monster-like enemy race that hunted them in the first season. As several beloved characters are trapped in a Gorn invaded non-Federation world, Pike (Anson Mount) is forbidden by Starfleet from interfering due to the risk of triggering a war with the old enemy.

Hegemony, Part II

When the Enterprise is attacked and outgunned, with close friends still captive, Captain Pike must make a critical and potentially devastating decision. Season 2 of Strange New Worlds left us with an old-school cliff-hanger finale that is immediately picked up in the opening moments of season 3 and launches us straight back into the action. The transitional moment between the two seasons is a nice call back to The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds” part I and II. That jaw dropping moment when Riker responds with unexpected confidence when faced with an impossible choice involving his own captain is contrasted with Pike, in a similarly impossible situation, having a true internal decision paralysis crisis. This is one of the storytelling elements and character explorations that makes Strange New Worlds so intriguing: optimism, compassion, and boldness are balanced with the characters’ frailty, imperfection, and sometimes flawed judgment.

Wedding Bell Blues

The theme of Season 3 seems to be nostalgia and “Wedding Bell Blues” gives us another call back to a classic Trek episode, “The Squire of Gothos,” in addition to an overt nod to a particularly creepy episode of the original Twilight Zone: “It’s a Good Life.” A broken-hearted Spock (Ethan Peck) finds himself in an unexpectedly positive situation but has to grapple with what is real and what is not. Altered reality stories are one of the most entertaining ways Star Trek plays with our minds with a twisted, waking dream scenario. “Wedding Bell Blues” leans into the strangeness with humor and a nostalgic twist at the end.

Shuttle to Kenfori

After the relatively light, although mind-twisting, adventure of “Wedding Bell Blues,” the narrative returns to monsters and violence in “Shuttle to Kenfori.” Pike and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) go on an unsanctioned away mission to find a rare but potentially life saving drug and, in the process, encounter a formidable old enemy as well as unexpected terrors when they land. This episode leans into the usual horror adventure narrative with plenty of jump scares and moderate gore. But, in true Star Trek form, the story uses the setting to show Pike processing troubling revelations about two people for whom he cares deeply, even as he comes to terms with what it means for someone to become a monster physically and psychologically.

A Space Adventure Hour

The often parodied style of original Star Trek television series (in everything from Saturday Night Live to Black Mirror) has become so iconic that the cold-opening moments of “A Space Adventure Hour” let you know we are in for a humorous, nostalgia filled treat. In this episode, directed by Star Trek icon, Jonathan Frakes, La’an (Christina Chong) and Lt. Scott (Martin Quinn) are drafted into test driving a new concept called a holodeck. Running a program of such stunning magnitude puts the ship's engines at risk so Scott is assigned to make it happen without blowing up the ship and La’an is assigned to do a walkthrough of a sample strategy based program. In a multi-level metaphysical piece of storytelling, La’an decides to create a murder mystery inspired by Amelia Moon, a beloved storybook detective from her childhood. However, instead of landing in an isolated mansion or on a luxury train, she ends up in 1960’s Hollywood near the set of “Space Adventure Hour,” a hilarious take on the original Star Trek. This episode is fun on so many levels for long time Trekkies. We get to see the holodeck in its infancy, unapologetically wreaking havoc with the ship’s safety. Viewers also have a fun foreshadowing of Captain Picard’s frequent Sherlock Holmes adventures on the holodeck in The Next Generation. To set up the look of the players, Scotty uses the transporter patterns of the most recent travelers. So, most of the show’s lead actors get a chance to play completely different characters in this comedic take on 1960’s Hollywood, including Strange New Worlds’s James Kirk (Paul Wesley) doing a very funny and very meta imitation of William Shatner’s James Kirk from the original series. And, we get to see a young version of Scotty in all of his stressed out engineering persona as the holodeck mystery takes on dangerous implications for the safety of the crew. But, most of all, we get a hilarious and poignant celebration of why Star Trek is beloved and iconic. In the character of a Hollywood agent, Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) gives a timely monologue on why Star Trek remains an indelible, and still relevant, part of our real life culture.

With intense action, twisty mind games, and unapologetic, self-aware humor, the opening episodes of Season 3 feel like a nostalgic letter to long time Star Trek fans. The jump scares, plot twists, and character angst, are balanced with the strong ensemble chemistry of flawed but relatable characters. And, as always, we have the series’ enduring moral core to guide us (hopefully) as we all continue to explore what lies ahead.

--

Highlights:

• Action and jump scares balanced with humor and nostalgia
• Character angst and dysfunction
• Perfect ensemble chemistry

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Tawny Man, Book 2: The Golden Fool

In which desire carries risks 

Cover illustration by John Howe

In last month’s discussion of Fool’s Errand, I discussed the complications involved in love – specifically, with relation to Fitz. This month, I’d like to have a similar discussion, but a bit more broad-reaching. I want to talk about the role of desire, and the complications it brings for everyone. 

Golden Fool is at its heart, all about desire. Yes, there is sexual desire, and we’ll get there, but so many other types of desire can drive characters’ decisions and actions, both small and large; and part of navigating the urges of desire is understanding the consequences and potential harms of satisfying them. So: let us examine some desires. We’ll start small. We’ll begin with Thick.

Thick is very intentionally written to have Down Syndrome¹. For our purposes, in this discussion of desire in Golden Fool, I will say only that he is incredibly powerful in the Skill, and that he is treated unkindly, regularly called halfwit, and indeed his own name, in this world of virtue names (King Shrewd, Prince Dutiful, etc.) reflects how he is seen². Up until Fitz takes him under his wing, Thick’s primary goal in life has been to remain unseen and unnoticed. But Thick's strength in the Skill will be useful to Prince Dutiful, and so Fitz, a Farseer to his bones, decides he can't let that go unexploited, and sets about to woo Thick to his cause. There’s a certain amount of persuasion that Fitz presents as cleverly manipulative psychology, but really, as I see it, Thick is unique in being unmanipulable. The approach that works best is when Fitz just asks him, straight out, what he wants. Thick answers, equally straightforwardly: He wants pink sugar cakes, not burned, from the kitchens. He wants a red whistle on a green ribbon, like the one his mother gave him. He wants a peacock feather, because it’s pretty. When Fitz persuades him to take a bath, Thick realizes that he likes being groomed, and having his hair cut. Thick’s desires are for simple things, but their significance is anything but simple. Small details throughout the book show that these desires reflect Thick’s past, his love for his dead mother, his own self-image; and in gratifying them and thereby winning Thick’s compliance, Fitz gains a vastly powerful ally in future plot elements. 

Yet no desire is harmless, in this book. Thick himself, in holding such humble desires, proves a weakness in Chade and Fitz’s need for secrecy. Yes, Fitz wins him over by giving him sweets and toys; but the Piebalds – those terrorists who wreak havoc on the Witted denizens of the Six Duchies both directly and indirectly, by commiting violence in their name – get to Thick first. They offer him pennies to buy sweets if he will tell them what happens in Chade's rooms, and what Chade and Fitz talk about, and what Chade calls Fitz when no one is listening. This is important because at this point no one except Chade and Kettricken know that Fitz is not Tom Badgerlock, servent to Lord Golden, but in fact that Witted Bastard, Fitzchivalry Farseer. The Piebalds stand to make serious mischief based on what they've learned from Thick, from the simple expedience of offering to gratify his simple desires (and, to be sure, threats to gut him if he tells anyone).

The more ambitious the desire, the greater the danger that comes with gratifying it. Chade’s desire for the Skill is one of the more dangerous ones. Using the Skill carries with it its own inherent desire-based element, because Skilling can be addictive. Unwary users can lose themselves entirely: their minds disintegrate and become part of the background stream of Skill that runs underneath the mundane world. Sensible fear of exactly this end was a large part of why Fitz resists Chade’s job offer to come tutor Prince Dutiful in Fool’s Errand for so many pages. However, Chade’s desire for the Skill compounds this inherent risk of personal destruction, because for him it represents more than just the immediate pleasure of the act of Skilling. Chade sees it as part of his inherited right as a bearer of Farseer blood, something that goes along with his power and political influence as Kettricken’s trusted advisor. So for Chade, the risks of misusing the Skill will not only destroy his own mind; they have implications for the future of the Six Duchies. 

More deadly still, there is humanity’s desire for dragons. The whole thrust of the Realm of the Elderlings thus far (and continuing into the future) is about the return of dragons to human lands. But dragons – whether biological, like Tintaglia from the Liveship Traders, or simulacrum, like Verity’s flock in Assassin’s Quest – are desperately dangerous. Verity’s flock, sculpted of memory stone, may rescue the Six Duchies from the Red Ship Raiders, but they will suck the humanity out of people who are shadowed by the dragons flying overhead. And Tintaglia, we have already seen, believes that humanity has no right  to freedom or self-determination in a world where dragons reign. And yet, despite these risks, humanity still desires dragons: 

The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not there, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at a blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. (pg 627-628). 

It is tropey to build a story in which the plucky humans, refusing to bow to any masters, must fight for their freedom. Only Hobb can build a world in which humans are forced to bend their knee, slavishly, obsequiously, to a greater power, and make the reader think, ‘Well, I mean, after all, if it’s dragons…’

Desires are dangerous, yes. But that does not mean they should be denied. Because only by gratifying the most primal desire of them all do we make more humans. That's right! It's finally time to talk about sex.

I want to start with the Narcheska Eliania, the Outislander who has been chosen as Prince Dutiful’s arranged bride. She’s got all sorts of things going on back home that she’s got to balance in her role as affianced peace treaty token, one of which is a mysterious woman who encourages her to use her sexual wiles to bind Prince Dutiful to her will. This is deeply gross, since Eliania is only 13 or so, but it also clearly lays out how sexual desire is a tool, a weapon that Eliania can wield. And it is a dangerous weapon -- not just for the Six Duchies, but also for Eliania herself. Especially since she is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a literal child³. Fortunately, Dutiful is not particularly interested in 13-year-olds, so everyone manages to sidestep the risks that come with gratifying sexual desire.

Sidestepping the issue of sex is also something that Fitz and the Fool have been dancing around for a few books now, but no longer. Remember, the Fool is totally, hopelessly, helplessly in love with Fitz. He has been flirting with Fitz for ages, as we saw with the whole ‘Beloved’ exchange in Fool’s Errand; he dresses him up in clothes that make Fitz look incredibly sexy; and he embodies a persona as rakish Lord Golden who chases after women and men (and boys) alike, to the extent that most of Buckkeep starts whispering about how Lord Golden is undoubtedly bedding his servant, Tom Badgerlock (i.e., Fitz). Fitz looks the other way when he can, about the teasing, but eventually he decides that Words Must Be Had about it all. Which, to be fair, is reasonable. No point letting the UST between you and your very best friend fester when it’s causing real problems in your professional life.

So Fitz forces a confrontation with the Fool, and the Fool, for all that he teases and snarks and plays games with words, does not lie. He admits that yes, actually, he desires Fitz. And in return, Fitz, here, becomes cruel. It’s one thing to clear the air, or to gently say no to a friend who confesses that they’ve caught feelings for you. It’s entirely different to force the friend to admit to the feelings, only to follow up that forced confession with something as bald as, ‘I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never.’  

The Fool responds, ‘That, too, is a thing that we both have known for years. A thing that never needed speaking, those words that I must now carry with me for the rest of my life… We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever’ (pg 404).

This forced confession results in a rift between Fitz and the Fool, between the White Prophet and his Catalyst, that lasts for hundreds and hundreds of pages. It is the last, sharpest danger of desire. If satisfying it is dangerous, denying it can be worse. If the White Prophet and his Catalyst cannot work together to save the world, then that will lead to skies without dragons.

---

1 I have already cut out hundreds and hundreds of words about how that works in this book, and indeed in the context of disability representation in general. Please feel free to have that conversation in your head, where no one will get upset at what I say or you think.^↩
2 Although I do rather wonder why he gets a virtue name. Thus far the tradition has been reserved only for nobility, and Thick has never been noble^↩
3 By even the in-world definition of child, I should add. She doesn’t reach puberty until the next book.^↩

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Reference: Hobb, Robin. The Golden Fool [Voyager, 2002].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

A tale of two men pulled off the ledge.

Content warning: this piece deals with both suicide in fiction and disclosure of a real suicide attempt

I’m going to tell the readership this bluntly: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a book about suicide. This is a slim novella about a man who boards the subway to the end of the line intending to drown himself, but upon leaving the train finds himself in an endless maze of corridors and rooms, with only one other person for company.

I’m going to tell the readership another thing bluntly: in April 2023 I tried to kill myself by jumping off of a bridge. The way I experienced this book, and the way I have interpreted its themes, is completely and utterly inseparable from having had that experience. This is going to be a thematically heavy piece on that front so I am warning people now.

With that said: this whole thing also, at first, reminded me of the new season of Severance, which I watched the week before writing this review. The unending corridors with the occasional vaguely recognizable business (such as the convenience store, always empty, from which our protagonist pilfers his nourishment) strike the same chord as the featureless corridors of the severed floor of the Lumon building. Both works are wrangling with the meaning of living when the world around you is so crushingly, miserably oppressive, and why ending your own life wouldn’t be a rational response to it (such as when Helly R. tried to hang herself in the escalator). The severed floor, however, at least has decent lighting. For at least the first half of the rather slim book the narrator had the voice of Seth Milchick in my mind.

The supernatural element here is something that is more hinted at than displayed, the most vivid of that rare open depiction is a harrowing physical depiction of the narrator’s grief. The entire feeling of all of this is a certain grottiness, a sort of brutalist gracelessness that makes the whole novella feel cold, uncaring, impersonal. The few other characters there are in this wasteland of corridors are not much better; all of them are too locked in their own problems, their own focuses, their own obsessions to care about our main character, a man named Vicken who is of Armenian heritage living in Montreal.

Vicken is a medic who has himself talked people out of suicides. Ajram spares you gory details of what brought Vicken to the metaphorical ledge, and chooses rather to shine a light on the voids in his life. In Vicken, you see an ultimately decent human being, but one who is on some level deeply empty of things that make life worth living. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this is a very eerie book by Fisher’s definition, which is the deep unnerving lack of something that should be there, but isn’t. Vicken’s life is deeply and profoundly unwhole, and that is the focus of the novella: not details, but mood.

It’s a mood I can relate to all too well. When I look back to the months before I drove to that bridge in the middle of the night, the feeling was that of a profound emptiness. I am not comfortable making too many details public, but suffice to say it was about me, in my status as an autistic person, to be able to truly fit in a neurotypical world. Human beings are social creatures; we evolved to live in small groups. What had set me down that dark path was the fact that I had not even a small group, but no group, or so my mind had resolved, and that removing myself from aforementioned neurotypical world was my only realistic option. After my attempt failed due to the intervention of a kindly passerby, I spent the next several months in a sort of aimless state.

It’s that aimless state that this novella captures so crushingly well. Vicken is, and I once was, someone who had every intention of ending his life and then found himself in a situation where life was going to go on. The end result, for both of us, was an unnerving existential shrug, a sense of ‘now what?’ pervading every aspect of our being. There is the unpleasant undercurrent where you ask yourself what the point of any of this was, and what the point of still being here is. Once you’ve walked back from the metaphorical ledge, you are confused on an existential level. Your soul, as much as that could be said to exist, is bewildered, and you just keep thinking about it. Your internal monologue becomes a droning question, never ceasing, affecting every single fiber of your being.

Not everyone will like the ending to this book. I think it worked, for what it’s worth, but it absolutely refuses to wrap up the narrative neatly, all wrapped up in paper with a colorful bow with a knot. The ending is deeply, profoundly messy, and it will make you wonder, as I did, what in the narrative is ‘real,’ as firmly you can define that in a work of fiction. I think that was the right decision, creatively. It is of the same sort of issue that makes too many works about historical tragedies, the Holocaust and American slavery being the most prominent examples although by no means the only ones, end neatly, where the victims live on, learn to be happy, and are improved through suffering. This book does not do that; Vicken is harmed by all this, indubitably, but it is not a purifying experience in that nigh-omnipresent Christian way. I can speak from personal experience: attempting to kill yourself and surviving is not an ultimately uplifting thing to go through, and Ajram knows this well enough to leave enough threads dangling that it feels true to life.

The phrase ‘coup de grâce’ is a French term meaning ‘mercy kill.’ It is the shot from a gun that puts down a wounded animal that will never recover. When I was in that state, leading up to that dreadful night, removing myself from the world certainly felt like a mercy to myself, who would never fit in with the neurotypical world, and to the world, so that my inability to read it would harm nobody else. It is a title that is provocative, attacking not the need to talk suicidal people out of that self-destructive haze, but rather to everyone else, challenging them to understand the dejection, and all too often the crushing sense of abandonment, that leads people like Vicken, and me once upon a time, to take their lives. The title, and the novel, are pleas for mercy from the world towards those it has abandoned so utterly. It is a plea I hope you, the reader, will heed, if you feel you can handle the telling.

--

Reference: Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce, [Titan Books, 2024]

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

Book Review: A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

Another go around at cosy, witchy romance, but this one doesn't quite hit the mark.

Back in 2022, I read, enjoyed and reviewed Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. It was cosy and heartwarming, but with just enough depth to keep it the right side of the line of schmaltz, and with a well-developed cast of characters and some genuinely excellent chemistry between the main character and love interest, as well as a decent character arc for that MC outside of just her romance. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was intensely enjoyable fluff and just the right sort of thing for a certain sort of mood.

Thus, when another book in a similar vein was announced, I was delighted enough to pre-order immediately. Publishing is publishing and delays are delays, but A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping came out this July, and I immediately devoured it seeking the same sort of comforting warmth I got from her previous novel.

And I did get that. And that might, slightly, be the problem.

While the details of the plots differ, the two books share a hell of a lot in common, especially in their characters, themes and vibes. Both feature love interests from the UK but not England who seem spiky and unwelcoming to the MC at first but upon further investigation have soft, mushy centres, and are devoted to one or several little girls who aren’t their daughter(s) but whom they care about fiercely nonetheless. They are also very bookish and knowledgeable, and very particular about their books. And hot. But it’s a romance novel so that goes without saying. They are also both slightly outsiders in some way. The main character is likewise slightly an outsider (because racial background, class, upbringing) and has her hangups, especially about her self-worth, but having persevered through many trials and loneliness has a core of determination. Magic sits in the hands of a small and conservative group whose beliefs/strictures the main character chafes against. A lot of people’s biological parents are absolutely terrible. Or dead. Or both. The plot predominantly takes place in a household that offers a supportive sanctuary away from the hardships imposed by the world and those conservative magic users, and which is, at some point, under threat from an external force. The main character ends up in a quasi-family, quasi-teacher role to a younger person with magic that she is not fully prepared for.

There’s probably more that I’m missing, but already, that feels like a pretty chunky overlap. For some of it, I’m tempted to assume it’s just how the author do - especially for the love interest. How many Guy Gavriel Kay novels have I read that contain That One Woman, after all? Many authors do it. And likewise, many authors have their pet themes and ideas that resolve again and again in their work. But this… feels just a little too close.

And even then, maybe I would have rolled with it, except… it’s just not quite as good at nearly all of it as The Very Secret Society is. It’s not terrible! But when you have something that occupies quite so much of so very similar a space, it’s really hard not to feel let down when the second one just doesn’t quite tick those boxes as well as the first. And especially so, when some of those boxes are the romance and the found family, the two key things that these books need to deliver on to be what they so clearly set out to be.

I’ll tackle the found family first. This is a book with a small cast of misfits who live together in the titular inn, because its magic draws them in as someone whom the inn and its owners can help in some way. Some of them, though they don’t get a tonne of attention, feel like they have a safely closed arc (if a relatively short one), like the cousin from Iceland whom the main character, Sera, coaches through a little moment of self-doubt and upset about his relationship with his family. He has his Moment. But there are two characters in that cast whose threads feel, to me, as though they are left hanging. The first is Nicholas, a slightly odd young man who works as a knight reenactor at a local medieval fair and who… certainly seems like he’s in love with the main character. And while he gets his Emotional MomentTM, it is handled mostly off-screen with a brief conversational acknowledgment, and the way he behaves towards the MC is never really addressed. It just sort of… sits there. More significant however is a character we meet right at the very start, whose “help” causes the initial conflict of the book in the prologue, and who continues to play a role of very mixed help and problem-causing right the way through to the end. Her name is Clemmie, and she’s trapped in the body of a fox. And she is a Problem.

Upon finishing the book, it seemed pretty clear to me what her arc was shaped to be, as a mischievous and self-serving person who comes to see the value and love available in the sanctuary of the inn. And some of the beats of it are there. Certainly the ending is trying to have that arc as if it’s been completed. But there aren’t enough moments throughout the story to fully support that arc and make her actions at the narrative climax feel plausible. It just felt a little flat. And there are moments throughout that have this quality - they conform to the overall shape of the narrative but just don’t quite feel fleshed out enough for it to work emotionally or intuitively.

Which brings me to Luke, the love interest, who has exactly the same problem, but far more prominently because well… he’s the love interest in a romance. He’s load-bearing.

One of the great things about The Very Secret Society (look, it’s too long of a title to type out every time and you know what I mean) is that the beginning and end points of the romance felt totally believable, and the middle spent a lot of words getting us from A to B, ramping the chemistry up over scene after scene and making it impossible not to buy. The two characters are very different from one another, and don’t really like each other, but I totally buy how they ended up there, because I have seen it happen. And that’s what we don’t get in A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping. We skip a lot of the necessary middle work, relying a little on flashback and implied previous interaction, and mostly on the reader knowing what shape of story this is and just being willing to go along with it. The ingredients are absolutely there, but they have, to stretch a metaphor, only been given the briefest of stirs. I’d have preferred she used the blender.

But if all that is missing, in a book almost exactly the length of her previous work, what’s there in its place?

Well, a couple of things. For a start, A Witch’s Guide is much more peopled than The Very Secret Society. We get to see more of an actual world - an England - in which this story is taking place, and that England is both a great strength and a minor weakness of Mandanna’s writing. On the one hand, she has a great skill for writing an obviously diverse world that absolutely feels like the world I know in reality - it is just casually peopled by a wide range of people, noticeably but unobtrusively because why would it be obtrusive? That’s just how the world is. And if this book had been set in a city, I would never have given it another thought. But it’s not. It’s set in the rural northwest, and includes some places I was quite familiar with growing up, and which, in my experience, were rather less diverse and wholly less accommodating of difference than, for instance, I have found London to be. And while this is a book that makes a point of the racial, ableist and classist tensions of modern England - they form, in many ways, the core of the narrative conflict - those tensions are predominantly centred Elsewhere, in the magical Guild that exists off in Northumberland, with only a brief nod to racism in the local area (a pub the MC no longer frequents). My experience of the northwest is hardly universal, and I cannot speak for every single village and magical B&B in the area, but in a book where a lot of the location and culture work feels so true, this felt oddly out of place to me.

There is also a brief moment when we are first introduced to characters in that stuffy, old-fashioned magical guild where their snobbery and Englishness has the dial turned to 11 and I likewise felt it just that little… off. But we get a snippet of one of them that hints to that parodic Englishness being a performance, just a little nod, and while that thread isn’t really developed from there, it sows enough discord into the characterisation that I took it much more in stride. This is something being done with purpose. Which makes me assume the other off note is purposeful too, even if I can’t quite grasp it in the moment.

Because the thing is, Sangu Mandanna is excellent at character writing. Even when other elements are awry, she crafts instantly graspable, distinctive characters. When I met each one in this book I instantly got who I was dealing with, and wanted to spend time with them. I wanted to see how they would develop and interact, and the plot was of somewhat secondary significance, a vector through which to reach more interesting character dynamics. That’s still true here, but it feels a little like she’s sacrificed full commitment to it in her core cast to give us a slightly wider supporting one, and it’s not a bargain I think, ultimately, is worthwhile. I’d have rather had a longer novel, or one with fewer characters, but where the dedication to that core cast gave me a fully satisfying set of scenes and interactions, and where the tension was palpable, the development really sold. But that’s not what we’ve quite got here. It’s most of the way there, but it’s missing the spark it really needs, and that I know she has because I’ve seen it before in her work, and the elements needed were all right here in this book, but they just never quite resolved.

It’s still a fun read. She’s still really good at a lot of the key elements needed for this kind of cosy, heartwarming fantasy romance. The message of the core plot is a schmaltzy one, but with its heart absolutely in the right place, and the two main characters feel well-crafted and suited to one another. It’s a romance I really want to believe. But it’s not quite there. Close - so very close - but just not quite at the mark. I would still recommend it as a fun read. I still had fun. But I can’t help but compare it to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, because that, truly, did have the spark.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• A realistically peopled England
• Places that feel absolutely real
• Genuine warmth

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping, [Hodderscape, 2025].

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

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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