Thursday Morning Superhero

It might seem a bit too early to start your Halloween planning, but time is running out if you want to be cool and give out mini-comics to your trick-or-treaters!  Thanks to Halloween ComicFest, you can pre-order bundles of 25 mini comics from your local comic book store. I placed my order last week and look forward to introducing the neighborhood kids to the amazing Johnny Boo! Check out the comics you can pre-order here!

Pick of the Week:
Darth Vader #21 - We are starting to learn why Vader has selected the world of Mustafar for his prize from the Emperor. He was given Padme's royal starship as his vessel to embark to Mustafar and there is something very odd about Vader piloting such a pristine and shiny vessel. It seems that Vader has similar feelings and has an odd and surprising method of altering the shiny exterior. It seems that Vader has never felt more connected to the Force than his time on Mustafar. The location where he lost so much, including his life, has some sort of power over him and drives him forward with a blind allegiance. Marvel has really done a great job filling in the holes between the movies and providing us with valuable insights of characters that we have know since our childhood. When I think back to my first impression of Vader I thought he was simply a bad dude that could force choke someone out. We learned more about him as the movies progressed, but nothing like the nuance we get in the comics. The Clone Wars cartoon does a similar thing in regards to Anakin and I would love to see similar treatment given to other franchises.

The Rest:
Birthright #31 - It has been quite some time since I revisited this series and will admit that I will need to read the  previous few issues to properly catch up, but am instantly reminded why this series from Joshua Williamson and Andrei Bressan stood out to me when I first read it. The lore (inside joke) of Terrenos, the mages, and the world add such depth to what started as a missing child story. This week we learn more about the tragic upbringing of Mastema and the sheer power that consumes her. This issue is a nice pause in the story and Williamson promises the next few issues are insane.



Daredevil #608 - Matt and Mike Murdock have some family issues to work out. I was unaware that Matt had a twin brother, but apparently he died many years ago and was brought back through the powers of The Reader. He is already causing quite a few headaches and kidnapped Foggy, but Daredevil is conflicted faced with the prospect of killing his brother or a realistic copy of his brother. I am not entirely on board with this development, but it became more interesting with this issue and has me very intrigued given the fact that Mike just went to visit Kingpin and informed him of Matt's research into the legitimacy of the mayoral election. If only our current political environment was this entertaining. I think some good old fashioned superheros would really liven up the Mueller investigation!




POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Microreview [Books]: A Glimmer of Silver by Juliet Kemp and Accelerants by Lena Wilson

Twin offerings by The Book Smugglers' Novella Initiative present vastly different experiences of growing up superpowered.

The Book Smugglers' Novella Initiative line was a highlight of my novella reading in 2017, bringing a set of diverse, different stories with some interesting romance and a more YA sensibility to some of the entries than I've seen in other fiction of this length. I've been hoping throughout this year that we'd see more from the line, and in August my waiting was rewarded with this pair - with some bonus theming around the classical elements to really seal the deal!

Both Accelerants and A Glimmer of Silver deal with people on the cusp of adulthood in their own societies, whose choices are immediately constrained by the societies they live in. Both protagonists also have superpowers: Jennery is a "communicator", one of an increasing but still tiny number on xyr world who can safely drink the water of their alien ocean, while Lucy Mi-Na is an "omni", capable of pyrokinesis in a world where superpowered people are suppressed and locked away. Despite these similarities, these are very different books in tone and outcome: where A Glimmer of Silver grounds its exploration of colonialism and other serious themes within a community that is loving, if not entirely supportive in the way Jennery wants, Accelerants is almost all sharp edges and barely concealed rage. This leads to an interesting juxtaposition between the two which means I might not have thought to directly compare them had the twin publication not felt like an invitation to do so. Certainly, you could pick up one or the other of these without "missing" anything in the book you do read -- but, in doing so, you'd be missing another novella which is well worth your time.

In A Glimmer of Silver, Jennery has grown up on a colony planet whose surface is covered by one large, sentient ocean. Upon learning this, and tentatively learning to communicate with Ocean, xyr society has developed around self-sufficient rafts and a complete taboo against eating anything that comes from the water - despite not being a single lifeform in the way we recognise, everything in Ocean is Ocean and eating people is bad. The fact that Ocean can and will destroy entire raft civilisations if provoked is also, of course, a good reason not to do anything one thinks will annoy it. All children in Jennery's world take a simple "test" when they are young to assess their capability for communicating with Ocean, with those who pass then being compulsorily trained in becoming a communicator between humans and the ocean. This involves several hours a day of floating in Ocean listening, an act which turns communicators' skin silver, but Jennery and I have a serious difference of opinion on how totally cool this would be, as all xe wants is to reach the age of 16 without hearing the voice of Ocean, at which point the rest of the communicators will have to give up on xyr and let xyr train as a musician instead.

Jennery walks a fine line between being bratty and sympathetic, which xe usually manages to stay on the right side of. I found the exceptions often stemmed from a fundamental element of the worldbuilding which I didn't pick up at the time, but found myself increasingly unsatisfied with after finishing the book. Forcing 16-year-olds into a single, all-encompassing "career" based entirely on abilities rather than interest or family situation feels very much like a problem of the 21st century, rather than a realistic crisis for a teenager on a precarious subsistence colony in space. Is it really the case that all these Communicators sit around doing nothing except be Communicators and live in their own bubble, with no time at all for any sort of other community-based activity? However, if you simply accept this one-person-one-career premise - as well as Jennery's occasional overuse of the word "stuff" (sorry, I am apparently my own grandfather) - you'll be rewarded with a very well-crafted quest of self-discovery and alien communication, when (of course!) Jennery hears Ocean at the last possible moment, telling xyr something xe can't ignore, taking xyr to the heart of a rebel settlement which threatens the balance on which humanity depends.

So, if A Glimmer of Silver is the warm, floaty novella with hidden depths, Accelerants is more like walking into a furnace. The opening drops us in one of the most harrowing moments of Lucy's life, and by the end, the catalogue of abuse and neglect and marginalisation verged on overwhelming for me. In the world of Accelerants, people with superhero powers are an open secret: known to exist, but highly controlled and effectively sent to government camps and locked away if discovered. Having burned down her house and apparently killed her mother when her powers first manifested aged 6, Lucy's story alternates between her present circumstances in one of these camps, and flashbacks to her past where she attempts to find her way as a queer, half-Korean teenager with severe anxiety around flame and a mountain of suppressed trauma. Because of this structure, we already know how the flashes of happiness in the past are going to turn out, a fact which becomes all the more heartbreaking because it's impossible not to root for the beautiful, supportive f/f romance in these sections. Lucy does manages to find support in her present too, in a relationship with a fellow inmate that has its own moments of loving care in the brutality that is the prison camp - whose "treatment" for omnis is a complete distortion of exposure therapy conducted by relentlessly sadistic prison staff.

Accelerants also does a wonderful (and, according to the "Inspirations and Influences" essay by Wilson, entirely intentional) job of confronting the "superpowers as marginalisation" trope by addressing the intersectionality between Lucy's identities. Although it's her pyromancy that gets her locked up, Lucy's terrible relationship with her father is clearly just as much a function of her race and his suspicions about her sexuality, and the latter in particular also shapes her experiences upon being locked up. One issue with telling this story at novella length is that there isn't space to directly experience the prejudices of Lucy's father while maintaining the effect of his menacing, silent presence throughout - but the effect of that presence is so well-realised that I can't fault the choice that was made here. I read Accelerants in one sitting, feeling increasingly sick and unhappy for Lucy as her story progressed: not, precisely, an enjoyable reading experience, but certainly not one that I'm going to forget in a hurry.

Ultimately, both Jennery and Lucy end their stories by coming to terms with themselves and asserting control over the positions their worlds have put them in. Lucy's climax, telegraphed from the start is a vicious yet not undeserved act of reclaimed identity; for Jennery, a more conciliatory but complex outcome is possible, re-centring agency on the colonised Ocean and enabling reconciliation on Ocean's terms. Both novellas end having punched far above their weight in terms of politically complex worldbuilding, and both deliver consistently excellent YA stories. Accelerants is, by a whisker, the more accomplished of the two, but A Glimmer of Silver offered me a more enjoyable reading experience (not least because, as regular readers of my contributor biography may have noticed, I'm a bit biased towards water). In any case, you can't go wrong with either of these, and I'm very pleased to see that the Book Smugglers' novella line is still alive and well.

The Math
A Glimmer of Silver
Baseline Score: 7/10

Modifiers: +1 Ocean content highly on-brand for reviewer; +1 colonialism narrative with non-human sentience that ends on the sentient's terms; -1 Communicator lifestyle just doesn't make sense

Accelerants
Baseline Score: 8/10

Modifiers: +1 superhero narrative addressing intersectionality theory; -1 just so relentlessly hard to get through on an emotional level...

Overall 
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. A pair that are both well worth your time and attention.

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

References: Kemp, Juliet. A Glimmer of Silver [Book Smugglers Publishing, 2018]

                     Wilson, Lena. Accelerants [Book Smugglers Publishing, 2018]

6 Books with Michael Mammay

Michael Mammay is a retired army officer and a graduate of the United States Military Academy. He has a masters degree in military history, and he is a veteran of Desert Storm, Somalia, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives with his family in Georgia, where he teaches English to high school boys, which is at least as challenging as combat. Find out more at his website.

Today he shares his six books with us.

1. What book are you currently reading? 

I just finished Age of Assassins by RJ Barker and while I haven't picked it up yet, I don't think there's any world where my next read won't be the second book in that series. I don't usually go for a book two immediately, but Barker's work kind of demands it. It's so good. Before that I read City of Lies, by Sam Hawke, which I loved, and I'm getting ready to read The Accidental War , by Walter Jon Williams, which isn't out yet, but I got a copy from my editor.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I'm looking forward to The Disasters, by Megan England. It's a debut that I got a chance to read the first chapter of a while back, and I think it's going to be awesome. To love a book these days I really need great writing to go along with a great story, and this book definitely has that.

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

I don't re-read books very often. I think I could probably count all the books I've read more than once on my fingers. There are a couple reasons: first, I try to stay up to date on new books, so re-reading takes away from that, and second, I don't want to go back and re-read something I loved as a younger man and find that I don't love it anymore. I'd rather have the good memory. With that said, I re-read A Wizard of Earthsea this year to celebrate the passing of Ursula Le Guin and it was even better than I remembered.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time, either positively or negatively. 

The Forever War. I re-read it last year, and in my opinion, it's the best military science fiction book ever written. With that said, it has some outdated views on homosexuality that are pretty hard to read in the current environment. The book was written in 1974, and tends to treat homosexuality as synonymous with androgyny. It's not hateful, it just feels a bit awkward. It makes it hard to recommend the book to young readers, even though it's an absolute classic, and the allegory of it is still spot on forty four years later.

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

The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon. The omnibus edition. I read it in the nineties and it's what made me want to write fantasy and science fiction. I think it was the first time I read military fantasy. I was in my twenties then. If you want something from when I was younger than that, I'd probably look to David Eddings. I read a lot of Heinlen as a kid, too.

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

My debut, Planetside, came out recently. Something I'm really proud of is that it seems to appeal to science fiction lovers, but also to people who don't normally read sci-fi. I've had so many people say 'I don't even like science fiction, but I loved this.' There's a really big mystery element in the book, and I think that surprises people in a good way. It's a military science fiction setting, for sure, but that element, while ever-present, isn't overwhelming. I think it's accessible to mystery and thriller readers, and I love that, because it might lead some of them to consider more science fiction in the future.

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

Nanoreviews: The Skaar Invasion, Phoresis, The Expert System's Brother

Brooks, Terry. The Skaar Invasion [Del Rey]

With The Skaar Invasion, readers are in a headlong rush to the really, truly final ending of Terry Brooks' long running Shannara series. If we count the Word / Void novels (and I do), The Skaar Invasion is the 30th Shannara novel. It is the second of four volumes in The Fall of Shannara. There's a significant weight of expectation and history here. The novel mostly holds up to what it needs to do.

It is completely not fair to compare the latest novels from Terry Brooks to his earliest. Elfstones, Wishsong, and his four volume Heritage of Shannara are by far the high point of his oeuvre (though his Dark Legacy novels are the best of his later books). For a number of years now Brooks has sacrificed detail, worldbuilding, and atmosphere for a breakneck pace and quick references to the past. The Skaar Invasion, like The Black Elfstone before it, bridges that gap as best as Brooks is currently able or willing to do.

It took me all of The Black Elfstone and a decent way into The Skaar Invasion to realize the titular invasion wasn't yet another breaking of the Forbidding and a demon attack, but rather an expansion of the world (even though the action all takes place in the Four Lands. This is a fantastic decision because despite all the callbacks in this novel (Cogline, Walker Boh, Shea Ohmsford), this invasion isn't a retreading of ground Brooks has covered several times before. To make a comparison to other fantasy novels, the Skaar feel somewhat more like the Seanchan from Robert Jordan's novels or the invaders from Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire. The comparison is not exact, but I think it's on point. The Skaar Invasion may not be among the best of Terry Brooks, but it is a fully entertaining ride.
Score: 7/10

Egan, Greg. Phoresis [Subterranean Press]

I typically hesitate before picking up one of Greg Egan's stories. At least of the ones I've read, there is often a coldness there - as if the story is a vehicle for Egan to work out his ideas and perhaps a problem he would like to solve. They're intellectually interesting, sometimes, but I bounce off of them. That was the case early on in Phoresis, but much to my surprise - the deeper I got into Phoresis, the more I enjoyed and appreciated it.

It's a story of twin frozen worlds, one of which has inhabitants eking out lives that to call hardscrabble might be too generous. It is on that world (the names don't really matter) that a plan is made to build a tower so high that people might jump from the top and land on the other world in order to colonize it and hope for a better / easier / more stable life. Something about Egan's storytelling is compelling, even if the central conceit of the tower is a bit absurd an unwieldy. The passion and tension of the tower and the crossing the gulf between worlds is the heart of Phoresis, so long as you don't think too deeply on it. Phoresis is a three part story and multi generational. Phoresis is increasingly compelling and engaging.
Score: 7/10

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. The Expert System's Brother [Tor.com Publishing]

Our own Paul Weimer reviewed The Expert System's Brother at length over at Tor.com and one thing that Paul touched on that I appreciated is the idea of a fantasy story morphing into a science fiction one. It is perhaps the most interesting idea going on in this novella. While I'm not overly well read in Tchaikovsky's oeuvre, I have the idea that a common theme is an opening of "what the hell is going on" that has the reader working through not just figuring out the story, but also scrambling to keep up with the underpinnings of the world itself.

The ideas running through novella are interesting, about what it means to be cast out from a community and the intersection of technology with an otherwise low tech existence. There's enough packed into The Expert System's Brother that it easily could have been (and perhaps should have been) a full length novel.
Score: 6/10


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

The Fugue of Fantasy and the Grimdark Interregnum

Grimdark has been around since the 1990's. Is it really all that new? And is it here to stay? I think aloud about the currently dominant mode of Epic Fantasy being published today.


There have been tendencies and trends in epic fantasy fiction ever since it became a mass market genre in it’s own right in the 1970’s. Waves of authors have come into the subgenre, falling into various schools of thought. While it is Science Fiction that is the literature that emphasizes the “genre conversation”, with books reacting and responding directly to each other, in fantasy it is somewhat different.

The fantasy genres, and subgenres like epic fantasy are more like a fugue. A fugue is a type of classical music composition which is composed of various musical melodies which appear in the course of the piece, and get emphasized, deemphasized, changed, and otherwise are in dialogue with each other in the overall composition. The fantasy genre can be thought of as an complex fugue, with various voices rising, falling and reacting to each other as the music of fantasy progresses over the years. The music of Fantasy continues on and on, even as the voices change.

In the history of epic fantasy, following this analogy and paradigm, there has always been a voice in a minor key, a strain of fantasy with antiheroes, shades of dark grey and darkness, worlds where hope and optimism are not valued or are even punished. Violence is the name of the game, dystopic amorality the norm and the worlds are often the successor states or the  ruins of another, brighter time. The classical Western European model of the first few centuries after Rome fell is the historical ur-model, and indeed, many novels use thinly disguised or even explicitly set in that time period. The latest iteration of this minor-key fantasy, which had in recent years become a dominant theme in epic fantasy, is what we call Grimdark.

Grimdark and its earlier iterations of dark fantasy first arose in the late 1970’s with Lord Foul’s Bane, by Stephen Donaldson. Lord Foul Bane’s featured a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist (who commits a rape against an innocent girl), a fantasy world under threat, and a definite reaction to the Tolkenian model of epic fantasy. That model, at the same time, was being voiced by books that explicitly were replications of that model, such as Sword of Shannara. That voice, and more particularly the grimdark voice in the fugue of fantasy both gave way to an optimistic strain of epic fantasy. Authors like David Eddings, Judith Tarr, Raymond Feist and Margaret Weis defined epic fantasy for over a decade, ringing changes and variations on that voice in the fugue. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, this could be seen as a reaction to Reaganism, Thatcherism, the last gasps of the Cold War, and other such political strains in the Western World.

This is not to say that there was no strains of the darker material. Just as a voice in a fugue can go quiet but not silent, authors like Glen Cook and Michael Moorcock continued the dark theme that would become grimdark in later years. There has always been that dark theme, even when fantasy has been dominated by the more optimistic theme.

In the 90’s, external politics changed, a relative period of peace and calm  in the Western World came to the fore. The “end of history” was bandied about. The Wall had fallen, the United States was considered to be the only superpower in the world. It was in this environment that Dark epic fantasy rose again in series like Martin’s A Game of Thrones and Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series. In the early 2000’s, authors like Joe Abercrombie, R Scott Bakker and Steven Erikson took up this mantle and created the modern Grimdark voice in Epic Fantasy, although it was not called that at first. Grimdark as a term was a word borrowed from the dark space fantasy universe of Warhammer 40000, around 2008 ,and applied to the dark fantasy being written. Even before it was formally named as such, though, Grimdark became the dominant strain in epic fantasy. The epic fantasy bookshelves became as dominated with dark antiheroes and terrible amoral worlds. Press releases from publishers breathlessly would tell of how dark and gritty the newest grimdark was, just how gritty and dark the newest generation, the newest author was. Modern publishing releases combined with this dominant strange in the fantasy fugue to create an arms race of books exploring this theme.

I call this the Grimdark Interregnum.

Grimdark was not just limited to fantasy novels, either. A parallel descent into dark and gritty themes in comic books occurred in the late 1980’s and 1990’s as well, suggesting that the external social and societal pressures affected both mediums. The idea of “fridging” female characters was first made manifest, for example, in a 1994 Green Lantern comic strip.

Mixed in with it’s realism and focus on amoral anti hero protagonists, however, it must be said, that a lot of Grimdark featured elements that fantasy today is reacting to--issues of misogyny, erasure of women authors and representation of diverse characters. It is not unreasonable, to my view, to see a lot of , but not all, grimdark fantasy as appealing to a single demographic: young white men. Given that the majority of readers, including fantasy readers, are women, this has turned out to be an inherently self-limiting practice.

And with that increasing awareness and attempts to address these issues, as well as a reaction to the current politics, climate change and other world problems extant today, the environment in which authors are writing in has once again changed. Grimdark is no longer quite a dark mirror for our times, and no longer needs to, or perhaps should be, the dominant theme. And given the slow cargo ship turn that is the publishing world, things are changing, but only gradually.

But after years in the ascendancy, I think that Grimdark wave is starting to recede, and new forms are coming forward. I am seeing more and more novels being described as hopeful (or even hopeful grimdark, which sounded weird the first time I heard the phrase, but not the second or third).. I attended a panel at 4th Street Fantasy which discussed Hopepunk, a term coined by Alexandra Rowland, as a reaction to Grimdark.

If one wants a visual representation of this, compare how well the DC movies, very much in a Grimdark mode have been reacted to as compared to Marvel movies, especially movies like the Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther. The latter movie is most definitely Hopepunk. It's what characters do with their agency, their power in a sometimes very dark world. Trying to build something better, on small or large scale, IS a hopeful act.

But make no mistake. Grimdark and dark fantasy are not going away, or going to go away. II do not see a return to 80’s style fantasy, either. I do think I hear a new voice in the fugue, one where the worlds may still be dark and gritty, or have elements of same, and yet the stories are not of antiheroes, nihilistic and brooding and without optimism. The green shoots of hope can now be seen. Even dark characters can find redemption and change. The lessons learned during the Grimdark Interregnum, in the exploration of that theme in the fugue, is producing a new voice in the fugue.

Will this newest trend hold and grow to dominate epic fantasy? We shall read and see.

Thursday Morning Superhero

I wanted to open this week's post to draw your attention to the Comics Comics #1 Kickstarter.  Featuring the talent of Patton Oswalt, Paul Scheer, Megan Koester, and other comedians, this anthology pairs elite comedic and comic talent into what will hopefully become a quarterly anthology that will highly entertaining. There are still some amazing limited pledges left that are worth checking out.

Pick of the Week:
Leviathan #2 - John Layman's newest comic is an absolute delight. The U.S. government believes that something upset an underground ecosystem of dinosaurs that had been living underground peacefully for centuries.  The plan is to drive them to the surface to showcase the power and might of our military, but there is one scientist who is convinced that the Kaiju that wrecked New York City are monsters, not dinosaurs. Ryan learns his soon to be fiance was dappling with some dark magic and likely summoned something much worse than dinosaurs that have been secretly living beneath us. Sprinkled with some fun Chew Easter eggs and Layman's somewhat vulgar sense of humor, this is quickly becoming my favorite ongoing series. With each passing moment I struggle not ordering my own Leviathan plush from Skelton Crew Studio.  I have the Poyo plush and it is one of my favorite pieces and this comic features the first Chew collectible I ever had (the pink Chog).

The Rest:
Asgardians of the Galaxy #1 - Cullen Bunn's new series is a mix of Asgardian characters that I don't know a lot about and a family battle featuring characters I do know a bit about. With an intriguing cast of characters, including Valkyrie sharing a body with Annabelle (a bookworm who wants nothing to do with any fighting) and Throg, the Frog of Thunder! I have seen various collectibles of Throg and will admit that this is the first time I have enjoyed a book with him gracing the pages. It seems that there is an armada of spaceships featuring various outcast gods associated with the Ragnarok of their respective cultures. This type of power has caught the attention of Nebula and it is up to the Asgardians of the Galaxy to save the day! Packed with over the top action and humor, consider me officially on board.

Paper Girls #24 - The girls seem closer than ever to finally returning home in Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's time-traveling blast of nostalgia.  Erin is connects with the grandfather's mother (it is typical for this series) and learns that there may be a way back home. This is all happening as we learn that Mikey is suffering from a rare case of cancer created by time traveling (I think we will learn she has been time traveling for an extended period of ...time) and KJ gets gassed. I will admit that I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around all of the moving pieces in this story, but I don't think the grandfather is going to be happy that the girls are getting closer to home.

Star Wars #53 - Following Han's successful run evading Vader and his forces, Luke and the Rogue Squadron are able to join the fight somewhat evening the odds. It isn't quite enough, so Luke attempts to motivate Admiral Akbar to put together one last rally after his crushing defeat. Leia knows that this cover can help her infiltrate one of the Empire's ship, but it is difficult to put one past Vader. He seems to be connected to some sort of Force that makes it difficult to slip anything past him. Leia's plan appears to be no exception and we are setting the stage for an epic showdown in the next issue.





POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Microreview [Book]: The Dreaming Stars by Tim Pratt

A less intense book than its predecessor, but one that leaves me very excited for where the series is going.

Fair warning, dear readers: this is the second book in the Axiom series, and as with all second book reviews, there may be small spoilers for the first book ahead! If a character-driven, banter-rich space opera with a great take on alien civilisations and "Big Dumb Objects" sounds like something you want to enjoy unspoiled, I suggest you stop reading now and just take my recommendation to go check out The Wrong Stars. Just promise to come back here when you're finished.

The Wrong Stars was an unexpected hit with me, taking a ton of entertaining space opera ingredients reminiscent of everything from The Expanse to Douglas Adams and blending them into something unique and entertaining. The humans of Pratt's world had made their way into the solar system when a jellyfish-like race made contact, telling grand stories of the wider galaxy and promising extraordinary technology in return for a base on Venus. The technology (and the base on Venus) materialised; the truth behind the grand stories did not, and after several encounters with different delegations, humanity branded its new sentient friends the Liars and fell into a good-natured but sceptical relationship with them. Now plugged in to a network of gates giving them access to nearly thirty different star systems, humanity happily develops in its new, larger sandbox. However, events involving Kalea "Callie" Machado and the crew of the White Raven, alongside five-hundred-year-old Elena Oh, sole surviving member of an ancient sub-light terraforming mission, and a surprisingly honest Liar named Lantern, have exposed this freedom for the lie it is. Now the crew of the White Raven are party to an ancient secret involving a dormant, all-powerful race of sadists who could wipe out humanity in a moment once we come to their notice - and, humanity being the curious-to-a-fault won't-take-no-for-an-answer race of stroppy teenagers we are, that's not so much a case of "if", but "when".

There's probably enough background in The Dreaming Stars to make it accessible to anyone who hasn't already read the first book. We are re-introduced to the Liars and the now-expanded White Raven gang, who have spent the months since the end of The Wrong Stars getting progressively more bored in close confinement with each other. The book fills us in very effectively on the rest of the backstory too - the now not-so-mysterious (but still quite mysterious) Axiom, the fate of Meditreme Station, the relationships among the main characters and their respective histories with sociopathy-inducing brain spiders, and the other events that have led to our multi-temporal heroes hanging out on their cool but limited zero-g asteroid base.

Despite its generously informative start, I hesitate to recommend jumping in here even if you're normally content to start mid-series, because what follows is an enormous amount of processing and follow-up to previous events. There's relationship conversations! And time refugee conversations! And post-traumatic event grief conversations! And some more relationship conversations! And some Fun with Simulators and Gravity! And then some more relationship conversations, and suddenly I'm wondering how we are so far through the book without any clear plan beyond "let's go see Callie's serially unfaithful ex husband". There's a method to all of this, and I'm not saying there aren't some charming moments: Callie and Elena's relationship is gorgeously well-negotiated and straightforward, and any scene with Ashok, the chief engineer, is an instant favourite of mine. However, having characters be generally quite nice and respectful to each other despite their differences (and this stretches to scenes with the unfaithful ex!) is at once highly refreshing while also limiting the hooks that conflict and tension can be built on, and with a notable exception near the start, everything in the first third of The Dreaming Stars feels like it has pretty low stakes.

Once the plot does get into gear, it's well worth the effort, although we're pushing halfway by the time we arrive on The Planet Where The Stuff in the Blurb Happens, making the action portion of The Dreaming Stars rather compressed. Despite this, the whole business with the nanobots works out pretty well. This is especially true for the solution to the finale's conundrum, which simultaneously does justice to the overpowering strength of the Axiom while also giving the humans a very believable and satisfying path to resolution. The Axiom themselves are a fantastic antagonist race, combining the unknowable menace of the Trisolarans with a terrifying aura of ominpresence that isn't diminished by the way things play out here. As soon as Axiom technology reasserts its presence, the tone of the story completely shifts, and Pratt manages to walk a very clever line between allowing his characters plot armour and letting us relax into their development knowing it's all basically going to be OK, while keeping the stakes high because it's nearly impossible to tell, until the very last minute, exactly how this could possibly work out once the Axiom are involved.

The crew of the White Raven also demonstrate how effortless and natural writing diversity into one's far-future space opera can be. Queerness is the norm, and people are open and communicative about their boundaries and methods of demonstrating affection. Notably, Callie is written as demisexual, which I don't think I've seen explicitly recognised in a book like this before, and there's also textual references to aromanticism and asexuality. Attention is also paid to neurodiversity and disability, although unless I missed something, the disabled characters all appear to be disabled through accidents rather than by birth. This isn't something I'd have picked up on a couple of weeks ago, but it's been brought to my attention by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry's excellent post-Worldcon thread on how eugenicist thinking often creeps into science fiction worldbuilding by failing to acknowledge that disabled people don't want to be cured or erased from the future by technology or whatever else. Just as neurodiverse characters like Uzoma and Sebastien have a place in the galaxy, it would be nice to see that extended to disabled characters who just are, rather than having the narrative emphasise extenuating circumstances as if disability somehow needs those to be allowed to exist.

If The Wrong Stars was the must-watch, high octane double-length pilot of your new favourite TV show, The Dreaming Stars is like taking a sample of the series middle, encompassing "the character driven talky episode" and "the really clever high-stakes detour". On its own, it's decent but not spectacular, but as part of a developing whole it represents a series that's shaping up as far more than the sum of its parts, and there's so much more to be developed: I want more Liars, more Drake and Janice, more glimpses at solar system and/or galactic politics and, please oh please, a lot more Ashok. If the author or publisher are reading this, I'd like to make clear that I would read the hell out of a 12-books-with-no-end-in-sight October Daye style Axiom series where Callie, Elena and the gang go on monster-of-the-week adventures disabling Axiom technology and saving the humans while getting slow-burning character development and the occasional game-changing plot twist. With the end of The Dreaming Stars promising at least one more adventure, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Pratt's space opera to become a fixture of my reading calendar for the foreseeable future.

The Math
Baseline Score: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Encourages readers to take space jellyfish seriously, unlike certain franchises *cough Mass Effect cough*; +1 Contributing to a series that's already more than the sum of its parts

Penalties: -1 Could have kicked off the cool alien stuff a bit sooner.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Pratt, Tim. The Dreaming Stars [Angry Robot, 2018]