Phew!

Friends, I have a confession to make. I have felt quite motivated the last couple of weeks and I think I’m back on the horse in terms of my reading and even starting to write again, though I may need to offer apologies to the Wheel of Time Reread. I pushed through a few books that have been lingering, and I’m feeling good (about reading, anyway). It’s been a while, relatively speaking, for October Daye, so I picked up The Unkindest Tide and I’m starting to take notes and speculate about a couple of characters (who *is* Maeve, anyway?) when I thought maybe I should double-check that I’m caught up on actually writing about the rereads.

I am not.

I finished Night and Silence back in August, so we’re going to do the best we can here.

Welcome back, dear readers. Today we’re going to revisit the twelfth novel in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series: Night and Silence. We are making a good push to catch up with publication, and with no October Daye novel this year, and if the September publication schedule holds with Tor (the series having moved from DAW), I’ve got some time. If I don’t flake. Twelve down, six to go.

The preceding novel, The Brightest Fell, took Toby to the deepest (and sealed) realms of Faerie to bring home the sister she never knew she had. Being a hero, she might have done so anyway, but Toby’s Firstborn mother Amandine took Tybalt and Jazz, and so a-questing-she-did-go. As an investigator and fully named Hero of the Realm (not always in capital letters), many of Toby’s novel-length missions involving finding people.

Night and Silence is the second book, after One Salt Sea (#5), where Toby has to find her missing daughter. There’s a much longer story there, and hopefully, if you are reading me talk about book twelve, you’re well familiar. If this is all new to you—hey, I really like the October Daye series, definitely recommend you read it, and start from the beginning. The books more or less stand on their own, but there is a growing impossibility of references and connections to how all this fits together that so much of the richness would be lost if you start *here*. There are worse places to start (Be the Serpent), but this is maybe also not the place.

If you are here, though, you’re ready for the search for Gillian and for Secrets to be revealed. I really like lore, and Night and Silence builds the lore of Faerie through the storytelling and also with more detail that Toby’s ex-husband and Gillian’s father has remarried a woman named Janet. Because this is a Seanan McGuire novel, Janet is far more than she initially seems—which is just the new wife who raised Gillian when Toby disappeared (being turned into a fish for fourteen years and all) and resents the mere idea of Toby trying to get back into Gillian’s life—but begins the novel accusing Toby of kidnapping their daughter, a scene that does not go well for either Toby or Janet at all. With grace, these are two hurting parents with no reason to like or trust the other. We see everything through Toby’s perspective, of course, which is one of the things I most appreciate about this series, because we see Toby trying to give understanding to Janet (and others). She may not always verbalize it, but she is more thoughtful than she often gets credit for by other characters.

Let’s just be clear that I’m going to spoil Night and Silence and, frankly, anything that runs through my mind while working through this.

I’ve mentioned Janet as the woman who married Cliff, Toby’s ex husband. If you’ve read the series this far, you don’t know Janet. You know Miranda. People have multiple names in this series and alternate titles and it’s just a mess of names. Miranda has been magically alive for some five hundred years. This bit doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s also the underpinning of the series. Back in the day when Oberon, Maeve, and Titania were walking through Faerie, there was a “Ride” where a human becomes a part of Faerie and is granted some power and position, but that incurs a debt, and that debt is paid through the sacrifice of that human’s life during the Ride of one of the Big Three of Faerie.

Janet, then a daughter of a Scottish landholder, fell in love with a man named Tam Lin, and Tam Lin was to be Maeve’s sacrifice in her Ride. Through the conniving of Firstborn Eira Rosynhwyr (always, she’s the worst), Janet “broke” Maeve’s ride and is ultimately responsible for Maeve’s disappearance and the splintering of Faerie. She, through a dalliance with Oberon, is also the mother of Amandine, which makes her Toby’s grandmother and Gilian’s great-grandmother despite now being married to Cliff and being known as Gillian’s mother.

It’s an absolute mess and also holy crap. McGuire has brought up breaking Maeve’s Ride a number of times throughout the series, and it’s mythic in every possible way. It’s this thing that happened so long ago (and is it weird that I wonder if 500 years isn’t actually that long in Faerie?) that it’s legend—but then, for all the fae, now Oberon and Maeve and Titania are all legend, and we are very close to McGuire pushing towards a presumed endgame in bringing back Oberon and Titania (like her daughter Eira, Titania is the WORST) and we have to be on the cusp of Maeve’s return. I’ve got a theory, which I’ll discuss more when I write about The Unkindest Tide, but it’s almost a certain that we’ve already met Maeve.

Lore! It’s a lot of Lore!

Also lore, but truly pertinent to Night and Silence, but for a number of books now the Luidaeg has been talking about needing to do something about the Selkies and that their debt is going to come due and they are on the clock and Toby is going to help the Luidaeg deal with it—but through the eventual rescue of her daughter, Gillian is elf-shot, and being fully human (see One Salt Sea), is going to die. But wait, there’s more! To save Gillian, the Luidaeg gives Gillian one of the lost Selkie skins, which anchors Gillian into Faerie, and Gillian *cannot* take off the skin for one hundred years and return to being human, or the elf shot will kill her. Faerie is seldom kind.

What all that means is that we are truly on the cusp of the Luidaeg doing something about the Selkies, and now Toby will have an even more personal stake in that action.

Next up on the reread will be The Unkindest Tide, in which the Selkies’ debt is paid, Toby is stabbed again, more Firstborn!, and because the path from A to B will always run through any number of additional letters, there is a bonus murder mystery.

Open roads and kind fires, my friends.

Previous Rereads

Today Joseph Brant interviews Xueting C. Ni, Chu Xidao and Hong Niangzi about writing horror and their recent anthology Sinophagia

Cover by Alyssa Winans

Xueting C. Ni has been extolling the virtues of Chinese cultures to the geek community since the mid 2000s, hosting tea tastings and Wing Chun demos at anime conventions, publishing articles on China’s traditions, emerging popular cultures, both on her own website, and for major media such as the BBC and RTE. She writes nonfiction books which have covered mythology and the growth of internet fiction in China, as well as collecting, editing, and translating (a set of roles she refers to simply as “curating”) genre fiction for a Western audience. The latest of these, Sinophagia, was released worldwide on September 24th, from Solaris Books.

We managed to sit Xueting down, alongside Chu Xidao (a pen name meaning Knife-Loving Chu), and Hong Niangzi (The Red Lady), both contributors to the book, to ask them about the project.

Ms. Chu, Ms. Hong, your works are all very popular in China, and are beginning to be translated for the West. Ms. Chu, I know you had work in The Way Spring Arrives, which Ms. Ni was also featured in, but for those of our audience who have yet to discover you, what can they expect?

CX: I’m a writer from the generation that grew up during the transition between traditional and internet literature. As a student, I was educated in the traditional classics, but when I was beginning to write for the general public, it coincided with the explosion of China’s internet age, and I found homes for my work, not just in magazines and anthologies, but on forums, blogs, and literary websites. I was getting instant feedback from my readers. At university, I studied pop culture, and particularly found its dissemination of narratives interesting. This is definitely present in my creative work, which combines my interests with the changing times. Even though I write fantasy about ancient or imagined worlds, the themes are unique and the issues are eternal, and I hope I’m reflecting the current psyche of the public.

XN: She’s not just famous for horror, though. She’s well known in China for qihuan (fantasy) and wuxia (martial arts fantasy) works, and also, she’s just released a new licenced novel based on the Assassins Creed games, set in the Tang Dynasty.

HN: Well, I’m a woman born in 1981 in a remote mountain village in the Chinese province of Hunan, whose culture venerates witchcraft and spirits. I grew up with no television or radio, and there were frequent power cuts, so our main entertainment was lighting a fire in the house to keep the cold out and listening to the older generation telling us scary tales. Many of these stories became the inspiration for the horror works my readers have loved. I’m so happy to be translated into different foreign languages, and for these fireside stories told in our village to make their way out of China and be enjoyed across the world.

Xueting, after the success of Sinopticon, many people were clamouring for a Sinopticon Volume 2. What made you pivot to horror?

XN: As an eclectic reader, I have always read across genres. As I said in a previous interview, science fiction reflects the hopes of a nation, and horror reflects its fears. I think that both of these facets are important to explore, particularly in such an unusual and rapidly developing society as China. I can also see that, after what the world has been through in the current decade, it really needs the darker genres right now to work through some of those experiences and emotions, and the popularity of horror attests to that thought. China has produced some excellent pieces of horror both traditionally and in the contemporary times (although it may not like to see them as such) which I feel the Anglopsphere would enjoy and benefit from. Sci-fi, horror, wuxia and crime, these are genres I have always been drawn to and are particularly important to me.

We’ve recently heard a lot about science fiction in China, but not modern horror. Why is that?

XN: Part of the reason is in my previous answer: what horror represents is not what China likes to present to its people or the world. After a mini-boom in the 2000s, there was a slew of trashy works exploiting the profitability of this type of storytelling that gave the genre a bad reputation, as well as tragic copycat killings that happened around the same time as the Death Note incidents in Europe. These resulted in a ban that went on for a decade, discouraging many writers and eventually, filmmakers, that persisted for a while. There seems to be a rather polarised view of horror in China. The traditional zhiguai or chuanqi, records or tales of the strange that are often quite atmospheric and employ the supernatural to explore a range of social and societal issues, these are treasured but not seen as horror. What is seen as horror are the stories with the jump scares and torture gore. Part of the aim of this anthology and the talks I’m currently touring is to try and merge these two concepts and elevate the genre to the literary status it deserves, on par with others, because, just like them, it seeks to explore the depths of the human experience.

HN: Science fiction novels gained a lot more attention in recent years because they express advancements in technology and imaginings of the future, which resonates with the social psyche in this age of rapid development, whereas horror literature in China is usually associated with superstition as well as the supernatural. Even modern horror isn’t free from this stereotype. Moreover, I don’t think there’s enough translated works out there to enable foreign readers to appreciate China’s excellent horror tradition, which is an immense shame, because Chinese horror writing is often entangled with its millennia-old cultures, it depicts the intuitive foresight of an ancient Eastern civilization on human nature, reincarnation, fengshui and cosmology in the modern times. It’s mysterious and bizarre, but also splendid and magnificent.

How difficult is it as a woman to write in the horror genre? Do you think it is harder in China than it is in the West?

CX: I feel the genre is very well developed. I’ve seen plenty of dark suspense magazines, and the best-selling novels have all been thrillers. And online, the genre is booming.

XN: I think the use of those terms demonstrates the issue China has with horror. A lot of writers don’t want to be associated with it at the moment. They prefer the term xuanyi, “doubt and suspense” or dark mysteries. If you euphemise something or avoid it altogether, then it comes under the danger of erasure. I was not aware of this euphemism at first. When I was initially putting together this anthology, quoting the terms for horror (kongbu and jingsong) to some publishers and agents, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Some publishers choose to assume I was soliciting for work and tried to assess me for translating their fantasy titles. Some authors backed out of the project altogether; others ignored the messages of this mad woman. I got sent some works that were suspenseful rather than horror. At the moment, it is hard for writers in China, especially women who want to delve into social horror, because very often a lot of their experiences are not seen as disturbing, and should be.

HN: Another challenge, especially in China, is the majority of horror fans are men, who tend to be bolder and want more thrills, so trying to engage them with female perspectives is no easy matter. On the other hand, appealing to female readers with love stories that are full of gore can also be a big challenge, as they tend to like sweet romances. Relatively speaking, the Western horror tradition is more established and more diverse, and female writers have a firmer foothold in the landscape. Yet, these challenges are what compels me to keeping breaking through the existing frameworks, to explore ever more unique, creative ways of storytelling, to grip the reader’s attention from the start with a marvellous sense of suspense, and thus to win their recognition and support.

Hong Niangzi / The Red Lady / 红娘子

Hong Niangzi, you have a huge following in China, especially with your Seven Colour Horror series. You yourself present as a “Colour-Coded Horror Heroine.” How much do you feel your persona is part of your success, especially in the age of social media and net novels?

HN: In the age of social media and internet novels, an author’s personal image definitely plays an important role on the propagation of their works and their success. The “Red Lady” persona I created for myself is closely associated with my work, and aims to provide the reader with a vivid and memorable symbol. With the seven colours I am representing seven kinds of emotions. It is a quick way of conveying the essence of the stories I intend to express, and my self-image, with its scarlet nature, represents my fiery passion, like a nüxia of ancient China.

XN: That’s the classic swordswomen of martial arts fantasies.

HN: In this way, I not only improve the interactions I have with my readers, but attract more attention on social media. Personal image and style of work combine to create a unique brand, and definitely give it more of an impact.

What do you think is the biggest difference between Western horror and the Chinese tradition?

XN: The biggest difference between Chinese and Western horror traditions seems to hinge on broad concepts such as delineation and pacing. The earliest Chinese concepts for gui, which is usually translated as ghost, actually had crossovers with divinity. It’s not until later that gui became associated with supernatural beings that cause harm, and morality. There’s even a place in the cosmos for spirits in the modern Chinese consciousness; they are not intrinsically frightful. Where Western horror may delineate more between the natural and the supernatural, for the Chinese, the horror is generated when taboo boundaries between the living and the dead are crossed. Chinese storytelling also has a different pacing, a four-part structure rather than the traditional Western three, and Chinese horror articulates yet a further variation on this. The pacing is something that reviewers and readers of Sinophagia have already picked up, and feel is an element that makes the works thrilling for them.

CX: China has had a tradition of “shamanism” since ancient times, and Taoism has its share of spells and charms to drive away evil spirits. Domestic thrillers pay more attention to karma. An individual’s death is not the end, and there is still the divine punishment of evil. Beyond that earthly conflict between good and evil, there is also divine justice, which focuses on roles within society. Western horror seems far more influenced by psychology, religion and the gothic aesthetic. Tropes like multiple personalities, the apocalypse, vampires and homunculi, etc. Behind the fear, there is often a complex psychoanalysis to be carried out, with more focus on the individual.

Chu Xidao / Knife-Loving Chu / 楚惜刀

Ms. Chu, what inspired you to write horror, and how does it interact with other genres?

CX: Horror comes from an inner fear, a fear of loss, which is then caught and recorded with a pen. I then combine it with fantasy, and add a little bit of interpretation outside reality, with impossible, imaginary scenarios, to dissolve that inner anxiety.

Do you think a country needs to be comfortable to write horror, or in hardship?

HN: The creation of horror literature is closely linked to a country’s social environment. In a comfortable environment, people are more likely to lean towards psychological horror and explorations of the supernatural; as their basic needs are being met, they can turn their attention to the experience of mental-related thrills. In hardship, horror novels usually reflect social problems or survival anxiety, manifesting in a more direct, radical expressions. I think different environments give rise to different types of horror literature, but whether in comfort or hardship, it’s possible to write compelling horror stories.

CX: No matter the circumstances, as long as humans experience death, there is parting, loss, and fear, and from that, violence and horror are born.

XN: Definitely. But I think that a country needs a certain amount of comfort to write horror. It would be ghastly to wish hardship upon any country. But literature is reflective by nature, and when reality is the very stuff of nightmares, it’s hard to find the space to reflect. Those nightmares don’t just go way after they occur. Decades after the Resistance and Cultural Revolution, writers like She Congge and Nanpai Sanshu are still reflecting on those recent collective experiences, and it’s important to do so. Contemporary experiences are more fragmented, and those who find themselves in horrific situations may not be in a position to tell their story, but horror writers like Yimei Tangguo and Zhou Dedong could and would, with their empathy and imagination. The roots of human fear are somewhat timeless, and often period settings can be effective frameworks to examine current or recurring concerns. This is why I loved working on Xidao’s piece Immortal Beauty. By retelling such an iconic classic tale as Pu Songling’s Painted Skin, it examines women’s objectification by society and individual fulfilment, issues that keep cropping up because they never seem to be resolved.

Sinophagia offers a mix of styles. Supernatural stories, folk horror, and stories that stray into science fiction and fantasy. Ms. Chu, are there any other stories in the collection you particularly enjoyed, or authors you’re glad the West is discovering?

CX: Death of Nala offers a brief glimpse into such a multifaceted dilemma and is a story that really gripped me by the heart. Xiaoqing, who wrote The Shanxiao, has been a long-time friend of mine, and I’m so glad to see her writing included in this collection. She’s always been an author who writes about love in such a sly, seductive way, and can always make the reader’s heart flutter.

Ms. Ni, you’ve written in particular about how difficult it was to get the broad mix of stories you wanted in this collection. What were the biggest hurdles and triumphs?

XN: One of the biggest hurdles was getting authors and agents to come forward with their stories, given horror’s bad press in China. Once I’d convinced the agents that this contemporary horror anthology was a vanguard that presented a valuable opportunity, it took them a long time to reach the writers I wanted. This led to some nail-biting moments as my schedule rolled on. For the authors I had to reach out to myself, I could stalk them in a friendly way and hope they wouldn’t think I was a madwoman and just ignore my messages. Luckily, a few of them did not. Once submissions started flooding through, the other biggest hurdle was trawling through the gore and misogyny to find solid gems beneath—I could see the exploitative approaches that gave horror a bad name. And I also had to specifically request works by women to address the gender imbalance in the pile, and to deal with some male contributors who demanded certain terms or for the collection to feature their works only. I could hardly believe it when it started to come together; it felt like a miracle or the workings of the dark forces, take your pick. One of the triumphs is all the love I’m already seeing for the stories in this collection.

Ms. Ni, one problem about writing about “horrible things from China” is that it may add fuel to the fire of Sinophobia in the west. Was this something you considered when curating this book?

XN: This was something I had anticipated, after some Sinophobic readings were somehow made of the title of the last collection Sinopticon, and the worsening geopolitical situation around us, the flak from which I myself have not been free at author events. We picked the title of Sinophagia for its memorability and the creepy feeling it evokes, in the sense of devouring, but also as an ironic comment on the fear of Chinese and Asian eating habits that had been rife over the last few years because of COVID reportage. Unfortunately, we were still unable to totally avoid Sinophobia from one of our promotional collaborators, who stated as an “appeal” of the book “the horrors of living in China.” I insisted we dropped them, though it was incredibly stressful during an important stage of the book’s journey. It felt even more important to get through these hurdles and put the proper representation out there for the contributors, myself and my heritage.

Ms. Chu, your story is about beauty, and violence, and power—themes you return to repeatedly. What is it about these themes that work so well together?

CX: This piece was inspired by the classic ghost story from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Studio, Painted Skin, which terrified me for most of my childhood, and the original title of the story, 红颜未老, comes from a song that was written by Chow Yiu Fei for Sandy Lam. A woman waits for her lover, looking and looking for him, but he’s a bad person. What she’s lost, she takes back for herself. It seems to be a love song, but it’s not quite. The human heart is a more complex thing than just love, but all we can see is what’s on the surface. This question reminded me that after I finished this, I wrote a story series called This Phantom Life, about a plastic surgeonwho helps her employers change their fates by changing people’s faces. It seems to be a common theme in my writing, wanting to explore beauty and the violence hidden behind it, and the way they both affect human relationships.

Xueting C. Ni / 倪雪婷

HN: I’ve always experimented with combining modern settings and traditional horror, to create new styles in the narrative. In this way, I hope to break that rigid Western view and propel Chinese horror towards the international stage. Confucian ethnics and Daoist principles play an important role in my stories, and still give cultural depth to modern horror, but the modern setting enables the reader to feel immersed in the fictional environment. A modern setting also allows for more innovative constructions, which I believe allow Chinese horror to be better represented.

What sort of horror stories do you like personally? What do you read for your own enjoyment?

CX: I love thrillers. I watch Hitchcock movies, and adaptations of Agatha Christie novels. They give me just the right level of chills. Horror films are a bit too much for me, so… maybe I just need a good proportion of beauty within my thrills. I loved Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. Aside from those, I like reading Japanese speculative fiction, especially Eichi and Kotaro Isaka.

HN: I personally enjoy stories that combine psychological horror with supernatural elements, especially works that delve into the weaknesses of human nature and social problems. I tend to read Western horror, like the Cthulhu mythos, and Stephen King, but I also like to read Chinese tales of the strange, such as Pu Songling’s Strange Tales, Ji Yun’s Notes from Yuwei Cottage, China’s County Records, and also works like Investiture of the Gods, from which I can absorb traditional horror elements that feed my creative writing.

XN: Interesting what Xidao says about beauty and thrills. That’s how I found Immortal Beauty; whilst there’s certainly a sense of horror to the story, I also loved translating the beauty of the embedded cultural elements. I grew up with Chinese tales of the supernatural, and classic European gothic literature such as Dumas, Radcliffe and Wilkie Collins, so shapeshifting demons in caves and trapped but spirited female heroines will always have a special place on my shelves. Jump scares can be overwhelming for me, and creepy tales I find far more impactful than slashers and gore. And I think tales like that, Susan Hill and Shirley Jackson’s works, always stay with you long after you finish the story. Hammer village horrors and films like Get Out are also a favourite, along with China’s urban legends. I agree with Hong Niangzi about needing to return to those Strange Tales too. In my research, not just for this book but my lectures and talks, I’m always surprised by how creepy they still are, even by today’s standards.

What is the one question you’ve never been asked in an interview that you wish someone would?

HN: I’ve been hoping that someone would ask me, “What first motivated you to write horror?” so I could reveal my inner motivations as an author and my passion for horror literature. In fact, what originally motivated me was wanting to bring those fireside tales, that I had heard as a child, to the world. Ancient stories passed down for centuries, stories that gave me insomnia, and the sense of dread that inspired in me, as well as the insight into the shining qualities in human nature. Through the external shell of horror, I hope to lay bare the complexities of human nature and dark side of society, and rouse more readers to contemplate their own destinies.

CX: I'm so delighted we’ve got the chance to introduce readers in the West to China’s dark suspense and this sort of dark history. So thank you, Xueting and Solaris. But, at the same time, whilst we've had many great works of horror and suspense come from the West, including film, television, novels, and games, there has been a section of those stories dealing with “the mysterious world of the East” as alienating and fearful, because of the cultural differences and barriers between them. We hope that Sinophagia will interest more readers in Chinese culture, bring people closer to each other, and encourage more excellent publishers to participate in projects like this and bring Chinese thrillers to life in different languages.

What else are you currently working on? Where can we see more of your work once we’ve finished Sinophagia?

CX: I’m continuing to write my fantasy works, set in the floating continent of Jiuzhou. Skylight and Cloud Shadows is the story of an avian man helping his friend take revenge and infiltrate the inner cadre of a league of assassins. I’m also working on a sequel to This Phantom Life: The Legend of The Cherished Night, which is the story of a young boy who learns incantations and spells as he roams the world. When I started the series, my own son Maike was ten, the same as the protagonist. But now he’s 15, and my character has aged far slower, so I feel I’ll have to pick up the pace. I hope I can finish these, and maybe they’ll be published in English. I’d love you all to read them.

XN: I’m working on a nonfiction book on the culture of wuxia fiction, a horror lecture and a few SFF translation projects. My translation of Whale Ocean, which is a scifi by Nanpai Sanshu (also featured in Sinophagia) will be published in Strange Horizons’ Samovar. So lots of exciting things to come, and I’m still regularly turning out articles on my site, but yes, next projects already lining up and ready to go…

HN: At the moment, I’m planning the next novel in the Seven Colour Horror series, and expanding it into a grander fictional universe. The next one I’m writing will be associated with the colour yellow. To me, it has always represented sadness, nostalgia, and the past, so within these tonalities, I want to write a story about the past, that is full of sadness and longing, to commemorate my late grandmother. I hope that she’s doing very well in another world, and occasionally thinks of me. After Sinophagia, readers can continue to find my new works on my personal website, social media platforms and major internet publishing platforms. I’m also planning to introduce more translated works in English, so that more international readers could get to know my work.

Chinese inkwash painting by Qi Qing, inspired by Immortal Beauty, by Chu Xidao

A weirdly addictive slasher, murder mystery, time travel homage to old-school Disney Channel Movie storytelling

Do you remember what you were doing in 2003? Flip phones, low rise jeans, bright pastels, Kim Possible and Lizzie McGuire. It’s weird to think of 2003 as retro or historical, but for the purposes of this story, it is. Time Cut is a time travel, coming-of-age, slasher drama that takes viewers on a nostalgic tour of the early 2000s while trying to solve a teen’s violent murder by a mysterious serial killer.

The story opens in 2003, with a prologue introduction of the triggering incident: the murder of popular high schooler Summer Field (Antonia Gentry). Summer is at an unauthorized party to de-stress after the murder of three other close friends. While she’s there, a creepily masked killer finds and kills her outside of the gathering. Then the story skips ahead to 2024, when Summer’s younger sister, teen-aged Lucy (Madison Bailey), is living in the shadow of her death. Lucy was conceived after Summer’s death to be a replacement daughter. However, her parents preserve Summer’s room as it was when she was murdered in 2003. Her parents are trapped in twenty years of grief and, as a result, they are simultaneously overprotective and emotionally distant with Lucy.

Lucy stumbles upon a time machine hidden away in the same place her sister was murdered. The time machine is inexplicably just sitting there in a public location, barely out of view. She inadvertently triggers the machine and accidentally ends up in 2003 just a few days before Summer’s murder. Lucy gets a chance to meet her long-dead sister and see the reality of who Summer truly was rather than the idealized version portrayed by her parents. While there Lucy meets brilliant and nerdy Quinn (Griffin Gluck), who becomes her confidant, she meets Summer’s inner circle of obnoxious, self-absorbed bullies, and she gets caught up in the serial killer chase while trying to solve the murder mysteries and trying to get back home. As is often the case in stories like this, viewers will need a willing suspension of disbelief, not for the fantastical elements, but for the practical ones, such as why the time machine is so easily located and how Lucy is surviving financially in the past.

Time Cut feels like an old-school Disney Channel movie (except done as a slasher film with time travel elements). The film leans heavily into the post-Y2K teen drama style of acting and storytelling. Summer is the popular girl with one quiet friend, Quinn, whom she exploits. Summer and Lucy bond over teen angst, and Summer, bewildered by Lucy’s boxy 2024 pants, decides to give her a fashion makeover, complete with upbeat movie montage music. The sweetness of the time-loop sisters’ budding friendship is contrasted with Summer’s intense obsession with remaining popular. As a result, she is complicit in the cruelty of the bullies against Quinn, despite their longtime friendship; she’s willing to use Quinn to cheat on her homework; and she hides her feelings for her friend Emmy. The cutesy teen elements are also deliberately contrasted with the ongoing threat of the serial killer and the succession of violent, on-screen murders. Fortunately for the squeamish, the gore is kept to a minimum, and some (not all) of the scenes are cut away.

The film does a surprisingly good job of keeping viewers guessing until the very twisty ending. Time travel films always ask the same questions about whether we should change the past and what will be the fallout from doing so. Time travel stories, like vampire stories, typically have a universal set of rules that can’t be broken without consequences. Time Cut opts to acknowledge, and then do away with, some of the traditional time travel rules. As a result, we never quite know what to expect as the characters navigate the murder mystery they are trapped in.

Time Cut does not always have the best storytelling. There are plot holes, inconsistencies, and story elements that will require a willing suspension of disbelief. But, despite these shortcomings, it does manage to be confusingly addictive all the way to the end. And it provides a healthy dose of turn-of-the-century nostalgia.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Low gore
• Twisty plot
• Nostalgic appeal

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

Gorgeous, slow-burn, adventure storytelling that takes a unique approach to building unforgettable characters

Among the likely contenders for Anime of the Year is relative newcomer, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, a story of a bored, eternally youthful elf mage, who begins her next adventure after completing a ten-year heroic quest with three friends. Despite the seemingly simple premise, the storytelling style is so clever that the basic journey narrative subtly becomes a unique psychological and emotional introspection as the characters progress through various adventures. The initial slow pacing and absence of feelings from the protagonist gradually evolve into intense adventures and a poignant, time-reversed exploration of the psychological connection between an indifferent, bored, immortal mage and a joyous, charismatic, but very mortal hero.

Frieren is a youthful, white-haired elf mage. She is not only incredibly powerful using magic; she is also essentially immortal, having been alive for centuries. But what sets her apart in the narrative is her personality. She is confident and curious but not really passionate about most things (except for finding new spells and grimoires (magic books)—then she becomes child-like. Prior to the start of the story, Frieren joins a party of heroes on a ten-year quest to defeat the demon king. The group consists of Frieren the mage, optimistic young Himmel, the heroic fighter, quirky, wine-loving Heiter, the priest, and strong, reliable dwarf, Eisen the warrior.

The anime begins at the end of their quest, when the four heroes return home after vanquishing the demon king. Initially, we aren’t given much backstory context about the demon king or why he needed to be vanquished. That detail is mostly beside the point, apparently. The heroes return home to much fanfare, celebration, and even monuments in their honor. However, the four remain contemplative of their time together. Frieren moves on without sentiment and without much of a future goal.

Years later, she encounters an aged but still joyous Himmel just before he dies of old age. She also encounters a much older Priest Heiter who asks Frieren to mentor a magically gifted orphan girl he has sheltered. The child, Fern, progresses under years of tutelage and Frieren reluctantly becomes attached to her. Later, the also long-lived Eisen, the dwarf warrior, gives Frieren his apprentice, a teenaged boy named Stark. Her new crew begins to resemble the original heroes’ party as they eventually pick up a priest (with his own complications) and deal with a range of obstacles throughout their journey, including monster attacks, vengeful elven mages, dangerous dungeons, political intrigue, personal grief and loss, and the inevitable tournament/competition arc, which adds a slew of new and intriguing side characters, including some semi-likeable antagonists.

Frieren has elements of many iconic journey stories, including Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and the tear-jerker anime (which I loved), To Your Eternity. The show takes a clever approach to showing us what life is like for a near-immortal like Frieren to interact with short-lived but ultimately beloved humans. Many of the key human characters age dramatically between meetings with Frieren, and even though the time seems short to her, we see that it is catastrophically impactful to humans. On the other hand, in her new journey, Frieren must become a mentor to the talented (and quietly opinionated) orphan Fern and later to the insecure boy Stark as he finds his own inner, as well as external, strength.

In her interaction with her two young apprentices, we see the way time slows down for Frieren. After gradually recalling lessons from her journey with the original heroes’ party, she begins to see the world in a new way. She ironically bonds with her old teammates long after they are gone and, in the case of Himmel, she seems to be slowly falling in love with him decades after he has died. It’s not romance in the traditional sense, but it is emotionally gorgeous and incredibly, poignantly sweet. But, instead of being or feeling tragic, her moments of post-death connections feel like a celebration.

That is the true strength and uniqueness of the show: the way it celebrates kindness and thoughtfulness without becoming morose or overly sentimental. Frieren herself remains aloof, irritating, funny, and quirky. There is only one moment where she truly breaks down and sobs, and it is a showstopper moment for the series. This is the moment when we realize the show isn’t really about this thousand-year-old elf mage; it is about all of us, humanity, in this current moment. Can we choose bravery, kindness, strength, thoughtfulness, and compassion in the face of terrible circumstances or in the face of the relentless pull of ordinary, everyday life? Frieren reminds us that everything we do matters, and everything we do will be remembered long after our journey ends.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A quietly powerful study of the human condition
• Unusual pacing mixed with lots of action
• So many appealing characters in a unique storytelling format

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

A thick, chonky SF heist novel set on a very deadly setting: a derelict spaceship orbiting a star that is about to go supernova

Sean Wren has a problem. He’s a small-time thief and smuggler, but he’s finally been caught. As one of the few people who understand a now dead language, he’s been put on a mission he can’t refuse: to go and board a spaceship. However, this spaceship has been derelict for hundreds of years, and is orbiting a star ready to go boom. And Sean soon learns that his is far from the only mission headed to the ship. What could be so important on such a ship to attract such interest in a dangerous place? Oh, only the secret to immortality...

This is The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt, the first in a series of books about Sean and his world.

The Immortality Thief is a book that grabbed me from the premise and setup from the world go. Future setting, science fiction (as opposed to actual space opera) on a spaceship, a countdown and relentless upward pressure on its protagonist—the book did a lot of the work in preparing me to accept its world. There is some tension in that, while this has some of the features of a SF heist novel, it also alternates pulse-pounding action sequences with a lot of time spent in buttressing its world. The action sequences make me think of games such as Dead Space, and given the monsters and traps the characters face, my mind cast back to that game (about exploring an abandoned spacecraft) time and again.

A lot of the novel’s chonkiness occurs with the worldbuilding that Hunt puts us into. Hunt has a fond use of flashbacks, helping develop both the world and also (as we shall see) the character of Sean. This is a far-future world set in a galaxy (although we start in a solar system, we spend time on one spaceship and that’s about it) that is on the edge of wary conflict between humans and the alien Ministers. We get a lot of character development of Sean as we find out the details of his history with the Republic, the alien Ministers, and just why he can speak and read the dead language that makes him invaluable for the mission. With aliens included, the world Hunt paints and portrays here feels something like the Cold War series of Dan Moren: two powers not quite ready to start shooting, but the forces pushing them in that direction are stronger than those keeping them in this wary peace.

For all that we stick to Sean’s point of view throughout, there is a lot of development of the other characters from Sean’s perspective, more than just their backstory tied to the worldbuilding. Once things have gone to pot and we shake out to our main characters of Sean, Indigo, and Tamara, the novel really picks up. These are as uneasy and untrusting a trio of protagonists as one might ever find in a heist novel, but the twin goals of trying to find the Philosopher Stone data and trying to survive a very deadly spaceship force them to, if not trust each other, work together. While we get to know Sean the most (via the flashbacks), we do also get revelations on Tamara and Indigo that flesh them out and complete our trio.

Sean is a very unlikely hero and not the kind of person you expect to be front and center, especially without backup on his side. He is absolutely bad at using force, and every time he tries, it goes sidewise. He is intelligent, knows a lot, is a good thief and smuggler, but force is not his strong suit. He’s also witty, snarky, and sometimes his mouth gets him into more trouble than he can actually deal with. If this is the sort of protagonist that appeals to you, then you are going to like The Immortality Thief a lot. Tamara (and especially the alien Indigo) are much harder to read; they are much more inclined and capable when it comes to force, as one might expect, but both of them show well drawn aspects that refract and reflect our protagonist.

And I could see how the relationship between the three could have taken well worn paths, but Hunt avoids taking the easy course at every juncture. Their relationship as they grow is prickly, difficult, complicated, and (even given a Minister) all too human.

The derelict spaceship itself, with its own alien and horrible creatures, traps, confusing layout, and other dangers is an immersively dangerous setting for Sean, Indigo, Tamara and everyone (and everything else) that they meet. If you want the literary equivalent of jump scares on a dark night in the fall or winter reading, Hunt has some scenes for you! The scenes when our protagonists face yet another dangerous and horrifying problem that threatens to overwhelm them (leavened with the lighter moments of worldbuilding and travel) is an excellent, if long, pacing for traversing the ship. And the characters themselves can’t forget: that star is due to go supernova any time soon.

The novel does go into a strange and unusual shift toward the end, as the Philosopher Stone and its secrets are finally in grasp. It’s a little more surreal, certainly less of an action novel and much more speculative in its nature. It was a bit of a gear shift that took some getting used to, and I was wondering where Hunt was going with this. However, the “runway” of the previous chonkiness in the book was good preparation for Hunt to go much more speculative and a bit of weird in the climax of the action.

One last thing I want to mention in discussing this book (I have obscured a lot of details on purpose; there is a great joy and discovery in figuring and seeing how Hunt puts her world together) is how she ends the book. This IS the first in a series, but Hunt manages to pull off an ending that can satisfy people who want a one-and-done bottle episode on the derelict spaceship. But it also has an irresistible sequel hook in its last paragraphs. The Immortality Thief is whole and complete and you will enjoy what you read, this chonky experience. But there is a lot more story to tell in this universe, especially from that hook. I feel Hunt really has hit that sweet spot between single book and opening a series really well.

I look forward to the continuation of the Kystrom Chronicles (named for Sean’s hometown) and seeing where Sean and his companions go in a rich and interesting universe with a deep backstory and an intriguing future.

Highlights:

• Strong primary character with an excellent pair of protagonists he is unwillingly teamed up with
• Really interesting and deep worldbuilding, an immersive and deep experience
• Excellent and sometimes rather frightening action beats

Reference: Hunt, Taran. The Immortality Thief [Rebellion Publishing, 2022].

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

Long, messy, violent, and exceedingly silly, Gladiator 2 is a still an entertaining sword-and-sandals epic. 

Before we dive in, remember that the original Gladiator won FIVE Academy Awards in 2001, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), and Best Supporting Actor (Joaquin Phoenix). The movie had a chokehold on the American public, which I think may be attributable to the brief love affair we also had with Russell Crowe, who from 1999 to 2001 received three consecutive Academy Award nominations. 

First, a brief and fascinating detour into how we got this sequel

Soon after the success of Gladiator, plans were quickly made to start drafting a follow-up script. Ideas changed hands several times until Nick Cave — yes, that Nick Cave — was commissioned to draft one. It involved Maximus leaving purgatory and being sent back in time by the Roman gods to kill Jesus Christ and prevent the inevitable spread of Christianity. Maximus then gets cursed to live forever and fights in major battles for the next 2,000 years, which is essentially just a rip-off of the Casca: Eternal Mercenary series of novels by Barry Sadler. 

Surprising no one, this Cave script didn't go anywhere (Stephen Spielberg actually put the final kibosh on it!) and the idea of sequel dwindled for a decade until Scott revisited the idea and finally settled on David Scarpa, who he worked with on Napoleon, to write script for Gladiator 2. 

Wait wait, I also have to talk about Ridley Scott for a second

Okay, on to the plot as best I understand it

The things that work

The things that don't

Guys, I just don't like Paul Mescal. He doesn't have the charisma or charm to pull off main character energy for a role like this. Also, his character spends half of the movie resisting Rome and rejecting his heritage, then in one single scene he reconciles with his mother to reclaim his birth right. This, in my opinion, is harder to believe than sharks in the Colosseum (I say this in my head in the same cadence as the "they did surgery on a grape" meme).

And while I do love Pedro Pascal, he is stiff in his performance of General Acacius. I was, frankly, shocked by this. He's usually a great actor, but I suppose wooden dialogue like "No...more...war" doesn't exactly give him much to work with.

Finally, there are CGI baboons in Gladiator 2 that look like something out of the Hercules TV show from the 90s. I'm guessing they blew most of the budget on eye makeup and 10,000 cloaks.

Final verdict

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10

Bonuses:Denzel Washington puts on a hell of a performance, and is pure gold. Joseph Quinn as the evil Emperor Geta impresses. Production design, as per usual, is breathtaking, and the Scott manages to capture a new look at the breadth and scope of Ancient Rome.

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

 No number of completed risk assessments can keep you safe.

Cover design by Dominic Forbes

Real world social commentary wrapped in memorable show tunes and a classic, fantastical setting.

Strange but addictive storytelling wrapped in stunning animation

Dandadan debuted with much hype and anticipation this year and has quickly become one of the most talked-about fall anime. With its addictive opening song and quirky, opposites-attract friendship vibe, Dandadan’s strange upbeat feel draws viewers in. But underneath is a strange tale of sexual assault, angry demons, and dysfunctional relationships. The show combines the vibrant, violent demon-fighting of Jujutsu Kaisen with the tortured, shapeshifting, slow-burn, romance/friendship (?) of Fruits Basket. In the end, it’s hard to know what to make of this anime debut. But, since it’s based on a manga, we know much more is yet to come.

Summary: Orphaned high schooler Momo is raised by her ghost-aware grandma. As a result, Momo has a deep awareness of the occult, although she tries to avoid it. She is also obsessed with movie star Ken Takakura. The first episode opens with Momo breaking up with her obnoxious, older boyfriend, whom she only dated because his tough guy attitude reminded her of her beloved movie star. Later, she intercepts a group of students tormenting a quiet, nerdy boy at school. She discovers that the boy’s name is also Ken Takakura. Momo and Ken become embroiled in a debate about the existence of aliens versus the existence of ghosts and agree to a dangerous bet. Momo sends Ken alone to a haunted area and Ken sends Momo alone to an abandoned hospital allegedly frequented by aliens. What could go wrong? It doesn’t take long before Momo gets kidnapped by aliens who take most of her clothes and threaten to assault her. Meanwhile, Ken gets a beatdown from a demon ghost who steals an essential sexual body part. The aliens’ attack on Momo releases her latent psychic abilities, and Ken’s demon possession leaves him with intense powers and, ultimately, an alter ego demon personality. Momo’s youthful grandmother helps the teens after they escape from both the aliens and the demon and then embark on a quest to get all of Ken’s body parts back. Eventually they connect with a popular girl, Aira, who, in a tragic episode, has her own supernatural experience and unlocking of power. From the opening sequence, we know there will be another person joining their crew.

I will admit I had mixed feelings about this anime despite the enthusiastic recommendations. The animation, character design, and music are all top notch and highly engaging. However, the plot, particularly of the opening episode, was problematic. A high school girl is dragged into a sexual assault situation by creepy alien men and the entire scene is played for laughs or at least flippantly. It was troubling and distasteful enough for me to want to stop watching. And the boy (also a minor) having his body parts stripped from him by an old woman was likewise distasteful. The other element that’s vaguely annoying is the constant potty humor. It’s meant to fit the farcical vibe, but ultimately feels distracting. There are many anime that deal with tough subjects or lean into low humor. Dandadan stands out in the way the disturbing content is merged into brightly colored, murderous teen angst.

Fortunately, the more you watch, the more the pieces fit together. It took a few episodes for me to realize the theme of sexual assault and violence against women was intentional. The demon who assaults Ken is nicknamed Turbo Granny. She is monstrous, hideous, violent, and vulgar. However, we later find out she was an assault victim, and she haunts areas where other girls were assaulted and murdered. The vibes are similar to Jujutsu Kaisen with its themes of sorrow leading to rage then leading to demon creation. In a later episode, we meet another victim whose unimaginable loss leads to a monstrous transformation. In that particular episode, the animation style changes, gradually becoming more realistic and dreamlike at times. Stunning moments like that make the show worth watching despite the juvenile hijinks happening elsewhere.

In addition to the quirky plot, Dandadan has two memorable protagonists. Momo is loud, bossy, and opinionated. She dominates the show with both personality and screen time. She refuses to call Ken by his real name, and instead gives him the nickname Okarun. Still, Ken is the more interesting character. Despite having strong opinions, he is insecure, soft-spoken, and passive, and he is the complete opposite of the tough guy movie star who shares his name. He has little backstory so far, and we don’t really see his parents or his home. However, when he becomes cursed, his demon form is powerful, cynical, and disinterested, while still being reluctantly heroic. The character design of Ken’s demon form is intense, and the animation is intriguing and addictive. And it brings a nice bit of irony to the story. I find myself feeling almost relieved when he finally transforms in each episode. Another intriguing character is Momo’s grandmother, who looks almost as young as Momo. She is gruff and cynical, and is obviously hiding a lot of information from the two protagonists. The story initially feels limited with the sole focus on Momo and Ken rather than a more traditional anime ensemble cast. However, the opening sequences foreshadow the others who will expand the story to more of a team adventure.

Dandadan is quirky, irreverent, and exhausting at times, but the core story provides a good payoff and the animation is stunning. If you can get past the strange plot elements and the weird combination of very adult and very juvenile content, Dandadan can be a good weekly fix of unique storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Stunning animation
• Weird, flippant treatment of adult themes
• Quirky, innovative storytelling

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

Sequelitis strikes back

The first shot of Moana 2 focuses on a hermit crab switching to a new shell. The metaphor is clear: you're about to watch a story about leaving your comfort zone and searching for a bigger home. After our heroine taught her people to sail again in her first movie, she now has to solve the reason for their isolation: a storm god, afraid of the heights humans can reach with cooperation, has sunk an island that served as meeting point for all the navigation routes. (How there can be an unskippable crossroads in open sea isn't addressed.) One of Moana's ancestors, a legendary leader, already tried to find the lost island and failed. If the scattered sea peoples don't reconnect, they'll die out in a few generations. Moana needs to gather a crew and her demigod friend Maui to raise the sunken island before…

Before what? What, exactly, is the threat here?

This is one of the most noticeable problems with the writing of Moana 2: an adventure story needs a sense of looming danger, and the one presented here unfolds on a scale of centuries. Moana could relax, train more sailors, recruit a bigger crew, and, you know, travel directly to the other islands instead of looking for a vanished one where nobody lives anyway. This artificial urgency may be an effect of translating into cinema what originally was intended to be a full season of TV. The first Moana movie had ticking-time-bomb stakes and a straightforward structure. This one shoves a massive, epic conflict between gods and mortals within a tight, crowded space.

Another of the consequences of turning a TV series into a movie is the loss of development for the supporting cast. Moana and Maui are joined by a shipbuilding engineer, a craftsman who records stories in woven cloth, and an old farmer whose unique contribution to the team is promised but not delivered. Whatever arcs they were going to have are reduced to learning to work together. These character concepts deserved more depth than they get.

While the animation effort was well spent in designing breathtaking landscapes and cool monsters, imagination seems to have been in short supply when it came to drawing people. Either that, or the shift to movie format reduced the available time for artists to devote the necessary care to each scene's emotional delivery. This movie is rated for kids, but you could play a drinking game for every time Moana makes this exact face:

To be fair, the plot makes valuable points about the civilizational dangers of isolationism and the advantages of intercultural competence. The character who weaves cloth can point the team to an important subquest thanks to an ability to read pictorial narratives. Moana realizes she's on the right track toward finding the other sea peoples because she unearthes a piece of ancient ceramic, which in the context of Pacific Islander culture, where most objects for everyday use are crafted from perishable plant materials, is a huge deal.

However, these achievements in storytelling get lost in the rhythm of events. Probably as another result of the change in format, this movie is left with a very strange pacing. The pivotal downer that ends the second act doesn't get enough time to breathe before it's overshadowed by a tonally dissonant song. A fascinating secondary antagonist gets a great costume and a banger song, but the hidden complexities of this character end up swept under the rug. In the climax scene, Maui suffers a major calamity that is almost immediately reversed. Moana 2 speeds through its beats as if ticking off a checklist, and the excitement that ought to linger after our heroine's daring adventures wears off as quickly as every other emotional moment in the story.

To complete the perfect storm against this movie, there's a live-action Moana planned for 2026, a convergence of Disney's frantic remake spree accelerating to an unsustainable pace and The Rock's meticulously curated self-mythologizing campaign reaching critical fission mass. The timing is inauspicious: the mid-credits scene of Moana 2 is an obvious tease for a sequel that may or may not matter under the shadow of the remake. I bet it's going to be hard for Disney to properly care for both projects at the same time, and it's conceivably going to be harder to do for viewers. The impression left by Moana 2 is that the studio didn't have a solid idea of what to do with it, and instead of committing to a TV series that could overlap with the remake, preferred to release it in one go just to get it over with.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

The long-awaited fourth installment of the Dragon Age series from Bioware—does it match up to the legacy?

You gotta have dragons, right? It's there, in the title.

What makes a Dragon Age game a Dragon Age game? Is it the mechanics? The plot? The worldbuilding? The characters? Something else entirely?

For me, it's the characters and their relationships, as well as the joy that comes from the branching web of plot decisions and ramifications, that show you a world in which your choices have meaningful consequences for the world, the people around you, and your relationships with those who inhabit it. It's what draws me in, makes me love all three (and a half?) previous iterations of the franchise, and had me so frothingly excited about this one I booked annual leave for launch day and the start of the week after so I could play more hours per day than is healthy for a person (it was great). It's what drives me to have logged around a thousand hours of play time across the series to date, and with no expectation that this number won't grow in the future.

Which isn't to say there aren't issues with each of the previous games, of course. And one of the interesting things about Veilguard is how evidently Bioware has put in the effort to resolve them this time. So I'll start my review there.

Charitably, I might describe the mechanics of Dragon Age: Origins as… clunky. Underdeveloped. More honestly—janky af. It's imperfectly attempting to recreate some of the D&D experience in a video game, and at a time when the tech was not exactly making the job an easy one. We—or at least I—forgive it because it makes up for it with excellent characters, some banger bits of dialogue, an introduction to an enjoyable fantasy world, plenty of lore to dig into, and some very interesting plot moments where the player has the opportunity to impact the direction the world and plot takes… if they do things right. But good lord is the actual gameplay a mess. Do not get me started on the inventory system.

Dragon Age 2 attempted so simplify and pare down a lot of that clunk (to reasonable success) and developed its skill trees into something actually functional. It was not exactly focussed on getting the player that involved in the nitty gritty of fighting, but it had some really cool, stylistic animations of your various characters giving the baddies what for, with occasional big dramatic moments that made your Hawke feel like a badass.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made the big jump into having you actually… doing the combat, rather than clicking to select the enemy and the skill you wanted to use on them. I actually had to get close enough and wave my sword right to hit the guy? Madness! Another marked improvement on the previous games, and with yet again a more developed, more interesting skill tree alongside it, where the choices you make in building what your companions can do feel like they actually have an impact on gameplay.

All the info you need is right at your fingertips on the tab screen in combat; it's easy to be fully involved in what's going on.

Veilguard then feels like the natural development of this thread—moving away from point-and-click D&D simulation into a fully bedded-in action game. I am choosing, moment by moment, what my character is doing and to whom and how. I block, I duck and roll, I parry, I shield. My involvement in the combat is down to me and my timing, my choices, and so feels… well, like I'm actually involved. And when you add in combos with your teammates—also very easy to achieve and clearly signalled in the combat screen—it just gets even better. There's a bit of a learning curve at the start as you get used to it, especially the timings for blocking, ducking and shielding, but the game does tutorial you in pretty well, and it is absolutely delightful the first time you manage to employ the perfect timing with a shield-block and are rewarded by absolutely twatting the opponent in the face. I am utterly, completely convinced that as a pure gameplay experience, Veilguard is hands down the best game in the series and just genuinely, actually fun to simply… play.

It also does a great job in differentiating the character classes by feel. My initial run was as a warrior, which felt suitably tanky, while still being able to dish out damage. Returning as a rogue, whose special attacks rely on the building of momentum (which is lost if you allow yourself to get hit) rather than a warrior's rage, changes how you react to combat. Suddenly, the dodge button is my best friend, rather than the parry. Then again into mage, where I can throw up a barrier and then go long range with staff attacks that really knock the enemy's socks off, but I'm constrained by my mana pool and refill rate. What we don't see is the full differentiation within the subclasses—Inquisition had you choose if you would be sword and shield vs two-hander warrior, for instance. What we get instead is the ability to switch between the two subclasses at any point, even in combat. For warriors, that's hitting X to pull out your two-hander. For mages, dotting between the two-handed staff and the ability to barrier, vs. orb and dagger which allows close combat, stabbing and parrying, at the cost of no shield. For rogues, there's no explicit switch-between at all—at any point, you can right-click and start shooting with your bow, while your default dual-wielding weapons remain in play for close combat. You can optimise your build for the subclass you find yourself most wanting to play, but the flexibility remains at the touch of a button. There's a learning curve to each class that comes with how truly distinct they feel, but once you get into the groove, each one does feel genuinely worthwhile—and enormously fun—to play.

However. As I said above, this is not why I play Dragon Age games. It's great, don't get me wrong, and I hope future installments keep and develop this, because it is extremely well done and satisfying. Moment by moment, there was none of the frustration because I just didn't have the control to win a fight I was involved in, or that combat was just feeling repetitive and dull. I applaud it. But… it's nothing more than a nice bonus to me. The meat of my interest was always going to be elsewhere, in the plot and the characters. Which is where I found things getting a little unstuck.

Which is weird, because a lot of the promo going into Veilguard talked about how they knew fans wanted character focus, so that was going to be where they put their efforts, and they visibly have done that. It just hasn't quite achieved what I, at least, want out of it. To boil it down to fundamentals, Veilguard just feels safe in a way that none of the others have. While the setting and story may be extremely dark, the characters and their interactions, both with each other and with Rook, the protagonist, just lack bite. I don't necessarily even mean conflict, though that could work too. There's just quite a sameness and a safeness to how they all interact, that ignores the vast range of positions and opinions on the core topics of the game that we've seen throughout the previous iterations.

Which also manages to deny the difficulty inherent in some of the factions at play within the story. One of the companions you recruit is a member of the Antivan Crows. This was, I know, something a lot of fans were hoping for, and harks back to Zevran in Origins. But the thing is, Zevran's story is one full of conflict—his position within the Crows is a fraught one, and one that has left lasting and unpleasant marks on him that he details in conversations with the Warden. The Crows are absolutely not an uncontroversial good, in that story, or his story. Which… of course they're not! They're a band of assassins for hire. They literally kill people for a job. Of course they're going to be morally complex at best.

So why then, in Veilguard, are they uncontroversial good guy patriots protecting Treviso, and we're just… not going to examine anything else about them, or about Lucanis (the companion from that faction)'s position within them?

Just some good ol' fashioned patriots, no murders here no sir.

What's extra strange is that we do get this introspection a little bit, but directed only at the Grey Wardens, who took a big hit on the "doing dark shenanigans" front in Inquisition, so that doesn't feel like treading new ground. But it means they were thinking about it, at least to an extent; they just never felt the need to turn that lens onto the Crows. Huh.

And it's that kind of lack of thoughtfulness that makes the game really suffer. Everyone gets along, more or less (I'm not saying there's zero conflict, because that patently isn't true, but it never rises to the levels we've seen in any of the previous games), and no one really critiques the position other people come from, or their background, or engages with any of the longstanding, baked-in societal difficulties that we've seen portrayed in the world so far. For a game that very much centres the elves, their stories and their histories, Veilguard is very light on talking about the impacts the events of the game will have on elves throughout Thedas. There are a couple of specific bits of dialogue (one of which you only get in the literal final mission) that touch on it, but it's not core to the story, when it really really should be to give us that feeling of a real, complex world that has been a key part of the series up to now. This is not a game that could encompass, for instance, a Vivienne or a Sera, two characters whose positions within their factions and peoples in Inquistion are fonts of discussion, argument and interest. There's no Merrill, with a complex view of blood magic that runs contrary to the dominant game view. There's no Alistair or Cullen to give us an insight into a Templar viewpoint. There's barely any Templar involvement at all. Without characters occupying fraught or complex positions, or a voice speaking from the other side of the divide, we end up with fairly unknown and unconsidered bad guys (why are the Venatori up to what they're up to? We never really get to know), and a coherence of vibe from the companions that feels a bit weird at times. Yes, we're all saving the world, but so were we in Origins, and that never stopped Morrigan from bullying Alistair, did it?

To add to this, on the one hand, we get way more party banter than in previous games, and they've added a device where, in the central home hub, you sometimes go into rooms and just find two companions chatting, which is great. And yet… for how long of a game this is, it feels like you don't get proportionally as much romance content as the previous games have given, which is one of the core USPs that Bioware have always had. We jest that it's a dating sim with a fantasy RPG in the background, but… well. Personally, I have always enjoyed the romance content because it adds yet another layer to those deep characterisations. It's part of making these people seem whole and real. And when that gets skimped on? It adds to the same feeling that their lack of bite feeds into.

In other gripes, the early game dialogue is rough, as frankly is the early game plot. You can see the shape of a slightly different game, one with some sort of prologue that has been skipped over now, and so they have to funnel new players quickly into the fun, main bit with enough info to get them invested, while also keeping hold of old players who know all the lore. They have not managed it well. But that evens out once you get into the main substance of things.

There are also times when the whole thing feels a little too linear, a bit too trammelled into the singular shape of the story they want to tell, without the semblance of broad-reaching options that the other games have managed to convey.

But… for all that… there are some moments, some choices, that really do hit and hit good. One of them came out of absolutely nowhere for me and left me fully shooketh, and remains one of the emotional highpoints of my playing experience. The game tells you early that the choices you will make matter, and on the whole, when those choices come up, they very much do. I would, of course, always love more of them, but I'm aware this is a sticking point for many games just in terms of hours of time and dollars of money that go into every branch they make. Where Veilguard does it, I think they do it right.

They also give us some really solid lore drops that are of a great deal of interest to anyone who's played the previous games and is into that sort of thing, things that make you go "OOHHHHHHH" about things previously hinted, or overturn things you thought you knew, sometimes in really fun ways. Unfortunately, there are issues with it as well, generally, more about what's missing than what we see. This is a story that really does centre a bunch of elven stuff, and I would have liked to see more of… well, literally anything else in the world. The chantry and chantry opinion and politics barely figure, even though we touch on a number of really quite important religious issues. For the die-hard elf fans, there is bounty. For the rest of us… a bit of famine. It also, in this elven-centricity, stumbles a little bit into… and here it is hard to critique without treading too close to spoilers… I suppose into the issue of wanting to make things too simple. Too many questions boil down to the same answer, where a multiplicity was one of the things that has long made this a world worth playing in.

Also, for all the people with deeply held opinions about the character creator, long hair and clipping? They got you covered. Like, so much. Also body sliders, which I am quite pleased to see.

I do also have to come back to the point that… it's just gorgeous. They've gone back to DA2-style "strong, coherent visual design" and it works, but expanded out further and with better graphics and more time spent on the game to back it up. I mean, look at this shot from Arlathan and tell me it's not pretty:

Or not enjoy how atmospheric and utterly committed to the bit the Necropolis is:

Or appreciate the atmosphere of a blighted wasteland, full of relics of the past:

So all in all… it's rather a mixed bag.

On the whole, I enjoyed playing it. I had a great time, moment to moment, dedicated some days to an intense amount of gaming, gasped, laughed and felt sad at various appropriate moments, and just generally got into the spirit of things. But there was, when I looked back across it all, and especially when I compared it with the games that had come before, some little spark missing that made it truly magical. What I keep coming back to, more than anything, is that there is no single moment in Veilguard that comes even mildly close to doing what In Your Heart Shall Burn did in Inquisition—i.e. permanently rewrite my brain chemistry and steamroller me on an emotional level. I will never recover from that quest, and I thank Bioware for it. Veilguard… just could never. For all the fixes, for all the improvements, for all the better mechanics, better systems, better graphics, better character creator, they have failed to fully preserve the spirit of the previous games, the thing that made me love them beyond sense and measure. And it's hard not to be sad about that, even when what I've got is still, objectively, a good game.

Nonetheless… I am currently working on both my second and third playthroughs, which is not nothing.

If you're a die-hard Dragon Age fan or a complete newbie, I still think Veilguard is a game worth playing, for all the things it has done well. I hope it succeeds, and I hope the studio can continue to make games set in Thedas, taking on all the improvements they've made here, but one day maybe recapturing that little special something that just hasn't quite made it through here.

The Math

Highlights: absolutely gorgeous graphics, genuinely enjoyable mechanics, lore drops that really dig into some of the background questions fans have been pondering for years.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

A high fantasy story of two men caught in the tendrils of justice, invasion, heroism, and dark recurring magic

A collection about the infinite, wonderful possibilities contained in intermixture

There's no such thing as a pure culture. Every culture contains blends of various influences. But in Latin America, the blending is taken to a whole new level, as showcased by the spectacularly titled collection of stories The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, by Carlos Hernandez. (Full disclosure: I was a playtester in Hernandez's TTRPG Negocios Infernales.) The very concept of a "quantum santeria" alludes to this hybridity that pervades mestizo identity, a fusion of contrary particles that would be expected to annihilate each other but instead create something richer and marvelous.

The Aphotic Ghost, about a grieving father traveling to Mount Everest to retrieve his son's body, plays overtly with this kind of opposition of extremes. The son, Lazaro, learned from his mother a love for the creatures of the deep sea, but after winning awards for his oceanographic documentaries, he felt the urge to climb the highest mountain, to get as far as humanly possible from the place where he spent most of his youth. The twist is that Lazaro's mother, a biologist who studies the immortal life cycle of jellyfish, is something more than human, so it may be possible to rescue him from the frozen mountain.

The prose style in this story is deceptively simple for the multitude of thematic layers it contains. Lazaro is a clear stand-in for mestizo children of mixed families. The repeated mentions of jellyfish and their powers of regeneration occur first as backstory, then as allegory, and lastly as a central plot point. Although the sections of the story are alternatingly titled "Mountain,""Sea-Level," or "Aphotic Zone," which signals to the reader what degree of reality is involved, the story is a unified, harmonic whole where even the mundane can't happen without the otherworldly working in the background.

It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like
hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling
into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into
rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus,
and strange, ciliated veins circuited throughout its interior.

Homeostasis, about a woman adapting to her husband's subtly changed personality after he receives a brain implant to heal a head injury, does away with the overly abstract concerns that usually accompany this type of digital brain story. Is my husband still the same person? Does he keep the same soul? Is his identity an immutable monolith or an aggregate of attributes? Stop worrying about all that. Instead, hold his hand and feel his warmth. If that's intact, he's still there.

The robber's knife went all the way through his head;
its point poked out from his palate like a shark
tooth. It’s a miracle he didn’t die instantly. It’s a
miracle he didn’t die during the operation to remove
it. It’s a miracle his eyes are open and saccading.

Entanglements, about a Many Worlds researcher in an affair with a married woman, is a cute little comedy where the road not taken should have stayed that way.

I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly
alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousand  of others in
this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself.

The International Studbook of the Giant Panda, about a panda breeding program that uses human-piloted robot pandas to teach the real ones how to mate, explores big questions about the embodied component of identity. If your nervous system is hooked to an artificial body in such a way that you can feel it walk like a panda, breathe like a panda, quack like a panda, how close does that get you to being able to say that you've become a panda?

She brandishes the helmet I’ll be wearing. It looks like a
bear skull made from machined aluminum, with rubbery
black patches holding it together. The eyes are covered
with what reminds me of the metal weave of a microphone.
In all, it looks like the lovechild of a panda and a fly.

The Macrobe Conservation Project, about a future humankind struggling to save an alien ecosystem they'd unwittingly endangered, returns to the same questions about identity, this time in the form of symbionts that invade your nervous system and eventually take over you. Although this premise is very strong, it's executed rather inelegantly. The first-person narrator is a researcher's young son who discovers a cruel secret about his family, but the secret in question is immediately obvious to the reader, and its coverup depends on more spinning plates than one person could believably handle. And the story ends precisely at the point where the really interesting events could begin to happen.

She was like a pillow, a walking talking pillow. But she gave
good hugs and smelled right. They did a good job with her:
sometimes when she hugged me and I closed my eyes it felt like
it’s supposed to feel and I forgot that she’s not my real mom.

Los Simpáticos, about a crime-themed reality TV show derailed by a real-life murder, isn't a speculative story. It's a moderately convoluted whodunit that pits together contrasting notions of getting even.

We weren’t ready for her, but in the reality-TV biz you learn to adjust fast. While
the rest of us hid, Xavier slipped into character: a laconic, efficient sociopath.

More than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give, about a man's quest to recover the soul of his mother, who was executed during the Cuban Revolution, establishes symbolic links between love and pain. For example, the object with the strongest emotional resonance for an old married couple is the wife's false tooth; a widower keeps a knife stuck to his chest to preserve his wife's soul; and the victims of a firing squad still linger in the bullet holes left on the wall.

When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of
his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.

Bone of My Bone, about a man slowly growing a horn on his head, is a brief but effective allegory for the bits of themselves that people leave in us after they leave.

When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he
found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow.

The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory, about an interdimensional migration of unicorns into our universe, reads like a fable with a nuanced position on when truth is necessary and when it can wait.

I don’t want this magnificent creature to die without knowing
some comfort and love in his passing. It’s a girlish, sentimental
thought, I know. That doesn’t make it any less authentic.

American Moat, about alien explorers meeting vigilante enforcers at the US southern border, casts a satirical look at the patriotic impulse and questions what exactly it is that conservatives want to conserve.

Neither Ham nor Alex should have been able to hear her so clearly from
that distance. It was like her voice had emerged from within their own heads.

Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66, about a dead pianist's mind preserved in a brain implant, comes up with a creative way to negotiate the not-really-so-inevitable clash between spiritual beliefs and computer science.

I am not making this music happen, but every time the
glove strikes a key, the music shoots up my fingers and
passes into my body, just as if I were playing this piece
myself. It’s so pleasurable and enchanting to feel the music
course through me that I forget for a moment to hear it.

And finally, the titular story, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, about a child with an overactive curiosity who resorts to untested rituals to help his widowed father find love again, returns to the theme of pain linked to love, this time through sacrifice. In the world of this story, to steer your life into the desired timeline necessitates that you sacrifice all other potential timelines, even those where you would have lived with less sorrow.

This story is framed as an extended flashback; in adulthood, the narrator is simultaneously a quantum physicist and a priest of the Orishas, and has a knack for unusual innovation in both fields. This character is another example of successful mestizo life: the creative acquisition of dual competence in separate traditions that needn't be opposed.

As I got closer, I thought I saw the house … waver. Like a mirage. And
then, like any good mirage, it became solid again, reasserted its reality.

The thread that binds these stories together is, naturally, hybrid identity. All through the book, a case is made for rejecting strict dichotomies. You can both be fully human and also a jellyfish; or be fully human and also a digital pattern; or be fully human and also a robot panda; or be fully human and also an alien symbiote; or be fully human and also a channel for ghosts; or be fully human and also a truck. At the same time that you're assimilated by a dominant culture, you can choose to assimilate it in turn into you. You can be all. You can contain multitudes.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Hernandez, Carlos. The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria [Rosarium Publishing, 2016].

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

The world is burning. Now pass the canapés

Each time the world's top leaders get together at one of those secretive meetings to discuss the road ahead for humankind, it's inevitable to sense a certain air of Dan Brown-esque conspiracy. A handful of the über-privileged talking in private about the future prospects of eight billion? What could they possibly understand about the struggles of the commonfolk? Whatever it is they're deciding at that exclusive hotel or remote island or private yacht or inaccessible ski resort must be something absurdly removed from the real lives of real people. They may as well inhabit a realm of existence apart from the rest of us.

So what if they really did?

In the acerbic satire film Rumours, what begins as your usual tediously uneventful G7 summit turns into a survival horror adventure where the most powerful decision-makers of the free world are revealed to be pathetically useless when faced with an actual crisis. Our leaders sit for a business lunch in a luxurious castle estate somewhere in the German forest, and after banal pleasantries are exchanged between heads of state, the next item on the agenda is even more banal pleasantries addressed to the media. In a manner that brings to mind sociologist Bruno Latour's 1979 ethnographic study of the practice of science at a molecular biology lab, which concluded with the hilarious pronouncement that the purpose of science was to publish articles, Rumours presents us with a G7 whose sole task, after rounds of vigorous discussion, is to compose a joint press release.

Even when the world outside seems to have vanished, and the forest is suddenly haunted by shambling figures, and a fog descends over the night. Where did everyone go? Did nuclear war break out and destroy civilization? Maybe. They were honestly not paying attention. But damn it, they will write that press release.

The script of Rumours is impressive in its ability to make hollow platitudes sound gravely significant. Diplomatic lingo ends up being the only tool available to these clueless leaders while reality crumbles down around them. The movie doesn't even bother pretending to be subtle; the president of France openly tells us to interpret these events as an allegory of their respective countries' behavior. So we have a Canada that doesn't know who they are without Britain; a Britain that feel embarrassed to be seen next to Canada; an Italy that parrots every nonsensical word that comes out of the United States and whose role is reduced to offering its food to the world; a United States that keeps an eye on everything from afar and likes to talk a big talk about decisive action but falls asleep when it's needed; a France that drops flat on its face when it tries to venture alone and thereafter has to be dragged everywhere by the rest; a Germany that reminisces wistfully about its violent past; a Japan that suspects it's starting to grow old and is just along for the ride. Plus a special cameo from a Scandinavia that is so fascinated by big brains (yes, literally) that it self-destructs in devotion.

While watching Rumours, I was reminded of Don't Look Up: the whole gimmick of this plot is basic and obvious, but the movie comes up with ways to keep milking it for merciless commentary for two hours. The leaders' incongruous fixation on finding the right empty words to describe their present situation in the vaguest, most noncommittal terms is only surpassed in topicality by their extended handwringing over whether they really should risk their public image to run to rescue a child that is crying for help.

Rumours is a cathartic spit in the face of performative caring, a vicarious comeuppance for those in charge of preventing the mess they've thrown us into. Like the statement released by its protagonists, it's just talk, not something meant to change things. But oh boy does it feel good to watch the powerful be the ones trembling in utter horror for once.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

This industrial fantasy tackles how to overthrow corporations while protecting friends and family, all while dripping in vivid prose.

Marney is born into revolution because she’s lustertouched. Her family works for Yann Chauncey in his ichorite mines and production centers. Because she has spent her childhood around the stuff, she can control it, though it sends her into a “fit.” Due to the lustertouched children and the working conditions, her family strikes at the production center, but the strike is broken—more than broken. Marney is the only survivor and runs away.

On the run, she meets Mors Brandegor the Rancid and her group of bandits that rob from the rich. Marney is immediately taken with the group and pledges to help them. Her ability to control ichorite has helped her out of a few scrapes, and she wins the bandits over when she is able to seal a door and help them escape—all because ichorite is being incorporated into more and more products as Chauncey’s industrial empire grows.

The bandits accept Marney into their group and take her to the Fingerbluffs, where she lives out the rest of her childhood before truly becoming a bandit and working toward her ultimate goal of killing Chauncey. The Fingerbluffs is the home of all the bandits that steal from the rich to redistribute their wealth. Everyone who lives there is rich and it means nothing. All eat, all are clothed, all are fed. The place is utopic even though hidden away in a world beholden to ichorite and war. Marney is awed by her first sighting: “Into the Fingerbluffs we rode, the gorgeous, heaving Fingerbluffs, whose dingy narrow mews peeled out from the brick streets and held children who played there in the darkness, chasing each other and shouting, twisting, braids floating behind them in deference to their speed, not working, not governed, unafraid.” This childhood is so different than Marney’s upbringing, but she discovers the Fingerbluffs can exist because the servants overthrew the baron, but did not let the rest of the world know. Instead, they plead his insanity and were able to keep the larger public away from the isolated area. From there, the bandits assist other revolutionaries like the hereafterists, who work toward a utopia that they know they will never see. 

Marney grows and develops her skills as a bandit until the Fingerbluffs is at risk of discovery, and she must strike at Chauncey in order to save her new family. Aiding the Fingerbluffs also puts her one step closer to her ultimate goal of taking revenge against Chauncey and destroying his ichorite-fueled empire.

At its heart, this novel is a revenge story, but clarke is able to pack a surprising amount of worldbuilding into this very character-focused novel. The first person point of view of Marney is dense—a few steps removed from stream of consciousness. This closeness of the character makes the politics easier to weave into the fantasy. Marney is not radicalized by ideas but by her trauma and the physical impacts of being lustertouched. This impact changes how she sees the world, and when she uses her ability to control ichorite, the world turns shimmery, almost like an oil-slick (and reminiscent of the gorgeous purple-toned cover art by Richard Anderson). Like the best fantasy, clarke doesn’t give the reader an easy one-to-one for ichorite. It’s perhaps closest to oil but the mining process and physical impacts on the people bring to mind the coal mining (and strikes) of the 1900s. Because ichorite isn’t a one-to-one allegory, the novel has more depth. Like C. S. Lewis argues of the best fantasy, it isn’t a metaphor for our usage of fossil fuels but certainly comments on real world industrialization through Marney’s struggle. 

While the revenge plot pulls the reader through the pages, the most captivating part of the book for me was the worldbuilding, particularly around the Fingerbluffs. The first time Marney rides into the Fingerbluffs on a lurcher (close to a motorcycle), it felt like the first time reading about Le Guin’s anarchist utopia Anarres. The sense of home that Marney finds there as a child and teenager comes through strongly due to the close point of view and draws in the reader. But the Fingerbluffs is only one portion of the worldbuilding. clarke gives the reader a rich world outside of that, with different cultures, religions, approaches to sex and gender, and so on. The world clarke creates is big enough for a trilogy, let alone this standalone book and left me wanting more in the best way possible. 

What sets this novel apart from other bandit or heist books is the careful approach to gender. Unsurprisingly, the people of the Fingerbluffs are pretty queer-normative, but much of the world isn’t. There are still slurs, religious abstinence, forced heteronormativity, but also cultures where multiple genders exist and are determined by sex acts. Sex and gender aren’t simplified into utopic relationships among the bandits and and hate crimes among everyone else, but there’s a real nuance here to the depiction via the worldbuilding. This nuance is evidenced by clarke’s reading list included in the acknowledgements. I love when authors talk about their inspirations, and it was fun to see the wide ranging list that inspired clarke, including writers like José Esteban Muñoz, Leslie Feinberg, and Silvia Federici. 

Metal from Heaven won’t be for everyone due to the density of the prose, but for readers looking for the found family of Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora or Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows or the politics of Le Guin’s best work, there’s so much to enjoy here. clarke manages to combine the fun and violence of a bandit seeking revenge with working class politics in this sexy, action-packed book. I know I’ll be thinking about the Fingerbluffs for a long time to come.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

Reference: clarke, august, Metal from Heaven [Erewhon Books, 2024].

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.