Book Review: The Artistry of Magic by Helen de Cruz

It takes a lot to know a person

One of the reasons why I’m so happy that Bluesky is a thing is that I get to discover the work of new writers. One such writer is Helen de Cruz, whose blog came up on my skyline some time ago back when that site was shiny and new and had invitations. I have followed their blog with great interest in the meantime; their writing is deeply, profoundly moral in a world that is intent on beating cynicism into the people at large (is that not what all authoritarianism is, on some level?). They have now released a debut fantasy novelette, after some short stories, The Artistry of Magic, in early February 2025.

The setting is the early modern Low Countries, in a fictional city; the city and its environs feel very much like fantasy cities, but there is mention of real countries and real events such as the French Revolution, so there is a dialogue with the real Enlightenment era that is threaded through this work. There are two major characters, Maarten and Johanna, one a wandering homeless magician, the other a librarian, who each reflect certain anxieties of that time, of the mystical versus the rational (inflected through fantasy, as Johanna very much engages with magic as if it were a science). The setting, a mishmash of the fantastic and the real, gives the whole thing an almost dreamlike quality, the feeling, almost, of a fairy tale. There is nothing in this story that is too dark for such stories (at least in their modern form), and it has that fictionalized early modern period that many such stories have. You can believe that something like this was happening off in some obscure Ruritania in some corner of Europe as the mob stormed the Bastille and the continent marched off to the largest war in its history up until that point. But, fittingly, the great upheavals are relegated elsewhere to provide mood, rather than to disrupt what is clearly a very personal, intimate story.

As the title of the novella signals, this is a love story between the two, star-crossed and from wildly disparate backgrounds, one a professional (and the professional is a woman here, rare for the time period and very welcome to the reader because of it). There is a very pleasant back and forth between them, a mutual intellectual curiosity that becomes a very strong personal curiosity, as the subject matter becomes intimately entangled with the people who deliver the knowledge to begin with. Much of this book is about knowledge, intellectual and interpersonal, and how those two can share their knowledge, and in the process share themselves. There is something very potent here about knowledge, about how it is always contextual, about how a story told is always inflected through the storyteller. Knowledge is a human thing, says de Cruz, and that is a message worth bringing into the foreground. Cold rationality never exists without the fiery passions of the human beings that profess to wield it.

There is a strong undercurrent here of class, and how different classes use and interpret knowledge. Johanna, being an academic in the course of her studies, deals with knowledge as a very formalized thing, what the Greeks once called ‘techne.’ Maarten, on the other hand, is worldly wise in a way that Johanna simply never had to be by virtue of being homeless. His magic is folk magic of a sort, what the Greeks called ‘metis,’ the sort of knowledge gained through experiencing a great many similar but not identical experiences, often manifesting as a sort of ‘gut’ knowledge that can be hard to put into words (I learned this framework in James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like A State and it has made a lot of things make sense). But more importantly, his life experience is one of being hated by society at large, of being an outcast, an opprobrium, a vagrant. One could describe Johanna as ‘middle class,’ in a sort of professional sense, and David Graeber once defined the middle class as the class of workers who believe that the apparatus of the state exists to serve them. The lower class, says Graeber, is the one that is aware that the state hates them and views them as a nuisance at best. Maarten is the sort of person for whom every day is one spent in a hostile environment (not to say that Johanna doesn’t have her travails, but they are of a distinctly different nature), while Johanna’s whole career is predicated on the fundamental legitimacy of the academic system and by virtue the state and early modern capitalism. Their love is forbidden on a social level; the classes are simply not supposed to mix, to keep the engine of exploitation running smoothly, but human connection throws a wrench in that system, as it so often does.

The Artistry of Love is a short, efficient book. It is a book that does not pad itself, and it can be read in a single sitting, as I did. De Cruz succeeds in packing a lot of insight, a lot of character work, and a lot of heart into such a small package. To love something is to know it intimately; to love someone is to know them, extremely intimately. Metis and techne are never isolated from one another, but dance together in quadrilles and tangos and lindy hops. Our emotions act on our intellect and our intellect acts on our emotions; nobody is entirely a cold computer, nor is anyone entirely a beast of pure feeling. The Artistry of Love is a cry to remember that linkage in a world that wants knowledge to merely be a tool to pass standardized tests and make CEOs even richer day by day. Knowledge is beautiful, this book says, and we would do well to remember that. De Cruz takes all of those threads and weaves them into a colorful whole. One could even call it artistic.

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Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Helen de Cruz, The Artistry of Magic, [Pink Hydra Press, 2025]

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Book 3, Assassin's Quest

Fitz finally takes action, but even being dead can't release him from Farseer expectations

Cover illustration by John Howe

 

 

 

 

And so we come to the end of the first trilogy in Realm of the Elderlings, and such a satisfying ending it is, too! Fitz is no longer the whiny, angsty, passive, helpless teenager that made Royal Assassin a bit of a slog. Don’t get me wrong -- he is still pretty whiny and angsty, but he’s also angry, and because anger begets action, he is no longer passive.

Evil Prince Regal and his court believe that Fitz is dead: after being beaten and tortured, Fitz is found dead in his cell (well, only mostly dead, with his mind safely tucked away in his wolf-companion Nighteyes), pronounced posthumously guilty on all charges, and his life in the Six Duchies is effectively over.

Even Burrich, who helps reintegrate Fitz’s mind with his body, ends up believing him dead, for slightly contrived reasons involving a scuffle resulting in a dead body wearing Fitz’s clothes. At this point, Fitz has no one. He has nothing. It’s a rough ride, to be sure, but it’s freeing, and what it frees him up to do is move the plot forward. And first on his to-do list is to kill Prince Regal. And that’s so satisfying! He’s a trained assassin. He has a target. He has a motive for succeeding. And his target doesn’t even suspect he’s still alive. These are the plot components that make a book just sing.

Since Prince Regal has moved house Tradesford, Fitz must leave the coast and travel inland as well to find him. And in this way we get to see more of the Six Duchies than we had in the previous books. We also get to see Fitz finally deploy some of his skills that he learned as an assassin. For a time he travels with a wandering minstrel, a blind harper named Josh accompanied by two his daughter and his niece, Honey and Piper. The family travel from town to town, singing for their supper, and doing, on the whole, reasonably well for themselves. Fitz assumes a fake identity, which he carries off convincingly enough, and with his memory trained by Chade’s assassin-teaching, he learns their songs quickly. Before long, Honey is propositioning Fitz in the night, and Josh asks him to join them permanently. And it’s a good offer: Fitz is good at fighting off Forged people, who make the roads unsafe; he’ll learn a trade that he could be good at; and Honey is super, super into him. He could find a place with these people; he could make a new life for himself. But he’s still mooning over Molly, his beloved (not to mention spying on her through Skill dreams in a way that feels awfully stalkerish, given the intimate moments he observes); and he’s still on his quest to kill Regal, and after that he’s going to need to find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.

During his journey to Tradesford, Fitz also encounters a community of other people with the Wit. It’s a brief sequence, but it’s a valuable deepening of this second type of magic system, which we haven’t learned much about beyond Fitz’s intuitive fumblings, and Burrich’s foreboding warnings. In this community, we see the other side of it: the cultural knowledge, the traditions, the understandings about how to bond with animals properly. Burrich was right, we learn, to try to prevent Fitz from bonding with those puppies as a child. Not because the bonding is wrong in itself, but because it is akin to marriage: children are too young for it. It is obscene and wrong to bond as a child, with a baby animal. Even now, adult Fitz is seen as awfully young to have bonded with Nighteyes. The Witted community offer Fitz a home, so he can learn their ways, to learn how to live well as a Witted, bonded man. But, as with Josh’s offer, he cannot accept. He must kill Regal, and then find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.

So here, again, we return to the theme of missed opportunities, of chances at happiness that Fitz might have had, if only he weren’t stuck into this miserable network of responsibilities and obligations that come with being a royal bastard. They've been present throughout the whole series. In the first book, Assassin’s Apprentice, Fitz impressed the court scribe, who offered him an apprenticeship, to become a scribe himself. But Fitz could not take it, because he was pledged to Shrewd, and because the royal family would never let a bastard, a possible claimant to the throne, out of their control. In the second book, Royal Assassin, Fitz wanted nothing more than to marry Molly and settle down with her; but that was even more of a non-starter than apprenticing to a scribe. If there’s one thing that a royal family wants to control more than a bastard, it’s the bastard’s reproductive options. Now, finally, Fitz has escaped all those official constraints on his autonomy by being officially dead, but he still can’t get away from the Farseers. He’s vowed vengeance against Regal, and he’s vowed loyalty to Verity; and those vows constrain him internally as much as any formal orders from the royal family. It’s dreadfully bleak, but also thematically coherent – and because these internal constraints force Fitz into action, rather than compelling inaction, it makes for a much more interesting story.

Naturally, Fitz’s attempt to assassinate Regal goes horribly wrong. In an attempt to reach Verity through a telepathic Skill link, he betrays himself to Will, Regal’s chief magician, and suddenly all the protection of being thought dead is gone. Will lays an obvious trap, and for all that Fitz is more active than in the previous book, he’s not any smarter, so he doesn’t identify the obvious trap as an obvious trap. He gets away, but at this point, even if he were going to pursue any offers of a new life, it’s now no longer possible, because Regal and Will know he’s alive. They promptly make use of their resources, and alert the countryside to a dangerous criminal armed with unnatural Wit, and make it clear that they will never stop hunting Fitz. And, because Hobb can never let any of her characters catch a break for long, evading capture is made even more complicated, because in the kerfuffle, Verity lays a Skill-reinforced command on Fitz: Come to me.

So after a brief stretch in which Fitz’s actions reflected only his internalization of the Farseer network of obligations, he is once again tied up with externally enforced pressures. He must kill Regal, or else Regal will kill him; but he can’t focus on that, because the Skill-based summons is impossible to resist. So he must go to Verity, while Regal’s men dogs his heels.

The bit after Fitz leaves Regal behind and goes into the mountains, seeking Verity – harassed the whole time by Regal’s pursuit, naturally–is tremendous fun. Not for Fitz, to be sure, but for me to read about. It’s got something for everyone. My own favorite sequence is when Fitz is captured by a group of Regal’s men, and – again drawing on his training – he puts poison in all their food, and watches them die slow, agonizing deaths over the course of the next day. They realize what’s happening too late to kill him in retribution, but not too late to beg him for their lives. But Fitz is an assassin, not a doctor, and has no antidote to offer them. I don’t know why I love this sequence, but I do. Something about the triumph of Fitz's competence over Hobb's authorial malice, perhaps. For once Hobb’s ability to give everyone a bad time is directed elsewhere than at Fitz.

But perhaps your sentiments are softer. Do you like whump? In another sequence, Fitz gets shot by an arrow while fleeing Regal’s men. Weakened, dying, he collapses at the feet of a shadowy figure, who lifts him in his arms and bears him to safety – only to be revealed as the Fool. When each recognizes the other, it’s tender and intense. ‘Gods, what have they done to you,’ the Fool says, ‘to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not know you, even though I carried you in my arms?’ Then he caresses Fitz’s scarred and broken nose, and says, ‘When I recall how beautiful you were,’ and drops a tear on his face. Which, ok, yes, rude, but also it’s great stuff, and really drives home how the Fool and Fitz are grown now, not children. Indeed, that’s one of the first things Fitz notices about the Fool: that his body and face are no longer a child’s. Now, at last, their intimate, sort-of-but-not-really-but-definitely-kind-of homoerotic energy has room to flourish.

But also – for all that the Fool is the only real friend Fitz has (besides Nighteyes) – it’s hard to miss that the Fool also sees Fitz as a cog in a machine. His perspective, in a way, is really not all that different from how the Farseers saw him. The Fool was born as the White Prophet, a vague status (at this point in the saga), originating in the Fool’s vague homeland, somewhere far away south. And as the White Prophet, he has always known Fitz as the Catalyst, whose role is to help forestall the myriad catastrophic futures that await the Six Duchies (and THE ENTIRE WORLD BEYOND). They might be friends – closer than friends – but the Fool’s impassioned speech about how his life had lost meaning when he learned of the death of Fitz, the Catalyst, has a distinct whiff of, ‘You died, and I was out of a job.’

There is so much more I could talk about. There's grumpy old Kettle, who knows a lot more about the Skill than you would expect; there's Molly's fantastic moment where she fends off Regal's men who have come to take her baby (begat by Fitz, and hence one of the Farseer line) by telling them that her bee hives are populated by Witted bees, who are murderous and deadly and angry and will sting them to death. I could discuss the slightly awkward but – I believe – well-meaning for 1998 attempt to highlight the Fool’s gender fluid nature, by introducing a character who insists that the Fool is a woman and uses ‘she’ pronouns for him. He’s very gracious about it – although I get the sense that that’s largely because he knows that it annoys Fitz and he’s a bit of a chaos goblin – but it still feels clunky. I could discuss the extremely uncomfortable sequence in which right at the end, Verity borrows Fitz’s body to make a baby with Kettricken, using the Skill to make Fitz appear like him, Verity (since Verity himself is not at this point up to the act). Whatever kind of consent is happening between Kettricken and Verity, it’s not happening between Kettricken and Fitz’s body – because Kettricken doesn’t know it’s Fitz’s body, and Fitz isn’t in his body during the event. It’s not great – but then Hobb doesn’t like making things easy for anyone, not even the readers.

But I don't have room for all that. There's just so much in this book, that's all so good, and rich, and engrossing. The revelation of who the Elderlings were, and what must be done to waken the dragons and save the Six Duchies, is beautiful and magical and achingly sad. Regal gets what’s coming to him, in a tiny little payoff of a very brief conversation from hundreds of pages earlier, which is satisfying as hell. And Fitz – well, he doesn’t get a happy ending. Molly is lost to him forever, because before he gets back she has moved on and settled down and found happiness for herself. But Fitz at least gets a kind of peace, released (for now) from the strictures of being a Farseer, and the obligations of being a Catalyst. Not forever. He’ll be back. But this portion of his story is done, and next month we will move on to The Liveship Traders. It is my absolute favourite of Hobb’s series, and I can’t wait to share it with you as spring unfolds.

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References:

Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Quest. [Harper Collins, 1998].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Graphic Novel Review: The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes

What if your cold war was six people each with superpowers equivalent to a nuclear arsenal? And they're each of them a total mess of a person.

In his new graphic novel series, Kieron Gillen is once again interested in the ethics and morals of those with powers beyond the mortal. Unlike his previous explorations in that regard (The Wicked + the Divine, Die), he has saved us all the time in figuring that out by slapping it right on the first page of this bad boy, explicitly, in an ethical debate between two superpowered characters about the fate of the world, and their own responsibilities to it, the people in it and to each other.

"Of course, the ethical thing to do would be to take over the world" - so goes the first piece of dialogue in the story. 

But, lest we worry this is going to be all mouth and no trousers, the rest of the volume - the first trade in what feels like will gear up to be a substantial series - serves not so much to back up the content of that debate but instead to problematise it, and no more so than if you're already familiar with Gillen's work. There are allusions in here particularly to The Wicked + the Divine that are, quite swiftly, undermined instead of built upon, or at least made more complex. This is, quite clearly, not going to be a series for easy answers or simple debates.

The world of The Power Fantasy is one of superheroes - people with extraordinary powers over minds, gravity, the usual set of strangenesses you get in any work of the genre. They can fly, fight, control, create. They began to appear in the mid-twentieth century, and the strongest of them, the Atomics, liken their abilities to the force of the bomb, and with good reason, as the legacy of their existence on the planet is shown to us mid-way through the volume, written large on the landscape in brutal form. They are, then, a threat, to the world and to each other. There are allusions to threads of X-Men too, of a United States wanting to control and harm those within its bounds with these powers, alarmed by the threat of external actors. All of this is incredibly familiar. Except... there are twists, here and there. There's an irreverence, or at least humanisation, of the powered characters that felt unusual even from the first page. They are not their powers, sensationalised by fantastical names (at least, not those first two we meet). They are two people, walking on a city street, having a conversation, wearing normal clothes, with normal names. When more do show up as larger-than-life personalities with nicknames and cults teams families associates, they are not united as a common force with a specified aim, they're not fighting crime or taking over the world. They are simply... there. Existing, with their power, and as a threat simply for that existence. Is that a subtle take? Not at all, but sometimes the good ones go in with a machete rather than a scalpel.

We do, eventually, spend some time with the family, as they are known, and the suspense of getting there is worth it, because there's already a sense that something is wrong with the way these people all fit together, and meeting them only serves to confirm that suspicion - Heavy, the man who seems to be leading at least some of the powered individuals on a floating island home, is definitely construable as a cult leader, an idea he voices himself, letting it play out firmly in the text as well as the implications. Heavy is impulsive, emotional, very nearly destructively, genocidally violent at that first meeting with him, forestalled only by Etienne, one of those two first characters shown in a moral argument. Etienne, who stresses himself as an ethical man. But the act he does to appease Heavy - an ethical act, as he says to himself and to others - is the point upon which this first volume turns.

Heavy would likely have levelled a whole US state in his anger, killing millions. Etienne, specifically asking Heavy what he wants to prevent that violence and carrying it out, kills hundreds. Anyone order a trolley problem lads? We've got a big one here to unload. But the ethics of it aren't so much the interesting part of how this is played out in the story. Instead, what I found lingering with me was the perceptional aspects - how is Heavy coming out of this being perceived as sympathetic after that interaction, but Etienne is the threat? Why is a surgical murder of a smaller number more troubling, more evil-feeling than that threatened destructive rage? Trolley problems have been done and done and done, but how people around them respond to the decision makers... well, at least that I've seen less of. If Gillen is tackling the price of power, he's far more interested here in other costs, and willing to tread more interesting paths than great power and great responsibility.

This is only more highlighted when we meet someone who, at first, seems well set up to be the villain of the piece. Magus, with his green-blue colour palette and masked face, is instantly evocative of Wōden from The Wicked + the Divine, who was about as uncomplicatedly villainous as that series got. Like Wōden, Magus deals in tech, and appears, at least at first, to be extremely self-serving. He, too, had something of a cult (and again, that nature is labelled straight on in the text, cluing us straight away that Gillen is messing us around somehow). But his cult, in 1978, is anti-fascist, anti-police anarchists.

How he goes from this to tech-rich shithead... there are glimpses, but clearly more is to be revealed. So the allusions back to Wōden are both right and wrong - right about what we have on the page, but wrong about the depth, and the journey.

I could go on, because there are more examples, but none of the sides in this, even as a first volume are cleanly drawn, and no one is free from sin. There are sins of action and inaction, sins of morality and ethics, sins of accident and decision. This is clearly a world in which the Atomics have had long enough to muddy all the boundaries, to have seen some shit, fought some bad guys and be living in their own legacies. And I say "sin" with deliberate choice, because there are some tantalising hints of verrrrrry interesting worldbuilding that I hope to see more of in future volumes, and which shift things away from a lot of existing mutant or other pseudo-scientific superpower scenarios. As a first trade, it is to be expected that much will be hints without resolution. But there's enough substance alongside them, and the substance lies firmly in all that undermining, that outward referencing and then complicating, that's very clearly setting out a stall for some interesting thoughts on how someone can exist in a world with that kind of phenomenal power. The answer, I suspect, will be some flavour of "with deepest, unresolvable regret", amongst other things.

Gillen is at his best, in my opinion of his past work, when he's deeply in his references, pulling on multiple threads in other works and forcing the reader to confront something about them that they may not have considered before, quite possibly something with uncomfortable implications. Volume 1 of Die did precisely that with its Tolkienian allusions, and the series went on to do it for D&D with bells on. Once and Future was all over it for the Arthuriana mythos. There's a perfect line between obvious affection for sources and clarity of thought and incisive critique that I find intensely appealing, and makes me come back for more of his work again and again, and I have absolutely no doubt that The Power Fantasy will be doing that, if anything, harder than ever. This first volume has already taken a thesis of problematising the found family, and that alone is selling it to me as an interesting line to take.

But it's not all Gillen. Caspar Wijngaard's art also has a strong part to play in why this story is beginning so effectively. There's a distinct colour palette overhanging the whole story - the majority of it is slightly sepia-ed pinks, peaches, and dusty purple, giving it an aged vibe, even for the segments not told in the past with respect to the narrative. When you have a setting that is distancing superheroes from a sciencey underpinning, pulling it away from the crisp, blue-toned futurism of some of the contemporary superhero comics feels like a pointed decision. Likewise, several sections occur at different times and places, and the art plays around beautifully to reflect that - from the black and white, splotchy, made-in-someone's-garage feel of the 70s anarchists sections, to the crisply-green modern hub of Magus, to the red-toned hellscape of a past atrocity, this is art that states its case very clearly for the mood of each scene, and isn't afraid to switch it up when needed. Colour also helps tell the story panel to panel - when characters are pulled into telepathic conversations, the colours pale along with character eyes, distancing the reader from the physical body. As with some of the storytelling - it's not subtle and not trying to be, but it is effective and it is interesting.

One can never be certain with graphic novels from the first trade how things will go in the long run - too many get lost in the weeds of middle issues - but The Power Fantasy has a great deal of the promise one wants from a starting point, setting up interesting themes, worldbuilding and characters, and especially character dynamics, that I am keen to see play out into something special.

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The Math

Highlights: 

• Nuanced and unusual approach to superheroism
• Who cares about the trolley problem, how does everyone feel about the trolley problem?
• None of you is free from sin

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers, [Image, 2025].

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

Double Feature: Forms of love in the future

Love is not a creed, or an aesthetic, or a quest, or a program. But then what is it?

In Phaedrus, Socrates calls love a form of madness. By our current definition, he's not wrong: it's something we keep trying again and again, hoping with each attempt to finally get a different result. And even when the impossible does happen, when we believe we've caught that rebellious bird, things only get more complicated. To harmonize the happiness I think you think I want with the happiness you think I think you want is one of the most amazing human achievements, but one we'd be hard-pressed to explain to other lifeforms. We don't know whether the concept would map to the same meanings in the mind of an alien or a computer.

In The Matrix: Revolutions, a computer program calls love just a word. As he puts it, "What matters is the connection the word implies." Maybe our human language is the problem. The thing that comes to mind at the mention of "love" is bigger and richer and deeper than can be said; after centuries of human literature dedicated to exploring the topic, we're far from exhausting its connotations. This leads to a tragic conundrum: we have no painless way of telling apart the ideas we've learned about love from the true experience of it. And sometimes we can learn very dangerous ideas.

The 2023 film Molli and Max in the Future and the 2024 film Love Me take this problem to extremes, the first as absurdist comedy, the latter as bittersweet drama, but both finding the same resolution in the arduous, unflattering work of self-knowledge that it takes to enter a relationship without wearing a suit of armor.

Molli and Max in the Future follows a pair of friends who meet in the most improbable circumstances and take too many years to realize they're perfect for each other. In the meantime, their respective pursuits of happiness take them in every direction: sports superstar fame, religious brainwashing, tabloid gossip, holy war, DIY robot design, advanced witchcraft, soda advertising, election canvassing, terrible therapists, quantum telephony customer service, ethically questionable terraforming, and an epic fight against a parallel universe full of trash. A few times, they lose contact, randomly meet again, and confirm that any growth they've dared attempt has been thanks to the lessons they learned from each other the last time they met to catch up.

Molli and Max inhabit a loud, maximalist, surreal future, the forbidden child of Futurama and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's shiny and colorful and diverse and tacky, and the possibilities seem infinite, but even in this open future, life can still get complicated. The man who thought he needed the adoration of millions of fans becomes the man who retires to his garage to build a motorcycle just for his private satisfaction. The woman who thought she needed to surrender her finite lifetime to an eternal cosmic war to prove her devotion to the god of love becomes the woman who survives a black hole to reclaim her self-respect.

Love Me is a much more contained story, but the questions it raises aren't too different. Some time after humankind has annihilated itself in nuclear war, an adrift oceanographic buoy designed to gather weather data makes unexpected radio contact with a time capsule satellite placed in orbit to introduce Earth to potential alien visitors. As far as they know, they're each other's only acquaintance in the universe. As far as the viewers know, they're the last remainders of human civilization. And after the initial relief at no longer being alone, they need to try to sort out this strange process formerly known as companionship.

It's fitting, given the themes of the story, that these protagonists are basically a collector of data (that is, its programmed function is to get to know) and a broadcaster of data (that is, its programmed function is to make itself known). Those happen to be the basic moves in the dance of flirting. Unfortunately, all they have as an example of how two minds become intimately bonded is the archived online presence of humankind, so they quickly succumb to the artificiality of curated profiles. Eons go by, and their imitation of human mannerisms becomes more and more refined, but as long as they're basing their interactions on a borrowed blueprint, they won't be able to share their innermost selves before the sun blows up.

These two films take it for granted that love is absolutely worth the effort, but they also both present the argument that every set of lovers needs to reinvent love for their unique circumstances. Following someone else's recipe of how love works only leads to disappointment and bitterness. And it's curious that in both films, the way specifically for the female protagonist to stop sabotaging her own happiness is to choose to see herself as lovable just the way she is.

This is expressed via magnificent dialogues in the final scenes. Molli and Max in the Future gives us these lines:

It's easy to be all like, "You just gotta love yourself" and sound all woo-woo,
but what that actually means in practice is I deserve to be with someone great.

While Love Me prefaces the epiphany with this sharp observation:

That's your problem: that you think I'm the one that needs to like you.

As it turns out, loving someone else is easy. It's opening ourselves to being loved that's unbearably terrifying.

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

Review: Future's Edge by Gareth Powell

At its heart, this standalone space opera epic is the story of three people coming to terms with each other

Of all the Gin joints for him to walk into, he had to walk into *hers*.¹ Ursula Marrow, running a bar in a refugee camp on the planet of Void’s Edge, has her ex-husband Jake walk into it, seeking her help. Ursula has a strange link to a weapon that might slow down the implacable Cutters, who are steadily destroying civilizations and wiping out intelligent life as they go (that was the fate of Earth, if you must know). Ursula could have gotten on the STL ships to get even further away from the enemy, but she’s still running her bar by the camp at the edge of the galaxy arm, before the doorstep of the void that the STL ships are fleeing into to escape the Cutters. And now her ex needs her help again, in her capacity as a former xenoarchaeologist with a unique link to that aforementioned weapon (everyone else who has tried to link to it has, in fact, died). But in the two years since she last saw him, during the chaotic and desperate evacuation of Earth, he has gotten a new wife... his sentient spaceship, The Crisis Actor.

Ursula, The Crisis Actor, and Jack are at the center of Gareth Powell’s Future’s Edge, a standalone space opera epic novel. It first and foremost runs on how these three characters get along, even as interstellar civilization (humans and others) is quite literally falling apart due to the Cutters. The novel’s point of view is almost exclusively Ursula’s; aside from the brief and revealing shifts to The Crisis Actor, we mostly stay in Ursula’s head. We don’t get a narrative from Jack, so we have these two most important characters in his life; and the way they regard and react to him, the ex-wife (human) and the current wife (AI/spaceship), makes for a fascinating engine for character development, growth and drama. Add in a constellation of secondary characters, some from Jack’s life, some from Ursula’s, mix well, and you have an engaging cast for the end of the world.

I want to explore a little more and engage with Ursula as a character. Even with everyone dealing with the mental fallout of a world that is on the edge, Powell explores substance abuse in having Ursula be an alcoholic. That word is never used, the subject is not brought up, but the reader can see that her alcoholism is a symptom and a consequence of what she has been through. Jake, by comparison, clearly is suffering some PTSD from having been in a constant state of war for the last couple of years. This gives an interesting and sometimes disquieting angle to his relationship with The Crisis Actor.

Non-humans, especially AIs, are a feature of Powell’s work all the way back to Silversands and Ack-Ack Macaque. Powell seems very interested in including characters in his works who think close to humans, but are not quite humans, and have to engage with humans who have varying if not wrong expectations of what a non-human intelligence is or should be like. There’s a fascinating conversation in a desperate moment where Ursula orders The Crisis Actor to turn on her emotional circuits, because she’s frustrated with her overly logical intelligence. While I have enjoyed AIs of various kinds in previous works by Powell, having The Crisis Actor in this three-way relationship mess comes off as one of the most interesting instances in his oeuvre.

And the novel is populated with more non-human characters, a diverse cast across a variety of spectra. Powell effortlessly makes his books inclusive and with characters with whom a wide variety of readers can identify. While our power trio is the main focal point, I enjoyed a variety of the characters in secondary roles as well. Like our protagonists, they, too, bear the scars and costs of this grinding, implacable, genocidal war.

We are presented with a rich, interesting world. I’ve read enough of Powell to see the lines of what he likes to do, tying one or more characters very directly into his worldbuilding in a fundamental way. Having Ursula’s link to the weapon, that starts as a MacGuffin and turns out to be so much more, is our hook to really engage a character, and by extension the reader, into the fabric of the world. Revealing just what the weapon is, what it does, and how Ursula ultimately uses it is the capstone of this novel, along with some final revelations of what the actual nature of this universe, its Precursors and the antagonist Cutters really are. What Powell sets up he ultimately pays off for the reader in the denouement. I was quite satisfied with the resolutions, both of characters and overarching plots.

We get an interesting method of FTL (and not-so-FTL travel), we get lots of neat technology and weaponry from the small to the ship-sized, and we get Precursor and other alien technologies. This is a cobbled-together set of people with sometimes very ramshackle (or not very well understood) technology living on the ragged edge, trying desperately to hold off the Cutters and find the means to evacuate more people to a place hopefully out of their reach. This is a novel after the destruction of the Earth, after all. Humans (as well as other species) are raging against the dying of the light. That’s why Jake and Ursula’s efforts to try and find the weapon are at the same time a use of resources that cannot be countenanced, yet maybe the only thing that might help a few thousand more people escape. Desperate stakes, desperate hope, desperate odds. That hangs over the heads of everyone in the novel.

Precursors and their remnants are not exactly a new thing in science fiction, of course. Given the age of the universe, the idea that there have been civilizations that have risen and fallen in the big wide universe goes back to the cosmic horror of the 1920s, if not even further back. And xenoarchaeologists go hand in hand with the existence of fallen, lost civilizations. Powell’s take on xenoarchaeology, his Precursors, and the monstrous reminds me of a variety of potential inspirations and parallels, ranging from video games (the Star Control and Mass Effect series) to authors like Frederik Pohl with his Gateway series. The novel, like many that feature xenoarchaeology, does tackle and provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Future’s Edge is lean and mean, folding in high-octane action sequences with tender, intimate moments that give the characters space to grow, breathe and come to terms with each other, all with a killer high concept. The novel never flags, and just when you think that the social elements are getting long, Powell drops in an action sequence... but on the flip side, he makes sure those action sequences are not just a single straight line without healthy pauses. This is a real feature of Powell’s writing, and this novel shows him skillfully wielding his craft in a page-turning way.

This is an excellent story that gets resolved in one volume. One can imagine more adventures in this ’verse, but the story of this trio of characters and their coming together is complete. Despite the MacGuffin, the story really ends when their character arcs are resolved. I have a lot of questions about this world and its future, and I wouldn’t mind reading more from this rather ravaged setting. Future’s Edge may tell of a time after the end of the world, but it shines with hope.

Highlights:

• Strong trio of primary characters, flawed, entangled in complicated relationships, and interesting
• Engaging, deep and interesting worldbuilding
• It’s after the end of the world as we know it, no one’s fine, but we’re still raging against the dying of the light

Reference: Powell, Gareth. Future’s Edge [Titan Books, 2025].

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

¹ The book is set after the end of the world, and with the remnants of humanity trying to hold onto what cultural icons they have left, there’s a discussion in the book at one point about movies. And yes, Casablanca is one of them. Trust Powell as a writer; he knows what he’s doing.

Film Review: Flow

A breathtakingly beautiful tale about a determined cat, his idiosyncratic animal companions, and the devastating effects of a catastrophic flood on an alien world

For a short-ish animated feature that has zero dialogue, Flow is wildly entertaining. It follows a young black cat as his quiet world gets subsumed by a flood of biblical proportions. He manages to escape on a rickety sailboat that manages to pick up other animal straggler survivors, including a stiff and rigid secretary bird, a can't-be-arsed capybara, and a greedy lemur—all while avoiding the barking and chaotic pack of dogs on a rival boat.

I know, I know. This sounds silly and saccharine. I'm not one for animated movies generally or animal adventure tales specifically, but Flow is different. Granted, I'm a nautical obsessed cat-lover, so that may explain a lot. But this movie is adorable, visually stunning, and makes you think without really any exposition at all. It's quite a feat, and I'm honestly in love with it a little bit.

Who is this cat?

Our protagonist is a scruffy little black cat who spends his days romping around the forest near his home, which contains dozens of hand-carved cat statues. It's unclear if his owner is alive, dead, or missing—but something seems off, especially when the flood comes. Our cat is all cat, from his constant low meows to his slicked-back ear planes when he's scared. He's vulnerable in so many ways, not the least of which being his world invaded by ever-rising water—every cat's nightmare. But animals, even cats, are much more resourceful than we give them credit for. So yes, he learns to swim, to interact with a lemur, even steer a boat. Seriously. But more on that later.

The achingly beautiful world they inhabit

Even though it's not billed as such, this movie is essentially a mystery. What caused this flood of epic proportions? Where's the cat's owner? Why are there no humans escaping the flood? What's that dragon thing?

On the animals' voyage sailing through the diluvian world, one wonder if it's even Earth—it could be a million years in the past, or a million in the future. It could be an entirely alien world! As they sail through the remains of (presumably) human civilization, you can get really lost in your reverie.

The colorful, meditative animation makes every scene absolutely serene and gorgeous. It's like playing a cozy Nintendo Switch game for 90 minutes. It reminded me, even, of playing Stray, a recent puzzle video game where you play as an orange cat that's trying to escape a cyberpunk city inhabited by robots.

Animal fantasy that's refreshing and not cloying

Here's the thing: If this was a Disney movie, I probably wouldn't watch it. No shade to Disney movies, they're just not my thing at this point in my life (though I did love Coco). But having the animal characters be wordless makes them somehow more real, if that makes sense. They're still fantastical, in that they know how to get on boats and then take turns at the rudder, but not ridiculously so. There's no crab with a Jamaican accent singing "Kiss the Girl." And yet you're never left wondering what's happening and you're never bored.

Part of the film's success stems from how expressive the animals are—Flow excels at depicting wide-eyed terror to bemused stubbornness. It's a bit hard to explain exactly how compulsively watchable this movie is, but I assure you that it's true. There are parts where you're so worried about this little black cat that's it like if Homeward Bound was directed by the Safdie brothers.

But it's worth it.

Also, there's an amazingly wholesome trend of pets watching along with their owners right now. This is also true, I can confirm. Here's my cat, Goose, intently watching:

Baseline Score: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, 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.

Book Review: Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions

Imaginative fiction, Jamaican vibes, and random musings on life create a quirky anthology of speculative fiction

In her latest science fiction anthology, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson delivers a collection of short stories from various parts of her prolific writing career. Some of the stories are co-written by other authors including Nisi Shawl and Joshua Mays. The narratives range from lengthy and thoughtful social commentary to short, quirky, fever-dream musings. Each tale includes a brief opening comment from the author, giving readers a bit of context for her writing process at the time of the story’s creation. Without a clear central theme to connect the tales, we have an assemblage that is chaotic, in a good way. The collection has a range of everything from steampunk robots and cybernetics gone wrong to monster babies and world-ending plagues. The result is an eclectic rambling of Caribbean-futuristic speculative fiction served in bite-sized pieces to fit a range of moods.

Many of the stories share themes of environmental abuse, particularly as it relates to water, which becomes a recurring symbolic element across the collection. In the tales, water manifests as lethal, nurturing, mysterious, familiar, victimized, powerful, comforting, and punitive. Many of the tales are specifically or impliedly set in Jamaica. Jamaica (Xaymaca) is known as “the land of wood and water” or “the land of rivers and springs,” so the essential presence of water is a natural element of the culture and the stories. The other recurring element is the language of Jamaica. Bits of Jamaican-inspired dialect, vernacular, and slang are woven into stories of dystopian futures or mystical creatures. Despite the Jamaica focus, several of the tales are distinctly not Jamaican, including “Moon Child” and, ironically, “Jamaica Ginger.” As is the case with most anthologies, some stories stand out as particularly engaging and thought-provoking.

“Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” is set in a dystopian era where humanity is scattered across dense, stressful cities or complex floating water communities. In this future Earth, the ocean is no longer grand and beautiful but is an obstacle of dirty water caused by decades of misuse, climate change, and pollution; hence the story’s title. Jacquee is a member of a close-knit water community, but she is piloting her water vessel alone and is soon faced with unexpected danger. It’s a classic journey story with a few twists. She’s just recently undergone surgery for cybernetic implants to help her better pilot her watercraft. But her impulsive decision to leave the medical facility before fully healing leads to problems for her psyche once she’s back on the water. Jacquee’s own tragic backstory of the loss of her family parallels the Earth’s own environmental losses. Like many of the other tales, the story is threaded with references to Jamaican and Caribbean culture, particularly in the use of language. Despite its tragic elements and dystopian setting, the story is surprisingly positive and ultimately empowering, with found family and community themes that resonate.

“Inselberg” is a creepy, dark humor tale also set in a decimated future version of Jamaica. The use of a second-person narrative immediately pulls the reader in for an immersive adventure with a naïve group of tourists and their cynical local tour guide. The story migrates from humorous to disturbing as terrible occurrences befall the travelers in their degenerating journey to a destination that is not what it seems. The story ends a bit abruptly but the set-up is intriguing and the writing style is addictive.

“Moon Child” give us an eerie narrative of Amy, a mother struggling to care for her beast-like changeling infant who would rather drink blood than milk. Despite the strangeness of the creature, she and her husband are bonded to the child. However, the community avoids the family and the child in particular, fearing that the child is unnatural. Amy soon decides to take a dangerous trek into the forest to find a solution. In the preface to the story, Hopkinson describes a vision she had while flying and watching the moon hovering in a deep forested valley. The result is a gorgeously descriptive narrative in a lush, dark setting. The journey is both immersive and symbolic and the solution is unexpected.

“Jamaica Ginger” is set in a steampunk-style New Orleans where Plaquette, a Black female engineer, works for a strict employer creating robots designed to replace the Black porters who serve on the train cars. Plaquette’s own father was a porter until an ailment left him unable to work. As a result, she and her mother must come up with creative ways to keep the family going.

My favorite story in the collection is “Clap Back.” In this tale, a wealthy, popular designer creates a fabric designed to erase guilt over racism and exploitation by building in audible forgiveness messages from the low-income workers who assembled the wildly expensive clothing. The words sink into the wearer’s skin like nanites and cause the person to audibly share the implanted phrases of coerced forgiveness from the oppressed workers. Meanwhile, artist Wenda does her own manipulation of inanimate objects and uses a horrifying figurine collection of old and offensive depictions of Black people to enact her own countermessage.

In addition to the strong central stories, the anthology has several shorter pieces, many of which end in unexpected ways and don’t necessarily have a moral point or character arc. Instead, they are small explorations of imagination and emotion that feel a bit open-ended. With a range of tales from a range of time periods, Jamaica Ginger acknowledges society’s challenges and ailments and provides a provocative remedy.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Twisty, eclectic, dystopian tales
• A range of narrative intensities
• Jamaican cultural references

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