Book Review: The Deep and the Drowned by Ian Green

 The opening volume of an extremely classic-feeling fantasy adventure

Killian is the captain of the Cutlass Hawk, a ship he may or may not have acquired entirely legally, in debt to local crime bosses, and haunted by the his past, both the crimes he's committed and the events that led him to them in the first place. He's charming, violent, clever, impulsive, and has a little bit of access to the skein, the magic of his world. Trying to pay off his debt to some local crime bosses, he's now been shackled with an entirely dubious duo from the culture who killed his mother, and who want to undertake one of the most dangerous sea voyages possible, through the domain of a mad god sea serpent with a penchant for storms and shipwrecking.

If The Deep and the Drowned sounds, from this brief synopsis, like the sort of fantasy story you've read before... well, you'd be right. There is something incredibly old school about it, an familiar too. Its expansive secondary world, its magic that underlies reality, its gods run wild and faded ruins of a once-great civilisation, its hero with a messy past and a yearning for revenge, even its pacing and twist reveals, all of it feels straight out of all the books I devoured as a teenager a couple of decades ago. And straight out of the type of books I haven't read in the last decade at the very least. This is a type of fantasy that just isn't hitting big, and I'm not picking up, these days, and so it was with a strange sense of déjà vu that I ploughed through Ian Green's forthcoming novel.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm honestly not sure.

In the abstract, I absolutely do not think stories need to be timebound to the trends of the moment: there will always be someone who doesn't like the flavour of the month and yearns for what came before, and they deserve books to read just as much as anyone else does. But... but. The problem with writing something that feels quite so familiar as this does, quite so keenly evokes a mode of fantasy I read so very much of as a teenager, is that it feels like the reiteration of the same mode needs to justify itself. When so much of a thing already exists, there's a sense that the new one has to make a statement about what it brings to the party that the pre-existing novels filling the same niche don't provide. That argument can take many forms, and "it's not new but it's phenomenally well-written" could be one of them. It doesn't have to be a twist (though twists, reworkings and reimaginations of the existing corpus are great fun and make their arguments quite plainly enough). But if there's already a plentiful crop of this one type of thing, the work has a lot of crowd to stand out from. I'm not sure "there's not been any new iterations of this one thing" for a while is quite enough, but maybe that's just me.

In any case, and sadly, I'm not sure The Deep and the Drowned succeeds in making such a case. Which isn't to say it's a bad book - the worldbuilding, plotting, prose and characterisation are all competently done, and while there are things to poke at in some of them (more on which shortly), that's true of many books still well worth reading. But when I put it down, I felt a great sense of it missing something. And I think it comes in at the level of theme, or possibly argument; I'm not sure if the book has something to say beyond having a cool story... and I think it might have needed one.

It's interesting to compare to Green's previous novel, Extremophile, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award last year. It was a novel of a type I'm not normally excited by (heists) but which managed to lure me into a heap of enjoyment through a mixture of good writing, the sense of a depth of knowledge on the author's part across several of its topics/settings, and just a strong thread, right at the base, of having something the say. It's a novel I ended up really liking, almost in spite of myself, just out of how well it was put together, at every level.

A lot of that same competence is here too, although translated away from near future climate fiction and into a secondary world. The handwriting of the same creator is visible, so to speak, just in a different font. But without the driving force of Extremophile's anger, or something equally forceful, it's not got quite the same magic to it that made the previous novel sing.

Which sounds like a lot of a downer on the novel, but it's not all that way. Some of the disappointment comes precisely because so many aspects of it are handled with the same skilled hand, that the little hole in the centre is felt that much more keenly. The possibility is visible.

One of the great decisions Green has made is to have his protagonist (and his ship full of crew and associates) be genuinely somewhat criminal. It's an unfortunately common issue in stories containing pirates, thieves and other lawbreakers that they don't... actually do any pirating or lawbreaking. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty is the easiest example that jumps to mind, but is hardly alone in this. Pirates are, to be quite frank, not very nice. They do not very nice things, often to entirely innocent people who just happen to be in possession of cargo. Or people who aren't totally innocent but still don't necessarily deserve to be pirated. If you're going to do a story with pirates in, you should probably accept that they are pirates and embrace it, moral mess and all. And if you can't swallow that... maybe don't write about pirates. Green has not fallen into this trap. His protagonist, Killian, gives plenty of examples of things he's done in his life which are... let's say not great. Certainly not lawful. Quite often not all that moral. But he remains a sympathetic character nonetheless, because people can be complex things. He has a backstory, he has context, that make his crimes make sense, but without feeling the need to constantly excuse and minimise them. It's great, and it gives the story and setting more weight for its premises to be taken seriously in this way.

There's also a sense of stories beyond the one being told, which to my mind is the mark of worldbuilding done right. This especially comes through from several of the secondary characters, with whom there are moments of understanding of their place, and their trajectory, through the world that only intersects with Killian's, rather than being subordinate to it. Whether that's the antagonists Marion and Mournchild, part of two different, temporarily aligned hierarchies, with their own goals and mores, or Silver, who disapproves of some of the plundering but needs Killian for his access to archaeological sites she has an interest in, or Kaikatsu, a member of another species called the Antian, who carries a mysterious creature called a relu in secret, and clearly has goals relating to it that have driven her far from her people. It is, in focus, Killian's story, but Green does enough work on these other threads to make them feel just real enough, just deep enough, to imply the world beyond the borders of the narrative.

It's also a book full of religion. In some ways, religion done much better than in a lot of traditional fantasy: the ones shown on page for any real time definitely give the feel of being institutions that people might actually be part of, which is rarer than it should be. These are religions that make sense as a part of daily life, with rituals and restrictions and hierarchies and internal politics, all hinted at and gestured to, if not explored in detail. It's not the superficial thing of "what if gods, but real", though there are gods walking (and swimming) about in Green's archipelago. Thought has been given to how the metaphysical shapes the societal, and that is so critical to making this kind of worldbuilding work. Religion is never quite enough in the focus to get some moments of real heft, but as a part of the construction in the background, it's pretty well done.

On a plot and pacing level, if we step aside a little from the familiarity problem, there's a lot of skill too. Without going into detail on the specifics, there's a late third act twist which, if you've read a lot of this sort of fantasy is entirely to be expected. But the way Green plots the course towards it, however visible on the horizon, is extremely competent: there's a reveal to the reader just the right amount of time before the reveal to the protagonist, and the gap between them is just right to enjoy the knowledge without getting impatient for the fallout.

But then again, there are some issues in execution too. These predominantly lie in the character of Killian, the hero. Making him have his thirst for blood and vengeance is great, he feels like a genuinely criminal criminal in the grubby mess of the world that it makes sense he'd inhabit. But, at times, he's also... a big softie. And having that genuine criminality puts these two parts of his character at further apart poles. By the end of the novel, I felt there needed to be more work to sell him uniting those contrasts for him to truly make sense to me reading him; the regret he feels for some of his bloody deeds isn't quite enough to make the link work. Likewise, he's clearly meant to be charming, impulsive but persuasive, but I'm not quite sure the writing sells that enough for me to believe in it, especially in his dialogue. He ends up being the thing he needs to be for the story at all points, and doesn't quite succeed in being a character, or not always.

And so, the world is interesting, the writing pretty good, and there's promise for a lot of intersecting lines of adventure in the future installments in what is clearly going to be a series. If you want the sort of secondary world fantasy that was going round in heaps 15-20 years ago, this is doing exactly that, and pretty well. But it's not doing a whole lot more, and after the promise of Extremophile I was hoping for something with a bit more bite to it.

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The Math

Highlights: fantasy religions that feel like people engage with them; a big, broad world; pirates who actually do crimes

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Ian Green, The Deep and the Drowned, [Head of Zeus, 2026].

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

Review [Video Game]: Nine Sols by Red Candle Games

A parry system to make Sekiro blush

Yi hangs off a cliff as an imposing figure points her energy sword down toward his disheveled form. He eases off into the abyss only to be absorbed and placed in a hibernation state by Fusang (a world-tree-like organism). Fast-forward five hundred years later and our protagonist awakens from his unwanted slumber, wounds healed, hellbent on putting things right. And perhaps a bit of revenge. But what is right? And what is Yi hiding from his friends, from the player?

Nine Sols immediately grabs the eye with its fetching art style. Crisp, bright colors with clean linework. Bold, charming character design and detailed environments fuel this sci-fi tao-punk adventure. The setup is accompanied by a solid score that follows throughout and hooked me right from the get-go. Yi’s bipedal, cat-like character design is, honestly, adorable, even if he can kill hordes and hordes of enemies. Most of the characters have a rather cartoony feel to them, even some villains, which all work within their characterization. The ones that are more serious seem to have a more balanced design that works within the artistic framework. One of the few Metroidvania games I’ve played that rivals Hollow Knight in execution. Red Candle Games has some good artists on staff.

It’s hard not to mention the indie juggernaut Hollow Knight when comparing Metroidvania titles, but alas, when one is at the top, all others shall compete for a bit of that spotlight. But here’s the thing: Nine Sols stands on its own and even surpasses the king in some places. Each takes its own focus and hones it to a sharp point. While Hollow Knight excels in exploration and lore, Nine Sols focuses on story, character work, and combat. Let’s get into each of these.

The story and characters are intertwined, as with any piece of media, though one of my favorite parts of Nine Sols are the extra bits sprinkled in. As you move through your adventure, new characters will join you at your base. Different collectibles will allow you to interact with these characters and grow your relationships with them. Completely collecting almost every item in the game will even give you the true ending (more on this later). Forging a bond with Shuanshuan is as satisfying as offering the conspiracy theorist Shennong a new poison to endure. And boy, does he like his poison. The more, the better. These relationships were satisfying enough to drive me to unlock all the hidden items on the map for a chance at more dialogue. And while I don’t think every character moment is earned, the ones that are land solidly.

Speaking of hits, let’s get to the combat. Fast, intense, precise, challenging. The game, at least on standard mode (there is a story mode that will essentially allow you to breeze through the game), offers the player plenty of trials. The game relies on a parry system, not dissimilar to the highly acclaimed From Software darling, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Parrying is the bread and butter of the game. Every parry fills a ki charge (you can get up to five), and these allow you to do more damage, either through talisman application or through other jade upgrades (for instance, one jade allows every third hit on your three hit combo to use two ki charges to do extra damage). Besides parrying, Yi can dodge, and eventually, use a different type of parry as well. These combined mechanics, along with the traditional sword slashes, create fun, frenetic gameplay that challenges you even against regular enemies. No matter how much I leveled, I always felt the heat.

The boss and mini-boss battles add an extra test of both player patience and mechanical learning. But each boss encounter, while initially frustrating, takes an appropriate amount of practice before you feel you’ve mastered a phase. And each of the battles feels appropriately boss-like without pushing me out of the range of total discomfort. All except one. The final boss is, to put it mildly, a horrendous difficulty spike of massive proportions. You don’t even want to hear what I really think. I respect making the final enemy the most difficult by all means, but that was a nightmare. It left a rather sour taste in my mouth right near the end of a rather enjoyable adventure. I’m surprised that difficulty spike got through play-testing. Unless you’re a masochist, go for the true ending on story mode so you can see the game through without wanting to delete the game (something I actually considered during my multi-hour bout). It’s unfortunate because the combat choreography of the fight is brilliant and would be otherwise enjoyable with some tweaks.

But back to the story. Red Candle Games made a solid effort in creating a flowing narrative, with ancient lore and other worldbuilding. While the translation doesn’t always align perfectly, and there are quite a few expository dialogue interactions, the game is comprehensive and enjoyable. If you prefer an alternative to the more subtle, environmental storytelling like in a From Software game, or the previously mentioned Hollow Knight, Nine Sols may offer what you’re seeking. While there are plenty of chances for exploration, the game focuses on its narrative, creating a slightly more linear feel. Something I preferred over Hollow Knight’s more enigmatic traipsing.

Nine Sols still has some of the Metroidvania staples I could do without, like mindless exploration (towards the beginning). Once multi-way teleportation opens up, everything flows much better. I understand the desire to push the player to explore the map, but it eventually feels a bit like drudgery. For some, this is one of the best parts of a Metroidvania, but I must admit, it is not this humble reviewer’s favorite thing to do. Luckily, Nine Sols isn’t the worst offender in this category, and, like in Hollow Knight, the world is beautiful and the puzzles can distract from the small irritation. Also, toward the beginning, when I ran into a boss that had a small cut scene, or a difficult stretch of enemies between the respawn area and the boss, I was displeased. Thankfully, these issues disappeared as I progressed.

Nine Sols should be revered for its slick, enticing combat, its story, its world, and its fun characters. It’s a great compliment to some of the best in the genre and deserves the attention of any fans of the genre. Considering Red Candle Games only made two horror games before this, I must say this was quite the pivot. My few frustrations with Nine Sols aside, I look forward to seeing what this developer does next. Now go out there and feed Yi’s bloodlust, teach Shuanshuan how to code, and dammit, find Shennong as much poison as you can. He deserves it. And you deserve to hear the stupid drunken conversations that emerge from the transaction.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 8.5/10

Bonuses: +1 for solid, intense combat. +1 for storytelling and character.

Penalties: −1 for final boss difficulty spike. −0.5 for some translation errors. −0.5 for typical Metroidvania exploration irritations.

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10.

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

TV Microreview: Ann Droid

A touching comedy about the search for meaning in the age of AI

Sue’s life is going through a hard time. She’s been a widow for two years, her son is willingly stuck in a bad marriage, her friends’ conversation consists mainly of sinister gossip about who just died or patronizing comments about her age, and her low blood pressure just gave her a fainting spell that resulted in a bruised arm. The last thing she needs is a constant reminder of the autonomy she’s losing as she grows older.

So when her son, who has been taking care of her lately, decides to move back with his horrifically toxic wife and rent a caretaker robot for her, Sue isn’t exactly thrilled. In the world of BBC comedy show Ann Droid, robots have a shady reputation, partly because some owners use them for unmentionable activities, and partly because the early models had alarming malfunctions. But surprisingly, Linda the robot proves to be a more reliable and supportive companion than anyone in Sue’s life.

With the same pitch-perfect deadpan style that launched her to international fame in the role of Philomena Cunk, Diane Morgan plays Linda as a competent caretaker (she remembers when Sue needs to take each of her pills, has impressive diagnostic gadgets, and can alert Sue when a phone call is a scam), although she’s a somewhat older model with only the most rudimentary social skills. The charm of the show comes precisely from contrasting the harshness and duplicity of modern society with the unfiltered honesty of this character who truly wants to help.

That’s the trick with this story: even though Sue doesn’t say it out loud, it becomes clear that society has created a series of problems for itself to which robots were never supposed to be a solution. Her son is a manchild with no willpower or self-respect, but it’s not entirely his fault, as the robotic domination of the job market leaves him feeling as directionless as his widowed mother. Still, the fact that we’ve built a society that shapes us into worse sons, worse friends, worse lovers than a machine can be is a sign that something has gone very wrong with us.

Through the six episodes of the season, Linda subtly guides Sue to exploring more of what life can give her. In particular, Linda’s lack of a filter helps Sue see more clearly the problems in her relationship with her son. Usually, stories about AI serve as proofs by example of the search for who we are, but in Ann Droid the important question is who we are to one another. Sue has been a mother for very long, and it’s way past time for her son to be an adult, and for her to figure out who she can be by herself.

As for Linda, it’s curious that technically speaking she’s barely a character: her wish to help is how she was programmed, not a choice she made. But the ways she finds to provide that help reveal a deeper person than the rest of characters give her credit for. That’s another item in the long list of human attributes that modern society seems to have taken away from us: the connection we create as helpers. Sue is lucky to have found Linda, but we in the real world shouldn’t have to.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A first contact novel on an unusually hostile alien planet. 

An Adrian Tchaikovsky science fiction novel has a big overarching pattern with endless variation. A strange setting in space or on a planet. Alien intelligences that don’t work like human ones at all, but slowly there is understanding between the alien and the human. The alien intelligences can and often are strikingly different than our own, and are not humans with headridges. 

His 2025 Hugo finalist effort in this regard is Shroud. 

The future depicted in Shroud is a rather bleak one--Corporatocracy goes to the stars, and like a capitalist von Neumann machine, is spreading in sub-light ships and cryosleep. Reach a new system, set up extraction facilities, get the minerals and materials to expand and move on. You are woken out of cryosleep if you are useful and the ROI on your food, water and air is there. It’s next stage Capitalism in a terrifying iteration. Capitalism ruined Earth... but also got us to the stars and allowing us to swarm, slowly, across the galaxy. 

Enter our main character and point of view: Juna Ceelander. Unlike the other members of her team, she doesn’t have a technical speciality in their Special Projects division. She instead is the interface between the specialists and their boss, Bartokh. Her teammates assume that being the interface means she is just sleeping with the Director and isn’t good at anything. The politics and conflicts aboard ship are reminiscent of a number of toxic workplaces in SFF (like, say The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey).

In any event, the team is soon confronted that the titular planet of Shroud is even stranger than they thought..A planet totally in the dark, and with aliens who live on broadcasting, essentially, radio frequencies. A cold and strange world. But there is life here, definitely, and perhaps even more. There is enough here that Juna and the Special Projects division gets a bunch of resources to investigate the surface. Life of this complexity (and maybe even out right intelligent) has never been encountered before. 

And. then, in short order, disaster happens. Juna and Mai and Bartokh get into the modules that Mai and special projects have made and manage to get down to the planet, leaving their destroyed portion of the spaceship behind. They land on a planet where everything uses radio, where they are the only creatures that can see. Oh and they are in pods they cannot leave, or they will die, quickly and messily.

And then the plot really gets going. 

The backbone of this is a classic “cross the planet” quest as our survivors, inside of their modules, try to get to the one location where they might be rescued--the beanstalk that they have set up at the “pole”. The novel turns into a road trip--but a road trip where Juna’s point of view is broken up by the point of view of the intelligent alien species. It’s a fascinating balancing act as we see Juna and the others’ actions interpreted and misinterpreted by the aliens, and vice versa by means of their interspersed points of view. We also get, in Tchaikovsky fashion, an omniscient drop in here and there. This omniscient bit gives us the backbone of how life evolved on Shroud and how it rose to intelligence and its current position. I don’t know that these sections are strictly necessary--one can enjoy the plot and worldbuilding without them, but it feels like a tip of the hat to Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden where all the alternate worlds’ divergences are explained in interstitial chapters. I do feel that at the bottom, that the appeal of Tchaikovsky’s novels are rooted strongly in their worldbuilding and that superstructure is *fun* for the author to show off for us.

Going back into the mainline of the novel, we see this at work. While we get bits and pieces until the crash-landing onto the planet, it is on the planet that the nature of the aliens and the interrogation of alien biology that Tchaikovsky is making her, becomes clear. We’ve had in prior novels aliens based on almost Lamarckian recombination (Alien Clay). The spiders which mark many novels and novellas in his oeuvre. Aliens who rearrange planets into art pieces. And much more. Here, Tchaikovsky builds a world and creates aliens who work and adapt on the principles of mechanics and mechanical engineering. 

Tchaikovsky also has a lot of fun with puncturing some of the assumptions that have accreted over first contact. This is a first contact novel, to be sure, but that contact is a long process that really doesn’t even work well until the denouement. The humans’ attempt to use the Fibonacci sequence to communicate (the whole math as the universal language) comes in with contemptuous humor in the novel. Getting the point of view of the aliens to these communication attempts helps illustrate for the reader just how off the map this is for the denizens of Shroud. They are mechanical engineers working by iterative trial and error rather than anything like theory. That’s how they evolved to be what they are. So yes, that trial and error does finally pay off, but it is a long pay-off for the humans and aliens to finally be able to talk to each other.

As much as it is the aliens’ story, the novel really is Juna’s story, much more than the other humans, especially since we don’t have another human point of view. Juna is not sleeping with Bartokh, and in fact as an understudy for everyone, has a small amount of knowledge in everything. More importantly, she has flexibility of thought that allows her to work with the more technically minded Mai to manage the journey. At several points, Tchaikovsky makes the subtext text: the flexibility and adaptability of Juna is why Mai and Juna can make a go of this wild idea at all.¹ But that goes to the aliens’ nature and the “whatever works” realpolitik of trying to make a go of it in extremely harsh conditions. 

Shroud is a paean to engineering, from the nature of the aliens, to the ways that the humans try to understand Shroud as a planet, and, eventually, work to leave it after being stranded there. It occasionally goes into the highbrow in thinking about how we could come up with aliens that exist in its lightless, high radio environment, but at it’s core, its a journey of survival across a wild world rendered expertly. 

It’s a science fiction novel that is unapologetically and in the central core of what we understand science fiction to be, and to do. To put it in the context of the other 2026 Finalists for Best Novel for the Hugo Awards, it’s the most mainstream Science Fiction of the lot by far. Death of the Author is metafictional, immersed in the idea of stories, who tells them, why they are told, and how they are told. A Drop of Corruption, The Incandescent, The Raven Scholar and The Everlasting are all fantasy novels. Fantasy has had a real surge in the 2020’s; Shroud feels like it is not in step with the other novels at all (Death of the Author feels different, too, in a different way, much of a literary chassis). However, with two Best Novel nominees last year, and Shroud this year, Tchaikovsky, even given that he writes fantasy as well (The Tyrant Philosophers novels and novellas, most particularly lately) seems to be the science fiction author of award prominence and in the mind of Hugo voters. Shroud cements that reputation and place.

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Highlights:

• Unapologetic Space Opera. 
• Strange and well done Tchaikovsky aliens, high engineering style
• Shows the versatility of the author. 

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian, Shroud, (Orbit, 2025)

¹ Tchaikovsky seems to riffing off of Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects” idea. Juna is the anti-specialist, but she is adaptable enough to be the essential member of the survivors.

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

Film Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta narrative on slasher films, queerness, the media that shapes us, and desire. 

Lots of movies about specific interests are often referred to as "love letters to [blank]" — so much so that it's a bit of a cliché, at this point. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by Jane Schoenbrun of I Saw The TV Glow, truly is a love letter to slasher films. In telling the story of young director Kris (Hannah Einbender of Hacks), who gets the extraordinary opportunity to revive the classic horror franchise that she grew up with, Schoenbrun creates their own new slasher world, complete with  lived-in world building and mythology.

The film itself is full of painted vistas, dreamy sets, movies-within-movies, and absolutely insane needle drops. But despite all this, it's the cinematic equivalent to inside baseball. There is a lot going on in the film, and fans of Schoenbrun's work will most likely revel in the weird, glorious, and twisted world they created. For folks who are into horror but in a more casual way, they may walk out confused. To be fair, it's confusing. A24 passed on it, if that tells you anything. There's an entirely different analysis that could be done from the trans perspective, but I'll leave that reading to others who can speak to it more meaningfully.

The heart of the film revolves around two main relationships: Kris and Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson in her best Southern Gothic Norma Desmond) as they spend a wild weekend exploring the possibility of a reboot, and Kris & Billy and Little Death, the recurring villain the series. 

First, Gillian Anderson's final girl-all-grown-up performance is absolutely the stuff of dreams, and maybe one of the strongest parts. Presley inhabits the abandoned summer camp where the first movie was shot, having become the classic ex-Hollywood recluse archetype. When Kris arrives, she's greeted with classic Southern hospitality: two buckets worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken (complete with dipping sauces) and copious amounts of weed. 

Kris and Billy are attracted to each other, and shortly after meeting hook up. Kris grows frustrated, declaring herself "bad at sex." Billy is empathetic and doesn't pressure her to continue. She admits that she too has had trouble with coitus, and has relied on imagining Little Death watching her have sex. Kris, we learn, that despite her status as a queer feminist filmmaker, frequently fantasizes about being a sexualized final girl. She admits that as a young child (perhaps too young to be exposed, in fact) she obsessively watched the Little Death franchise, and this fantasy became embedded in her psyche. 

For many people, media shapes us in ways that go beyond just taste — including the ones kept secret from everyone else. Horror and sex have always been intertwined, for a multitude of reasons: teenagers are drawn to it. The line between fear and desire is razor thin — titillation goes both ways. Horror films have often been also used as morality plays, where the "horny" teens get their comeuppance by way of brutal stabbing. Then there's the homosexual subtext in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a movie so gay that Freddy Krueger himself becomes the metaphor of being gay for a young teen, an intense self-loathing that permeates the film. Movies like Sleepaway Camp added to the gender dialogue, though that film has been hotly debated in recent years by queer scholars as to what it's really trying to say.

Much of the film revolves around these two characters simply talking and eating, and Schoenbrun in an interview with The New York Times described it as being influenced by My Dinner With Andre, the 1981 character study where the leads dine at Cafe Des Artistes and simply chat about life. The fried chicken, and then the candy that's every where — these all speak to the joy and comfort we get from pleasures of the flesh.

It reminds me of the novel Cranford, where the strict Victorian women must retreat to the solitude of their own room to enjoy oranges. When my English professor back in 2003 mentioned that this was absolutely a metaphor for sexual desire, I was floored. And yet, here we are, 175 years later, and we're able to witness the exact opposite of such prudishness. We get not only the metaphor — there are literally gummy bear and Sour Patch Kid chandeliers — but also later, two women having sex on screen. In another era, the simple fact of the main characters being gay would have doomed them to certain death by the villain. The very opposite happens, however.

They are thus connected together in their respective sexual proclivities that revolve around the fictional monster. Naming him "Little Death" is a little too on the nose for me, but one can see where it could be clever. The movie's end then gets meta as they insert themselves into the world of the film, and that's where I stopped understanding what exactly was happening. But that's okay! I admittedly came for the vibes, and I stayed for the vibes.

When it comes to meta-textual films, I think there's a very thin line you have to tow: Staying part of the "new" plot while not crossing streams too often. Self-aware media has existed for a long time (Hamlet, anyone?) but recent films have had varying degrees of success. Adaptation, for one, but also Scream, Being John Malkovitch...the list is surprisingly longer than you'd expect. Personally, I'm not the hugest fan, as I mentioned before I think there's such a thing as being too clever. It can quickly obfuscate nearly everything else about the film, especially the acting and the story. 

For Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I didn't worry about the meta-ness of it all. Sometimes, you don't have to understand every single beat of a movie to enjoy it. When the characters didn't die at the end of the run time, I just shrugged and said, "Great!" It was enough for me to live in this odd world for a little while. The mythology of Little Death is so well choreographed that it felt like home. The opening sequence uses that classic exposition trick of overlaying the titles with a 30-year history of the franchise via newspaper articles. This old trick is up there with the Indiana Jones airplane-travel-red-line-on-a-map trick, and I'm a huge fan. By the time the movie starts, you have a really good grasp of this lived-in franchise and its ups and downs over the years. As someone who wishes there were more classic slasher villains in the world, getting this fake one is actually really fun.

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Highlights:

• Gillian Anderson eating fried chicken.
• Classic homages to Sleepaway Camp, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Friday the 13th, and countless other horror films.
• The Counting Crows needle drop being used in a scene Adam Duritz could never have imagined when writing this sad ballad.
• Great supporting cast in Eva Victor and Zach Cherry
• Like many good horror films, it has hilarious moments to break the tension

Rating: 7/10

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.

Film Review: The End of Oak Street

Come for a bite of big lizard action, stay for the biting social commentary

You’d think that dinos going nom nom on people is a sure winning formula that should be impossible to flunk, but then you look at the lamentable state of the Jurassic franchise and notice how easily it’s put to shame by The End of Oak Street. Its simple premise of an entire neighborhood mysteriously snatched in time and transported to prehistoric Earth allows for plenty of cool monster action in assorted combinations that maintain a heightened level of tension throughout. The ending, however, feels abrupt and incongruously happy after all the terror that precedes it. If you can excuse a less than elegant resolution, this movie rewards with abundant people-munching gore. And if you take a look beneath the surface narrative, you’ll realize this is a far smarter movie than its primeval beasts would suggest.

The story is set in a suburb of Detroit in 1982, a very difficult time that writer/director David Robert Mitchell experienced personally in his childhood. The deterioration of the American carmaker sector resulted in waves of closed factories and thousands of newly unemployed. This crisis coincided with the start of Reaganomics and its devastating effect on the income gap, and with the cultural shift toward a conservative moral agenda anchored in the past. In the film, Ewan McGregor’s character is shown to be struggling to provide for his family after being fired, while his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is stuck in the position of desperate housewife with unfulfilled professional aspirations. When they’re thrown into prehistoric Earth, her husband reacts with the same naïve optimism that characterized the average 1980s American patriarch, complete with purely performative religiosity. Even before they’re faced with the task of surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs, this family is already in the middle of the epic quest to survive Reaganism.

And if the historic parallels aren’t enough by this point, please look up General Motors Poletown and the depressing tale of how, in a desperate attempt to revive the past glories of the car industry, an entire neighborhood of Detroit was demolished in the 1980s to clear up space for a new car factory, displacing hundreds of families in the process. This is a movie about what happens when the past comes uninvited to tear your house down and wreck your everyday life. At the symbolic level, surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs is surviving Reaganism.

Put yourself in the shoes of a kid growing up in 1980s Detroit. There’s a spiraling crime wave, a crack epidemic, deadly gang wars, a dwindling job market, and a perverse new hobby of setting houses on fire. That’s the city in utter chaos that inspired The Crow and Robocop. That’s the Detroit where Mitchell grew up, and the anxiety that he expresses in this movie is not a fantasy scenario. The movie translates that feeling into thrilling action with dinosaurs, but the numerous scenes of abandoned houses crumbling to pieces, of background characters being randomly killed all over the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the protagonists’ dread that the same violence could target their family at any moment, is precisely what it felt like to grow up in 1980s Detroit.

And Mitchell has very specific points to make about society’s response to those changes. The 1980s provided mass culture with a limited repertoire of role models. The protagonists’ son likes to play with a bow and arrow, à la John Rambo, but once the dinosaurs show up, that weapon proves useless. Pay close attention to a couple of scenes in the first act: first, during a family meal, the daughter remarks on her brother’s annoying boys-will-be-boys attitude, and a joke is made about a massive load of poop that he once made as a baby; the morning after, the next-door neighbor, a guy previously established as a gun-happy jerk, shows up to complain that he’s found a man-sized pile of poop on his backyard, and blames the protagonists. To defuse the situation, the father decides that it will be the son’s responsibility to clean it up. The audience knows that it’s actually dinosaur poop, in a clear allusion to Jurassic Park, but hidden there is also a clever commentary on the role that gun violence plays in constructing the 1980s macho archetype (which Mitchell evidently judges to amount to a big load of poop) and the responsibility that falls onto young men to help dismantle it.

Am I stretching my interpretation too far? Consider a later scene, which I think makes the point even more obviously: a Titanoboa enters undetected through the parents’ bedroom window and sneaks past each kid’s bedroom, even though the doors are open and its presence should be obvious if only they bothered to look. It finds the mother and prepares for the fatal bite, but the son injures it with one of his arrows, giving his mother a snap-instant opening to fight back. Note that (a) this is the only time in the movie that the protagonists are attacked inside their house, and (b) this is the only time in the movie that the son’s weapon is good for something. This scene is a metaphor for sexual violence. The real Titanoboa was a snake, but in the movie it’s portrayed with a smooth, off-white skin that makes it look like a gigantic penis. When it’s about to attack the mother and opens its mouth, its tongue looks nothing like a snake’s tongue; it looks unmistakably like female genitalia. The point here is that sexual violence can go on undetected inside your own house (starting in the parents’ bedroom and spreading from there), even when it should be obvious, and women shouldn’t have to fight it alone without the help of male power.

It would be irresponsible and pointless to try to speculate on which of these horrific social scourges were specifically part of Mitchell’s lfe, and in the movie itself he takes pains to let us know as much: the mother has been writing a novel in her free time, in which she describes an unhappy housewife who plans to abandon her family, but she makes it clear that her urge to explore those feelings through her art doesn’t mean she’s describing herself. The End of Oak Street is 1980s Detroit as Mitchell saw it, and it’s there to make us feel like it felt for him. The fact that our heroes escape the prehistoric Earth through a shiny spherical bubble, like in the Terminator movies, gives us the last key for interpretation: whatever his personal hell, science fiction presented him with a way out. Just like it was for so many of us who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s, science fiction was how he escaped.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

The Recluce Reread: The Order War

Welcome back dear readers to the fourth installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to discuss The Order War, in which we learn a lot more about the nature of order and chaos, have more political Recluce drama, and end with a world changing finale - though if we’re being fair, a number of these early books have world changing finales.

If you’re keeping up with the series chronology, and I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone for just going with the flow, The Order War is set 400 years or so after the previous book, The Magic Engineer, which means it is around 700 years after the founding of Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset. The Order War is still some 200 years before we meet Lerris in The Magic of Recluce, though if you’ve read *that* book you’ll note very quickly that this is the same Justen that Lerris meets and Gunnar is Lerris’s father.

Modesitt changes up the Recluce formula a bit in The Order War. This time our protagonist Justen is not exiled from the island of Recluce (or functionally driven from Westwind as Creslin was) but as a magic engineer joins a small military detachment traveling to Sarronnyn to help defend it against the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Oh, those chaos mages. They just want to take over the whole world and there’s always some order mage getting in their way. 

To simplify a good amount of plot, In the battles against the Fairhaven wizards and troops, Justen is separated from the rest of the Recluce and while hunted by the white wizards eventually travels a decent way across Candar to the forest of Naclos (after being rescued by a druid who has been talking to him in his dreams)

In various novels we’ve encountered mentions of the druids, Naclos, the Great Forest, The Accursed Forest - but here we are introduced to the actual community that lives in the forest and in balance (always the balance) with nature and order and chaos. I may have to push the re-read farther than I was planning to see how deep into the Naclos lore we actually get. 

When we first met Justen in The Magic of Recluce we meet him as a Grey Wizard, one who embodies (sort of) both Order and Chaos. The rest of our protagonists and heroes have been fairly pure black (order) mages thus far - but what the novels have been hinting at to various degrees is that excessive order concentrated in one place or machines will only breed more chaos across the world, which is how the white wizards of Fairhaven have grown so powerful even as Recluce itself has become a world power. 

To the druids that accumulation of excessive order and chaos in the world is, well, unbalanced for how the world should be and is a harbinger of great conflicts to come. In Justen they see a potential druid who is at the cusp of understanding his own balance but who can also be a tool for stepping back into the world to “do something” about Fairhaven and respect the balance at the same time. Recluce has since learned that building a stronger fleet of order based ships or doing mighty deeds with massive amounts of order magic may achieve their short term strategic aim but will long term increase concentrations of chaos across Candar. Also - I kind of wonder how the island nations of Hamor and Nordla feel about all of that. Like, they are just minding their business and all of sudden, bam, there’s more powerful magicians in their land?

The thrust of all of this is a big climactic battle and mighty deeds and Justen (and his brother Gunnar, a weather mage like Creslin, along with a guard from Recluce) takes his newly built “land engine” and floats a giant magnifying glass in the sky and melts Fairhaven like an ant. It’s much more traumatic than that, both in the experience of it as well as the Frvn we first discovered in The Magic of Recluce.

The Order War is a significantly more satisfying book than The Magic Engineer was and Justen is a more enjoyable (less dangergeld whiny) protagonist to follow than Dorrin could ever hope to be, though there is still a pattern of not explaining things in this book as has been in the previous three. I suspect it’s because there is a greater maturity to Justen and he generally accepts Recluce and Order as they are, though we are not without conflicts with Recluce as the three person ruling council includes an incredibly corrupt trader and two other councilors who seem to not want to go against said councilor. It’s never smooth sailing. Conflict from within. Conflict from without. 

There is an ancient druid in Naclos. I don’t know when we learn who she is, but internet sleuthing tells me that she is Ayrlyn, one of the original “angels” who ended up in this world in the events we read about in The Fall of Angels and The Chaos Balance - which is approximately 1200 years in the past, if we’re wondering how long lived some of those druids can be. We also revisit Werlynn, a singer and druid, who mentions his long dead children, which we know are Creslin and Llyse from Westwind (if you remember The Towers of the Sunset).

Well - that’s it for The Order War. When we meet again we’ll talk about The Death of Chaos, in which everything ends even though Modesitt will write 20 more Recluce novels, but none set after that book.


Related Short Story: The Price of Perfect Order. 

Set 8 years after The Order War, the story doesn’t so much deal with the fallout of the climactic melting of Fairhaven and reduction of chaos and order as show some consequence of what it means to be truly ordered and how Recluce deals with those who don’t live up to that ideal.

What is interesting and not successful reading this right after The Order War is there is a trader named Ryltar, which unless I am getting twisted up character names, which is the same name as one of the antagonists of The Order War and in the same profession but is a 20ish year old trader who still seems wrong. Maybe I have the name wrong, but I read this right after finishing the novel and that aspect read incredibly discordant.

This is also probably my least favorite of the short stories I’ve read while pushing along the re-read.

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PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.