Realm of the Elderlings Project: Book 2, Royal Assassin

Fitz is angsty, but has reasons; and other characters are awesome

Cover illustration by John Howe

Brandon Sanderson describes the basic three-act structure of a plot as follows. In Act 1, you chase your hero up a tree. In Act 2, you throw rocks at them. In Act 3, you get them down again. Royal Assassin, book 2 of the Farseer Trilogy, the first installment of Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings saga, is 750 pages of Robin Hobb throwing rocks at Fitzchivalry Farseer. Rock after rock after rock. Poor Fitz. And it’s only going to get worse. 

In principle, it didn’t have to be this way. When we last left Fitz at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, things were not great, but there was hope of something better to come. A path forward, a path towards recovery. Despite Evil Uncle Regal’s (literally) poisonous shenanigans, the political marriage between Kettricken, Sacrifice of the Mountain Kingdom, and Good Uncle Verity came off as planned. Now, with the aid of their new ally, the Six Duchies might now have the resources to mount an effective defense against the brutal Red Ship Raiders, who have been laying waste to their towns and cities, and stripping their prisoners of humanity in a process known as Forging, after the first town whose people were so treated. Yes, Fitz got a bellyful of poison and nearly drowned, but he’s sort of recovering, and on the whole, things might still work out.

Ending Book 1 of a trilogy in this way is evidence of how new Robin Hobb was at this endeavour. She was still hedging her bets in that first of 16 books in the Realm of the Elderlings, giving readers an easy exit point, a way to check out with a sense of accomplishment and hope. It’s what makes Assassin’s Apprentice such a satisfying first book in the series. It makes the reader trust the writer: I had a good time, the reader thinks, but I’m not going to be compelled to continue reading if I don’t want to.

This is the last time such a thing will happen in a Robin Hobb series. 

And yet, somehow, despite all the large boulders the size of small boulders that Hobb chucks at Fitz, it never quite feels unfair because he does, kind of – well, not deserve it, quite. But you know how many books that feature whiny, angsty, stupid teenagers making stupid decisions are just exercises in frustration for the reader? This isn’t. No matter how stupid Fitz is (and gosh, is he ever a dummy in places), it’s never really the case that he could have averted his misfortunes by being smarter. ‘Oh, woe is me, the world is out to get me,’ wails the tediously self-absorbed teenage protagonist. Except in Fitz’s case, he’s right. He's the acknowledged bastard son of the former heir to the throne; he's loyal to King Shrewd and current heir-to-the-throne Prince Verity; and he's a mighty thorn in the side of Evil Prince Regal, who wants nothing more than to carry out a coup in peace, raid the kingdom for all its valuables, and retire to his comfortable inland Duchies, leaving the coastal duchies to take their chances with the Red Ship Raiders. Of course Regal's not going to take kindly to coastal Dukes' attempts to replace him with Fitz. Of course Regal's going to want to do a bit of murder on our narrator.

Still, I find this book the hardest to take, because, no matter how justified the angst, I still find angst a hard sell. So instead of whiny angsty Fitz, let’s talk about the other characters who deeply kick ass in this book. Let’s talk about Duke Brawndy, who, when Evil Regal withdraws all support against the Red Ship Raiders because he gives 0 fucks about the plight of blue states coastal duchies, organizes the defense of Bairns himself. It's doomed, and Bearns falls, but Duke Brawndy showed the world what proper leadership looked like.

 And speaking of leadership, let’s talk about got Kettricken. She’s wonderful in ways that are not ‘kick-ass princess on a horse with a sword.' To be sure, one of her best moments is exactly that -- but, crucially,  not because of that. In fact, it is wonderful because she rejects the equation of virtue with martial force. See, the people around the castle discover that a horde of Forged marauders have been lurking in the countryside, attacking and ravaging whoever they find. Aching with powerlessness against the Red Ship Raiders, the castle guard put together a hunting party. The goal is to find these Forged monsters and kill them, letting them stand in as targets for their rage against the raiders who created them and set them against the people of the Six Duchies. 

And Kettricken, on her horse and armed with a sword, tells them, No. Not that they mustn’t kill the Forged – they absolutely must – but that they mustn’t kill them in anger.  Forging cannot be undone –  all attempts at that have failed.  So the quarry of this hunt are their own people, Six Duchies people, who have been dead from the moment they were Forged. This expedition is not a hunting party, but a funeral. Instead of fighting and killing in anger, they must do it in mourning. They are not killing monsters. They are burying their dead (who must first be cut down until they stop moving). 

It's a beautiful moment, and illustrates exactly the kind of leader Kettricken is. How hard must it be to take powerless, furious, grieving warriors, who have worked themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust against a clear target, and tell them not to abandon their killing spree, which would be hard enough –but to continue with the killing spree, and abandon the bloodlust behind it? It’s a fantastic character moment, so much deeper and subtler than just making Ketricken someone who’s good at swinging a sword and being violent. 

Then, we’ve got Patience, and her quietly magnificent companion, Lacy, who definitely has training that goes well beyond stitchery. Patience is the wife of Fitz’s father, Prince Chivalry, but not his mother – because, remember, he is a bastard. She never had any children of her own, but in a deeply mature way, she decides not to resent Fitz, whose very existence is proof that their fertility problems originated on her end. Instead, she pursues a relationship with him, and ends up being one of his strongest allies – but never really a comfortable ally. Their interactions are full of the deepest respect and goodwill, and also uncomfortable and awkward in a way that never really eases, and feels deeply real.

Again, this is an example of Hobb’s skill at characterization. There are relationships other than antagonism, friendship, romance, and found family, that authors can build between their characters, and this is one of them. And it doesn’t even interfere with plot! You don’t need to be best friends or lovers to plot how to spirit the queen away from a castle where her evil brother-in-law is orchestrating a coup and would dearly love to make her and her unborn true Farseer heir conveniently disappear. You don’t have to be sworn comrades to stitch up each other’s wounds following capture and torture – although it does take a slightly odd perspective on the world to insist on doing that after your awkward-but-respected acquaintance is already lying dead on a gaol floor, awaiting burial. Still, Patience does have a neurodivergent perspective – ADHD coded, jumping from obsession to obsession and prone to hyperfixation in a way that yields oddly useful tidbits of information. And since it turns out  that Fitz is really, really hard to kill completely, the dead-body stitchery is also useful. It’s nice, when being dug up from a fresh grave, to have first aid already completed.

And, finally, we’ve got Nighteyes. Despite Fitz’s repeated ill-fated attempts to bond with puppies in the previous book, he goes and does it again here, this time with a wolf. Nighteyes is great – not just because he’s a talking wolf, but because here, finally, we have a relationship between Fitz and someone else that is true, open, trusting, and not hampered by any of the missed opportunities that made the previous book such a lonely read. 

It’s Fitz’s bond with Nighteyes that makes it possible for him to nope out of his body after Regal finally finds a reason to catch him, torture him, and beat him to death. (To be fair, part of this is on Fitz. He did go on a very ill-advised murderous rampage through the castle and kinda sorta agree to let Duke Brawndy put him in Regal's place while Brawndy planned a coup of his own, so it’s not like Regal had to work all that hard to come up with an excuse to get rid of him.) Only by placing his consciousness into Nighteyes’s mind can he take a break from the world of humans, which has treated him so badly, and denied him any bonds that might encourage him to remain. (Again, to be fair, another part of this is again on Fitz. His beloved Molly left him in no doubt as to what he wanted, and he took ages to talk to Shrewd about marrying her, and then ages to tell her that Shrewd said no. She ends up much, much better off without him than she ever could be tied down to him.) 

 And it’s Fitz’s bond with Nighteyes that allows us to learn more about the Wit, this wild, animal-based magic that is a counterpart to the royally-approved Skill. From Fitz’s perspective, the Wit gives him a sense of presence of living things: animals, yes, but also people. It’s his Wit that allows him to recognize how inhuman the Forged are: they give off no more sense of presence than a rock. But from Nighteyes’ perspective, the Wit gives him insight into humans. Burrich, who seems so cold and disapproving, who finds the Wit obscene while indulging, against his own values, in a bond with his own dog, is still Heart of the Pack to Nighteyes. Kettricken is not really Witted, but she has a sense for life that Nighteyes senses in her, and it's part of what makes her such a conscientious devoted leader. Nighteyes recognizes people in other terms from human terms, and in so doing offers another layer of characterization.

Because – have I said it before? Hobb is a master of characterization. Even when she’s characterizing an angsty teenager. And, as we’ll see next month, she’s also a master of plot.  

--

References:

Hobb, Robin. Royal Asssassin. [Harper Collins, 1996].

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

Anime Review: Hell’s Paradise

Fascinating characters and deep philosophical explorations balance the intense violence of this unusual tale 

After hearing much acclaim for this gruesome anime, I finally decided to try out Hell’s Paradise although I’m not normally a fan of very gory or intensely nihilistic fiction. However, Hell’s Paradise lives up to the hype and delivers fascinating characters, meaningful emotions, and intriguing backstories in its very violent first season. 

Hell’s Paradise is set in a fictional historical time period and is primarily the story of Gabimaru, an emotionless assassin taken from his murdered parents as an infant and trained from childhood by a cruel ninja leader to be a high level killer with no emotional attachments. Gabimaru’s efficient and ruthless killing, along with his lack of emotion lead to his nickname, “Gabimaru the Hollow.” As a reward for his overwhelming successes at killing, Gabimaru is given his leader’s daughter as a wife. Gabimaru initially treats her with emotionless indifference, however his wife is unexpectedly emotionally strong, intellectually thoughtful, and intentionally kind in a way that slowly brings Gabimaru back to his humanity. Of course, this kind of happiness can’t last. Gabimaru is sentenced to death for trying to leave the assassin group so he can stop killing and live quietly in his marriage. He is jailed and separated from his wife (whose fate is unclear throughout the story). However, despite his death sentence, he remains alive because repeated violent and horrific executions fail to kill or even injure him and he becomes bored to the point of despondence. This leads some to believe he is a demon. After multiple attempts at killing him fail, Gabimaru and several other condemned prisoners are given a chance for a pardon, but the cost is high. They must journey, each with an assigned asaemon (guard/executioner), to a fabled paradise island and bring back a substance known as the Elixir of Life. The prisoner who successfully brings back the elixir will get a pardon but everyone else will be executed. Gabimaru is suddenly motivated to live, and accepts the offer in the hopes of earning a pardon so he can be reunited with his wife. 

All of these detail are just the premise. The main plot of Hell’s Paradise is composed of the experiences of the prisoners and their guards as they navigate the unimaginable terrors of the island along with their own internal demons. Gabimaru is assigned a young woman named Sagiri as his guard. She is lethal, quiet, and introspective, but also periodically insecure—not because of her skills but because of the constant sexism and gaslighting she faces. Her internal journey to balance, rather than suppress, her emotions becomes entangled with Gabimaru’s unsteady journey to and from emotional deadness. Over time, the two build a strange connection. The initial exploration of the island is portrayed through the experiences of Gabimaru and Sagiri, but the story soon shifts to the intriguing backstories of the other prisoners, some wrongfully condemned, and the asaemon guards, many with complex motivations or unexpected viewpoints. These include loud and powerful Chobei and gentle but lethal Toma, the criminal and guard pair who are secretly brothers. The anime also follows the poignant friendship between the reformed criminal guard Tenza and innocent child prisoner Nurugai. 

The overall vibe of the story feels like a combination of shows like Lost, Jujustsu Kaisen, and Squid Game. It has the mysterious island setting of Lost along with the intriguing character backstories that lured Lost viewers in the first two seasons. It has the intensely artistic animation style of Jujustsu Kaisen (MAPPA is the same animation house that does both series) and it has the fantastical, supernatural creature element, in which unexpected, strange, or grotesque creatures create an ongoing atmosphere of uncertainty for characters who are constantly surprised by new antagonists with randomly unknown levels of strength. And, if that isn’t stressful enough, there is the Squid Game-style lethal competitiveness where the prisoners are pitted against each other in a race for both the elixir and survival. But, what makes all of this stress worth it are the primary characters. Each one is intriguing, tragic, likeable, and complicated, making the show more than just a bloodbath or an adrenaline rush of adventure. Each individual’s race for survival is an extension of the character’s struggles that began long before they arrived on the mysterious island. 

Hell’s Paradise is also a dizzying philosophical exploration of conflicting concepts. The fabled paradise of the island is actually a hellscape of terrors hidden in serenely beautiful plants and flowers. The titans of the island, the Tensen, continuously shift genders, sometimes mid-conversation or mid-conflict. The trees are human beings. The only child on the island is hundreds of years old. Throughout the story, characters ponder a range of conflicting philosophies in an ongoing struggle to understand their unbelievable experiences. In fact, each episode has a title and theme which reflects the ongoing inherent or interwoven dichotomy (“Heart and Reason,” “Gods and People,” “Dreams and Reality”). 

Be warned that Hell’s Paradise is not a teen shonen anime. The show has adult content in terms of both violence and sexuality. Those less familiar with the discussed philosophical theories, may want to research some of the referenced concepts, although it is not essential to do so. Gabimaru and Sagiri start as the primary protagonists but gradually merge into the ever-changing ensemble, and, as the story progresses, it turns out many of the core elements of the journey may not be what they seem. The effect is, at times, intense, heartbreaking, and profound. However, the next season of Hell’s Paradise is still a year away. So, there is still plenty of time to become immersed in this violent but uniquely addictive adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Fascinating characters with intriguing backstories
• Extremely bloody
• Thoughtful philosophical explorations amid fast-paced fight scenes.

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

Film Review: Dog Man

Let's pretend the unsanctioned decapitation didn't matter, and let's have a deep conversation about parenthood and growth

First, a confession: it's been a long time since I've tried a story targeted specifically at very small children. I'd forgotten the tons of suspension of disbelief required to simply sit and enjoy the mayhem. But apparently, from what I can gather, there's been some great storytelling going on in that area, with the likes of Peppa Pig and Bluey straddling the line between wholesome and topical, and even commentators finding fuel for discussion in the politics of Paw Patrol. So I guess I should start paying more attention to that segment of SFF.

Another confession: what drew me to the new DreamWorks animated film Dog Man wasn't this realization of a gap in my screen watching record, but simple morbid curiosity for how a production for kids was going to handle its spectacularly gruesome premise: the titular hero is a Frankenstein-ish monstrosity built by sewing the head of an almost-dead dog onto the body of a (now most definitely) dead man. Dr. Vladimir Demikhov would be proud. Because this is a fun adventure in bright colors, the movie cheerfully brushes away the obvious questions about animal cruelty or the fact that a man has been decapitated to create this abomination. Look, a dog walking on two legs!

Following the long and rather strange tradition of severely injured characters technomagically transformed into obligate crimefighters (think of The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, Inspector Gadget, M.A.N.T.I.S., Max Steel, or Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex games), Dog Man promptly resumes the frenzied chase for an evil cat called Petey, whose crime is... getting revenge on Dog Man, I guess? We aren't told what was the original misdeed that kickstarted this cycle of dramatic arrests and creative prison escapes, but the sequence is undeniably funny.

(Also, let the record show that I protest this slander against cats.)

This first part of the movie goes like a breeze and helps the viewer get used to the lightning pace of the story. Not only are we treated to a beautiful picture-book art style, with clouds that look like crayon scribbles and canine howls that visually reach from one scene to the next; we're asked to switch off our brains and delight in the rapid succession of cuteness and absurdity and pathos and newfound joy.

Petey the cat only changes tactics when he runs out of ideas for increasingly wackier doomsday machines (I am impressed by his seemingly infinite R&D budget), and when he tries to create a duplicate of himself, he ends up with a child duplicate of himself. And that's when the actual theme of the movie is presented to us. This is more than a slapstick series of loud, splashy cartoonish antics. If it were only that, it already does it pretty well. But what Dog Man is actually about is the question of inborn tendencies vs. conscious choice.

Little Petey is sweet, friendly, optimistic, and without one drop of cynicism. He can see the best side of the worst people. Adult Petey, the typical jaded edgelord, wants to teach him that life is the opposite of that. But after a messy series of mishaps, Little Petey gets the chance to spend some days living with Dog Man. And Dog Man is going through the same identity crisis: does he want to be a policeman with serious obligations, as his human part, or a fun-seeking dog, as his other part? His canine instincts have already interfered with his duties too many times by now, but he doesn't know what other job to do.

I find it reassuring that Dog Man acknowledges the difficulty of this question. It even introduces a quick subplot about adult Petey's father that helps the young audience get a sense of how learned mistakes can be perpetuated across generations. Evil, as the plot demonstrates, is more a matter of actions than one of immutable nature. So is love. That's a precious message to present to the children who will be too amused by the endless gags to notice upon first watching. But a few years from now, when they want to revisit the immensely entertaining experience that was Dog Man, they'll find the strong heart that was beating at the center of it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: The History of the World Begins in Ice by Kate Elliott

A diverse set of stories and essays set in Kate Elliott’s world of Cold Magic (Spiritwalker)

The Spiritwalker/Cold Magic books by Kate Elliott are self-described as taking place in a post-Roman Afro-Celtic icepunk regency fantasy setting. That’s a lot of adjectives and nouns, but the complexity of this Earth, that never was but resonates with our own, is a rich invention that, beyond the bounds of the three novels, begs for more development, involvement and exploration.

The History of the World Begins In Ice: Stories and Essays from the World of Cold Magic is here just for that. We get a curtain pulled away to watch the author develop and create a setting from more angles and facets than the novels you “see on the screen.” A lot of worldbuilding for novels, especially in SFF, is below the waterline of the iceberg, never to be seen. Given the wide range of writing that Elliott had already done in developing this setting, bringing it all together seemed like a no-brainer. And given that the Spiritwalker series is (unusually for Elliott) a first-person point-of-view series, having stories from other perspectives is a way to get some of the wider-screen experience you get in many of her other works, in bite-sized formats. And the essays give a look underneath that waterline.

So what’s here?

The three quarters of the book are fictional pieces arranged in chronological order, starting decades before the events of the novels, up to a story about the youngest daughter of Andevai and Cat, thirteen years after the series ends. We get a variety of points of view, characters, themes, and styles, ranging from the origin story of Kemal, far to the east, to the epic poem of the Beatriceid, to a story about a little girl who is convinced what she wants to be when she grows up... but more importantly, wants to find her stuffed animal. The stories are relatively light, fresh, and delightful. I had read several of these before, and it’s good to have them in one place. Many were unavailable for years until this volume came along.

For me, the last quarter is where this book really sings and comes to light. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beatriceid, and The Secret Journal, and much else in the fictional section. But it is when Kate starts talking worldbuilding that I sit up and *listen*. We get essays on why Kate wrote this book, the thinking process behind the magic system, the geography (Doggerland represent!), the development of the Antilles creole, character development studies, maps, and more. You can guess how much detail and research goes into a thick Kate Elliott book and series; here is where she shows her work and the way it’s done. The true extent of the “iceberg” is revealed. I found the essays on the creole language particularly fascinating; it’s the deepest dive I’ve seen on the subject short of talking with a full-on linguist.

One last thing to note is that the book is well illustrated throughout. Some of these stories and works, such as The Secret Journal of Beatrice Hassi Barahal¹, already had copious artwork, but others are newly commissioned for this edition. Like the artwork for The Secret Journal, the addition of art for this work really completes the book, and it would not be nearly as compelling without it. Through the history of the Spiritwalker series, the art really has gone hand in hand with the writing, and I am pleased that tradition continues here. The galley review copy proudly lists the artists’ names on the cover. Part of the reason to get this book in print is to get the artwork (which really is wasted on a digital screen).

The last and important thing to ask about this book is: Who is it for? If you are a fan and reader of Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker series, this review just confirms known facts, and you may have purchased this already. (If not, get thee to a bookstore or library.) If you are a reader of hers but haven’t read the Spiritwalker books and have been curious about them, you might like this collection if for no other reason than its “back half.” The process of Elliott’s worldbuilding and the facets of it may well be in your interest... and this collection in general might then spur you to pick up Cold Magic.

But what if you haven’t read any Kate Elliott? Is this volume for you? This is where I feel uncomfortable and conflicted. I want to say yes, because I do want her work widely read and loved as I love it. But the stories are atypical of her longer SFF works (when she’s written things like even novellas, it felt like an ill-suited fit for her). She’s widescreen, big screen all the way. So while you get tastes of the world she has built in Cold Magic, the stories do resonate better if you have some “buy-in” to that world, so reading the origin story of Kemal, or the Beatriceid, or the funny misadventures of Rory in To Be a Man may just not land quite as much without that background.

So I’m going to have to reluctant come down on the answer of *mostly* no. If you’ve never read any of the Spiritwalker books, or any Kate Elliott, this is not the place to start with it. Unless, maybe if you are a fantasy writer, or aspire to be, and want to see how a master writes an intensely built and created world. For those people, the last portion of the book may be an invaluable guide.

For those curious, Kate has a blog post on where to start with her work, written in a unique format.

Highlights:

• Great art that compliments the writing
• Fascinating worldbuilding essays
• Welcome return overall to the Spiritwalker 'verse

Reference: Elliott, Kate. The History of the World Begins in Ice: Stories and Essays from the World of Cold Magic [Fairwood Press, 2024].

¹ A formatting criticism that really doesn’t fit elsewhere: I am glad that I had read The Secret Journal before. As it so happens, the electronic review copy I had was not formatted well, and treated this section of the book like a PDF, which made it impractical and unpleasant to read on my Kindle. I skimmed through a physical galley I had to make sure I had not forgotten details of the story. I hope the final electronic copy does not suffer the same issues.

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

What the Hell, Star Trek?

There was never going to be a good way to tell a story where Section 31 are the heroes, but it didn't need to reach this abysmal degree of atrociousness

For all the excellent ideas to come out of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it had some… less excellent ones. The Klingon episodes were tedious, the Ferengi episodes were cringeworthy, and the Trill episodes only had one topic to be about. The series had a bizarre obsession with fetishizing manual agriculture, an incongruous skepticism of the capabilities of galactic medicine, and a willful inability to trust the Federation's sincerity. Deep Space Nine turned the Federation's enlightened optimism into a veneer that concealed ruthless pragmatism, effectively dragging Earth into the same muddy playing field of Romulus or Cardassia. Although I'm typically in favor of questioning claims to exceptionalism, the version of Earth presented there was hardly one that would have founded something like the Federation. And Deep Space Nine's fundamentally cynical view of humans found concrete form in the worst creation of the series: the clandestine operations agency of the Federation government known as Section 31.

The rationale for introducing Section 31 to the Star Trek setting was that, if future Earth is able to thrive as a peaceful, prosperous utopia, it's only because it has spies and assassins scattered everywhere, discreetly doing the thankless work of keeping humans safe. In other words, series showrunner Ira Steven Behr either refused or failed to imagine a perfectly happy society that was capable of sustaining itself without doing a bit of evil under the table. It has often been said, by the most radically traditionalist fans, that Deep Space Nine contradicted the whole philosophy of Star Trek. They're only partially right. Such defiance of canonical ethos didn't happen because the series eschewed the Planet of the Week format, or because it gave a voice to protagonists outside of Federation authority, or because it refrained from giving every problem a simple, high-tech solution. Deep Space Nine broke away from the core assumptions of Star Trek because its humans aren't the focal point of view by default, and they don't provide the show's moral center. These humans play dirty. Sometimes they're downright nasty. Winning the Dominion War via biological weapon plus attempted genocide left humans in a morally unstable position that subsequent shows haven't dared to acknowledge.

A few years later, in the revived Battlestar Galactica, captain William Adama said this wonderful line: "It's not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving." That is the test of moral fortitude that the humankind of Star Trek fails by having a Section 31. The very thing that made Star Trek stand out from other works of space opera was its trust in reasoned argument and the fundamental goodwill of every sapient being. This was a gust of fresh air in a science fiction ecosystem where conflicts tended to be resolved by who had the biggest pew-pew. Giving humans a Section 31 undermines the message of any episode that tries to present as reprehensible the cruelty and treachery of the Romulan Tal Shiar or the Cardassian Obsidian Order.

And none of these are the reasons why the new Star Trek: Section 31 movie is a horrendous mistake.

Again, Section 31 was always a bad idea, but that has nothing to do with why this movie doesn't work. The movie doesn't work because the dialogues are lazy, the characterizations are one-note, the pacing is erratic, the set design is boringly generic, the fight choreography is impossible to follow, the performances (save for the always exquisite Michelle Yeoh) are either dialed down to utterly forgettable or dialed up to utterly irritating, the villain's plan contradicts his own goals, the heroes' solution is to repeat the villain's plan, and the direction is too obviously desperate to add some energy to an insipid nothingburger by inserting gratuitous camera movements that can't disguise how mediocre the whole production is. Think of any of the thousand ingredients necessary for making a movie (casting, lighting, scriptwriting, editing, color grading), and every one of them fails catastrophically.

Section 31 starts with a prologue showing us former Empress Philippa Georgiou's backstory. We learn that the evil Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe elects its ruler via survival contest. We see young Philippa return to her home village, exhausted after countless rounds of brutal fighting, tasked now with severing her personal attachments, which she succeeds at by giving her family a painful, slow death by infodump. So she wins the throne, plus her closest competitor as a slave. I'm no expert on dictatorial practices, but I suspect that keeping in your palace the person who almost got the throne is tantamount to asking to be poisoned, stabbed, and defenestrated several times before breakfast. Add to this the fact that she and her runner-up were in love, and that she effortlessly went full tyrant on him the nanosecond she was declared Empress, and you have a fertile ground for drama that the rest of the movie proceeds to casually throw in the trash.

The actual thing that has the temerity of passing for a plot in Section 31 is the quest to intercept a superweapon that someone wants to sell to someone. We're told that the eponymous secret agency is given this mission because the sale is going to happen outside Federation territory (it just so happens to be former Empress Georgiou's bar/disco/love hotel, because when an unrepentant despotic genocidal cannibal from another universe is set loose in ours, the thing she chooses to do with her life is create jobs). After extended infodumps that matter not one bit, because they're about describing a hypothetical convoluted heist plan that has just been frustrated, the aforementioned superweapon, which turns out to be a conveniently portable item designed to look and spin like the illegitimate child of a d20 and a Hellraiser puzzle box, is tossed around like a hot potato between Georgiou and a mysterious new enemy until it's time for the next infodump.

Also, time for a reveal: the superweapon was built in the Mirror Universe, by orders from Geourgiou herself. She explains that it's capable of killing an entire quadrant of the galaxy, and somehow it never occurs to the team of expertly trained defenders of the Federation that they might want to alert the galaxy about the faction that intended to buy such an item. Instead, the entire second act is derailed by what should have been minor subplots: rooting out a traitor in the team, getting clues from a body camera, repairing a damaged ship—these tasks consume too much precious runtime, detracting from the tension that the movie should want to maintain about, you know, stopping a superweapon that can kill a whole quadrant of the galaxy.

Not that the villain intends to do anything remotely comprehensible with the weapon. To end quadrillions of lives as preparation for a campaign of conquest is to inflict scorched earth on yourself. This plan makes so little sense that it's perversely fitting that the heroes fly into battle on a garbage transport ship and improvise, as their only available attack, a load of garbage timed to explode.

That's right: the resolution of this movie comes via literal dumpster fire.

The aesthetic, the tone and the metaphors of this movie seem calculated to maximize the viewers' angry revulsion. The story is a textbook MacGuffin chase like every other MacGuffin chase you've watched. The main characters don't have personalities but post-it notes: the movie stars Walking Tragic Past, Only Sensible One, Barely Repressed Chaotic Neutral, All Points Went To Armor Class, Galaxy's Most Punchable Face, and Blatant Eye Candy. In fact, let's talk for a minute about the Deltan in the room, because the very fact that they chose to have a Deltan in this movie illustrates the instrumental way its characters are treated. In Star Trek, Deltans are an alien species whose entire deal is being irresistibly hot. The franchise has never known what to do with the Deltans except point and ogle, which means they're not allowed to be people in a story, only talking decoration. So of course, this time as every time, as soon as the Deltan does her one trick, she's quickly out of the movie. And it goes likewise with the rest of the cast, who have all the inner life of a call menu.

To conclude the list of questionable choices that went into this production, Section 31 doesn't tell us anything about Section 31. This was the best opportunity to explore the ethical complications inherent to resorting to dirty tactics in the service of a nominally righteous civilization. It also could have given us a more nuanced portrait of Philippa Georgiou as an exiled tyrant with a whole galaxy's worth of skeletons in her closet. But Section 31 has no interest in the complex questions. And if anything defines the essence of a Star Trek story, it's the willingness to jump deep into the complex questions and live with the complex answers. What we get instead is a movie incapable of realizing that a secret police is by definition the opposite of cool, and that a cannibal mass murderer is a terrible choice of hero, and its too-hard attempts to make that disastrous combination work are just embarrassing to watch.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

An incomplete list of recurring motifs found in the novel Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

• A woman growing a beard. Caught on camera or seen in person, the act is impossible to believe, but its method cannot be understood, by viewers or by the reader. There is weirdness in the world, and we must simply accept it.
• Miracolo. Miracle hands. Hands that make miracles. Art is a miracle. Sport is a miracle. Science is a miracle. All the things that humans do, that touch one another, metaphorically and literally. The urge to reach out a hand to those around you, the only possible reaction to the knowledge of the inevitability of death.
• Tree of heaven—a real type of tree, which I had to look up to be certain of. So much in this book is invented, but feels real, I began to doubt myself on all manner of things. It is an invasive species in the US, fast-growing and hardy, and it outcompetes local species to take up space and resources. The book is set across a huge span of times, thousands of years, on Earth and Mars, but so much of it is in the near future as we see resources dry up and competition become fiercer, and the things that thrive within that environment are not always beneficial to those around them.
• Anne Frank. Subtly at first, and then with strangeness, and then understanding upon which the novel pivots.
• This one weird book about a droplet of water in an arid, dried-up future Earth. The droplet dies at the end, but that ending is considered happy. How people respond to the book, the art they make themselves after having read it. The life of the author, and what that drove him to, the rippling effects on his family down the years, and the people they interacted with, spreading out and out across geography and time.
• Tattoos. Medical tattoos, weird tattoos, tattoos that are art and books and crimes and innovations. The body as a canvas and a battleground. Who owns the body? No, really, who owns that one specific body they want to drop into the sea for science?
• Weird art. Sometimes on bodies, living or dead, but not always.
• An address in New York—7 Tailor Lane, the Diamond Exchange, which I don't know if it's real or not. I don't want to look it up. I want to preserve some of the mystery, knowing as I do that the author has inserted so many absolutely plausible bits of fiction, alongside the obvious truths and obvious lies. But seeing one physical location recur, even as its occupants are recorded over and over in obituaries, makes them more poignant, and even more so when the building, as a sidenote in another story, gets its own obituary of a sort. Death comes for things beyond the living.
• The tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it. Is it a tree of heaven? Any kind of tree, really. The witness of a human to its suffering is not required for that suffering and death to matter, or be real.
• Witness and martyrdom. Witnessing in all the senses. Obituary is an act of witness, speaking for those who can no longer speak for themselves. It reminded me of, in The Goblin Emperor, the witnesses vel ama, whose role is to speak for people and things, whether the dead or the inanimate, whose voices matter within a particular frame of reference, but who cannot speak for themselves. But the reader is also the witness. Obituary is a reflexive verb; the subject becomes the object eventually. Memento mori is also memento testis fieri. Testis, testis (n.), witness, but also just a third party, as we are to the story, as we must become, through the passage of time. We must all bear witness.  
• Etymologies—are these real, or very well faked? I don't know. Does it even matter? They felt real, and more critically, after we are given each thematically appropriate etymology for the moment in the story, we get examples of sentences in which the words are used. In these sentences, we find the only examples of the voice of Peregrine, searching for her daughter, and then simply for meaning. As if meaning can be found in looking back through time like that, simply cataloguing fleeting moments of existence and pinning them down to the page. Wait. Am I talking about obituaries or etymologies?
• The fictional virgin Wilgefortis. Is she real-world fictional, or fictionally fictional? Does this matter? I suppose that's becoming a theme within the themes—it is increasingly difficult, as the story progresses, to unpick which pieces the author has invented and which have been pulled from history. It would be possible to look them all up, as I did for quite a few in the beginning, but I decided the story is better if I believed in all of them, even the ones I knew were false, as long as the narrative wanted me to. Stories do not need to be gutted and pickled, each organ in its own labelled bottle of formaldehyde, and some stories yearn to live in their own mystery more than others. This feels to me like one of those stories. It does not resist explanation, but perhaps resents it. It didn't need to be explicable to have meaning that mattered to me as a reader.
• Art as meaning, or lack of meaning. The relationship it has with the artist and the witness observer. It makes sense that so many of the people discussed in the story would be artists—they seem, more than many, to be whom we expect to see memorialised. They matter. Even the small ones whose art touches only a few lives. Art weaves itself through the story, constantly, but especially art being destroyed, lost or found again. Art as a vector for ideas of memory and legacy, and being forgotten. There is something particularly poignant in the art being found of a child taken too early, whose gift was unknown to everyone around her. Her loss is in the loss of the art she did not create.
• The having, or not having, of children. Who can have children, whose womb can be used to bear children, in whose body, being a transgressive act. This feels apt right now, but has always been. It made me think of Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock, imagining changes in reproductive science and the culture around it in vignettes going on into the future. This may be a story told in death, but aren't we always concerned with whom the dead do (or do not) leave behind them. She is survived by her parents. His husband. Their many friends. Her daughter. Obituaries are, so the story says at one point, for the living after all.
• Forgetting, being forgotten, leaving nothing behind. Because in a story about the ways we remember, there is naturally the negative space in which we consider what has been lost.
• Memorial/legacy are the natural contrast, of course. And it goes without saying that a book written in obituaries is concerned with memorials. The Latin "mori" again, in there though it's not related (sometimes what looks like etymology is just a coincidence, and not all puzzles have such easy solutions). The very earliest snippet in the story is not an obituary at all, but a collection of translated Roman tombstones, just as heartbreaking as ever they are to read. People have always been people, and always grieved the dead. It is always useful to remember that some things do exist that connect us through time like this. They reminded me of Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley in that there's no commentary on those tombstones, but their position within the story feels very pointedly to say part of what she does in her story, that connections exist, reaching backwards and forwards through time. But the absence of commentary reminds us that we are, sometimes, on our own trying to understand them, and we cannot verify if our connection back to the past is truly the one we believe it to be.
• Obituaries. The previous point being said, very nearly the whole story is told through obituaries, of people connected to other people connected to other people, all through history. They are the real story; this is a book about people. But in the background as well, there's another story, a mother/a machine/a monster on the run, hunted down by law enforcement and fanatics. A mother who has lost her daughter, and is hunting for her too, even as she is hunted. At every moment in the book, the focus is only on someone no longer living. How can a story have action, if all the participants are dead? But maybe stories don't need action, and the three-act structure is so passé. We're not so gauche as to need any direct actions, and can subsist quite happily instead on remembrances, if done well. The kind that tell us not only about the deceased, nor even just about the person who writes about them, but about their world, and about the perceived reader. Worldbuilding relegated to the margins of an often marginal form of writing—in the assumptions the reader would surely already have, and the gaps we see formed by those assumptions in our own understanding. Infodumps and exposition are surely even more passé than action?
• Flowers. Poppies. Where has Poppy gone? Peregrine is searching for her daughter Poppy, who committed suicide and then ran away. The image of the poppy, a symbol of pain and war and death, often paired with the rose and all its many meanings and associations. But the poppy is also life coming out of death, when the flowers grow on the churned-up mud of the battlefield. Symbols (or motifs) can have multiple meanings.
• Femininity. Or rejection thereof. Women through history whose place was forged in pain and determination. Throwing piss out of windows and being run over by a hansom cab. Deliberately having a sex scandal with a politician and getting oneself arrested just to get the publicity to keep your business afloat after a strange stage artist does a magic trick that didn't make any sense and ruined the whole act.
• Absence of understanding, in which is contained, right in the middle of the story, a dramatic crux that passes by almost without fanfare. One of the most dramatic, obvious unrealities of the story, that makes you sit up and ask "wait, what?" is the product of that misunderstood artist, a stage magician doing real... well, not quite magic, or maybe it is. We'll never know, after she was booed off stage. But her art, magic, science, whatever it is, changes history. Except that, once it got changed, history had never changed at all, because no one remembered the difference except her.
• Escape, of all kinds. The physical, the emotional and the metaphorical. Peregrine escapes capture and danger again and again, in the margins and the background of the story, back and forward through time.
• Faked deaths are a subset of the above, as a kind of escape. But at least one of them is also a kind of performance art.
• Real deaths. Likewise.
• Escaping, or at least postponing, death. Which is only possible up to a point, as per the book's title.
• Grief, which is inevitable, after that inevitable death. It can't be avoided, only understood. Perhaps by looking at etymology after etymology, trying to sift meaning out of the building blocks of human understanding.
• Acceptance which comes after the process of grief, though probably not as a direct result of any specific activity, just through the passage of time.
• Inevitability. That passage of time, for one. But, as the cover says, of death.
• Uncertainty, which is at odds with that inevitability, but when so many people manage to fake their deaths, you can never quite trust the particulars, even if, broadly speaking, we know it comes for them eventually. Obituaries are written by people, and so are flawed as they are, whether by bias, misunderstanding or a lack of complete facts.
• AI. Maybe I should have said this one sooner, given how central it is to the plot, and that it's right there on the back cover blurb. Peregrine, who has lost her human daughter Poppy, is an AI. How does that work? Well, that takes quite a few obituaries to explain, but is well worth the explanation when you get there. And it's more satisfying to learn piecemeal, at least in my opinion, as each detail falls into place when linked to the person who made it happen. Peregrine and Poppy's lives are a tapestry of many, many threads of connection with all these (dead) people, and can —or perhaps should— only be understood by witnessing them as individuals, whose brief moment in the spotlight recognises them as the main character in their own story, not just a bit player in a wider tale.
• What does it mean to be a person? Who gets to be one? AI stories always tackle this one, but it's not just the AI we're examining that about here, and not just in the trite way of turning it on its head and asking what truly makes us human. Everything Eden Robins does, through every part of this book, turns on subtlety, and no more so than here. This is a question without a clear answer given in the text, and all the better (as most things tackling the big themes are) for not presuming to have one at all. Experience Peregrine's life, and the lives of those around her, and decide for yourself.
• The relationship between humanity and mortality. Which is critical to that above question. Is mortality necessary for the definition of humanity? It's a thesis put forward, and not a novel one, though one worth considering all the same. By telling a story in obituaries, by putting death and the finity of life front and centre, the story considers that these lives can only be told in their absence, that their completion is critical to the telling.
• And so, the ending. All endings. The story ended before it was begun. All action was viewed from a detached future point of resolution, and it was all entirely gripping nonetheless. It takes a skilled author to handle something like this, and keep each individual text worthwhile and still a meaningful piece of the whole, but Robins manages it all the way through. She plays with format, prose style and voice constantly, and is willing to let meaning take its time to develop, without the last quarter panic crescendo common to so many stories. Every single obituary is a full text, and forms into a sum greater than its many, many parts, that is well worth the time spent reading it.

Reference: Robins, Eden. Remember You Will Die [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].

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