Book Review: A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

Meat is murder

This is a book about murder and forced labour as well as the cost of beef. And the last is quite probably the most important.

A Trade of Blood is the third book in Robert Jackson’s Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series of fantasy mysteries. The books follow the duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol as they investigate politically sensitive crimes across a biohacked secondary world empire which is constantly threatened by attacks from massive, amphibious Titans from the sea (think Pacific Rim-esque kaiju). Both Ana and Din have had significant biological enhancements. Ana struggles greatly with external stimuli but is able to stitch together astonishing chains of logic when provided with appropriate information. Din, meanwhile, has been altered to have perfect, photographic memory. He investigates, observes, and reports back to Ana, who reaches conclusions with alarming rapidity.

In A Trade of Blood, Ana and Din travel away from the sharp end of the Titan threat for the first time in the series (the first two books having been set right near the sea where the Titans come ashore). They travel to the agricultural heartland of the empire to investigate the killing of the daughter of one of two key families in the beef industry by the son of the other key family. Any disruption of food supplies would seriously upset the stability of the Empire, and thus Ana and Din, specialist Imperial Iudex (the judicial/police/investigative branch of government), are sent to try to resolve the matter with a minimum of fuss. The facts of the killing seem largely indisputable, but the victim doesn’t remain the only dead body for long, and things get a little bit more complicated than they first appear, leading into a well-crafted, engaging mystery. I picked the culprit a bit earlier in this book than in the earlier ones, but it all still, in my view, worked very well.

As with previous books in the series, Ana and Din are very much our core cast, and their dynamic is fantastic. Ana is salty and waspish, and has absolutely no filter. Din, in contrast, is the straight man, sighing along, but also giving his own deadpan ripostes. This is established from the very start of the book, which opens thus:

“IT IS AN INARGUABLE TRUTH, you know,” said Ana, “that most people are absolutely enthralled by dead girls.”
I cracked my eyes and gazed at the carriage ceiling, certain I’d misheard this comment. I waited, listening to the rumble of the wheels and the crackling of the horses’ hooves on the gravel road.
Perhaps she would stop now, I thought. Perhaps there would be no more of it.
I shut my eyes and sought my way back to sleep.
“In fact, did you know, Din …” said Ana.
I opened them again.

It’s a genuinely funny dynamic, but it’s also great character work; the general banter and occasional seriousness and sincerity make it clear that these two, three books and a year or so into their working relationship, like and respect each other. Both also have ongoing, though low-key, plot threads that carry through from earlier books, Ana relating to what exactly her modifications are and Din to a quite difficult family history (these do mean that the book doesn’t entirely stand alone—though you can certainly enjoy a significant majority of what’s going on in the book without having read the first two, you would be missing enjoyable context if you did so).

The interchanging support cast is also (as it was in the first two books) very well done. This ranges from various family members of the victim and the accused to local law enforcement and, most prominently, the leader of the local Orbiis corps—essentially agricultural bioengineering specialists. Din also has a family connection pop up in a quite unexpected fashion. I also enjoyed very much that Bennett continues to present Din as that exceptionally rare beast in SFF, the bisexual man who generally prefers men, and the use of that aspect of his character (and his eidetic memory) to play with the “love interest of the week” dynamic one often gets in noir fiction is well judged.

This is the point at which mystery reviewing gets a touch difficult, at least for me. I find it quite difficult reviewing in this genre—at least before release—because you can't go into that many plot- or character-specific specifics without spoiling the whole thing. In most cases spoilers aren’t something I care about, but they really do matter for most mysteries, and that that is indeed the case here. However, the fact that it is a fantasy mystery means that isn’t all there is to talk about—the worldbuilding and thematic concerns hanging off the mystery plot also reward attention. RJB is very clear that what he's doing with this series (aside from writing deeply entertaining Nero Wolfe pastiches) is examining the different institutions of a society designed and tuned to address an ongoing, existential environmental threat. In Ana & Din's world this is the annual march of the Titans inland from the sea (as noted above, these are major presences in the first two books, absent in all but the use of their body parts and excretions as essential elements of Imperial biohacking here). But the story is also very clearly holding a mirror up to our world and the ongoing, existential threat of environmental degradation, particularly climate change.

As I've written elsewhere, there is a distinct genius to the nature of the role Bennett gives Ana and Din as specialist Imperial Iudex. They're not private detectives. They're not CSI technicians. They're not even really cops. They are Ombudsmen (in the European sense of the term of an organisation to investigate and ensure integrity in government). It's not a perfect analogy—there's rather more violence and crime scenes than Ombuds in the real world typically deal with—but at heart the crimes and puzzles Ana and Din investigate go to the proper functioning of the Empire's government. That proper functioning, it is made very clear, is maintaining social stability and directing that stable society at the eternal problem of staying alive with a decent standard of living in the face of centuries of rampaging kaiju. This setup allows our main characters—and Bennett—to poke around in all of the key institutions that make society tick. The Tainted Cup was engineering/civil works. A Drop of Corruption was basic forms of government and international relations. And A Trade of Blood is agriculture and food production.

It might seem weird to say this is part of government, but there's an Imperial bureaucracy responsible for agriculture too, complete with genetic enhancements: the aforementioned Orbiis. And food production is of course critically important to social stability; there’s a reason Juvenal sneered about “bread and circuses” as a mechanism for keeping the plebs happy almost 2,000 years ago. That sneer is particularly true of raising beef, which ultimately is an unnecessary luxury in land use and nutritional terms. But it's delicious, people want it, it keeps them happy, and happy people are easier to direct at the existential problem. But raising beef in this world is also wildly, weirdly artificial: biohacked giant tottering cattle with tonnes of meat on each limb, pre-sapient cat-monkey things pressed into service as field hands, and perfectly tuned magic fertilizer. We also see the waste: enormous piles of bones and hides. In reality that would very likely be used for something, but Bennett is clearly going for a 'slaughter of the buffalo' style image here, and it's an effective one. If he isn't going full militant vegan (and I think the book's take on the role of food as a social stabiliser is too pragmatic for it to go that far), he's clearly interested in showing the desensitisation to death that the factory beef farming methods cause.

The point Bennett is making, of course, is that this is all pretty much all true of how agriculture works in our world too, at least on a mass scale as it is practiced in most developed countries to a greater or lesser extent. Exploring these ideas in a secondary world gets the familiar context out of the way so we can see the strangeness in what we accept as quite normal in our own society. As Bennett states in his author's note, despite agriculture being framed in much of our current political discourse as a “natural” sphere set against the unnatural cities, there is little we do that is more profoundly “unnatural” than industrial farming. In this shock of recognition amidst the alienating oddity of Ana and Din's biohacked world, Bennett asks us how far we will have to hack ourselves and our society to survive what's coming from our planet and what the costs might be. Having these questions consistently in the background throughout a well crafted, taut mystery, excellent character work, and engaging worldbuilding really is impressive. It's rare that a novel this much sheer fun is also so thought-provoking. Another excellent entry in a series of remarkably consistent and remarkably high quality.

Highlights:

• Engaging fantasy mystery
• A hugely compelling core duo
• Asks compelling questions while entertaining

Nerd coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson. A Trade of Blood [Del Rey, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social

Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

To Burn the Walls of Troy; To Break the World Entire - Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

Another take on mythology's most complicated man, and the world he lived in.

Before I get into the review, a quick PSA. After I had already been to the cinema, I was informed that there have been calls for a boycott due to Nolan's having filmed some of the movie in occupied Dakhla (Sahrawi Republic). More details on that here.

There have been, over the years, countless takes on The Odyssey, one of the Ancient Greek poetic epics historically attributed to a man called "Homer"*, and there will always be more. Indeed, we have already been promised another, as Jorge Rivera-Herrans' Epic, a musical interpretation, will be translated to the big screen in the near future, and mythical retellings are a consistent presence in the literary world. This year, though, we get Christopher Nolan's take. I say "take" deliberately, because I think the key feature of his cinematic vision for the story is that it is very explicitly making an argument, with the text and with the current world; Nolan is not deluded into thinking he's doing just a straight re-imagining of the original onto screen. This is an Odyssey with something to say, an angle that encompasses the mythological narrative, the historical context in which the original story may have occurred, and maybe some of the contemporary culture wars to boot. That's a lot to pile onto a single film, even one that's 3 hours long. But, spoilers, I think he mostly manages it.

Played by Matt Damon, Nolan's Odysseus is worn down by his travels, and more so by the memories of those he has lost, and what he has done to bring himself this far in his journey. This is regretful Odysseus, slowly recovering himself on Calypso's island as she weans him off the lotus flowers that have been preventing him from remembering... well, everything. The film cuts between their sparse island, his own flashbacks, and scenes back at his home island of Ithaca, where his wife and son have their own battles to face.

This non-linear approach to narrative is, of course, very Nolan, but it's also very Odyssey too. And I think this is something that really carries through on this version of the story, one that I think is important to hold onto when I start talking about history in a bit, and even more so when delving into the hot mess of the discourse about this film: whatever else he has or has not done, whatever ways he chooses to approach the text, I think it is clear that Nolan has read the text, and has a very clear idea of it, his own reading of it, that forms the bedrock of the film. It is a film aggressively in conversation with the original text. Not "faithful" to it, whatever that means. Not bound only to recreate it. Not constrained within the walls of literal interpretation. But thinking about and responding to it, and that, above all, is why I appreciate Nolan's version immensely.

It is at this point that we must handle the idea of spoilers before continuing.

I don't think it is possible to spoil The Odyssey. For one, the text is *mumble* thousand years old at this point, but more importantly for two, it is very likely that audiences in the ancient world already knew the stories therein before hearing it for the first time. It is not a story meant to surprise, as it draws upon various sources and other stories, weaving together many myths into a single poem. And, of those myths, it is often only one version among many. The story of Helen of Troy that we know, for example, has any number of variants (including my favourite, that she was never at Troy at all, but hiding in Egypt while a copy of her made of clouds went off to Priam's city in her place). But it is possible to spoil how a modern version argues with the original text, and so that's what I'm warning for here. I don't think it matters; but I also mostly don't think spoilers matter. Read on at your own choosing either way.

So how exactly is Nolan's take in conversation with the original? Well, it all starts with what the film calls "Zeus' Law" (ξενία in the Ancient Greek). This is a law of hospitality, the duties owed by hosts towards their guests, and strangers who come to their home. It is a theme present very strongly in the poem, as the suitors' years-long occupation of the palace at Ithaca strains against the obligations guests have towards their host. Matt Damon's Odysseus is keenly aware of the concept, but raises it repeatedly in terms of his own (and his crew's) actions towards various "hosts" throughout their journey, and how they have continually violated its strictures as they are pushed by necessity, survival and the desire to return home after their long years at war. This culminates in his slaughter of the suitors back at Ithaca - I'm sure it will shock no one that murdering guests is bad form - which he insists on undertaking alone as he already bears the shame of having violated ξενία over and again, while his son and wife are untainted by such crimes. Zeus' Law is mentioned over and again, by character after character, driving home throughout the narrative how fundamental it is to their society, a bedrock of civilisation in this world.

Which I really enjoyed, because it is both very comprehensible to a modern audience, and yet somewhat alien. Obviously the modern world also doesn't condone murdering one's guests, but the core idea of the rule - that any stranger in your home could be a god in disguise - is less familiar, as is the impetus to accept in any passing traveller, feed them and wash their feet. It establishes firmly that this story takes place in some other when, a time where things genuinely work differently. Very true for history in general, but also apt for Homeric epic, poetry in which it is not an uncommon theme to be reminded that people and society was different, just better in the past. Men could casually chuck boulders and everyone adhered to Zeus' Law, or paid the price as the Furies hurtled down upon them in vengeance. Good times, y'know?

Agamemnon's armour has drawn an amount of criticism

This is not to say that Nolan is deeply wedded to an authentic image of a specific time period in the ancient world, however. But nor is he only wedded to the Hollywood swords and sandals aesthetic, absent any visual cues from the past. There's a mixture of the two, evoking something again both familiar and strange, where nothing quite sits comfortably in the watcher's expectations. Agamemnon's armour - weirdly blockish and futuristic looking - has little to do with history, but the walls of Troy definitely evoke real locations and archaeological finds. The statue of Athena, which appears over and again, reminded me strongly of a real statue, but remained resolutely white, in defiance of the exuberant polychromy archaeologists know to have been the norm in ancient art.

The statue on the left sprang to mind when I saw the Trojan statue of Athena on screen

A lot of the commentary I've seen online in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the film's release focuses on these inaccuracies. And I won't deny them; a lot of the visual choices do run counter to our understanding of the fashion, armour, architecture and art of the ancient world. But I have two counterpoints to this. The first is that this is a myth. While Troy itself was a real place, really destroyed (a number of times, in fact), the specific historical reality of the Trojan War as depicted in the Homeric epics is... uncertain at best, and this is a story populated by gods and monsters, heroes larger than life: it's not real, and not really pinpointing a real time and place that we know for a surety. Once you start playing with fantastical elements, I think some of the historicity necessarily goes out of the window anyway, and doubly so when it's myths composed we-don't-know-when and about we-don't-know-when**. What, exactly, are we being historically accurate to? The second, which is a more general point, is simply that I'm not certain why that accuracy is owed in this context, and to what extent. It's an adaptation, a new version of a story, for a modern audience, and is being made to appeal to a modern audience. Balancing what of the past and what of the present to incorporate is always going to be a conversation in play, and I don't think a blind dedication to recreation is always the highest ideal to be aiming for. There's the art to consider too, the message, and the choices made to support that are the interesting ones. I will always prefer something ahistorical whose choices are purposeful, interesting or fun - there's a reason everyone loves A Knight's Tale - to something more interested in not getting yelled at by the internet than in making good art.

And this comes up in some interesting ways in the film. I've seen some criticism, for instance, of the choice to have all the actors speaking in US accents (even when some of them aren't American) and in modern dialogue. I, too, did a bit of a double take to hear Tom Holland call Anne Hathaway "mom". But then, what would be more "authentic"? The obvious answer is Homeric Greek, but I'm not sure that would be a crowd-pleaser. What do the critics want? British accents? Archaic British accents? Is that more authentic to the material (spoilers: no). Nolan has chosen consistency, which I think is perfectly defensible - they are all from the same region, so have them all speak in the same accent - and well, why would characters in a story be speaking "archaically" by their own measures? People (with a few exceptions) speak in their own now, so by representing these characters in our now, Nolan gives them their own contemporaneity.

Which isn't to say his choices are entirely above criticism. Much was made right from the first casting announcements about exactly who was playing these figures from Greek myth, and that none of them were, themselves, Greek. While I do think most of the cast did well in their roles, I think this point still holds up, having watched the film. There is a long history of Greek (and Roman) myths being recentered into British (and sometimes American) visuals, written only by Anglophone creatives and denuded of their location, just as the statues are stripped of their colours. There's a false idea of US/UK as an anglophone cultural "neutral", I think, without acknowledgment of the specificity of the mythology. To uncritically recreate that in a retelling is worth critiquing, not so much as a single choice (because, see above, adaptations) but as part of a wider pattern of who gets to retell these myths, and how, and to what end. 

But, on the flip side, some of the casting choices are clearly thoughtful in their own ways. Lupita Nyong'o as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra has been the focal point of (racist) outrage dressed up as "historical accuracy", but that has no equivalent qualms about just-as-not-Greek Matt Damon. But the world of the Greek myths is the Mediterranean, with its trade routes and its interconnections between peoples. A black character here is perfectly legitimate, even before you introduce the "child of a deity born from an egg" option that throws most arguments out of the window anyway. Also, let's be real, if you're picking someone who is meant to be so beautiful they could start a war... Nyong'o is a very good choice. She plays her position - post war, trapped with an angry Menelaus whose brother has been killed by his wife - well, with a strained poise that comes through even in her relatively brief scenes.

I can't find a good image of Nyong'o from the film, so have instead this photo of her from one of the premieres in which a) she is stunning and b) her outfit to my mind is evoking the Egyptian Helen of Troy myth variant

I think the theme I'm trying to make clear here is - whatever choices Nolan has made, whether you like them or not, there is a sense of deliberation to them, an artistic vision to which they are all turning, and a message about the story they are all supporting.

He has made his Odysseus an unreliable narrator - all of the parts of the film which contain fantastical elements are narrated by or, in one specific case, only seen by Odysseus. The title card at the beginning calls this a time of "apparent" magic, opening up the possibility of disbelief in what follows. And, as Odysseus' story unfolds, it becomes clear that his time at Troy has changed him deeply, and his travels likewise. Tom Holland's Telemachus may look for Athena in the eyes of those around him, but there's no evidence to suggest he is ever right, that she is ever present in his world. This ambiguity is incredibly interesting when held alongside the centrality of "Zeus' Law" to the story - you must treat strangers as if they are gods in disguise; are the gods even possible?

Or were they possible in a time that was better, before things become ruined, before civilisation crumbled? And this is the crux of Nolan's story. As the flashbacks progress, as Odysseus makes his way home to Ithaca, there are rumours of a mysterious "People from the Sea" who are ravaging across the world, looting and destroying on their way. They are an existential threat whose existence is being used to drive Penelope toward the thought of picking a suitor to marry, to drive Telemachus toward claiming his absent father's throne. Ithaca needs a king because it needs a central figure to unite them against a looming external threat, and armed resistance requires strong leadership to call up and maintain. A mundane motivation, but a very real one, and in keeping with others in this version of the story: it is made clear early on that the war on Troy was not for honour but for trade, Helen's recapture only the pretext Agamemnon needed for his overweening ambition. And then, when Odysseus returns, all the threads unite and he sees what he has been unwilling or unable to connect throughout his journey. The destruction of Troy via the trickery of the Trojan Horse was, in Nolan's telling, a cataclysmic rupture of Zeus' Law, one that echoes out in Odysseus' actions all throughout his journey homeward, the first of many acts in defiance of the bedrock of their civilisation. Agamemnon pays with his life when he returns home to Clytemnestra. Has Odysseus paid in his sanity? In his crew, all of whom die as they voyage toward Ithaca? Or has his payment yet to come? He is ravaged by guilt as he realises that his people, his crew, were the beginning of the People from the Sea. The destruction of Troy, this monstrous act in contravention to all the norms of their world, has set in motion a disruption of everything that cannot be stopped: the Bronze Age Collapse.

That I seriously enjoyed that as a concept does not preclude me also finding it quite funny, as others have memed:

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/ens0.me/post/3mr45wglb5k2g

Anyway. This is a real, historical event, visible in the archaeological record and the sudden absence of a lot of the material and textual culture of the time that went before. Nolan, then, unites history and myth, reinforcing a reading of the Trojan War as an apocalyptic event, ending the heroic age, by giving it real-world repercussions. I actually, genuinely love this as an idea. I was not expecting it. It works beautifully. The reading of the Trojan War as apocalyptic to the age of heroes is a perfectly valid and present one in the Homeric epics themselves, but to unite this with history and archaeology is, to my mind, a fascinating choice and one well borne out by the decisions made in the adaptation. The constant reinforcement of the criticality of Zeus' Law to the world of the story makes plain the stakes when it has been revealed to have been broken. But it is also a narrative and an argument that has its place in the modern world: welcome the stranger, treat him kindly, do not take lightly the bond between people, even those without connection of blood, birth or location, and if you do not... the result is lawlessness and disaster. It is a film about what bedrock we might build a society on, and how we can break the world when we forget those fundamental tenets. I'll take that reading, reinforced as it is by the creepy-as-ever Robert Pattinson depiction of the suitor Antinous and his awful treatment of dogs, beggars and people who get in his way. The person who dismisses the law of hospitality, the narrative says, is kind of a dickhead.

I think, in this unity of the historical and the mythic, Nolan's cleaving to the text is most clearly revealed. Not in literal detail, but in his selection of an argument from the original poem, and use of it as a central post around which to build his narrative tent. This is a film about ξενία, a film about a specific reading of The Odyssey as a story, to which he has subordinated all other aspects, the visuals, the dialogue, even the historicity. It's a story which cares about the text and how to read it in conversation with itself, its world, and ours. This, truly, is what I want from myth adaptations. It is a film with a clear answer to "what does this bring that the text itself did not already provide?", and a presence that is both clearly tied to its inspirations but also, indelibly, its own. And, critically, it is a story at the scale of the myths from which it draws, invested both in the personal, the story of a man who wants to get home to his wife and son, and the epic, the sweep of history that, in this time of heroes, could be swayed by the actions of a few.

Odysseus wonders whether burning the walls of Troy would - had, will - break the world entire? Nolan tells us that it did.

*Here is absolutely not the place to get into the authorial tradition of Greek epic, but short version, there probably was no such guy. It's just convenient to have a place holder way to refer to the poems.
**I am bound to point out here that it's been a good decade since I was actively studying the Ancient World, so while I feel like I'd probably have heard if someone had sorted this for certain, I don't /know/. If I'm wrong, mea culpa, I shall do a penance on JSTOR.

--

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

Video Game Review: Luna Abyss by Bonsai Collective

Beware of delving too deep

Luna Abyss is a soulslike, although it’s more on the roguelike end of the spectrum. A mythic sci-fi story from the small UK based developer Bonsai Collective, it tells the story of a world in which a new moon arrived in Earth orbit and changed everything.

It is very definitely post-apocalyptic, but the bounds of that apocalypse are tantalisingly never quite fully laid out—it’s hinted that when the moon arrived, it devastated Earth, but the game itself takes place entirely on the new moon, and the colony that established itself there has, too, been largely destroyed.

Left in its wake is a prison system that sends inmates down into the colony and the moon’s depths to retrieve lost tech and, occasionally, hunt criminals.

Your character comes from Earth and was selected for imprisonment not because of a crime but because of a random(?) change in your physicality which marked you out as someone the All-Father declared should work on these reclamation runs.

Given a 9,000 day target to work off, with bonus deductions for successfully completed retrievals and goals, you have a long way to go.

The game is pretty linear, although I don’t think that’s really a criticism. There is some backtracking later on as you get the chance to go places and explore secrets new abilities make possible, but they’re relatively minor, and I didn’t get bored in the exploration because the goodies you find are always interesting or useful.

The story is told largely through found artefacts, with hints and conversations with enigmatic NPCs leading your progress. There’s a light reliance on Norse myth (with the presence of the All-Father being the central conceit), but this is a techno-mythology, and the only supernatural element is this second moon and its presence over the Earth.

All of which goes to say that the story has some familiar tropes but deploys them in its real interests, which is about confinement, illness as life, loss as driving force and how fate (or chance, depending on your bent) governs us and remains inexplicable no matter how hard we fight to understand.

The mechanics are nice and chunky, and they do not punish you for their own shortcomings—one of my biggest beefs with soulslikes and action RPGs is how you can die because you get stuck in a wall while an antagonist swings through it, or a sequence gets locked in and no matter what you do it can’t be broken. These feel like punishments because of poor design and have had me walk away from a game because I don’t have time to push through shitty design masquerading as difficulty.

As a result, platforming sections and big boss fights never feel like they’re trying to trick you into disaster for the fun of it—their challenge is in there on itself, and you beating it isn’t a fight with the controls but in learning how the game works and then navigating that difficulty. This is my kind of challenge.

The colour and sound are coherent; the music in particular is atmospheric and really elevates the setting, which is techno-organic with a sense that pipes might come alive or walls breath when you’re not looking. The saturated reds and blues that feature strongly give Luna Abyss a strong sense of identity, and are used to do more than simply paint the screen.

Bonsai Collective have delivered a strong and very playable game here.

The reason I play games, though, is for the narrative (I’m not your person to review MMOs because I HATE grind). Luna Abyss’s story works for me. It’s a touch opaque at times, and you need to slow down and piece things together to understand all the nuances here, but even someone paying no attention is going to pick up the broad strokes of families at war, of ambitions defeated and the idea that we make our own dooms. In Luna Abyss, the road to hell was absolutely paved with good intentions.

For a small studio, this is a big game with a satisfying story.

Highlights:

• Great gameplay
• Fabulous mythic SF story
• Fabulous character design

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a great game with really enjoyable gameplay and an interesting story.

Reference: Luna Abyss [Bonsai Collective, 2026].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Reading the Hugos: Best Novella 2026

 A roundup of this year's novella nominees.

It's Hugo time bay-beeeeeee. I love awards season. There's a lot of reasons for that, but honestly the main one is that it's the time of year when the conversation all aligns and we're discussing the same books as each other, picking at things and having big thoughts about them, and through them into genre and how it's doing at the moment. Delightful!

And so, in the spirit of doing my part, I'm going to chat about one of this year's Hugo categories, one particularly dear to my heart: the novella.

For those not familiar, the novella category looks at science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year, which specifically are works of fiction of between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Still chunky enough to feel like a whole book, but short enough you can binge them in a sitting if you're so inclined, I find novellas such a nicely digestible format, perfectly in between a full novel and short fiction. There's a lot you can do with that, and I am just incredibly fond of it as a format, and so I read a fair few in any given year.

Which alas means that, as in this year, I'm a bit disappointed when the Hugo shortlist isn't representative of the good things out there in the ecosystem. I'll get into the specifics of the books themselves in a minute, but in my view, this is an unfortunately weak shortlist when taken collectively. It draws heavily from a single publisher (Tor, as is often the way) but even when doing so, manages not to represent the best of what they have to offer, because whatever else you might want to say about the situation, Tor does put out a robust and substantial offering of novellas every year from which we can draw. This just... ain't it. I'll come back to that a little more at the end. But first, let's actually talk through the works in question:

The shortlist this year contains:

• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK) 
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) 
• Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK) 
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
• The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK) 
• Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)

Going from the top, then:

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar.

This is, for me, unquestionably the best book on the shortlist. I read it almost immediately when it came out, and was delighted to find it showcased El-Mohtar's signature lyrical approach to prose magnificently. Inspired by and loosely retelling the story of The Bonny Swans, there is a strong sense of folk music that underpins the story-logic and stylings, and El-Mohtar has done a lot of good work to do this in a way that feels distinct from just fairytales or mythic retellings: it is emphatically folk music that forms the bedrock. Which of course means there's a lot of horrible to go along with the fantastical. Folk songs are rarely cheery things. The ending is perhaps slightly happier than I might expect from the context, but still feels thoroughly in keeping with the tone.

The whole thing is intensely readable, with an interesting approach to magic (referred to as "grammar" and left delightfully slippery as to its specifics), a believable sisterly relationship, and a fairy-world that has the necessary alien quality to feel truly detached from human things.

My only criticism of it is that, in the year or so since I read it, it has mostly slipped out of my memory, especially in the specifics. It's a book of tone and feeling, and that feeling persists, but the details easily and quickly fuzzed over. Even so, it was excellent, and I think it would be an entirely worthy winner.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Sworn Soldier #3)

For all that I didn't love What Moves the Dead, the first in the Sworn Soldier series of novellas and a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, I will wholeheartedly admit that it was intensely creepy. I don't particularly like creepy, but I salute the success of it there and did not want to read the book at night or in the dark. That feels like a goal well achieved.

What Stalks the Deep... does not achieve that. It has all the ingredients to do so, inspired as it is by an H. P. Lovecraft story (At the Mountains of Madness) with its mysterious cave, inexplicable glowing lights, missing men, horrible noises and so on. And yet, tonally, it feels consistently soft and gentle. I never had any concern that things wouldn't turn out, in some way, alright, more or less. Despite moments that really ought to be terrifying, of the claustophobia of mine tunnels, of suffocation and near death experience... somehow none of it actually manages the emotional payoff of terror, or even a light disquiet. I'd wonder perhaps if this is Kingfisher's typical humour working counter to the aims of the story, but both managed to co-exist in What Moves the Dead, so I find myself at a bit of a loss about it all.

The loss of the horror does not really seem to come with the addition of much else though, which leaves the story feeling oddly insubstantial. Shortly after I put it down, I described it as having "passed frictionless through my brain", which I hold even more true the more time passes. The writing, the wry self-deprecating humour at oneself and society, remains distinctively in Kingfisher's voice, making it a very easy, pleasant read. There's just not much else to hang your hat on, alas. 

Cinder House by Freya Marske

This is the first of the two fairytale-style stories proper, though I would group them along with The River Has Roots into a loose theme. Folk song and fairytale do share a fair bit of thematic ground. This one is, like The River Has Roots, a retelling of a specific story: Cinderella, in this case. However, it's a rather more vicious version than the one we might be used to. Especially because Cinderella - Ella - dies at the beginning of the story.

Marske remakes the fairytale into the afterlife of Ella's furious ghost, having to co-exist with her stepmother and stepsisters after the murder of her father. In this reimagining, the magic of the house absorbs her at the point of death, allowing her to become a sort of ghostly embodiment of its magic, visible only to those who live there and, initially, bound by its confines. The original themes of the Cinderella story remain, as do some of the critical plot beats (including the ball), but they are remade by coming in the wake of the worst already happening. To some extent, the stepmother has won, and so the stakes, what winning might look like, what revenge might mean, are remade too.

Marske also adds a little depth of characterisation to the stepmother (who now has her motives, though they don't exculpate her) and to the dead father, as well as granting a little more agency to one of the step-daughters, and critically makes the prince a character in his own right, rather than the embodiment of the freedom Ella craves. And the ending is more complex (and queerer) than one might imagine.

That being said, it does not truly escape the risk of all fairytale retellings. It's got a twist of difference to it, but it's still stuck telling us a story we already know. And I don't think, ultimately, the twist is enough to convince me it was worth the retelling. The changes amplify much of the original themes, but don't really change them. It's relatively well done, but I don't think exemplary.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

I did not like this book. I did not like it at all. It's also one of the kind of books that does not bear up under the lingering scrutiny I tend to direct at awards nominees: the more I think about it, the more it falls apart, even on its key themes and ideas. It is, and here I am using this word again, incredibly insubstantial.

The story follows a group of robots waking up in a shop in California, having been turned off by the shop owners (who have disappeared). The bots, mostly, really need to be working - they have debts to pay, of various sorts - and so, in the absence of the existing restaurant, they decide to set up their own and just hope no one notices that it's not human run. It is fairly obvious from the outset that this will work, and that this is meant to be a relatively cosy story of community and success.

There are, however, a number of problems to grapple with, and one in particular that underlies them all. The world of the story is an independent California, after a mostly unexplored war with the rest of the United States. The area seems to be deprived and war ravaged, with people having to work hard to barely survive. This feels like a really substantial setting, right? A lot to be done with that, possibly some hard hitting critique of the real world? But that doesn't materialise. Problems, even the problems that result from this larger world state, are easily resolved. This includes, at one point, a robot who is haunted by traumatic memories of the war, and the death of his close comrades being told by another robot (a friend) to maybe move his traumatic memories to long term storage rather than immediate memory. This... does not feel to me like a meaningful engagement with that emotional journey.

Newitz keeps trying to set up problems or themes with bigger, thornier stakes... but then never commits to them in that same spirit. Everything is, ultimately, relatively easy, in a way that just does not work with those stakes. It's a story at war with its own tonal choices, with clunky writing to boot, and I think just completely unsuccessful because of it.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Another fairytale book! This one, however, is not so much a retelling as a story in the style of fairytales: think something like T. Kingfisher's Nettle and Bone, where the elements are often familiar but not the whole.

In this one, a young daughter of a duke, Celia's beloved brother Argent decides to leave their family home. In her upset, not understanding his reasons, she awakens an as-yet-undiscovered magical talent and curses him to a life without love. He leaves her, becoming a questing knight, and she is left with her guilt, her father's abandonment of his duties at the loss of his favoured son, and the other brother (Roric) she's never really liked.

To save Argent, she must work with Roric, developing a relationship she never gave much notice, and learning more about the world, her family and their history than she realised in the meantime. And, of course, discovering a much bigger threat from the fairy people whose border lies alongside their realm.

While the story of this may be an original one, it nonetheless feels awfully familiar while reading. The plot unfolds very much in expected directions and to expected ends, and without anything about it that really feels... itself. Novik's previous fairytale-type stories, especially Uprooted, have a distinctive voice and setting that stands them apart from the well-worn elements of their creation. The Summer War... less so. It doesn't help that the characterisations, predominantly viewed through the eyes of the main character, are often incredibly flat or weirdly patchy (even including Celia's own internal life). By turns, Celia is both a naive pubescent girl and an accomplished schemer, through only her own wit and the writing of a few letters. A story could make something of that, dig into the complexity of growing up, the changing shape of one's own mind and abilities. But it is not this story. It felt, more than anything, rushed, and the whole thing relies far more on tone and vibes than creating something that feels a coherent whole, with genuine concerns to explore.

Novik certainly captures the feel of fairytale in this story, but none of the pieces quite fit together nicely enough when looked at closely. Especially on a ballot with multiple other fairytale stories, this one feels rather disappointing.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Dorothy Gentleman #1)

Not a fairytale or a retelling! Murder by Memory is the opening volume in the Dorothy Gentleman series, in which an old lady solves murders on a generation ship while talking about knitting and fussing about her nephew.

As a fan of series like Miss Marple, I was entirely in favour of the premise of this story. And indeed, at the beginning, was pretty on board with the execution. Dorothy wakes up in someone else's body, and has to figure out why the sentient ship has awoken her from digital slumber, let alone put her in the wrong body while doing so, without alerting anyone to the situation. The ship leads her to the dead body it needs her to investigate, and she begins her enquiries, telling us about the ship, its inhabitants and its technologies along the way. Great!

There are two problems, however. The first, and far more troubling, one is simply to do with the pacing. Murder by Memory is relatively short by novella standards, and the majority of the length of it feels like setup. And then, rather suddenly at somewhere around 90%, it switches into resolution mode. There's no sense of a comfortable middle of the story, and between the strange structure and the brevity, I ended up feeling slightly short-changed. I was wondering where the rest had gone to; had I lost a forty page chunk somewhere? But no. It also means there are rather more dangling threads than I would like or expect from this sort of story, even knowing there will be sequels.

The other problem, and possibly something that will be solved by the sequels, is the oddness of the worldbuilding. There's a glimpse into the ship and the people, and they're enough to make me wonder what, why, how would something futuristic end up so retro feeling, but not enough to bed that in and make it feel plausible. It's not really answers I crave, more a sense that this world... well, makes sense.

It's a nice idea, a concept I am very easily enticed into reading, but there's a lot wrong with how it goes about it, by the end.

Final thoughts:

With the exception of The River Has Roots, which is a very well-written novella with a strong prose voice and sense of direction to the story, much of the rest of this shortlist is disappointing in some way. There are structural or tonal issues with most of the entries, plots that don't match up to their premises, conflicting emotional journeys and some janky writing choices in parts. Some years, I look at the novella shortlist and, for all I might wish it otherwise because they're not my favourites, I can at least see why they're someone's favourites. Books with big ideas or engaging plots or fascinating worlds, funny or scary or enticing, or just odd in the compelling way unusual things are. For want of a better word, this shortlist feels quite safe, quite quiet, quite middle-of-the-road (and, incidentally, rather homogenous). There's not much daring or doing. And so I struggle to see quite why someone would pick some of these and say "yes, this is the best that 2025 has to offer", even had I not read a single other novella for the year. And so, I finish this with bafflement. I really just do not get it.

--

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

Book Review: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Hugo finalist sequel to the Hugo winning The Tainted Cup.

Readers of The Tainted Cup, now that we have gotten the meeting and setup out of the way, are plunged right into the action of A Drop of Corruption, second in the Ana and Din mysteries by Robert Jackson Bennett. The novel assumes you’ve read the first novel, and know the situation, and know we are going to go right into the action. Ana and Din are investigators for a fantasy Empire, looking into mysteries, particularly murders, that defy normal investigative techniques. It’s an Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe situation: Din does the legwork, while Ana, because of some double edged gifts, usually is never in the field and instead uses what Din (magically augmented to be able to remember anything he sees or hears) gathers to make the case.

 
If you are reading this review, and haven’t read The Tainted Cup, you might be ready to tackle this book with that precis but you will miss a lot of the nuance of the Empire and what it does, and not be quite ready for the further conversation here. There are many lines in this book, and one of them is one that should not be overlooked: a critique of the Empire and the Imperial Project.

 
That critique is a nuanced and interesting one that goes beyond the usual binaries of Chaos vs Absolute Law and Ana and Din, as representatives of the Empire in a important but still independent border Kingdom, do navigate. We saw in The Tainted Cup about the importance of the Empire and also the costs of that Empire as well. We still don’t quite know what the Leviathans really are. Here, in this book, we are in a place where the reagents and the remnants of defeated Leviathans are processed. Yarrow is an important kingdom because of what it can do for the Empire, but it is not yet within the orbit of the Empire. But it seems like it is a matter of time before it is.

And that is interesting because there are conversations about the idea of Imperial Expansion and the uses of Empire and the health of the Empire. Since I think about the Roman Empire everyday, there are two time frames here I am thinking of. First is the 2nd century AD, in the time of Trajan and Hadrian. Trajan conquers a bunch of Mesopotamia from the Persians, in what is now Iraq. However, upon his death, Hadrian begins a campaign of consolidation, giving up the new gains and fortifying the Empire as it is. This is of course where we get Hadrian’s Wall.¹ The point is that the Empire is at a limit...and that is a dangerous place for Empire to be. It’s dangerous for an Empire to further expand, something Ana talks to Din about as Din considers his own problems within the Empire. And it is dangerous for an Empire to remain in this position. That mirrors Din’s all problems again--as Ana’s hands, he is trapped in an old crushing debt, but getting out of that position is difficult. But remaining in that position is taxing. It’s a nice balance of the internal problems of the main character with the geopolitical position of the Empire he works for. What good is an Empire and is it all worth it?

The even stronger second Roman Empire parallel is the 130’s BC and the kingdom of Pergamon. Pergamon was a Greek Kingdom in what we now call Turkey. Attalus III, last king of the kingdom, had no direct heirs, and so bequeathed the kingdom to the then Roman Republic. This was something that seems to have been in the wind for years (much like in this book how the people of Yarrow know that the Empire is slowly closing its jaws around them to absorb them completely). The actual attempted transfer mirrors events in the book here, as a supposed brother challenges the transfer and violence erupts. Here, events diverge from the history, but the upset is that the transfer is much messier and more fraught than it might otherwise be, both for Yarrow and the Empire, and Pergamon and the Roman Republic.

Beyond all of this fascinating and crunchy worldbuilding, supported by the previous novel, there is of course a murder plot, and schemes and wheels within wheels. Now that we have the Ana and Din pattern established, the book can unleash us upon it. Din finds himself in some precarious positions and situations gathering data from Ana, ranging from a perilous trip up a canal in boats that reminded me personally of a visit to the Mekong Delta, to schemes and conflicts involving the Empire’s own bank, the workshop/magical foundry that Yarrow is famous for, and an opponent possessed of prescience. Said opponent has some of the classic uses of the form--false identities, faked deaths, body doubles and more. And the actual inciting incident is that classic trope--a locked room mystery.

Ana does find herself, as the jacket cover suggests, with an opponent that can predict her every move. How does one beat someone who can see so many moves ahead? Therein lies the story. It’s a fair bit of puzzling and it is our slow understanding (as it is for Ana and Din) of the culture and society of Yarrow that keeps our investigators on their toes.

The question of award eligibility comes to a head here. Should a book be award worthy if it does not stand on its own? A Drop of Corruption most definitely extends the world, builds out Ana and Din more, and provides a whole new set of secondary characters who are fascinating and interesting (and not just our antagonist, once revealed). Ana as always remains a strange and sometimes alien person, it is Din who goes out into the world and has to be, for lack of a better word, a people person. Not that, especially when it comes to sexual relations, that Din is at all a wilting flower in this regard. But for all of that, does this book stand on its own?

No. I don’t think its reasonable for a reader to pick up this book, without having picked up The Tainted Cup, and get the full experience of what Bennett is doing. If your standards for award nomination is “the book stands on its own”, then A Drop of Corruption, as strong as it is, and as vibrant the characters are, the worldbuilding and the writing, does not pass that test. There are some hints here and there of the past, but this book assumes the reader knows about Din’s secrets, his debt, and already know that Ana is more than she appears (something reinforced here, but you are clearly meant to continue in a vein already known).

As a book, however, if you do not want to follow the rule of a book standing on this own, I think myself that A Drop of Corruption is among the strongest of the finalists. It does what The Tainted Cup does, but without having to set up the story and the problem, can really focus on a problem, an area, and a situation and really go into deep depth in it. Bennett is one of the more interesting fantasy authors out there today, and A Drop of Corruption proves just why.

--

Highlights:

• Second Ana and Din mystery - does not stand on its own
• Interesting puzzles and an intriguing, frustrating antagonist.
• Deep worldbuilding, including crunchy thoughts on Empire

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson, A Drop of Corruption, (Del Rey 2025).

¹ A successor to Hadrian, Antonius Pius, tried to build a wall further north, in the area that is now Glasgow and Edinburgh. There are some remnants but that project was abandoned two decades after it was finished, and Hadrian’s Wall remained the furthest permanent projection of Roman power until the 5th century. There are some artifacts from the Antonine Wall fortlets in a museum in Glasgow.

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

Series Review: The Amberlough Dossier, by Lara Elena Donnelly

A clear-eyed, relevant exploration of the tragic humanity of flawed people, flawed countries, and how impotence does not excuse wrongdoing

I picked up Amberlough, the first of Lara Elena Donnelly’s rich, thoughtful, and distressingly still-relevant trilogy of politics and style, because of the style alone. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘Moulin-rouge-flavoured nightclubs with art-nouveau style, queer flamboyance, and a 1930s-bohemianism! Sounds like fantastic fun! Sign me up!’

And it was fantastic. The absinthe flowed, the nightclub performers danced and bantered and exuded fae-like glamours over their bewitched spectators. What is more, Amberlough city has a functional streetcar system, further adding to its already stratospheric base level of extreme sexiness. But was this series fun? Not really. Because fucking fascism always has to ruin everything.

This series is beautifully constructed in three parts: the fascist take-over, the resistance, and the aftermath. But where other writers might turn this into an inspiring, rah-rah tale of the RISING TO THE CHALLENGE and RESTORATION OF JUSTICE and EVERYMAN HEROES WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST EVIL THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, this series is decidedly more restrained. Everything is complicated. Everyone is complicated. There is hope for a better future, yes, but the flaws and constraints and uncountable opportunities to make the wrong choice temper that hope in a way that feels both realistic and depressingly relevant.

The story revolves around an interconnected ensemble of key players, who expand and contract in number throughout the series. In Book 1, Amberlough, we have Aristide Makricosta, a wildly popular, glamorous, (ageing) nightclub performer, who has, through a series of disagreeable compromises, entirely remade himself from a country boy of dubious ethnicity to the ne plus ultra of Amberlough nightlife. Cyril DePaul is a government agent who is simultaneously sleeping with Aristide and investigating him (not very effectively) for drug smuggling. Needless to say, this relationship necessitates a certain divide between work life and personal life. Finally, we have Cordelia Lehane, a stripper who works with Aristide at the nightclub. 

When the story begins, the nation of Gedda ---  a loose confederation of different regions, much like the UK --- is preparing for an election in which the governing party, a regionalist faction that favours backing off to let each region govern itself, is facing off against the rapidly strengthening One State Party or OSP. The OSP stands not only for a unified government, but a unified people, a unified culture, a unified ethnicity, a unified morality. People like Aristide, who work the wrong jobs, love the wrong type of people, and walk around with the wrong skin colour and shape of nose, face a rough future if the Ospies take over. And the Ospies have a good chance of it: When Cyril is sent to investigate the possibility of election fraud, they lose no time in finding his weak points and manipulating him to aid their efforts in rising to power.

In Book 2, Armistice, the action shifts to a different country of Porachis. Porachis has a subcontinental flavour, but it’s a subcontinent where British colonialism didn’t happen, and where Bollywood, not Hollywood, defines the international standard of film studio glamour. There, Cyril’s sister, Lilian DePaul, is working in the Geddan diplomatic office. Like Cyril, she is serving the Ospies, and like Cyril, they are enforcing her compliance --- in her case, by threatening her son. Yet Lilian is hardly a downtrodden victim here. She is very good at her job, highly respected in Porachis, and maintains access to her family’s inherited wealth. She may not like the Ospies, but she is doing well under their rule. Aristide, too, is making the best of matters. He has fled Gedda to land on his feet in the Porachin film industry, where he gains international acclaim and spends his time sleeping with handsome men much younger than him, drinking too much, and generally living the life of glorious public dissipation that often betokens internal emptiness and despair. Only Cordelia is suffering under Ospie rule, and only Cordelia has been doing anything about it.

In Book 3, Amnesty, the Ospies are gone, and Cordelia is a hero. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean everything is all right again. Are the heroes of the resistance the right people to lead a country once they’ve overthrown the government? Aristide and Lilian have returned home to Amberlough --- but how can you pick up the threads of your old life, when you and your home and all the people you once knew and loved have changed so much? And how can you build a future when the misdeeds of the past --- arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, collaboration with the enemy --- are brought into the open for some long-delayed justice? What value is there in justice, if it cannot bring back the dead, and serves only to hurt the living?

These books are profoundly melancholy, because they identify so precisely all the complications inherent in a story that a simpler book would present as a rousing, heartening, rallying cry to resist oppression and build a better world. Cyril and Lilian’s collaboration with the Ospies seems utterly unforgivable from the outside, the weak actions of weak people (especially Cyril --- oh, especially Cyril!) but when we see the story from inside their heads, it’s brutally clear why they act as they do. Aristide’s collapse into dissipation and despair is distressing --- but what would you do if you had clawed your way from the dregs of society into a moment of glittering triumph, only to have everything you’d built, and everyone you loved, ripped away from under you?

The set dressing of this story --- Art Deco Europe --- gives the rise of the Ospies a classic Nazi odour. But the book has more universal applicability than that. The publication dates (2017, 2018, and 2019) makes one suspect that a great deal of this series was inspired by living through the rise of the far right and the first Trump administration (although the parallels break down a bit now, during the second Trump administration, largely because the Ospies have much less interest in destroying science and medicine and general government function than MAGA). The agitations of regions wanting to break away from the central government give Brexit referendum vibes, or Scottish or Catalan independence. The complex relationships between certain regions within Gedda and other countries outside Gedda have a distinct whiff of Northern Ireland. And that’s not even leaving Europe! The reality is that every complex society will have its agitators against central authority, and authoritarian assholes are always lurking, eager to assume control. The central themes of this series, the flawed actors, the flawed governments, the flawed cultures, the flawed movements, are not specific to one point of time. They are universally, tragically, perpetually relevant. 

And what is worse, it remains unclear how much power any individual actually has to change anything. Would the Ospies still have come to power if Cyril hadn’t been coerced to aid them? Probably! Would there have been a resistance to bring them down if Cordelia hadn’t gotten involved? Maybe! Will Lilian be able to affect the form of the new government once the Ospies are gone? Who knows? This series is full of sympathetic, flawed humans, committing tragically understandable misdeeds, with no guarantee that anything they do matters. It is bleak. It is grim. It is complicated.

And yet: there is hope. The Ospies come to power, but they can be overthrown, and although we don’t know if Amberlough will find its way to a just future --- with or without Lilian’s involvement --- there is a path in that direction. People and society are complicated. The world of Amberlough is complicated. But so is ours; and it is a comfort to see these complications acknowledged on the page, without losing sight of the possibility of hope. 

--

The Math

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

Highlights:

• Complex people, complex setting, complex themes
• Glamour and style
• Melancholy
• Streetcars 

References:  

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amberlough. [Tor 2017].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Armistice. [Tor 2018].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amnesty. [Tor 2019].

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 or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.