Book Review: The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern

On freeing the human spirit from a late-stage-capitalist cell

My first experience with the work of Sim Kern (they/them) was with their nonfiction book Genocide Bad. Kern is Jewish and nonbinary, lives in Houston, and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace (a group of Jewish people who oppose Israeli state policies towards Palestinians). That book is a reckoning for them, as a member of an oppressed group which shares an ethnicity with a state that is actively engaging in genocide. They work through a whole raft of thorny issues, with great empathy for all involved, and I finished Genocide Bad with a sense of admiration for them. Sim Kern is a moral human being in a world where the human capacity for reason is used in a motivated manner in the service of the worst parts of our nature, and that is hard and brave to be.

It is with that sense of awe and admiration that I turn to their 2023 novel The Free People’s Village. This novel is several things at once: alternate history, political fiction, a deep character study, an exploration of trauma, and an exhortation to hope. And, deep below all of those things that nerds on the internet could write blog posts about, it is a moral book by a moral person.

The alternate history here is built into the background, not advertised, and I didn’t know this book counted as alternate history until I was well invested in the story. The story has a politically salient point of divergence that feels calculated to cause good trouble: this is a world where Al Gore wins Florida in the 2000 election, and from there the presidency. A liberal may think that this would have been the turning point of all America’s ills; not so, writes Kern, for this world is still miserably dystopian albeit technologically advanced. This is an America that has made Gore’s war against global warming a national priority. This takes the form of climate credits that restrict the ability of poor Americans to buy the occasional nice thing while rich people game it, a ready-made excuse to bulldoze Black neighborhoods for not being “eco-friendly” enough, and a shiny new justification for invading Brazil. This America has flying drones with sonic weapons, as well as dog-like drones along the lines of those made by Boston Dynamics. Both of these terrifying weapons are at the disposal of the Houston police department, the city where the novel is set.

Your protagonist is Maddie Ryan, a young white woman, a teacher, who ends up living in a dilapidated apartment building in a poor Black part of Houston because she is infatuated with the man who is its landlord, who wants to turn the building into an anarcho-communist commune. This building rapidly becomes a haven for artists and political activists, and Maddie joins a band that holds regular concerts there. The whole thing is bohemian/utopian while being relatively politically unaware, until the fateful day the City of Houston informs them that the building is being seized to build a monorail line. Maddie, and everyone she knows in the Lab, as they call it, find themselves in alliance with the local Black community, as well as radicals from all over Houston. The Lab becomes an encampment, like Occupy Wall Street but bigger, a symbol to America and to the world that another way of living is possible.

There is something very salient about the fact this story is set not in New York or California or Illinois, but in Texas. These grotty near-future SF stories are usually set in the more famous cities, which incidentally are in Democratic states, states which like to think of themselves as being somewhat insulated from the worst of late-stage capitalism. In Texas, the velvet glove of liberal democracy has been removed from the iron fist. The Texas of our world is a bastion of contemporary American fascism whose authoritarian peculiarities are being exported (the Texas Department of Education has a massive influence on the nation’s textbooks, for one example). In the novel this is all topsy-turvy, with Republicans lukewarmly following Democrats in their War on Climate Change, and much like the other party, are weaponizing it to persecute America’s weakest. On the one hand, this is a rebuke to liberals who think that everything can be solved via institutions, and on the other hand, reminds us that there are plenty of good people, active people, in red states. It is Houston that is the epicenter of a quake that shakes the world.

As so many of Kern’s characters are from minorities, queer or ethnic or in a great many cases both, they have been shackled by the trauma of American bigotry. That’s a theme that runs through this novel, where they are abused by the people that allegedly love them, as well as by a society that allegedly cares for them. The novel brings interpersonal abuse and societal oppression into parallel, and then demonstrates how hard they are to disentangle from one another. For example, Maddie is from a fundamentalist Christian background and rushed into marriage with an abusive man, before divorcing him and winding up with Fish, the aforementioned landlord. But Fish is not blameless, either, nor is he entirely untraumatized. Another such example is a Black character who is under house arrest and is monitored by an implant in his skin, blurring the line, again, between the societal and the domestic.

It’s telling that this novel has plenty of hope, but none of it comes from institutions. There’s very little about what constitutes “legitimate” resistance, or which organizations are truly worthy of your support, and more on what bluntly works. There’s civil disobedience in this novel, and there’s direct action, and both are implicitly stated to be worthy of support if they get the state to back off. On the other hand, the institutions of both local and national government are all basically oppressive forces that only ever make the lives of the Lab’s dwellers worse. Much is made about how Democrats are just as complicit in the national order as Republicans, and there is an argument over this timeline’s 2024 presidential election that will sound familiar to those of us who paid attention to discourse over the one in our own world. When contextualized with Kern’s own discussion of their worldview in Genocide Bad, I feel comfortable describing the philosophy of this novel as anarchist. It is a philosophy where only the people will save themselves, which brings to mind this verse from Charles Hope Kerr’s rendition of The Internationale:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

Kern is not afraid to show the flaws of their characters, as socially disadvantaged as they are. You get an unflinching depiction of poverty, with the addictions and the compromises that it entails. Some people die, and die because of these compromises, but they are never abstracted into statistics. Each act of hurt is an indictment of the systems that made them possible, each moment of suffering another intrusion. Many of these characters are viewed from Maddie’s first-person perspective, as previously stated a white woman, which in theory sounds potentially unpleasant, but Kern is more skillful than that. Maddie is called to account several times, and she has to reckon with her privilege and her ignorance about the lives of those who lack it. Through Maddie you see how a privileged person can become a true ally of the oppressed, and that will be a useful demonstration for a lot of people.

There is a part of me, as I read this book, that wished I were there in the Lab, helping build utopia. Kern depicts a new society being born in great detail—not the detail of dreary transcripts of debates and rules and resource allocations, but rather in the way people act, people behave, people live. It reminded me of a version of the Occupy Wall Street movement as depicted in David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, but rougher around the edges. A whole little society was built there, based on better moral principles than our own. There are big personalities, of course, and people who have not really reckoned with the facts of their privilege, and act in that ignorant way. It’s not perfect, but it feels real, like something that could actually happen if enough of us could just snap out of it, and that is ultimately its glory.

The ending of this novel is not happy, exactly, but nor is it sad, exactly. The grand experiment of the novel ends, as we suspected and indeed dreaded it might, but such grand experiments achieve their grandeur by the fact they inspire further experiments. The denouement feels, again, like something real, plausible, almost inevitable. But even so, this novel inspired a certain swelling in my heart, an uplifting of my soul, that saw that better things are possible. As Cory Doctorow said in Walkaway (a novel with many thematic overlaps with this one, and one that fans of Kern’s may enjoy), “it’s not the fight you win, but the fight you fight.” This novel is, ultimately, honest about the stakes at play when dealing with utopia, about the fact that the fight will continue to be fought long past the point we may hope it is over, but it’s worth fighting anyway, because it’s just. But still, I dream of what people could do, if we woke up like the characters in Kern’s novel.

Reference: Kern, Sim. The Free People's Village [Levine Querido, 2024]

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

Film Review: Slanted

A microcosm of race and gender that wanted to be far more daring than it is

Slanted is a film about identity. It is about Chinese-American identity inflected through the turmoil of finding yourself in your teenage years. It is about how America demands a very specific roster of traits to consider you truly included, and the most obvious of those is white skin. Through its history, America has demanded outsiders mold themselves to the white nationalist mold, and brutally punishes those outside it. This film is about one fantastical way of trying to transcend that dissonance, and the cost of becoming “American.”

Joan Huang is a Chinese-American student at a high school right out of the movies, with all the cliques and drama and entanglements we have been conditioned to accept. She is one of the few people of color at this affluent lily-white school that highly values conformity and submission, especially from its girls. Joan spends too much time on social media, and particularly is obsessed with a filter on one of said apps that makes her look white. As the culture of capitalism swoops down, she is offered the chance of a lifetime: a new experimental surgery that will turn her into a white girl. She uses this new procedure to seek the holy grail of teenage girlhood, according to Hollywood: the coveted status of prom queen.

Note that “according to Hollywood” bit in the last paragraph. This film is very much in thrall to the Hollywood genre of the “teen film”: high school is divided into mutually exclusive cliques, everyone is in a dog-eat-dog contest for popularity, everyone is seeking love and sex constantly as opposed to decent grades, and nobody can think about anything else. For example, Joan spends much of the film seeking the heart of a white boy at her school, who was tragically born without a personality, as part of her quest to join a clique that likewise has no personality. The film feels like, for no reason at all, it has a special obligation to a hackneyed formula that is already decades out of date and has been since subverted (I think that Spiderman: Homecoming was the closest film to my experience in high school in the early 2010s, for example).

The most striking example of this dated feeling is a scene where Joan is conveying her half-thought plan to become prom queen to her closest friend at school, using sheets of paper in a binder. I watched this film with my younger sister, who graduated high school in 2019, and she found the notion that this would be done on paper, rather than in a social media app, to be completely unbelievable.

Nor is the traditional “teen movie” the only genre to which this film pledges fealty. The other is the “immigrant movie,” where your unfortunate protagonist’s lunch, packed by her hardworking mother, immediately provokes disgust in her peers because it dares have a spice stronger than mayonnaise. Her parents are hard-working recent immigrants, stuck in menial labor and at the whim of rich white people. She speaks mostly in English, while her parents speak mostly in Chinese, but each understands the other language well enough. Her journey is that of what Northrop Frye defined as comedy, one where a character is ultimately reconciled with her society. At the end, she learns to be American, a newly accepted part of the nation of immigrants.

The film, though, never bothers to actually interrogate any of these notions that the narrative takes for granted, and the end result is a feeling of tonal dissonance. On the one hand, the way most characters behave is, if not “realistic,” normal enough according to Hollywood, all within the standard genre of the “teen film” and therefore part of what Hollywood considers to be “reality;” it is enough of a simulacrum of immigrant life that you can shrug and say “good enough.” But so many accoutrements of the setting, particularly her school, are exaggerated enough to feel like an inaccuracy, but not enough to feel like commentary. The school’s mascot is the wizard, and the posters for said wizard look unsubtly like a Klansman when viewed out of focus. The significance of prom is enshrined to the point that portraits of prom kings and queens past line a hallway, implying that the significance of this ritual is honored by the school administration too. The group of white kids that Joan is trying to fit into does a number of its routines completely in unison, such as when they take out their inevitably identical lunches from their packs. You have characterization that is totally at odds with worldbuilding.

The result of this is a film that feels like a machine-generated average of two other hypothetical, better films. One of them is a searing look at the insidious nature of everyday racism, where the smiling faces of Joan’s peers hide the fact they will never view her as one of them. This one would be very grounded, tragically real, with the race-changing surgery as the only speculative element, where the cost of assimilation is made viscerally real. The other hypothetical film is wilder, more exaggerated, going down past the point where One Battle After Another was with its Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor, and down to the far lands of satire where a school with a Klansman as a mascot feels earned. This hypothetical film would be biting, irreverent, and dystopian; it could have cross-burnings in the football field, lynchings conducted over Tik-Tok, and the prom queen receive the honor of being marshal at a Klan parade; in other words, it’d have to go all the way with the exaggeration or it would fall flat. Either option would be a film that would dare to say something: Is striving to be “American” worth pursuing to begin with?

The traditional immigrant story in the United States, where the newcomer passes through trials and tribulations and ultimately ends up a new American, is wrapped up in the “nation of immigrants” propaganda line that became common in this country after World War II as a reaction to the wave of decolonization sweeping the world. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Europeans had never had a right to rule Africa or Asia, and this of course raised questions about the white man’s right to rule the Americas. The response concocted was to portray this country as a land of opportunity for people from all around the world. The idea was that America’s strength came through its diversity and tolerance, and that all the anti-immigrant riots and massacres and poverty was simply human beings failing to live up to a quasi-divine ideal.

As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has shown in her book Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (excerpted here), the “nation of immigrants” line is based on a fundamental conflation between a settler and an immigrant. The settler caste of white people came to this continent to plunder and kill so they could create a white nationalist ethnostate where they would rule forever as overlords. European immigrants, often called “white ethnics,” could to a point assimilate into the settler caste (the most precariously placed being Jewish immigrants). Those from darker countries, on the other hand, are only allowed into the country at white allowance, and will (and do) face shockingly brutal violence if they ever step out of line, or are seen as a useful scapegoat. If America were truly a “nation of immigrants,” truly a “land of opportunity,” truly “tolerant” and “accepting” and “diverse,” it would not be murdering Palestinian children on a whim in Illinois, or throwing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in concentration camps where they are tortured. No amount of self-soothing pablum can deny the fact that America has never been tolerant of immigrants, and has never viewed them as anything other than cheap labor. The “nation of immigrants” line is fundamentally a way for affluent white people to justify slavery and genocide as a price worth paying for cheap takeout.

I am a Filipino-American, and through this film I was reminded of a bit in Dylan Rodríguez’s nonfiction book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, where he argues that the idea of “Filipino-Americans” as a people is a contradiction in terms. America has historically hated Filipinos, never accepting them, indeed willing to slaughter them like cattle, as Samar and Bud Dajo and Watsonville attest. Rodríguez is in the same school of a number of critical ethnic studies theorists who argue that America’s demands for assimilation are of a fundamentally genocidal nature, not necessarily through killing but through a mechanism similar to an Indian residential school. In Slanted, America, through Joan’s classmates, sees a character like her and wants to “kill the Asian and save the girl.” This line of theory, however, overlooks the existence of half-Filipinos like me (“tisoy” in Tagalog, derived from Spanish “mestizo”), who cannot just abandon America even if we wanted to. Back to Slanted, just by growing up in America, absorbing its individualism and its enterprise and its optimism, Joan has become something other than purely Chinese, but will still never be fully American. This is a dissonance, the type of chasm that Rodríguez failed to consider and the film never bothers to reckon with.

The film is ultimately unsatisfying because it is so wedded to genre conventions that rest on shaky assumptions, and never questions any of them. Joan is railroaded down a particular path of acceptance and is not given a chance to see that said “acceptance” is not worth pursuing. Sure, by the end she sees that the surgery was not worth the cost, but she is still buying into the myth that she can be accepted into the American white nationalist project. She still views acceptance into the echelons of the “popular crowd” at a school with a logo suspiciously resembling a Klansman as a worthy goal.

The film most clearly fumbles this with a side character, Brindha, an Indian-American (played by Canadian actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who is Joan’s best friend and who goes along with her plan to become prom queen, but is clearly not buying into the whole charade in the way that Joan is. There’s a piercing scene after Joan has become whitened, where to gain acceptance from her white peers she rejects Brindha from a gathering. This scene vaguely gestures towards the “model minority” placement of East Asians as occupying a somewhat higher rung on the racial ladder than darker-skinned minorities, but never commits to it. The film is not interested in interrogating this notion, and represents no real alternative when doing so could have led to a far more compelling arc.

There is one place in the film that does have some depth, although not terribly much—that of predatory capitalism. The way that the whitening surgery is pitched to Joan is through an app with a filter that makes her look white on social media, and is done with a great sense of false urgency. The surgery, then, is ultimately a scam, as is omnipresent today to the point it has overwhelmed telephone calls. This more than gestures at the way predatory capitalism harms teenagers through social media, and specifically teenage girls. Indeed the gendered aspect of all this is the film’s strongest aspect. Take, for example, the hall of prom kings and queens; Joan is ultimately aspiring to be a picture among pictures, an object among objects, something to be admired and not respected. She is chasing white beauty standards to be a more desirable thing in the eyes of American patriarchy, as that is how it values its women (and the standards have broken out of containment, as skin whitening is common in Asia). Much of this wasn’t clear to me until talking about it with my sister at length, but this story would unquestionably not be what it is if the protagonist were instead a teenage boy. What becomes frustrating, though, is that so much of this plot could be told with a white girl and more regular plastic surgery. Sure, not every story with a nonwhite protagonist needs to be about race issues, but the film clearly wanted to be about race issues in addition to gender issues. Once again, the film gestures in a certain direction, but never actually treads that path.

The film doesn’t want to critique Joan’s reasons for wanting what she does, particularly the ones she isn’t necessarily aware of. Joan is subjected to a particularly gendered form of racial capitalism, where her value can only be expressed through the ways an Asian woman could be valued according to white nationalist standards. These are the standards that, while appearing trifling in a high school context, are the things that will press on her adult life from all directions. Her school life is a preparation for her adult life and she is being prepared for a particular role. Ideally, we’d get something like the portrayal of racial capitalism in 2025’s Him, which I have reviewed for this blog previously.

Ultimately, I am conflicted about this film, and frankly am unsure if I was the right person to review it, as I have not experienced its gendered issues. To me, Slanted acts like it wants to deconstruct genres, but doesn’t dare to dig under the surface. It still accepts the liberal idea of immigrant assimilation as fact, and views the ‘80s template of high school films as the only way teenagers could ever possibly live. It interrogates gender rather well, but only glances at race when race and gender are so intertwined. Ultimately, the critical project of the film feels incomplete. I left this film with a sense of wasted potential, of a daring film that could have been rather than the timid film that is. Both my sister and I agreed that this would have been better off as an A24 film, for it would feel less need to be commercial. In any case, Slanted simply does not think big enough about its subject matter to be a truly satisfying film.

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

Book Review: A Fire Beneath the World, by Jas Treadwell

Demons and castles and the French Revolution

A few years ago, I wrote approvingly of Jas Treadwell’s most excellent novel The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach. The best part, I reported, was the delightful, opinionated, quarrelsome narrator, who lost no opportunity to make the most of the tools available to him, be they typographical—footnotes, capitalization, emphatic formatting—or more structural explorations of post-Aristotelian non-unities of time and place. Now, in the equally excellent sequel, A Fire Beneath the World, our narrator returns, and he is not alone.

Where Thomas Peach was set entirely in England, this tale turns its eye to revolutionary France. It splits its focus between English characters, familiar to us already from Thomas Peach, and a new set of French faces. Our friend the English narrator (as I call him in my head) handles the former, and the much more straightforward French narrator (as I call them in my head) handles the latter.

This split in narrators is a structural mirror of one of the more charming themes of the book: the attempt to split people into one of two types. Our English narrator ruminates upon this at some length, quickly dismissing the easy binary of men vs. women as utterly uninteresting and unfit for purpose, and instead landing upon (he asserts) a far more foundational, undeniable, and universal division—namely, whether or not a person supports the French monarchy or the French revolutionaries. Obviously. Clearly. I see no problems with this fundamental universal binary.

The English portion of the tale does its best to support this philosophy. On the one hand we have Miss Arabella Farthingay, a pro-revolutionary poet who is invited to appear in front of the National Assembly in Paris to declaim her verses in their honour. Orbiting around her is a mysterious swashbuckling rescuer of persecuted French aristocrats, known as Forget-Me-Not, a hero lauded across English society with appalling doggerel, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.

As our English narrator relates Miss Farthingay's story, the action eventually shifts to France, and our English narrator is not happy about that. You see, he does not speak French very well, and so unless the French people speak slowly and clearly, he has difficulty following a lot of conversations. And furthermore, he doesn’t much care for the French, actually. French druids, for example, built their stone monuments in straight lines rather than circles like Stonehenge, which is obviously very bad and inferior to English druids, who well understood the principle of the curved line. Modern French people are just as bad, inexplicably devoted to the swearing and keeping of oaths as a matter of honour. Good solid Englishmen know that a serviceable lie is an indispensable component of an orderly nation’s government and commerce. (I don’t quite know why this anti-French bigotry is so funny to me. Is it because it’s based on such absurd pettiness? Is it because it’s over two centuries out of date, and so its teeth are drawn? Is it even possible to draw the teeth of bigotry? Evidently yes. This was hilarious.)

The other half of the tale focuses on French characters, and for that we get a French narrator. This narrator has a great deal less personality than our English narrator, but does, at least, speak French, and so we can understand all the French conversations spoken by the French people. (The French narrator does not, however, speak English, so some degree of linguistic confusion is an unavoidable component no matter who’s telling the story.) We follow here the (mis)adventures of three adventurers: a young woman, who seeks to leave her small town and see the world; a scoundrel, who follows demonic guidance in return for escape from prison; and an ex-valet, whose previous employer was also not averse to more than a little demonic shenanigans of his own.

Our French characters both support and contradict the English narrator’s claims about the Great Division of people. In support: they defy traditional gender divisions. The young woman is so large and strong that she can believably threaten to squash the skulls of men who betray her. The ex-valet is so dainty and beautiful that he is frequently mistaken for a woman; and looming throughout the narrative is a mysteriously powerful government official who is addressed both as Monsieur and Madame in different circumstances. Clearly, the distinction between men and women is pretty useless as a way of splitting the world in two, exactly as our English narrator has asserted.

But in contradiction to the second half of the English narrator’s Great Division, we find that—in France at least—a great many of the French people do not actually care much one way or the other about the state of the revolutionary government. For some, the sheer weight of living crushes out any political opinions: denouncements and disappearances weaken the labour force; but the availability of labour to bring in the harvest is a moot point, because the endless rain is rotting grain in the fields. In the teeth of starvation, what does it matter who writes the laws and collects taxes you can’t pay?

Even among those who can manage the luxury of political identities, many adhere not to the monarchy, or to the revolutionaries way off in Paris, but to their own Breton brethren on the coast of France. Our English narrator’s great division of mankind falls apart utterly when it is put to the test in the country to which it applies most directly.

Knowing the English narrator’s opinion of the French, I suspect he would probably dismiss this failure to adhere to his principles as even more evidence of the deficiencies of French character. However, since he does not speak French well enough to ask the French people themselves about their political opinions, he remains blissfully ignorant of this counterexample. As, in fact, he remains ignorant of all of the French components of the plot. In the climactic pages of the book, revelation after revelation emerges that he lacks the background to understand, leaving him spouting indignant protestations of bafflement into (he imagines) our sympathetic, equally baffled ear.

But we are not baffled. Our view of the tale has not been divided—not by gender, not by language, not by political opinion, not by nationality. We have seen all of it, and the result is a delight. I can think of no better words to end this review with than our English narrator’s own footnote. It refers to the previous book, The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, in its original place in the text, but it applies equally well here:

You must take matters into your own hands. Seek out the book-sellers and the circulating libraries—hunt high and low—And find [this] volume for yourself.—Find it, and read it. We dare say, the effort will reward the toil.

Nerd coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/standout in its category.

Highlights:

• Two narrators, both alike in dignity (well, not really)
• French Revolution
• Demons

Reference: Treadwell, Jas. A Fire Beneath the World [Hodder and Stoughton, 2024].

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.

Film Review: Hokum

Irish folk horror and a haunted house full of actual scary moments. (Spoiler-free)

As an avid horror movie fan, it takes a lot to shiver my timbers. When I'm sitting in the dark rows of a cinema during a new release, I sometimes try to view it through the eyes of those who don't revel in scary delights. Regular (some would say normal) people who jump at grotesque faces, get unsettled by hideous screams, and hide their eyes when the blood starts to flow.

During Hokum, I had quite the experience trying to imagine how such folks would react, mainly because I was extremely, deeply unsettled. That doesn't bode well for everyone else. But also, I loved every minute. It's rare to get a scary movie these days that actually delivers honest-to-goodness scares without absolutely wallowing in A24-level trauma dumps that just emotionally punish you for two hours. Hokum achieves this despite having some gnarly generational guilt scarring on the main character, Ohm Bauman. 

Ohm is a successful writer visiting the Irish hotel where his deceased parents had their honeymoon, aiming to spread their ashes in the woods nearby and also maybe squeeze in some writing while he's abroad. It's not just anytime for him to be visiting, though, it's Halloween. The creaky old hotel is chock ablock with carved turnips, the OG jack-o'-lanterns whose origin lies in Ireland and Scotland. If you haven't seen one, they are ineffably creepy, and the effect is truly unsettling. Fun fact: During the pandemic, I carved a turnip into one such jack-o'-lantern to see it in person. It is not only difficult to do, as root vegetables aren't soft and full of seeds like modern pumpkins, it's also eerie. Picture for proof:

Baumann, as a deeply cynical author-type who's honestly downright mean, is portrayed by Adam Scott, who's playing against character here. Instead of the usual nerdy and demure guy, he's terse, angry, alcoholic, and absolutely alone in the world.

While at the Irish hotel, he encounters malevolent employees, a locked-up honeymoon suite that's haunted by a witch, a woman gone mysteriously missing, and a local forest man who stays hopped up on magic mushroom milk. It's hard to get too into the plot without giving away the twist, so I'm trying to keep it high level. 

The hotel is essentially another character in the movie, and the camera does a good job of lingering on all the dusty, spooky 1950's accoutrements: vintage clocks, distorted angel sculptures, and countless ringing bells. It's the exact opposite vibe of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, which is large and open and expensive. This hotel is quaint, small, almost claustrophobic. 

Fittingly, the atmosphere that follows you from room to room is dark and foreboding, and the multiple effective jump scares are a feature, not a bug. Some horror aficionados decry the use of jump scares in elevated horror, calling them cheap or gimmicky. But the jump scares in Hokum are earned, and sometimes, you can even see them coming — and even as they slowly approach they still make you flinch. That's how good they are.

Monsters, gore, and humans don't scare me, and fortunately Hokum doesn't rely on these for its scares. Instead, it's all spirits, witches, and demons, and the production design renders them absolutely nightmarish. There's one fiend that resembles the Momo challenge hoax monster that went viral for terrifying kids about a decade ago, all bulging eyes and rictus smile. There's a scene at the end that is reminiscent of the ending of Ghost, where a character is dragged into the afterlife, and I was actually cheering for the divine justice it was bringing to life. 

The most effective part, for me, of the film is how the Irish folklore organically starts to seep into Baumann's defense mechanisms. Early on, he dismisses the conjuring tales and chalk circles for protection as so much hokum, but as he descends into the lair of the witch, he absolutely starts to believe. Watching him search for his magical stick of chalk in his jacket transforms from "Maybe I'll try this!" to "I absolutely have to do this to stay alive."

When you dig deeper into the themes of the film, there's also some good (and not really didactic) lessons about forgiveness, self-compassion, and letting go, and horror can be an especially good vehicle for these.  Ghosts, of course, aren't real, but the emotions that humans leave behind in the living can haunt one for decades, and a tormented spirit can be a regular person struggling with big feelings, not a poltergeist.

What sets Hokum apart from the Weapons and Smiles of the world is that it comes by its themes honestly, and allows for actual character growth. It feels human, and also lived-in in a way that makes you believe everything, despite the folklore freakout of supernatural beings. 

But the scariest part of the entire movie wasn't what was on screen. It was the fact that I was in a matinee theatre all by myself for the first hour. Then, someone walks in with a huge popcorn and soda, and sits down in front of me a few rows. Within a matter of minutes, they then walked out, leaving the snacks behind. It was 100% a ghost. Or maybe it was just hokum.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Mortedant's Peril by R. J. Barker

 Grimy murder mystery in gaslamp Minas Tirith

R J Barker has established a fine career writing consistently very good to excellent fantasy that is just a little bit weird. Not so much the particular frame of the New Weird(TM), more that it reads like it was shot predominantly from a Dutch angle: you’re reading what appears at first glance to be (top quality) but reasonably down the middle fantasy and then you realise everything is just a little quirky, unsettling, or both. In Mortedant’s Peril, Barker deploys that lens to great effect to not one but two of my favourite fantasy building blocks: the book is a murder mystery set in a well-drawn secondary world city.

After a brief prologue from the perspective of the murderer, the book opens with our protagonist, Irody Hasp, arriving at the scene of a death in a down-at-heel neighbourhood. Hasp is a Mortedant, a quasi-religious order which reads and passes on the last thoughts of the dead (This is one of the three great orders of the city of Elbay, the others being the magic engineers the Spurriers and the more familiarly clerical Worshipful, who revere the Howling God allegedly trapped beneath the city). Although he reads nothing unusual in the deceased’s thoughts, someone obviously thinks he might have, and shortly afterwards Hasp is caught up in a murder. In the rather brutal criminal law of the setting, absent any other evidence the last person seen with the deceased will be fingered as their murderer, and so Hasp has only a few days to find said evidence before his scheduled execution. The mystery plot which unfolds from this is well-crafted and surprising: the end result makes sense in a way that doesn't betray the reader or the setting, but neither is it quickly obvious what the details of the (in the end quite convoluted) plot surrounding the murder are.

Perhaps the obvious comparison (and, indeed, it is one of the comps the publisher user in the blurb) with “death priest secondary world city murder mystery” is Katherine Addision’s Witness for the Dead. And at one level, sure, the similarities are obvious. Both Addision’s Celehar and Barker’s Hasp are ultimately gentle men who have been ill-used by people who are not, both are death priests investigating murders. But the sensibility of Elbay is very different from that of Amalo, and Irody Hasp is a very, very different character to Celehar. Celehar is a quiet, lonely man with little understanding of his own worth & endless empathy for his clients. Hasp, meanwhile, is a quiet, lonely man (though he'd not realise the latter) who is, at the start of the novel, a prim snob with a significant collection of prejudices about pretty much anyone and anything and a perhaps inflated sense of his own worth. He has a general contempt for pretty much all other people and institutions he comes across. He finds fault with the behaviour of both people higher and lower in social status to him, is dismissive of religious belief and, when we see him encounter the Sea People – another species of sapient which exists in the setting – somewhat racist as well.

What Barker does and does well is, over time and with exposure, show us that Hasp’s bigotry is more due to ignorance than deep character law and is not particularly closely held; he slowly realises that perhaps his prejudices are not universally justified. This is achieved in large part by making Hasp do something he has not been able to do for quite some: rely on other people. The key supporting cast who achieve this are Whisper – a Sea Person mercenary forced upon him as a guard after the murder – and Mirial, the sister of the murder victim who essentially swindles Hasp into taking her on as an apprentice. These characters are well-drawn, with enough detail coming through to get a sense of personality while also making it clear that Hasp very much does not have a complete picture of his (initially unwanted) companions. 

The setting itself, the city of Elbay, is a remarkably evocative thing. It resembles M John Harrison’s Viriconium superimposed on Minas Tirith with a side of Dickensian London (Given that Harrison’s city is in part a response to what he saw as the fussy nerdism of Tolkien and his successors, this is a provocative choice of setting). I do not think the Minas Tirith reference can be accidental. Like Tolkien’s city, Elbay has seven tiers, with the top being a castle within which a possibly absent ruler allegedly resides. Like Minas Tirith, Elbay was designed from the ground up to resist invasion, and with that imminent threat now centuries in the past, the city’s defensive orientation makes little sense and is in some ways a net negative to its residents, as I imagine is the case in Minas Tirith after the fall of Sauron. The Viriconium aspect comes from the gothic skewering of the more romantic side of fantasy, the grime and the steam and the old technology which the residents still use but do not wholly understand (and is no longer wholly reliable). This obviously overlaps with the Dickensian aspect of the worldbuilding, but the Dickens influence goes wider than just the cityscape. The wonderfully evocative names, the well-judged aspects of caricature in some of the characterisation, and the ongoing touch of genuinely funny humour throughout all point in that direction as well, and the labyrinthine bureaucracy and legal system are certainly reminiscent of Bleak House.

The worldbuilding is widescreen in its approach, which works for the book's pace. By this I mean it flits from set piece to set piece of the murder investigation with an impressionistic view of the city in between rather than a detailed one. Points of detail and specificity (I particularly like the communal plumbing whereby the further down the city you go the more second and third and fifth hand the water is) do contribute to the worldbuilding, but a lot is left in soft focus. This doesn't bother me,  but if you're a worldbuilding nerd this may frustrate. 

As with the slow evolution of Hasp’s character, this approach is reflective of the fact that is both Book One of a series and that it has its own distinct (and complete) plot and character arcs and the reader is expected to have patience with both. As noted above, aside from the prologue, the narration is in the first person and thus tightly. At one point a fair way through the novel, Mirial takes Hasp off the main streets to avoid attention. As he goes through these back alleys and byways, he sees “quiet neighbourhoods... [he] had never seen before, places where the houses rose up in great steps and grew on top of each other in teetering piles that almost met just above our heads”. Until the events of the novel, his small life – and his bigotry – have constrained his experience of his city and its people and it is the later opening up of his character which opens up some of the world as well. Hooks for the sequels and further character dives (Hasp and Whisper both have very interesting pasts which are very much not fully explored in this book) similarly remain, and we can expect further unspooling across the rest of the series. This is entirely deliberate and brilliantly done, to my reading, but I can see it irritating readers who expect things to be more clearly and fully laid out from the get-go and want an immediately likeable narrator. 

Like the characters, Mortedant's Peril's thematic concerns resist simplistic analysis. In the opening chapters of the book, reading Hasp’s repeated sneers about religion, I thought I was seeing the voice of the author. And there is some of that in here, sure, fanaticism for religious or personal reasons is clearly not something the book has much time for. But the stuff at the start I nodded along with sympathetically as Hasp sneered about the Worshipful is shown later on to be just another emanation of the Little England bigotry (Little Elbay?) he'd built for himself; a wider exposure to a wider range of believers showed that view impoverished. It could be read as a condemnation of the way class and capital eat up and spit out those at the bottom of the heap (here, in the towering hill-city of Elbay, literally the bottom). And yet even that understanding is at least complicated by the raw utilitarian views of one of the supporting characters one might be tempted to class as 'good'.

Ultimately, this is a riotous, seething romp of a book with a city and a cast that are both weird and fantastical and also viscerally, plausibly human. Another very impressive series starter from an author who has an unblemished record of producing them.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Well crafted fantasy mystery in a wonderfully realised setting
• Both demands and rewards patience from the reader
• Asshole protagonist (complimentary)

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 

Reference:  R. J. Barker, Mortedant's Peril [Tor, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed

Captain (A)merica must die

cover artist: Marcel de Neuve

Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory is that rarest of things -  a proper space opera that has no real interest in what the West has to say about space or stories. El Sayed is a former journalist of Egyptian descent and he was there for the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt largely known to westerners (if they know it at all) because of its central role in the Arab Spring as it unfolded in Egypt. 
 
Mahmud is London based right now and won the Future Worlds prize in 2023 for an earlier version of this story that now finally makes it into print.
 
I mention these biographical facts because they are pertinent not just to the style and nature of the story in an authorial sense but also in terms of the themes and characters within the pages. 
 
This next paragraph contains mild spoilers about the plot so if you want to skip it and move on to the next part of the review feel free to do so. The Republic of Memory is about a generation ship sent out from earth on a very long (centuries long) journey to colonise another world. The people sending them are, if not quite then almost a world government centred in the Levant and entirely ruled over by an AI overclass. As becomes clear right at the start of the novel, something goes wrong back home, the threat of mutually assured destruction finally becoming a promise and the ship is ordered to turn back with its precious cargo of rich and powerful people to rebuild in the aftermath. Instead of doing so, the crew destroy the AI and continue on their way – their reasons not fully clear to themselves or us. What follows is set centuries later but still far from their destination as the various societies and factions that manage the functioning of the generation ship reach a breaking point. 
 
(Spoilers over) The story follows a number of PoVs but the crucial two, Damietta and Iskander, begin the novel. El Sayed puts these two characters (young family members) on seemingly opposite sides of the social divide and through this we have our way into the story. Damietta is a young woman in a close knit and culturally conservative family who chafes at the constraints she feels in her life. She is privileged as far as it goes with a good life laid out before her, but that’s the problem – that life is laid out before her with no deviations, no creativity and no chance at making choices other than those the people around her approve of. 
 
Damietta doesn’t know what choices she really wants to make – her horizons are too constrained for her to understand what she might actually want and, as for so many people, this leaves her with the only choice available – break things. Damietta is the person who reminds us that we all want to be able to make choices (not in the sense of the hero’s journey but in the sense of being able to determine who we are for ourselves) and when those choices are suppressed we will, reasonably even if the choices themselves are unreasonable, make choices to break whatever is within reach – be that ourselves or others. 
 
Damietta cannot see her privilege – her constraints leave her idolising resistance movements, rejecting authority and looking to engage in acts of rebellion regardless of the consequences because she cannot see how her life could be worse. And sure, in the immediate her life can be worse but a life whose practical choices might deteriorate is still nothing when compared to a life where self-determination is absent. One is waves on the ocean rocking the boat, the other is drowning without being able to die.
 
Iskander is a lawyer (of sorts) working for Administration, the distant overclass that manages the entire generation ship (called the Safina which literally means vessel or ark in Quranic Arabic). He is the face of authority, able to open doors and go places others can’t because of his role. He sits with two faces – one facing his community as the person they look to when they want to get married or get things done and one facing Administration as their loyal functionary ensuring their rules are followed without causing riots. Iskander is the willingly colonised actor, trying to see both sides, aware of the tensions, embodying them in his very person but looking to make the world work. Sometimes that’s for the better, sometimes that’s bending the rules and sometimes that’s following them. Iskander exists on a kind of personal capital – a currency he has to spend that is built up through the cautious and cunning use of his position. His effectiveness built on people seeing him as just reliably enough on their side to help them get what they need and want when Admin might otherwise say no while knowing that his power comes from Admin’s overall approval.
 
Iskander is the classical sepoy, the good native, the conflicted coconut, the collaborator who both legitimises the oppressor but also subverts their authority. 
 
El Sayed does a truly brilliant job of ensuring that we see their points of view. This isn’t a political treatise; it’s a story about people whose lives are political from the moment they’re born to the moment they die (and beyond). Why? Because for so many people this is the world they live in and to see it on the page is utterly brilliant. 
 
What I mean is that El Sayed isn’t writing about politics here – the story isn’t a metaphor for non-western experiences of colonialism. He’s both way beyond that, deep into postcolonial Arabfuturism, but also interested in these people in and of themselves. What Iskander wants, what his dreams are, what Damietta discovers in her journey to finding a way to express what’s inside her in a way that makes sense to her, consequences and all, is at the heart of this story. Whatever else it is, The Republic of Memory is a personal journey for people whose lives are…complicated. 
 
And how complicated they are because the Safina isn’t just Iskander, Damietta, their family and their community. It’s made up of communities from across old earth whose roles and cultures are disparate and essential to making the ship work. From hydroponics to medical to engineering and those who mine for resources beyond the ship, the tasks of keeping a mechanical world flying through the void are endless and demanding. What’s worse is that the ship is gradually deteriorating no matter how hard the people work at keeping it all working in harmony. 
 
It’s unclear whether the slow collapse of the ship’s systems is the fault of Administration, the inevitable result of destroying the AI at the start of the voyage or whether it’s simply entropy presenting its bill. The answer to the question depends on who you ask and their place within the ship. 
El Sayed has rolled together caste (or class if you’re a westerner), gender, functional essentialism, racism and post-colonialism into a single pressure cooker of a story. He is aware of and plays with a host of different ideas; from a variety of communisms and communitarianisms to capitalisms, religious expressions of different kinds including manifest destiny through to AI as god. 
 
However, central to everyone’s life in this novel is a gift economy. In a capitalist society where the rule of law tries to ensure transparent equity for all concerned this would be called bribery. Where there is no cash, per se, and the levers of power are invisible and asymmetric beyond family and community units it is called gift economy – bringing an official’s favourite sweets, making sure someone’s cousin got the car they wanted at a good price and so on. You might call it a society built on social obligation.
 
What I’m trying to say is that El Sayed’s novel is that truly remarkable thing in English – a speculative story that regurgitates precisely none of the prevailing Western ideas about how the world should be run and rests on none of those foundations. Beyond that it does what it wants not by eschewing consideration of these possibilities (after all, Administration is a specific proxy for American hegemonic power over countries like Egypt and how client states must come to operate for maximum benefit for their rulers), but by understanding and reflecting how complex politics between different factions is especially when relationships are stable. After all, it is successfully navigating complexity that allows stability to be sustained as the deliberately untrained and willingly ignorant are discovering in the Strait of Hormuz at the time of writing this. 
 
The last thing I want to comment on here is language. It seems to me that language and its use, its control and its boundaries are central to building consensus but also to building and controlling communities. The societies in The Republic of Memory aren’t split by culture or skin colour but by language with the mantra that anyone can learn a new language with the goal of preserving social mobility. It’s a cunning sleight of hand because it wilfully ignores the power of community and relationship and culture in building social capital while remaining superficially utopian. 
 
El Sayed delivers so much of this novel through conlangs, creoles and macaronic structures that you need to take your time to understand the rhythms of what he’s built. I think that is very, very important because in language and how people use and deploy it you find the real levers of power being expressed. What words you use at home versus what you use when speaking to power are revelatory, and throughout El Sayed reminds us that language is, at all times, a tool not simply for consensus but for control and subversion. 
 
The Republic of Memory is the first of a duology and as a way of working through modern global politics, personal lives within that context and as an exploration of how you and I survive such potentially crushing pressures it’s an extraordinary achievement. 

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The Math

Highlights:

• Amazing languages!
• Proper political SF
• Non-western viewpoint

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, a powerful exploration of what worlds look like when seen from a postcolonialist perspective. A superb starting point for people interested in Arabfuturism.

Reference: El Sayed, Mahmud, The Republic of Memory [Orion 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.

6 Books with Jordan Kurella

Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. He is the author of the fantasy novella, I Never Liked You Anyway, the short story collection, When I Was Lost, and the climate fiction novella, The Death of Mountains. Jordan lives in limbo with his perfect dog and practical cat.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Right now I’m doing a re-read of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones as I am answering these questions a day or two before I’m due at the L.A. Times Book Festival. I’m on a panel with Stephen Graham Jones and Catronia Ward. I have Ward’s book ready to read on the train to Los Angeles. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of my favorite horror books I’ve read in a very long time, but then again, I’m an enormous fan of Dracula by Bram Stoker (probably read that four times). The book is paced and constructed similarly (but not samely) to Dracula but with more revenge, more justice, and more skill in voice (in my opinion). Jones does an absolutely incredible job in the narrative voice differences between Etsy, Good Stab, and the Pastor. This is the kind of thing I just gobble up. I’m about a third of the way through my re-read, and picking up on clues I dropped the first time.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This was originally going to be a very difficult question to answer, as my two big books I was anticipating were Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis and Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman. But Year of the Mer is already out, so! This makes answering this question far easier (get Year of the Mer at your favorite indie bookstore). As Ignore All Previous Instructions is due out in May, I’ll talk about that one. This book is an incredible rocket-ride of spacefaring adventure and romance with the kind of drama that I don’t usually see in science fiction—by which I mean relationship/romantic drama—and that kinda messy stuff is totally my jam. I love fictional relationships that mimic soap opera levels of mess, and Ignore All Previous Instructions has that with trans characters, neurodivergence, space travel, and a total and scathing takedown of LLMs. Hoffman is an incredible writer, and I’ve been a fan of their work for ages. This book is my favorite of theirs so far.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I always want to re-read The Mountain and the Sea by Ray Nayler. This is my answer every time. When I’m in-between books, I see it on my shelf and want to read it again. Had the fortune of talking to Ray about this at the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, and he said that he wrote that in the hopes that folks would find it that way—like their favorite Pixies album—but to me, The Mountain and the Sea is itself about language and communication and the problems and benefits of it. So re-reading it again and again (I’ve read it twice) makes me understand the book on a deeper and deeper level, like listening or replaying a conversation in my head might do. See where I erred, or where maybe someone wasn’t being completely on the up and up. It also makes me a better writer, I think? Re-reading something that I love so completely? Because I can pick it apart and get to the makings of why it works so well.

4. A book that you love and wish you yourself had written?

No. 

I don’t get jealous or envious about other authors’ work, and when someone else writes a book concept that was close to something I was thinking of, my immediate thought is, “Oh thank gosh, now I can put that idea aside.” And then I read their book to see how much better they did it than me, and then sit back and enjoy it. Authors are all unique and bring their own life experiences to the page. Ideas might be chaff, but every idea is built upon the backbone of experience. To get to the question? The closest I got to this was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which thank gosh he wrote that. Chandrasekera wrote Rakesfall as a far better book than I could write, and executed the nascent idea I’d been playing over in my head so much better and more masterfully than I ever could do. Which is cool! How can I be upset, now I get to read it! I just love reading, and I love reading a lot of things. So when I come across something that is similar to something I want to write? I am just super happy go along for the ride.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

This is a complete toss-up between D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths and The Stranger by Chris Van Allsberg. Each of these books I was given by my parents when I was around nine or ten years old, and I wore the copies out so much that the covers fell out and pages fell out. I still have the originals I was given. But I’m going to talk about The Stranger. This book is not one of Allsberg’s more famous works, it’s about Jack Frost, who gets hit by a farmer’s car, and is brought into the farmer’s home to recover from amnesia. Like much of Allsberg’s work, the illustrations are phenomenal, and there’s a mystery to be solved. When the seasons don’t change, and the harvest doesn’t come, Jack Frost suddenly regains his memory, and winter arrives. I’m getting chills just typing this. It made me seek out and have curiosity about more things. Books, nature, and beauty in the world around me.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The last book I had published is called The Death of Mountains and it came out last year (March 2025). It features Plundered Mountain, who is a middling hill of the Appalachians who does not want to die. When she is visited by the Death of Mountains who has come to usher her along? Plundered Mountain bargains for her life through the trading of stories back and forth over the course of one night, but it becomes more involved than that, as stories always tend to do. Told in three points of view in novella length, this book was a fun thing to write, an experiment in how weird can I go? There’s a book called Before the Feast by Saša Stanišić translated by Anthea Bell. I read it about six years ago, and in it, there’s a town that speaks in a first person plural. Reading this book changed my entire perspective on how a book could be told. I could not have written The Death of Mountains without Before the Feast. But I’m getting lost in my answer: Death of Mountains, the character, is terrible at his job, while Plundered Mountain is exceedingly good (and stubborn) at being a mountain. The two clash in the kindest and gentlest of ways as they tell stories and ask questions over the nature of permanence, what is life, what is joy, and how there is no life without a little suffering. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thank you Jordan!

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