The Recluce Reread: The Towers of the Sunset

 

When I wrote about The Magic of Recluce I mentioned The Towers of the Sunset was my entry point into Recluce and was the novel that hooked me enough to begin a now thirty year fandom for the series and of L.E. Modesitt, Jr’s various fantasy series (Recluce obviously being the most prominent). All these years later I can still feel Creslin skiing off into the snow just as clearly as I can with June Morrissey walking off into the snow in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, which is a foundational literary moment fundamentally burned into my memory.

All of that is why I was concerned when I started re-reading The Towers of the Sunset and didn’t immediately feel whatever I felt decades ago - which I realize is impossible because I was a teenager thirty some years ago and now I’m pushing 50 and have two kids, one of which is only two years away from becoming a teenager himself. I have changed immensely, the book remains a moment in time.

When the novel starts Creslin is a young man being pushed into an arranged political marriage. He is the son of the Marshall of Westwind, the military outpost that is its own community and under its own rule. Westwind follow The Legend, which is to say that there were once angels and demons and it was men’s hubris that led to the fall of the angels and as such, only women should have true power and rule.

Creslin is resentful about all of that. Not the legend so much as that he knows what his fate is and he wants no part of it. Because the Marshall allowed him to train with the famed Westwind guards who are truly the best of the best, Creslin is a far more accomplished warrior than he understands and has skills to slip away in the aforementioned snowstorm in order to find a different path for his life than that arranged marriage and subservience.

That path involves a whole lot of pain and a surprising amount of wizards trying to kill him because of where he comes from and what he represents to them - which is some sort of perceived threat to the existence of the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Creslin, of course, is an untrained black wizard. It is noted later in the novel that if the council at Fairhaven just allowed for Creslin to be trained by their black wizards all of what happened later could have been avoided because Creslin was only in opposition to them because he was fighting for his life.

Instead what the white wizards of Fairhaven get is the founding of Recluce as its own entity to stand on its own for Creslin and Maegaera (more on her in a moment) to have a place of their own. Creslin, it turns out, was an untrained black mage and possibly an even stronger storm mage. Magaera was a powerful white wizard who is bound to pain to her sister but who will eventually become an equally powerful black mage. They are bound together, not by choice, but in their desire / need / drive to find a place where they can just exist.

The two of them are the arranged marriage I’ve mentioned a few times. Megaera is the sister of the Tyrant of Sarronnyn and their marriage was to solidify an alliance, but the path to that connection is perhaps harder than anything the white wizards could throw at them, which includes Creslin having his mind wiped and being made a slave doing heavy labor.

Until Creslin and Megaera are finally brought together and even for a bit after that, the magical connection of the not-a-relationship is probably the most frustrating part of the novel because they are magically connected to the point that Megaera can feel everything that happens to Creslin, resents his existence, somehow comes to him in what feels like a dream and even though it’s real he has no reason to think it’s anything other than a dream and through Creslin’s actions Megaera resents him even more for being an animal or a brute - and then when they get together for their survival she makes clear how much disdain she has for him because the two of them are collectively bad at communicating or coming to an understanding. All the while they are fighting for survival against the white wizards and not really coming together. 

It’s not a great time and remains not a great time until they begin to come to an understanding much later in the novel when we get closer to their escape to and founding of Recluce. Everything comes together then and the novel really starts to build to a more satisfying resolution. It’s just a little frustrating until we get there because a core part of the novel is the two protagonists sort of being dicks to each other because they are hurting and don’t understand the other is also hurting.

Thinking back to how The Towers of the Sunset was one of the most foundational fantasy novels for the younger me, even through nostalgia, it doesn’t hit remotely the same as it did thirty years ago. I suppose it never could have.

I’m not disappointed, exactly, but I do acknowledge that even as the series has remained a constant over those three decades that not all of the moments that were so meaningful once will be as they were.

What does hit just as hard as it did the first time I read it was the fall of Westwind, which still feels so intensely powerful even though it was only introduced in this book and was a relatively small part of the story. Westwind looms large, possibly because of how it was targeted and also because Recluce is, in some ways, built upon the bones of Westwind.

Another thing that I really appreciate in this book, but also across the full series is the little bits of lore that are doled out. There are legends of the angels and demons, of Ryba, mentions of Nylan (which we know as a city in The Magic of Recluce), and just little bits that I just enjoy.

I’m also pretty sure the idea of the Balance was discussed in The Magic of Recluce, but it is more called out here.

“Klerris thinks that Creslin is a creation of the balance, that too much chaos necessitates a greater focus on order. Theoretically the opposite would be possible, of course. If, for example, Recluce became a home to order, too much emphasis on order could create an imbalance and empower of a few great Chaos Wizards.” She shakes her head. “That’s just speculation. We really don’t know”

Between this book and then The Magic Engineer, it seems pretty clear that is an accurate guess of how the world works.


Related Short Story: Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come

The stories collected in Recluce Tales fill in gaps or provide a bit of added color to the universe. “Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come” is one of the stories that (sort of) answer questions raised in the books. In this case, about the silver haired singer who came to Westwind and fathered Creslin before disappearing, as well as a suggestion that he was sent by the White Wizards to do so?

He’s not named in the story, but the singer here is Werlynn - he’s a druid (we don’t really know much about that yet) from the Great Forest, the absentee father of Creslin, and sort of a legendary figure who has dreams and visions of all sorts of events that he needs to nudge the world into bringing to occur - so where he is said to have been sent by the whites to go make a baby and reduce the amount of order in that part of the world it’s really his idea, or the idea of his dreams.

“Song Past, Songs for Those to Come” is a glimpse into the person who really set everything in motion for the eventual founding of Recluce and destruction of Fairhaven (all things in his visions) - so one can reasonably say that all of this is his fault, but the presumption is also that by acting Werlynn is preventing a greater imbalance of order and chaos. As I said, it’s a fill in the gap story without being truly satisfying.


Related Short Story: Sisters of Sarronnyn, Sisters of Westwind

I had read this story at least once before, likely more, but it hit like I remember The Towers of the Sunset hitting. “Sisters of Sarronyn, Sisters of Westwind” is told from the perspective of Shierra, a guard captain at Westwind. The story mirrors that of The Towers of the Sunset, starting just before Creslin skis off into a snowstorm and ends reasonably close to when the novel does. It just jumps in time for how the events impact Shierra, how she ends up volunteering to be the first Westwind guard contingent to travel to Recluce to help Creslin, her relationship with the male guard commander there, her relationship with Megaera, her perspective on her broken relationship with Fiera (the Westwind guard that Creslin kisses early in the novel who brings the last remnant of Westwind to Recluce late in the book).

Somehow the jumping in time to follow where the events of the book more directly intersect with Westwind and Shierra, the story is far more effective than “Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come” or even “Black Ordermage”. In the novel Shierra is just the guard who trains Megaera and builds the Recluce guards into a stronger force. Here there is real heart. 


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

Anime Review: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Season Two

Cozy magic vibes and big battles in an entertaining but short season of comfort storytelling

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Season Two continues the story of Frieren, a centuries old, apathetic, eternally youthful, and fiercely powerful elf mage, who begins her next adventure decades after completing a ten-year heroic quest with three teammates whose friendship she didn’t fully appreciate until they were gone. Season one offered a unique style of storytelling featuring a seemingly indifferent protagonist who gradually realizes the value of her past life lessons and her relationships. The combination of poignant growth balanced with fierce battles for survival set the stage for the next level of emotional wisdom and physical strength. This defines season two as Frieren’s party journeys to the dangerous Northern Lands. However, with only ten episodes, Season Two is so short that it almost feels like a side quest compared to the twenty-three segments in Season One. The decision seemed to be to adapt the next shorter portion of the manga without venturing into longer story arcs that would end the anime season on a cliff-hanger. Despite the short offering, Season Two has a meaningful tale about the value of protecting one’s community and showcases both Fern and Stark’s substantial growth in strength and emotional maturity compared to the first season. We also see Frieren’s quiet evolution from being socially indifferent to profoundly compassionate after learning the meaning of her past experiences and allowing Fern and Stark form a found family with her.

At the start of Season One, Frieren was wandering aimlessly through life after being a member of the world-famous party of heroes who defeated the oppressive demon king. The group consisted of the heroic and optimistic young leader Himmel; the quirky and kind priest Heiter; and the strong, reliable dwarf warrior Eisen. Years later she is deeply moved by Himmel and Heiter’s deaths, suddenly realizing the connections she had taken for granted. Before dying, the old priest Heiter asked Frieren to mentor Fern a magically gifted orphan girl he had sheltered. Later, the long-lived Eisen, the dwarf warrior, gave Frieren his apprentice, a strong but insecure teenaged boy named Stark. The new trio dealt with a range obstacles throughout their journey, including magical fights, political intrigue, and Fern’s intense journey to be certified as a first class mage. Season One had plenty of spectacular fight scenes but was memorable for its big and small emotional moments between the living and the dead characters. Many key moments were shared in flashback.

Season Two begins with Fern and Stark following Frieren on her journey through the Northern Lands to fulfill a spiritual connection. The emotional dynamic is more settled in Season Two. Instead of being surprised by her memories of Himmel, Frieren openly embraces her connection with him and accepts the changes in herself inspired by her interactions with him and with others whom she belatedly appreciates. Season One ended with Fern earning the rank of a rare first class mage after a fierce competition. In Season Two, on their journey north, Fern, Frieren, and Stark, reconnect with acquaintances from the mage exam and soon find themselves in a fight for their lives and for the protection of the decimated village of their stoic ally, the powerful mage Genau. Instead of creating a major shift in the tone of the story, Season Two confirms Frieren as comfort anime that offers moments of intense action but solidly focuses on character, relationship, and small acts of morality in a cruel world.

In an early episode, Fern’s party takes a job cleaning a statue of the “Hero of the South,” who Stark is surprised to learn is not Himmel. Statues of Himmel appear in random towns along their journey but the story gives a reminder that the famous heroes in history are supported by many others who are forgotten. In the middle of the season, Fern and Stark finally go on a date with mixed results. The big climax of the season is the team aiding top mages Grenau and Methode in a terrifying battle against the mega-demon Revolte. In addition to some emotional flashbacks for the very unemotional Grenau, we get to see the boys, Grenau and Stark team up against the terrifying Revolte, while Frieren, Fern, and the always calm Methode tackle a mega demon of their own.

Despite Frieren’s growing emotional awareness, she retains her pragmatism and her life-saving cynicism. This keeps the story from drifting into over-sentimentality. Similarly, Fern imitates Frieren’s calm and practical tone even when it comes to Stark to whom she is attracted. Stark remains a foil to them both since he is comfortable with being dramatic, and since he has no magic powers and must rely on his extraordinary strength and speed in their battles with demons. Stark becomes the speaker for the audience by calling out outrageous occurrences that Frieren and Fern take in stride. In Season Two, Stark also steps into instinctive and consistent bravery while maintaining his sense of humor. On the other hand, instead of being a blank canvas for others to write on, Frieren becomes the dispenser of wisdom, not just for battle, but for small human interactions with strangers in need. The episodes explore the importance of honoring unsung heroes who fight for justice, protecting the dignity of those in need, and standing with allies in tough times. In a key moment, when asked why she made a certain choice, Fern notes that it was what Frieren would have done.

Despite the very short run, Frieren Season Two delivers a strong collection of comforting, thoughtful stories, carefully balanced with big fight scenes, humor, and quiet emotions while we wait for the next big story arc to take us on a new adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Solid comfort storytelling
• Intense Northern Lands battles
• Strong character growth

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

TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: Breath and Bone by K. V. Johansen

Johansen’s penchant for epic fantasy distilled instead into a twisty sword and sorcery tale

Cover art by Laura Galli

It starts off simply, or seems to. Arrany, a young woman, is trying to get her twin brother free of the possessive control of a witch. She travels far to find a pair of godlings that have the power to free him. Or at least kill the witch. But the godlings are not who they appear to be, and neither is Arrany. And neither is the witch. What seems to be a simple quest across the landscape turns out to be a much more complicated affair than anyone anticipated.

Thus begins Johansen’s standalone sword and sorcery novel Breath and Bone.

In this review I want to discuss the form and nature of the book, its characters and its world more than a recitation of the plot points. And also posit an idea of theorycraft for genre.

Johansen has written a number of fantasies on a variety of levels, but is probably best known for her epic fantasy series The Caravan Road (starting with The Blackdog and ending with The Last Road). She has written a number of fantasies for children as well. But sword and sorcery is a stratum that she has not written to before. In her interview for this blog, she mentions that:

“… the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.”

And I do like this idea and want to explore it further. Pony and Hedge have DONE the epic fantasy thing, and Breath and Bone makes lots of deep references, allusions and connections to their past. In many ways, this novel is their past coming to impinge on their present. Their present was a quiet one, living in “retirement,” with the boundaries of their life much smaller. And the novel supports this by Arrany’s journey and the initial steps of their adventure to free her brother to be entirely within the sword and sorcery mold. It’s a low stakes and seemingly straightforward story.

It doesn’t quite stay that way, but it puts me in the mind of a D&D campaign starting at level 1. Low-level D&D characters are basically in a sword and sorcery story. They don’t have control of epic powers as yet (or if they are associated with one, they can’t handle it). Their foes are low level. The stakes are low. There is a wider, wilder world out there that the PCs will get connected to, one way or another, over time, but they start small. Over time, as characters rise in level, the GM provides larger and more world-spanning challenges and opportunities. Player characters’ abilities rise. Clerics can raise the dead. Wizards can cast fireballs, and then things like plane shift. Rogues and fighters grow epic in their combat abilities. In other words, the campaigns shift from sword and sorcery to epic.

So there can be a progression in fantasy characters, going from the sword and sorcery of a low-stakes and small adventure, all the way up to epic conflicts and grand fates. You don’t have to have this progression; you can dunk characters into the deep end, but generally the inciting incident or two can be of small enough stakes to feel like one is touching the base of sword and sorcery before launching toward more epic realms. The Wheel of Time television adaptation shows this tactic in particular.

In Breath and Bone, we have two characters, Hedge and Pony, who have gone all the way to the epic phase and to the other side, to retirement. They became movers and shakers, capable and willing to topple an emperor and his empire. They have left legacies and legends and their names across the landscape. But now they are retired, living in the aftermath, in a cottage in a nowhere village keeping waterfowl.

The call to adventure in Breath and Bone for Hedge and Pony, as they get wrapped up in Arrany’s plight, is like a “second childhood” for them. Although they have done the epic thing, the initial steps are pure sword and sorcery, low stakes. They meet bandits. They run into a stray old god. Arrany gets kidnapped, and her story begins to unravel as we find out there is much more she did not say, and that matters are larger than Hedge and Pony realized. The scope widens as this rebalancing of the narrative continues, as we reach the lair of the witch. It’s a slow and gradual widening, and the true abilities and powers of Hedge and Pony become terrifyingly clear.

I’ve seen the rise to epic power many times before, but this “second childhood” of retired heroes slowly getting back into it by means of a return to epic fantasy via sword and sorcery is somewhat less common in fantasy. There have been a spate of retired hero books, but generally, given how much fantasy as a genre is a “young person’s game,” having a retired hero return to the fold happens, but less commonly than you’d think.¹ So in Breath and Bone, the shape of a graph of time and stakes and scale proves to be a curve with two humps, with the first hump in the past, but as the story progresses in the new storyline, we get a new rise.

The backstory is key to all this. At first it seems like a simple story: Arrany is trying to rescue her twin brother from a witch, so she seeks out a legendary hero to help. But what the story slowly reveals is that “first hump” and just how dangerous Hedge and Pony were as renowned movers and shakers. We slowly learn just what deeds they are responsible for, and as the novel progresses, I felt trepidation that Arrany had awakened from retirement two very powerful individuals… and worse, has not been entirely truthful with them. Arrany asks two retired and extremely dangerous individuals on a seemingly simple quest but withholds key knowledge about herself and what is really going on. It’s a logline that is ripe for drama, action and adventure as we head across the landscape.

And the landscape supports this sword and sorcery narrative. Arrany travels across relatively mundane locations to reach Hedge and Pony, and as they travel toward the witch, their surroundings become somewhat more fantastic, particularly the inhabitants. By the time we get to the glaciated area of Under Ice, we have definitely abandoned the quiet and peaceful cottage for a wilder and more dangerous place. All through it, the lush landforms are wonderfully described. If the Caravan Road was based on the Silk Road, from the Caucasus all the way to China, this is much more of a glaciated Western Europe, with fells, lakes, swamps, mountains and eventually the border of the Ice.² Landscapes are important to sword and sorcery. Even if the range of possible locations is massive, from teeming cities to bloody frontiers, a sword and story story must give the reader a good sense of the landscape to be effective. Breath and Bone succeeds on this level. This world feels a bit like her epic fantasy The Wolf and the Wild King (with a sequel forthcoming), with the cold landscape and a huge lake as a central figure that a bunch of the action occurs in and around. But in all cases, the landscape continually invites the reader to step into it and imagine what the characters will run into around the bend.

The novel is a one and done, completing the story in one volume (a relatively compact book by Johansen’s standards but more in keeping with a sword and sorcery length). In the course of this book, Johansen unfolds a world, a set of characters, and a set of premises that invite the reader’s imagination. And, perhaps, it will spark the author to write more in this ‘verse. Find out more about Breath and Bone in the interview I did with Johansen here at Nerds of a Feather.

Highlights:

• Sword and sorcery from an epic fantasy writer
• Excellent characters
• A world that invites going around the next corner

Reference: Johansen, K.V. Breath and Bone [Candlemark and Gleam, 2026].

¹ The reference and tie-in I want to go with here is Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver. The inciting incident is that a military force decides to decimate a small town. It just so happens that this town is the retirement home of general Cobalt Zosia. Zosia does not take this well, not well at all, and goes on a carefully constructed campaign of revenge and retribution. It is suggested at points that the attacking force was directed to make an example of Zosia’s village by someone who knew she was there, and how she would respond. Zosia had already had her epic adventure and was in retirement. She gets pulled out of that retirement and ramps up her revenge, and by books two and three in the series, we are firmly in epic fantasy territory once more.

² Sort of like a Western European answer to Michael Scott Rohan’s The Winter of the World. Also, the Doggerland books of Stephen Baxter, or the colder world of Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic series.

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

Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

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

Film Review: Exit 8

Surreal, addictive, mind-bending horror

Life can sometimes feel like a disappointing, endless loop of mind-numbing repetition. On the other hand, unexpected crises can leave us feeling trapped by decision paralysis, and guilt can be a weight that keeps us from moving forward. Imagine those feelings physically manifesting into a real-life confinement. Exit 8 is a surreal Japanese horror film that quietly pulls the audience into the terror of being trapped in every meaning of the word. Part puzzle box, part horror, part psychological thriller, the story is awash in quiet symbolism, creepiness, confusion, and fear, that demand that you pay attention if you want to survive.

Based on the video game The Exit 8, the film is the story of a young man (Kazunari Ninomiya), later identified only as “The Lost Man,” who is traveling on a crowded train in Japan when he observes an overbearing man in a dark suit bullying a young mother because her baby is crying. The other passengers notice the bullying but stay focused on their cell phones and EarPods and don’t intervene, and the young man exits the train at the next station. He gets a call from his ex-girlfriend (Nana Komatsu), who tells him she’s pregnant with his child and wants to know what he wants to do about the baby. He is so much in drone mode that he doesn’t notice he has walked the same departure corridors multiple times and hasn’t made it to the exit. As the phone cuts out, he realizes he is now alone and unable to find his way out. The only other person he sees in the station is an older man (Yamato Kochi), later identified as "The Walking Man," holding a briefcase and cell phone, and who is walking the same looping hallways in the opposite direction as the protagonist. The Lost Man quickly realizes that the Walking Man is no longer human. The signs and posters hanging in the subway station rewrite themselves periodically, and the Lost Man eventually gets instructions that warn him to pay attention to his surroundings. He must turn back if he sees any “anomalies,” but must continue forward if things look normal. Each successful loop brings him one level closer to level eight, where he can finally be free, but any mistakes land him back to the beginning at level zero. Needless to say, there are lots of anomalies. Some are horrifying, some are subtle enough to be missed and therefore land the man screaming in frustration at losing his progress. However, some things that seem to be “anomalies” turn out to be real, which creates a different type of fear. Adding to the tension are his debilitating asthma, a pounding music score, and a few strange inhabitants of the corridors, including monstrous creatures, a quiet small boy, a strange adolescent girl, and the occasional bleeding wall.

Exit 8 is a feast for puzzle box fans. The film invites viewers to not just watch but to participate in the game of observing and strategizing. The close camera angles and intense sounds of the opening scenes put us directly into the physical point of view of the main character. We see the subway through his eyes, listen to his strange choice of music in his EarPods, and are startled by his eerily familiar-sounding ringtone. The story relies heavily and delightfully on symbolism. The subway corridor has a poster of an Escher painting of a never-ending, twisted Möbius track with doomed red ants futilely following an endless looped path. The music in an early scene is the repetitive beats of Ravel’s Bolero, which seems an unlikely choice for this character until we sense its significance as a pounding, escalating, relentlessly repeating pattern. The shape of the recurring exit numeral 8 also echoes the infinity symbolism and the poster of the Möbius track. His EarPods block out reality, reinforcing the drone and avoidance mentality, which opens the door to deeper feelings of paralysis and regret, in the purgatory-like setting.

Although the story starts out with a closely personal point of view, the scenes expand to take in layered emotions and backstories. One of the best aspects of the film is the clever camera angles used throughout to draw the audience in and make them feel trapped, fearful, but curious as well. The story alternates repeatedly from silence and sterility to loudness and pressure. Adding to the tension is the very small cast, in a small space, and their restrained but fearful response to a different kind of horror. Kazunari Ninomiya is a convincing Lost Man trapped in a terrifying situation while also internally struggling with another, more profound, type of fear. His ordinariness and passivity become the ideal canvas for this type of story. Yamato Kochi is perfect as the Walking Man, managing to be stoically pedantic, jump-scare creepy, and heartbreakingly afraid. The portrayal is multifaceted and intensely memorable. Completing the central trio is young Naru Asanuma as The Boy, an unexpected small child who is both strange and poignant and has ties to all the characters as the story time loops through a deeper level of meaning and fear.

Like 2025’s Sinners, Exit 8 is heavy with symbolism. Viewers could easily spend lots of time trying to unpack all the visual clues tucked into each scene. Like Inception or season one of Lost, everything matters in each frame. Focusing more on fear and less on gore, Exit 8 is the ideal detour into clever, cerebral, stressful, mind-bending light horror that has higher messaging and is worth the creepy journey.

Highlights:

• Addictive cerebral horror
• Quietly solid acting
• Satisfying and unique storytelling

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

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.