Film Review: Toy Story 5

A treasure trove of worthy ideas wasted in a movie that has no reason to exist

In Toy Story 5, our girl Bonnie receives a computer tablet that now consumes all her waking hours, and the toys are worried that they’re going to be abandoned. Jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. I think it’s time to ask in what year the Toy Story universe is set, because if anyone at Pixar has kids, they should have noticed that the preoccupations explored in this newest film in the franchise have been discussed and analyzed to death since literally the last century, and this plot adds no fruitful arguments to the conversation.

Traditional toys worried that they’ll be replaced by a newer, shinier electronic toy was the plot of the first Toy Story, back in 1995. Just one year later, the world saw the launch of Tickle Me Elmo, the Tamagotchi, the Game Boy Pocket, the Nintendo 64, the Palm Pilot, and the Yahoo Kids portal. Then, in 1997, came the Tetrix Robotics Kit and the Digimon (the virtual pets, not yet the TV show). And in 1998 came Betty Spaghetty, LEGO Ninja, Imaginext, and the Furbies. All that happened before there even was a Toy Story 2, which had nothing to say about the Tamagotchi and its cousins.

So who is the intended audience of Toy Story 5? If it’s the nostalgic fans of the first film, it’s absurdly late to say anything about electronic toys to viewers who already moved on from the death of their Tamagotchis. If it’s today’s children, this film has nothing useful to say to them either, given that what they have to deal with is Minecraft giving them malware that can steal their data, Fortnite pressuring them to spend more and more on loot boxes, Roblox serving them on a silver platter to pedophiles, and ChatGPT teaching them how to kill themselves. This movie makes a big gesture of concern for the dangers of digital entertainment for children, but it shows no awareness of what those dangers are.

I’m not saying that the Toy Story franchise has used up its potential. But it needs to make a more serious effort to stay relevant. For example, toys in this universe are cursed with immortality, accumulating lists of past owners across generations. So there are much more interesting stories that could be told with this lore. The new gadget in Toy Story 5 is a supposedly kid-friendly tablet computer, and because toys have sentience, this computer can take its own initiative to use its browser, email, chat or camera functions, acting as an agentic AI without constraints. With that character there’s a lot that could say about today’s AI craze.

Or consider the small army of Buzz Lightyear dolls that are set loose on the world at the start of the movie and eventually learn that the sole purpose for their existence is to play with kids. Why can’t one of those toys wonder whether maybe there’s more to life? Barbie, of all things, did a deeper exploration of the meaning of a toy’s life than Toy Story 5 (and the fascinating questions raised by Forky from Toy Story 4 are completely forgotten in 5).

It seems that toys in the Toy Story universe are expected to resign themselves to a life of unquestioned subservience, much like the robots in Star Wars. Jessie the Cowgirl, who takes a more central role in 5, laments the fact that children grow up and forget their old toys (and makes the laughably boomer-coded observation that those new digital gadgets are making them grow up too quickly), but even after going through an extended reflection on the pain of repeated abandonment, she doesn’t question her assigned function, and even considers it an honor to be used as a literal plaything for an unknown number of lifetimes.

The core ethos of Toy Story may be the heart-warming “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” but friendship happens between equals, and the dynamic between a child and a toy that can never reveal it’s actually sentient is far from equal. All the fanciful imaginary adventures that the toys enact are decided by the child, with the toys forced to go along with them. Once you really give it some thought, where’s the fun, let alone the honor, in such a life?

Toy Story 5’s solution to Bonnie’s difficulty in adjusting to digital culture is to find her a new human friend who also likes traditional toys and doesn’t bully her on a public chat. That’s a more reasonable narrative choice than a flat “machines bad,” but it implies that a whole swath of “kids bad” is left unexamined. Sure, hurray for the handful of kids still interested in playing with toys, who would otherwise face the existential horror of immortality inside a shoe box, but when it comes to the many, many more kids whose playtime consists of interminable sessions of Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever it is that today’s kids are into, the movie just gives up on them.

The safety of children in the digital world is a very real concern, and Toy Story 5 doesn’t have anything to say on the matter that rises above tired Black Mirror-level platitudes. If you want a good animated movie about the absurdities of electronic life, try Ralph Breaks the Internet. That one’s from 2018, and the points it makes feel more relevant than this year’s Toy Story 5. Try to keep up, Pixar.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

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

Book Review: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

Ilona Andrews expands their fantasy and romance talents into the burgeoning realm of isekai in English

Isekai. Portal fiction. The very Japanese origin of the word suggests it is relatively new, even exotic, but it is a tradition that taps into a small but active stream in English SFF while using the enthusiasm of its Japanese taproot for basic concepts. Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the latest iteration of isekai fiction in a mainstream English language format.

Online encyclopedias define isekai as a genre of Japanese manga, anime, light novel, video game, etc. It has characters who go into a different world. But that’s not quite right, since you might be thinking: What’s the difference between isekai and portal fantasy? Portal fantasy does all of that too. One can think of portal fantasy as a bigger umbrella category than isekai. Portal fantasy covers any time characters go from one universe to another, usually from our world to a fantasy-based world.¹ Examples are numerous, and the concept goes back at least to the pulp era of science fiction.

Isekai is a more specific form of portal fantasy. There are some strains and varieties, but the main thrust is that the protagonist is transported to another world. Sometimes they have to die in order to get resurrected into this new world.² A lot of the time, unlike some portal fantasy, they wind up getting powers and abilities, even godlike ones, by the act of transferring across to the new world.³

Some isekai have an explicitly roleplaying element to them. The protagonist finds themself inside of a roleplaying game, or a piece of fiction, sometimes one that they know quite well.⁴ This knowledge can itself be a superpower, but the thrust is, the character has been transported into a new world that can run on rules that can be manipulated.⁵ There are even subsets of this where the protagonist finds themself in the role of a specific character from the book/property whose world they are now in. There is a sub-sub-genre of this where the protagonist finds themself specifically in the body of a villain… a villainess in fact, and has to figure out how to avoid the sticky end that inevitably awaits them.⁶

So let’s get to This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me and see how this fits into isekai. Our protagonist is Maggie. Maggie has fallen into the world of her favorite fantasy series, one that has never been finished. She is in the city of Kair Toren, and she knows the plot of the two books by heart. She is immersed fully in the world of the books. The problem is, she is absolutely penniless. She is not in the body of a villainess or anyone else, and she knows that the world is in for a rough time. And so she decides that, in addition to survival, her goal is to stop the tragedy that the book unfolds.

Maggie does have a superpower, one that she does not expect. She dies early in the book… and then she is resurrected. This is not like Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. The world itself does not reset; the world keeps going on, and the resurrections are painful and take time. Maggie herself thinks about the gruesomeness of this, and whether she could come back from, for example, being torn to pieces. So she uses her extensive knowledge of the books and tries to bootstrap herself out of poverty and try to derail the beginnings of the plots that will consume Kair Toren in fire and blood. Along the way she makes some friends and gets wrapped up in intrigue and adventure. She also discovers a secondary superpower that is subtle but important: although she has read the book many times, she discovers that she can quote from the book, chapter and verse as it were. It gives an interesting metatextual twist to things. It also means that at points she doesn’t know some facts, because even the braided multiple POVs of the book don’t cover everything, so she is forced to guess and deduce some things about the plot and people around her because they were not in the book.⁷ As far as telling her companions what she is, she does not tell anyone that she is from the world outside the story. She is genre-aware enough to realize the problems of that. As it is, her ability as a seer means she has to try and keep her head down to avoid entities who might want to grab her for information.

And then there is the romance. This is an Ilona Andrews novel, and romance is a common subgenre in the novels they write. So there is no surprise that Unresolved Sexual Tension is shot through the book, especially when Maggie realizes that one of her companions and friends is not who she thought they were, and is instead someone far more dangerous and compelling. Given that the character in question is, according to the book, destined to marry someone else, this provides narrative tension as well.

And that is the real heart of this book and what it tries to do, and what it is in the isekai subgenre. Maggie knows the book by heart and even better than she should given that secondary superpower. What she finds is a conservation of narrative working against her. She does indeed try to stop the tragic events of the book, including even the “pebble” that rolls downhill to start the avalanche of war and rebellion and conflict, but at every turn, the narrative tries to assert itself and put the story “back on track” despite her efforts. It’s a fascinating use of metatext here, as Maggie tries to defy what happens in the books, only to be resisted and have to find a different approach or fight a new problem.

The story ends on a cliffhanger, with a situation seemingly resolved, but then, out of nowhere, the problem arises anew and puts our protagonist in peril. But that, too, is a narrative convention (and our protagonist knows it), which suggests to me that she is still trapped in a narrative structure that keeps wanting to assert itself despite her efforts. So this is not a novel that is going to satisfy if you are looking for the one-and-done approach. Instead, we have a series, and we still have a whole set of unresolved mysteries, and of course, peril for the protagonist. The novel stays entirely in Maggie’s point of view, which is an interesting commentary and choice given that she is in a world of multiple POV epic fantasy. I like that tension for the reader, and wonder if she will keep up that for the inevitable sequel.

Highlights:

• Isekai, in a English language SFF mode.
• Yes, this is a kissing book. Or at least slow-burn would-be kissing.
• Interesting metatextual elements.

Reference: Andrews, Ilona. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me [Tor, 2026].

¹ A notable exception to this is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Out of This World and sequels, where there is portal travel from our world to a fantasy world, *and* to a space opera world. The space opera world may have a touch of science fantasy to it since it's not a rigorous “the net is up” sort of hard SF universe.

² That bit doesn’t seem to yet be popular in mainstream English versions of Isekai. However, the far out of print Through the Ice by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise (1992) does use this, having its young protagonist fall through ice and then get resurrected into a fantasy world. I thought it very strange at the time I read it, not knowing at all of isekai in any form. But in Japanese isekai, it would be bog-standard. Did Kornwise and Anthony read isekai at that point, or invent it independently?

³ The first time I came across that in mainstream English form was Dave Duncan’s The Great Game series, which explicitly has as its worldbuilding that if you transfer to another realm, you basically have it in you to be a god in that realm. The protagonist goes from 1914 England to a realm where he has the potential to gain prodigious power… but the gods already there have very mixed ideas about someone else joining their pantheon (especially the God of Death). The author’s foreword, 10 years after the fact, doesn’t mention isekai as an inspiration at all. But, again, by Japanese framing, bog-standard isekai.

⁴ And showing that this is old in English language SFF, I present to you The Incompleat Enchanter ‘verse of Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague de Camp. Harold Shea and his friends find that portal magic, and magic in general, is based on verse, and they wind up in a variety of worlds that they know—Norse myth, the Roland cycle, The Faerie Queene and other worlds that they recognize. There is even some directed targeting at one point, seeking a world with a magician powerful enough to handle a problem, and picking it based on their reading. Also a bit of Duncan here, as, except for portal magic, the protagonists seem unable to do spells with verse in our world… but in other worlds, they are indeed magicians with verse.

⁵ LitRPG enters the chat at this point, as well as its outgrowths and parallels. Being thrust into the world of a game is much older than that in mainstream English SFF, however. One can look to the 1980s and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, which runs on this premise. Or Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame novels, which have the characters transported into an RPG world. Although it is not a videogame, Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying has a protagonist who was brought across, portal fantasy style, but every time she dies, the world resets. Wexler is extensively deep into anime and manga, as seen in other books of his, and he is definitely channeling isekai tropes throughout.

⁶ And this is where Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil comes into the chat, because it runs right on this chassis in a mainstream English language form. Main character Rae is dying and makes a magical bargain… and winds up in the world of the books… but she is not the superfan; her sister is. So she doesn’t know everything, but she does know that she is Lady Rahela, and that in that role, she is due to die the next day.

⁷ And what of the book and its actual world? As revealed by Maggie and what we see, Kair Toren is a high-magic epic fantasy world with lots of intrigue, and yes, lots of blood. Think Martin’s Westeros or Elliott’s Wendar, but with the magic turned on to high. The two fictional novels have lots of PoV characters, extensive worldbuilding and backstory, and are exactly the kind of thick doorstoppers that someone could read and reread extensively and obsessively.

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

Film Review: Masters of the Universe (2026)

Lighthearted nostalgic adventure that doesn't take itself too seriously

Saturday mornings in the ‘80s were a sacred time for fantasy loving kids, a time when they could indulge in a range of fantastical animated adventures. Some cartoons were available in the after school hours as well. Long before cable gave us 24-hour kids and cartoon channels, and before streaming services gave us on-demand access to thousands of superhero shows, weekend and after school cartoons were the primary gateway to adventure. Among the curated selection of kids cartoons was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The series, based on an existing toy brand, gave kids the animated version of action figures from Mattel’s Masters of the Universe collection. In full disclosure, I will note that I am not a He-Man (or spinoff She-Ra) superfan, although I watched some of both original shows in their original runs and have sometimes watched other iterations of the series, including Netflix’s She-Ra reboot. I mention this because the 2026 Masters of the Universe feels very intentionally grounded in that original sense of childhood nostalgia. Depending on your perspective, you may find this a joyous relief or an irritation. For me, despite the film’s many shortcomings, I mostly found it to be the former: a fun, optimistic surprise in a sea of otherwise perfectly appropriate and timely cinema bleakness and intensity.

In the 2026 adventure, Adam is the young prince of Eternia, a magical kingdom with talking animals and sorcerers. He is small for his age and hesitant to fight. As a result, he is pushed around by the other kids in their weapons training sessions and looked down on by his father the king. Despite this, he is friends with his strong friend Teela and is encouraged by his teacher, Teela’s dad, the head soldier Duncan. Adam’s home is Castle Grayskull, home to a sacred sword of power and protected by a mage known as the Sorceress. When the evil sorcerer Skeletor and his partner Evil-Lyn attack the castle, the king’s forces are overwhelmed. The queen, who is from Earth, is forced to send Adam and the sword to safety through a portal to Earth. But in the fall to Earth, Adam loses the sword. Suddenly (one time skip later), fifteen years have passed and Adam is going on Tinder dates and working in HR in Oklahoma City. Despite his average life, he is obsessed with memories of his home planet (although no one believes him) and is determined to regain his lost sword. When he finally finds it, it triggers an attack by a fantastical creature, which leads to a rescue by his now grown-up friend Teela, who takes him back to Eternia. Adam must use the sword and his own inner strength to rescue his parents, free his people, and retake his kingdom from Skeletor.

The major strength of this film is the lead actors. Nicholas Galitzine is believable and enjoyable as a likeable but insecure everyman who knows he’s destined for more than the drudgery of his day job. Camila Mendes, who did several seasons as Veronica in Riverdale, is excellent as the no-nonsense, sharp, grown-up-in-the-room in all of the scenes. Idris Elba is, as always, perfect as Duncan, who ranges from tough teacher to substitute father figure to defeated and depressed drunk to fierce soldier. Kristen Wiig is also funny as Duncan’s sarcastic robot companion. There is even a Dolph Lundgren cameo, where the former He-Man actor gives Nicholas Galitzine some cryptic advice about the way to be a hero.

There are many funny moments in this film, including the opening scene where Adam is telling his complicated life story to his eyerolling blind date. Although not all of the jokes hit, the story is, for the most part, amusing and very kid-friendly. Unlike other superhero live-action films, Masters of the Universe opts for comedy and camp as its primary tone. The choice is a bit unexpected in this age of edgy superhero interpretations that are either grim or cynical. Masters of the Universe is closer to the tone of the Barbie movie or the live-action One Piece series. But it opts out of Barbie’s cerebral social commentary sarcasm or One Piece’s balance of outrageousness and grim intensity. It’s most similar in tone to the 2017 live-action Power Rangers, a film that tried to balance a modern, edgy aesthetic with classic, campy, kids show nostalgia. Power Rangers was a film that started off edgy/cool in the first half and then jarringly dove into campy kids nerdiness in the second half. However, Masters of the Universe has a clear target audience and vibe in mind, and stays consistent in its tone of lightness, kid-friendly playfulness and self-aware nostalgia.

In fact, the film is very self-aware of its campy nostalgia. Adam reps the old Prince Adam outfit by wearing a pink button-down shirt and jeans in his non-He-Man scenes. He repeatedly acknowledges the goofiness of some of the things he says or does, admitting that many of his choices are based on a child’s worldview and childhood memories he wants to reconnect with. Although he is an adult, it is clear he is emotionally stuck in his childhood trauma, loss, and insecurity. In the original He-Man animated series, Adam’s fearful or lackadaisical attitude was an artificial cover for his alternate identity. In Masters of the Universe, he has genuine hesitation and insecurities. And when he transforms, everyone around him knows he’s the same person with the same insecurities. This evolution of the premise is an asset to the story, to humanize both him and his connection to his friends. And it avoids the always annoying trope of close friends not noticing that the hero and their clearly identical alter ego are the same person.

However, despite the appeal of the story and the fun tone, there are some elements of the film that are confusing. Given the intentional and thoughtful characterization of Adam, it’s odd to leave out any reference to his childhood upbringing on Earth. He talks about life on Eternia as if it is the only thing he knows. In other lost prince/princess stories, we get at least a quick explanation of their survival. Superman was adopted by the Kents; Emma from Once Upon a Time was raised in foster homes in the U.S. The absence of even a passing explanation for his survival was a distracting plot omission that felt like a missed opportunity to give this Oklahoman Adam some personal context. His bestie and roommate Hussein is a likeable but underused character who mostly disappears from the plot without an opportunity to get to know about his connection to Adam. Another strange choice is an extended detour into Adam’s day job at a human relations company where his obsession with swords gets him in trouble. There is a particularly protracted scene of his boss (an excellent Sasheer Zamata) lecturing him on sensitivity in a way that paints her as a semi-villain (she seems almost like a corporate counterpart to Evil-Lyn), and the scene is clearly meant to mock corporate sensitivity lingo. The fact that a consent joke is twice used as a derisive punchline is another strange choice. Later in a crucial moment on Eternia, Adam initially opts for negotiation and empathy when everyone wants him to fight, but he is soon forced to abandon that approach in favor of fighting. This throughline is a confusing theme in a film that is otherwise fun, optimistic, and likeable.

Like many films lately, Masters of the Universe is at least thirty minutes too long, especially for something that is primarily a comedy adventure. It is a film that has plenty of kid-friendly content and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The very last scenes and the first post-credits scene emphasize this lightheartedness with a big homage to the original 1980s cartoon in its final send-off. Although it deals with themes of empathy versus aggression and self-confidence versus insecurity, the overall story is mainly a fun reminder of childhood imagination and adventure. Depending on your mood, that may be just what you need.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Self-aware nostalgia
• Solid acting
• Kid-friendly content and humor

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

Comic Book Review: Absolute Martian Manhunter

Lean, green and cosmic in a way you've not seen before

Illustration: Javier Rodriguez

I’ve not been a reader of comics featuring superheroes for the longest time, and certainly not DC or Marvel, but then my friend dropped a copy of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow on me, and the rest was, as they say, history.

Call it my own snobbishness at the idea of superheroes, my weariness of superheroes fighting for the status quo, or just a fear of how to get started with a medium that has more options than grains of sand on the beach. Anyway, I arrived at DC Comics only recently, and a friend recommended I start with the first collected volume of Absolute Martian Manhunter, written by Deniz Camp and illustrated by Javier Rodriguez. This volume covers issues 1-6. There’s a second coming in August 2026, which will take the story to the end of issue 12.

I’m delighted to say it was nothing like what I thought I was going to get. The artwork is really trippy, colourful, unexpected and full of emotion. The Martian Manhunter here isn’t the one you know from the Justice League, but a cosmic entity travelling by consciousness and protecting the emotions of the vulnerable from the physical disasters that unfold when we lose ourselves in fear or hate or despair.

This was interesting to me in a number of ways—by making this something that wasn’t about people in capes but about one of those same heroes appearing in an unexpected (to me) way, it gave me both a way back into these characters but also provided something novel, surprising and with a lot of room to do more than focus on a superhero to the exclusion of everyone else.

Absolute Martian Manhunter has the eponymous character inhabiting people to make themselves present on Earth, and they’re here investigating an imbalance in people’s psyches. This manifests itself as radicalisation—the kind that leads to riots and violence and hatred and death.

Yeah, it’s a little on the nose, but as a metaphor for examining what divides us and how you might overcome that, it’s a lovely little story.

This first volume is a complete arc, which felt great because it does a great job introducing this unusual take on the character, laying out his concerns but also introducing the human characters through whom MM is intervening in human affairs.

The main character, John Jones, is an FBI agent (one assumes pre-Kash Patel, given the Bureau’s competence in this comic) who starts to investigate how 24 people died in the same way but were killed by 24 different and unrelated perpetrators on the same night. Each attack appears carried out by a lone wolf—except, of course, they’re all done in the same way at the same time.

These baffling crimes are heinous and devastating, but also have an uncanny element to them which Jones can’t get his head around. That is until MM arrives in his head and turns his head upside down. Having a cosmic entity invade your consciousness will ruin your day, and Jones spends as much time trying to survive the arrival of MM in his psyche as he does investigating the how and why of these crimes.

This creates a tension in the story between Jones and MM that feels, if not quite a battle, then certainly a fraught journey of acceptance and challenge—especially around trauma and what we do with it even when we do want to talk about/process it.

Alongside this is the series antagonist, a White Martian who MM explains not as an actual White alien from Mars but as another cosmic power who seeks to destroy because that’s its fundamental nature. The White Martian is built of hate and corruption and violence, and to the extent it wants something rather than being a force of nature, these are the things it wants.

I found the political underpinnings of this interesting, suggesting that hate and violence and extremism are as much a viral meme (in the worst sense of “virus”) that eats its host alive regardless of the cost. In this sense there’s a peak transmission rate and infection rate that, ultimately, results in complete eradication, but this end point is of no concern, only the journey of violence and destruction.

AMM supposes that sometimes those who want to destroy have no other goal than destruction. In a world in which we constantly hear idiots telling everyone they’re “disrupters,” it’s hard not to see how such an approach finds so little resistance—because most of us are built to assume that people want something longer term—stability, peace, calm, predictability. When something comes along that wants none of these things and actively doesn’t care about negotiating, the future or how this all ends, well, our defences are pretty weak to that. AMM suggests there are ways of defeating such radicalisation and attacks, but they aren’t easy, and they’re not momentary ripostes but ways of being that require practice and vigilance.

Highlights:

• Incredible colouring
• Neatly done psychological story
• Cosmic horrors

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a really great take on a classic DC character.

Reference: Camp, Deniz, and Rodriguez, Javier. Absolute Martian Manhunter [DC Comics, 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.

Film Review: Disclosure Day

It’s not about the power of whistleblowing. It’s about the power of movies

The common refrain I keep seeing in most reviews of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is that the 79-year-old-director is too behind the times if he believes that showing people the truth will suffice to fix the world. Those complaints don’t give Spielberg enough credit. It’s too literal to read Disclosure Day as a movie about secret alien files. It’s like reading Inception as a movie about psychonautic espionage. There’s no way Spielberg isn’t aware that we’ve fallen into a cynical, post-truth world, and yet this is the movie he chooses to make at this point in history. I suspect the guy knows what he’s doing, and he knows that, precisely because we’ve stopped placing any trust in truth, this movie’s plea for unafraid openness to each other is the message we need to hear.

Moreover, I think Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s Inception: it’s his personal statement on what moviemaking means to him. (Yes, I know The Fabelmans exists. But that one merely tells us his point. This one shows us.)

It would be one thing if Disclosure Day had stuck to the character of Daniel, the hacker who steals a trove of secret government videos that prove aliens are real, and just followed him on his race against time to make the files public. That would be the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times, the kind of movie the haters believe they’re criticizing. But the message of Disclosure Day is not “Our problems would disappear if the truth were exposed.” What it’s trying to say is, rather, “Our problems would be seen more clearly if the truth were received.” That’s where the character of Margaret comes in. Healing the world takes more than having someone brave enough to make others see; you also need someone brave enough to do the seeing.

The power of seeing has been a constant in Spielberg’s work, most obviously noticeable in his signature move of framing a character’s awestruck face. In a couple scenes of Disclosure Day, which have been unfairly mocked by reviewers, a character who is not very well hidden manages to sneak away from the bad guys who are looking for them. That’s not a mistake in scene composition; it’s fully intentional. In this story, what marks the bad guys as bad guys is that they don’t want to see. In a movie that is so explicitly about moviemaking, that’s got to be the closest there is to a definition of evil, and that’s why the two heroes in this movie are one who shows and one who sees.

In parallel with Daniel’s quest, we follow Margaret, who after an encounter with a mysterious bird gains the power to read into people’s souls, speak in their language, understand their deepest truths. What is happening is that she has become the ideal moviegoer. Margaret sees a stranger and instantly understands their whole life. That’s what happens to you when you sit at the movie theater. Later, she gains the power to show people hidden parts of themselves. If a movie is well made, that’s also what should happen to you at the movies: the story should tell you something about you. In the most symbolically charged sequence of Disclosure Day, Margaret visits a replica of her parents’ house, which is for all purposes a movie set, so she can relive a repressed memory of a childhood encounter with aliens. She’s watching a movie that turns out to be about herself.

That’s how Spielberg feels about movies. He’s showing you a story he made up for his own reasons, but he hopes it reveals a truth about you.

There’s a scene in the middle of Disclosure Day where Daniel shows his girlfriend a sample of the files he stole. If you pay attention, you’ll see that an opening in the wall lets a bit of sunshine enter the room from behind her head. It looks just like a movie projector. That’s the Spielberg formula in a nutshell: let me show you something that will change your life. He’s been saying this, in various ways, throughout his career. In his adaptation of Minority Report, people are judged based on movies made about them (in the original novelette, the reports were written). In the night scenes of Jurassic Park, the only sources of light are the heroes’ handheld lanterns that expose the hidden dangers, effectively movie projectors that create the next bit of action.

In Jurassic Park, the idea was: let me show you… a simulation of life. In A.I., it was: let me show you… a simulation of love. In Minority Report, it was: let me show you… a simulation of you. And in Disclosure Day, the trick is turned on itself: let me show you… what’s on the other side of the simulation. Spielberg has already said plenty about the power of seeing. Now he’s trying to tell you that he sees you, and he hopes to provoke in you the no less transformative experience of feeling seen.

Disclosure Day opens at a wrestling match, a quintessential simulation if we’ve ever seen one. And the very first shot is a boot stomping on the camera. Of course Spielberg knows there are dangers to the power of seeing. In Jurassic Park, you’re safe as long as you’re invisible to the T-Rex. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hubris of trying to see God is what kills you. In Minority Report, your eyes are the key to how the state controls you. In Disclosure Day, the villain finds perverse uses for an alien machine that (quite literally) lets him see through someone else’s eyes.

Many have called Spielberg naïve for making a movie about his belief that movies can save us. That critique is not only unfair, but also logically self-defeating: if he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be making movies in the first place. How else would any sincere art exist? It’s only fitting that the ending of Disclosure Day has the entire planet turned into a movie theater, all of humankind joined in the experience of seeing something that makes them feel seen. Is that schmaltzy? Very well, let it be schmaltzy. It’s not like jaded cynicism has taken us anywhere worth being at.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Rainmaker, Rainmaker, by Kevin B. Hillstrom

A creepy, evocative Dust Bowl tale of con-men and folklore 

cover painting by William Holbrook Beard, 1885

Remember high school English class? Remember MAN VS. MAN, MAN VS. NATURE, MAN VS. GOD, etc? In my high school lit class, we did not use A03-style tags. These categories were mutually exclusive: if this then not that, certainly not both, let alone all of the above! But Rainmaker, Rainmaker, rises above such artificial categorization. It is all of these, and more. It's a skillfully written, deeply unsettling book that risks, I fear, being lost in the maelstrom of traditionally-published books that bear the advantage of professional marketing and word-of-mouth and established writer reputations. 

Unless I can change that here, today. Because this creepy story of folklore and con-men and Dust Bowl desperation does not deserve to be overlooked amidst the unnavigable volume of 21st century publishing.

MAN VS NATURE: Greenheart, 1936. A once prospering farming town on the great plains of USA is now crumbling under the destruction of the Dust Bowl. Storms bring blinding, choking, unbreathable dust that leaves behind dead bodies, drowned on dry land, their lungs choked with dirt. There is no water; crops will not grow; starving rabbits infest the land and eat everything that grows. 

MAN VS MAN: Into this slow, scrabbling decline, a stranger comes to town: Gideon Starling. He brings with him wealth, glamour, impossible tales of exotic travels. He has been everywhere, done everything. And he promises that he can make it rain in Greenheart. 

He hires our narrator, a teenager named Will Thorpe, pays him handsomely, and asks of him nothing more than his company. Oh, and also, everything he knows about everyone in town. Basic information, nothing huge: what do people say, what do they think, who do they like, who do they hate? Gideon makes friends; he sows hope. But not everyone is as dazzled by his worldly charisma, and fault lines develop.

MAN VS GOD: Who is Gideon Starling? What makes him so unnaturally compelling? Why does the reader find him disturbing -- well before Will starts having doubts -- and mistrust him so deeply that she finds herself putting the book down and avoiding picking it up again without proper mental preparation? Because I want to be very clear here: for all his charisma in the town of Greenheart, for all his sinister vibes, on the page Gideon Starling is no sexy shadow daddy. He's creepy as hell. The events of the first half or more of the book correspond to a straightforward enough bit of literary fiction about con men preying upon desperate people in an evocative setting; but the mood and tone make it clear that something much more disquieting is going on.

Properly exploring that last A03-style tag would bring me into the realm of spoilers, but playing properly coy would make it impossible for me to remark upon some of the most lasting and successful elements of the book. I'm not going to be shy about pointing out that the cover image, a 19th century painting by William Holbrook Beard of a fox-king receiving tribute from his woodland prey subjects, is less metaphorical than it first appears. I'm going to remind people of that awful realization that Julia experiences in The Magicians that a Trickster-fox is everyone's favourite bit of folklore until he actually works his mischief on you, at which point you realize that some types of mischief are not cute and quirky, but absolutely fucking awful. And I'm going to remark what a brilliant concept it is to have creatures from folklore falling into their own portal fantasy, ending up trapped in a world where their magic doesn't work and they must scrabble to survive. 

Just as the farmers were betrayed by nature, finding themselves trapped in someplace weird and terrifying, where everything they thought was true and reliable -- the rain, the wind -- no longer works as it should, so too are these creatures trapped in the wrong world, unable to return to the home they knew. Just as those displaced Dust Bowl farmers become itinerant wanderers, seeking to find a new place, to make a new life, so too must these creatures find-- or make -- or ruthlessly carve -- a new niche for themselves. Some are more successful than others; some make allies, some exploit enemies. Some betray the innocent. The best stories have layers, and the layers that make up this tale -- the unearthliness of the Dust Bowl, which drowns its victims without water; the unexpected cruel humanity of these trapped, homesick creatures of myth and legend -- make a compelling narrative.

Hillstrom is not the only writer to have recently observed the otherworldly potential of the Dust Bowl as a setting. Last year's excellent The Antidote, by Karen Russell, told a very different type of story that built on many of the same components as Rainmaker Rainmaker: the brutality of the jackrabbit drives, the terrible dust storms, the role of Works Progress Administration photographers as key sources of documentary evidence. They're wonderfully evocative narrative tools, and the fact that two such different books have come out so close to each other makes me wonder -- why only two? Why do writers not use this setting more often? It's fantastic!

There are a few issues this book that could have been tightened up. Some revelations rely on a rather tired trope of meeting someone who just happens to have some very esoteric knowledge conveniently stored in his home library. Others rely on essentially tying the hero to a chair and monologuing at him. But where some tropes are deployed in conventional ways, other issues of pacing are nonstandard, but thereby effective and novel. A leisurely epilogue might feel like an oddly slow fade-out, but it has the effect of properly acknowledging that people's lives can extend beyond the main events of a book. Learning how these characters grow and move apart and experience joys and successes and griefs and utterly mundane disappointments does a lot to make them more real than when they were merely actors in a fantastical story.

Give this book a read, friends! There is gold to be found in the roiling tumult of self-published, indie-published, small-press-published books that struggle for visibility in the shadows of the big names. It is my privilege to dive therein and come out with treasures to share with you. This is one such treasure. Please come and have a gander at it.

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 8: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• Evocative Dust Bowl setting
• Folklore
• Con men

References: 

Hillstrom, Kevin B., Rainmaker, Rainmaker [2026].

Russel, Karen., The Antidote. [Knopf 2025].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.