Film Review: Terminator 2 (35th Anniversary)

The sequel that set the standard for action films holds up perfectly after 35 years

When Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out in 1991, I was 8 years old, and my suburban household had a no-holds-barred approach when it came to R-rated movies. Consequently, I've seen it dozens of times, mostly in the '90s on VHS. This was also, for some reason, back when R-rated films released profitable lines of children's toys. I had all of the action figures, including the plastic-goo-flesh pump that overlaid "skin" on a Terminator metal skeleton.

When I found out there was going to be a 35th anniversary re-release, I knew exactly where I'd be. Terminator 2 is widely regarded as one of the best action movies, best sci-fi movies, and best sequels. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1991, and set the stage for James Cameron's eventual future triumphs in Titanic and Avatar.

But after 35 years, does it hold up?

Absolutely. On this rewatch—it'd been a few years since I'd last seen it from start to finish—I found myself rapt at the effortless storytelling and human beats, and there's a few key things I'd like to review about in lieu of a traditional narrative post-mortem.

Sarah Connor: The opposite of a Mary Sue (and maybe also a Cassandra at the same time)

Has there ever been more character growth between two movies than that of Sarah Connor, mother of the savior of humanity? In the original Terminator, Sarah is a young, naive waitress thrust into a world of violence, destruction, and utter fear. The movie ends with her hitting the road to Mexico, pregnant and filled with a newfound knowledge of the apocalypse that's coming.

When we meet her again, 10 years later, she's almost unrecognizable. Locked up in a mental institution, lean, muscled, and doing perfect chin-ups on an up-turned hospital bed. She has seen some serious, serious shit. Over the course of the movie, we witness her perform extraordinary feats of physical prowess, shoot and reload countless weapons without even looking, and wrestle with killer robots. We also learn that she's been training John for his eventual rise to power in the resistance since he was born—spending time in jungles, flying in helicopters, and stockpiling arms in the Mexican desert. For a female protagonist in the early '90s, this is incredible. It hit me while watching that she is the exact opposite of a Mary Sue, having put in a decade of work to show for skills and talents, learning from outlaws, scumbags, ex-army guys, and countless others. She is deeply competent in many different ways, and competency is hot.

Granted, I know that many folks use the Mary Sue descriptor almost exclusively for (strong) women, so I'm hesitant to even justify it with a response, but I think that's why Sarah Connor is unassailable in the canon: she literally can do it all when it comes to evading Terminators. Compare this to the common criticism of Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy; we have no idea how she can fly starships or fight so well.

One other thing that hit me while watching: Sarah Connor is basically Cassandra from Greek myth. Cassandra was a Trojan priestess blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to never be believed. Sarah didn't ask to be the mother of John Connor, hero to humanity, but she was fated to become her. And in so doing, learned about the horrors that await humanity and the eventual nuclear war that would devastate the planet. She ends up in a mental hospital because I imagine at some point, her PTSD got the better of her and she leaned into the story of the future in all its gory detail, hoping that someone, anyone, would listen. I don't think folks realize what a burden that knowledge must be, and how horrible it must be for someone to internalize day in and day out.

James Cameron's daddy issues on full display in a Terminator father-figure fan fiction

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but it's impossible to watch Terminator 2 without having your heart break at least a little over the relationship between the T-800 (Arnold) and John Connor. Having never known his real dad (or at least, he won't until he's older and meets him in the future), John has bounced around foster homes and been around Sarah's random boyfriends.

The T-800 is sent back to protect him at all costs, but he also has to obey him. The two bond over the course of the movie in a truly touching way. As Sarah muses, "It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him."

James Cameron has been vocal about his issues with his father, who always disapproved of him becoming a filmmaker. In a podcast I remember learning that even after winning an Oscar, his dad still was cold and distant. Taking this into account, Terminator 2 hits very different. Cameron turned the monster from the first film into the ultimate protector and bastion of unconditional love. Even writing this out, it sounds cliché, but the performances have to be seen to be believed. It works. Another parallel? John only spends a few short days with the Terminator—almost exactly the same amount of time that Jack spends with Rose in Titanic. So, yes, you're right, "My Heart Will Go On" could theoretically be the theme song for this movie, too. Old Jim Cameron is a big fan of love touching one time, but lasting for a lifetime.

This is Arnold's defining role—full stop

One of the reason the aforementioned relationship works so well is because of Arnold's performance. It's some of his best acting, both emotionally and physically. Does it make sense for scientists in the future to program language in a robot with an Austrian accent? No, it does not. But does it help nearly every scene? Yes! And this is partly because Arnold's not the greatest of actors. By portraying a stern robot with a limited emotional capacity, he's already got it made in the shade.

But he's not like he was in the first Terminator. That's a completely different role with a different motive and personality. In that movie, he's playing Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. In this one, he's got to form a bond with a human boy, and his programming allows him to learn. The scenes with John are truly heartwarming, and Arnold's comedic timing and facial expressions are absolutely perfect. At this point, Arnold was 43, not at the peak of his physical conditioning, but very close to it. He's a presence, and there's a reason why the entire world spouted "Hasta la vista, baby" for years afterward.

Terminator 2 works so well because it's a horror film masquerading as sci-fi

It's sci-fi because of the worldbuilding, of course. And the use of technology, time travel, and robots. The Terminator extended universe is a delight to spend time in, and I've enjoyed every entry into the canon over the decades. But Terminator 2 (and this applies to the original Terminator, too) is truly a horror film in two main ways. First, the aforementioned slashers: The T-800 and the T-1000 are unstoppable, largely silent, and possessed of otherwordly brute strength. When you think they're dead, they're not. When you think you've gotten away, they crash a truck over a bridge and keep heading your way. When you think you've crushed them in a steel mill a decade earlier, they show up again with the same face. This theme of being powerless to stop a methodical monster who will stop at nothing to destroy you is textbook horror.

Second, the movie's structured almost exactly like a horror film, too, with all the attendant tropes. You have the pulsing, loin-girding, percussive score. You have the incredible body horror of the T-1000 getting mangled, his skin peeling off and bullets perforating his back. The scene where he degloves his arm skin to get Miles Dyson to believe him is body horror writ large.

But perhaps the scariest part is the liquid metal Terminator. The T-1000 is shot, stabbed, crunched, frozen, and still gets back up every time they try to destroy him. And still he keeps coming, like every psycho killer you've ever seen. And the scene where he melts through the bars of the hospital is basically straight-up ghost behavior. People gasped in theaters when that happened, and not just because of the CGI.

Final thoughts

After my rewatch, I realized that Terminator 2 is just as good as I remembered it being throughout my entire life. The CGI, while groundbreaking at the time, does exactly what it's supposed to, and it doesn't take you out of the movie (unlike a lot of late '80s/early '90s films). It's meant to look real, and it does. This is better than the hyper-realistic stuff we have today, and also better than the absolute garbage effects of older films (looking at you, Poltergeist 2). The performances are still great, the storytelling is tight, and the emotional heart of it still makes me tear up just a bit—just like it always has.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Book Review: The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

A book resistant to many things, among them clarity, simplicity and relatability, and mostly the better for it.

"Nothing in memory ever made itself so available"

This line, from late on in The End of Everything, the new and Booker longlisted novel from M. John Harrison, is a fair summation of the book the precedes it. But not the only one. Not by a mile.

This is the point of a review that usually contains a plot summary. It won't here. I could try to craft one, and talk about some of the things that do, probably, happen in the book. But it would be wildly unhelpful, and possibly misleading. I could, by stating only facts, give the impression of a thriller or a dystopian climate mystery or even a cosy journey through a landscape (though that one might require a few elisions). Some characters exist. Some actions and conversations are undertaken, the world has suffered a dramatic change. This isn't a novel that's about its events; it's just not what its for. To effectively talk about it, then, I have to turn to what it is, and is about... and that feels rather more slippery.

First up, it's been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which, if you're familiar with their game, says a fair bit about it in some regards. There's a type of prose-forwardness, and formal play, that is far more usual in literary fiction than in SF or broader speculative fiction (not unknown! just less common), and a lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the world that speaks to its use far more metaphorically than functionally. The prose particularly of these is worth focussing on, because it's in that interesting space of being obviously crafted and thoughtfully deployed without being particularly purple. Though certainly there are some high scoring scrabble vocab choices around, they don't feel encrusted onto the text or particularly burdensome to it (though they do, fairly quickly, form a distinctive style that comes through especially in the dialogue - more on that a little later).

More prominently though, are the themes and metaphors and general sense of idea interplay. If novels can be plot forward or character forward, I would call this one theme forward, perhaps. Or idea forward. Motif-forward? It is dense with moments and scenes that feel laden with meaning, invested with something being their direct plot function, and often divested of a direct plot function - there are meandering digressions that don't seem to relate to what anyone is doing, because well... they don't. They serve instead the text's function as a potential map of meaning and interpretation.

There are many ways to feel when you finish a book, but one of them, and one I savour very much, is the feverish excitement and urge to discuss when finishing a book that sparks not just thought but criticism. That's what all that theme is serving here: the creation of a book that wants not just to be read, but to be read into, and which provides a rich field for the harvest, a cornucopia of potential readings. With that sort of book, you always, at least to some extent, take out what you yourself bring to it, so I do not consider these an exhaustive list of potential readings, but they were the ones that came to my mind most readily as I made my way through the text, and the ones I felt best connected into one another and were best served by being laid alongside the rest.

The first, and one I will freely admit is absolutely something I'm primed to bring into a text with me, is a class reading. Specifically, a disdain for a certain kind of grasping middle class, and perhaps a glee at the downfall the cataclysmic change may have wrought on them. There are several vignettes from a before time, of the rich partying (predominantly in South London; it's strange but wonderful to read a book in which I recognised so much of the landscape), that felt drenched in contempt for their excess. I don't think at any point it turned into a wider take about capitalism more broadly; it felt too pointed, too specific and sharply observational for that. And it was, in that, desperately English too. Those South London and south coast locations all felt critical to the message being put across, to the very particular people being evoked in some of the characters, even those who only got a very brief stint on the page. Even in that brief time, many of them felt familiar without necessarily being individual: washed out photos of someone I might once have known, or a face in a crowd. There's... not anger, quite, but some emotion that felt to me underlying all this, a disgruntlement or irritation, that made it feel more powerful.

But where that reading felt to me sharply invective, there's another one more drenched in sorrow, and possibly the most obvious reading of the book: about dementia. One of the characters is described explicitly as suffering from it, and the way her actions proceed throughout the narrative, and the way the descriptions and emotions are portrayed as diffuse, blurry things, only swinging into sharp delineation at key points, seems to underscore her experiences as she describes them. But this is not just focussing on the memory loss aspect of dementia. Instead, it is quite easy to read some of the events as representative of the loss of inhibition that is also part of the condition, and so to take some of the worst events of the book as a possibly inescapable tragedy, horrible for all involved.

This reading makes particular sense to me of a moment which comes early on in the book - page 14 in my edition - that seems out of nowhere. It is horrific, particularly because it is a horrific act described with intense nonchalance. The horror has to come from the reader, because the prose isn't providing it. And it is somehow more palpable for that choice. This moment unsettles everything that comes later, and made me doubt the emotional tone being presented, and how that connected with the events and the characters' perceived reality.

There's also a more generalised reading about ageing, which goes hand in hand but distinct from the dementia one. This is more tied to the actuality of the characters' words and experiences, rather than in reading into the gaps and how different pieces interact. There are several moments of characters noticing how the world has changed around them, how it seemed to happen without any way of stopping it, and feeling detached from and alienated by the world they now live in but can neither change nor control, fondly thinking back to the better time of their youth. What is this if not a lament for the passage of time? And while the dementia thread is a great tragedy, made all the more so by what it causes, the ageing one feels to me more ambivalent, resigned to the reality but not happy about it.

There's definitely also some "politics of modern Britain" in the mix, though I admit I could not quite find a specific angle to connect throughout the story. There are sharp moments scattered throughout that felt specific and directed - like a line talking about the state of the country at the time the story is set, where the tide of small boats has turned to predominantly fleeing rather than entering. I certainly paused when I got to that part of the text. But I cannot quite figure out what it's doing or saying. Is it just broadly pessimistic about modern Britain? In what way? I am lingering over it, picking at it, wanting to figure it out and not being quite able. We'll come back to this too.

Aside from the potential for thematic readings (plentiful) there is still more to enjoy. The formal playfulness comes out not just in the crafted prose, but in occasional oddities, repetitions and deviations out of the flow of the text, used to illustrate the shape of the world but also just fun, as pieces of artistic meandering all by themselves. There's also a hint, maybe, that the text is at least in part diegetic, in a way that is pleasingly headfucky if thought about too long or in too much detail. Harrison is clearly interested in the text as specifically a text, and what texts, collections of words imbued with greater significance, can do in the hands of someone with a mind bent towards nonsense (in the most complimentary sense).

There is also, to loop back to that first delayed point, an oddity of character. I enjoy it, but it runs rather counter to the norms I'm used to both in genre and in litfic - a rejection of realism. None of the characters feels intended to convey individuals that one might meet on the street. They do not have distinctive, individual voices, and they all talk, more or less, like the text rather than like themselves or anyone I've ever met in the world. They are constantly artful, affected and approaching their topics at a weird angle, full of slightly off-kilter descriptions and philosophical musing. They aren't people, meaningfully, and that's fine, realism is only one option among many. But it's still strange to read, when it's the thing I'm quite so immersed in 99% of my reading time. And because I'm not quite sure I can articulate why Harrison has chosen to make it this way, what purpose its serving to the text. It's possible that this rejection of relatability, this intense opacity of character interiority, is meant to demonstrate quite how implausible relatablity ever was - every man truly is an island, and we can see through no window into his soul. Or is it meant to render out the individuality, in this broken down world where so much else about normality has been lost? I don't know. It could be something else entirely. It could be nothing. It could simply be an affectation. There's nothing I can quite find purchase on to really figure it out.

Which brings me back round to my second delayed point.

There's a spectre that haunts the corners of the text, and that is the iGhetti, who are, perhaps, an invading alien force from the astral plane. Maybe. Of all the things in the book resistant to explanation, they are perhaps the most opaque, the most unclear, to the extent that, at times, I doubted whether they existed at all. I think it entirely possible that Harrison is having us all on with this, and it's some sort of complex bit in service of a different narrative agenda. Or that it's just doing something I haven't quite figured out yet. There are conflicting details littered through the book, but few of them, never in enough useful explanation to make much in the way of sense. It feels like the characters try not to think about them, mostly. And so it's a book that's making you work for a lot of its content, both the thematic and the background. Getting a sense of the iGhetti requires me to be reading in a very active, brain on sort of way, and in the end all that activity merits little in the way of reward, just as the politics seem ever so slightly out of reach.

This is, I think, the novel's great strength, and also its great weakness. It is a text oblique enough to permit many readings, and it is also a text oblique enough to be unsatisfyingly impenetrable at times.

I like books that are hard work. I like sometimes not being given everything on a plate - I complain often enough about books that do that too readily and too clearly. And so it feels rather perverse to be complaining that I got what I asked for. And I'm not... not exactly. I certainly wouldn't change the book in any way. I think the thing is that, by choosing to be so resistant to reading, Harrison has closed himself off to the sort of emotional access that, for me at least, allows me to love a book. He's maxed out the "appreciate" bar, though, and I like it plenty. It's a siloing of the type of response available all into one pot, and one that runs counter to a lot of current speculative fiction's approach, and I can only salute it. I think making the book easier to access would ruin much of the magic. But it does just mean it's not quite all the way for me.

And my literary diet needs that variation. I want to read books that satisfy me intellectually as well as emotionally. And that is, more or less, what is happening here. I felt a sort of feverish rush when I finished it. I felt awake. I felt stretched, like I'd done a nice jog with the little grey cells. I felt satisfied. Books like this are a necessary complement to the ones full of character realism and emotional heft, and absolutely ones prime for critical discussion. If I stick with the food metaphor, that's broccoli, but I fucking love broccoli.

So, after all that, what is this book?

It's SF but it's also unapologetically literary fiction in how it approaches its concepts - no sense of or desire for explanation, or even necessarily experience. It's about conjunction, reaction, the interposition of idea and motif and theme and how they might bounce off each other to make the reader have some sort of response, rather than an attempt to create immersion or realistic people. It's a book asking you to criticise, not asking you to solve or relate. It's a book doing a dystopia and an alien invasion and an astral plane and maybe even some satire. It's about dementia and ageing and Britain right now - if the unspecified pessimism that runs through it all can be considered of the moment (not unreasonable). It's a fuzzy journey through a familiar yet strange landscape, a tragedy and a warning. It is intensely, indescribably itself. It's fascinating. And it's frustrating.

The thing is about the books that cause this feverish excitement, the thrill doesn't always last. Sometimes it smoulders down into the embers of a long, burning passion, it's true. But not always. I think, after my initial fascination with The End of Everything dies down, what will be left instead is something less emotional - an appreciation for the complex artistry, a fascination with the way the different layers and pieces work together across the whole. Not exactly love, but something nonetheless necessary and worthwhile.

--

The Math

Highlights: Delicious prose with the occasional line that lands with a big bang, rich text full of possible readings, lot of cleverness available to find as soon as you start looking

Nerd Coefficient: Yes.

Reference: M. John Harrison, The End of Everything, [Serpent's Tail, 2026].

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

Happy 60th Birthday, Star Trek

Going where no TV series has gone before

If there’s a Major League of SF TV, it’s an honored place where only the truly memorable names are enshrined. The full list of the Best of the Best is perpetually subject to revision, but a few entries are beyond dispute. The Twilight Zone. The X-Files. Doctor Who. Orphan Black. Babylon 5. The Expanse. Future versions of this list, I daresay, will surely include newer masterpieces like Sense8, Severance and Andor. And at the top of the very top sits the endlessly influential and inspiring TV franchise that predicts a future where diversity and collaboration are our biggest strength: the simultaneously silly, profound, comforting, irritating, topical and strange Star Trek.

The Star Trek franchise is far from perfect. Too often it has failed its own message. Fans can name exactly which episodes were so outrageously sexist or racist that they shouldn't be shown when introducing new people. Whether a given producer would be respectful to the actresses he hired has been a lottery. And yet, we continue to stubbornly love this ongoing story, despite its many stumbles. Much like the republic for which it stands, we love the promise of Star Trek more than its track record in fulfilling it.

It’s a simple but potent idea: that the future will be open to everyone. Star Trek shows us a prosperous. peace-loving, educated civilization that welcomes people of all origins, all languages, all body types. The United Federation of Planets has built a culture that prefers dialogue instead of aggression, learning instead of fear, cooperation instead of avarice. It was a daring, necessary idea in the ’60s, when the US was going through a crisis of identity regarding its place in the world and its foundational ideal of equal rights for all; and it remains a daring, necessary idea now that xenophobia, patriarchy and willful ignorance have returned with a vengeance. Against those forms of hatred, Star Trek presents us with a potential future worth striving for.

The themes that recur in all iterations of the franchise form a generally consistent stance. We should meet the universe openly, without suspicion or malice. We should value curiosity together with skepticism. We should explore the vast space within us as deeply as that outside us. We should beware those who manipulate religion to control others. We should cultivate the integrity to live by our values, but paired with the prudence to not impose them by force. We should feel at home in the universe wherever we are. We should invite our enemies to become our allies. We should not take our freedom for granted, but we should also trust that good actions will inspire many more. We should embrace the precious diversity that surrounds us.

In a science fiction ecosystem too often dominated by big guns and flashy fights, Star Trek has stayed firmly, unapologetically humanistic. Star Trek recognizes the historical abuses of science and still defends the worth of science as a tool to improve our lives. It takes note from the calamities of history and asserts that they are not inevitable. The stars and the worlds that live under their light are not there to be conquered, but to be met with respect, as equals. And the search for knowledge, if done honestly and fairly, will protect us from our most shameful impulses.

The type of plot that characterizes a Star Trek episode is most often a moral parable where thorny questions are translated into personal drama. This is a franchise that doesn’t feel intimidated by big ideas. The nature of personhood, the extent of our mutual responsibility, the proper counterweights to political power, the uses of mythmaking, the value of reason when faced with irrational forces—Star Trek has space for everything. Such confidence in the power of truth has sustained the same ongoing story for 60 years and is capable of keeping it alive for many more. Now is a doubtful moment for all things Paramount, but if the history of Star Trek proves anything, it’s that the fans’ love for it is a force that should not be underestimated.

It’s with that love that I say to you, Star Trek: Thank you for all the mind-blowing concepts and the fun moments. Thank you for taking a stand against exclusion, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Keep pointing the way to a future where everyone has a fair chance to grow and keep learning. Keep reaching for the wonders that are out there in the infinite realm of imagination. Keep boldly going.

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

Book Review: Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey

Guys, is this a romance?

cover art by Anders Røkkum

There are two Sarah Gaileys. One writes whimsical romps about rootin-tootin hippo-riding cowpokes (hippo-pokes) who do heists, and queer anti-patriarchal librarians on horseback who do revolutions. The other writes… um… well, works like Spread Me.

Don’t get me wrong. I like both Gaileys. It’s just very important to know which one you’re getting before you dive into a work. This one is written by the second Gailey, the one who wrote Just Like Home. This is important information for setting expectations.

Spread Me is a slim tale covering the misadventures of a research group in a near-future American Southwest, where repeated waves of pandemics have swept over the world and made a remote research assignment deep in the desert, far away from other people and contagions, look awfully attractive. Kinsey leads this research team, funded by some vague Big Money organization to do some vague Biology Research™. The logistics and funding and motivation for her project are simultaneously unconvincingly hand-wavey and also utterly irrelevant to the primary story, which is about what she and her team find underneath the sands of the desert.

It’s a sex pollen sex-virus-fungus-lichen thing. It’s a sex-microbiotum. It’s a sexy shmexy microscopic hive mind crittur thing. Despite a whole entire scene with a microscope, the science is as unimportant as the funding and project objectives. This book keeps its eyes on its prize: the sex-critter spreads by infecting things, and it wants to infect Kinsey. And although it seems to infect other people through incidental contact, with Kinsey it is determined to be an STI. The only problem is, it hasn’t quite figured out how to (a) make its hosts sexually attractive people, and especially not to (b) Kinsey in particular, who has her own particular tastes. She keeps bacteriophage macrophotography pinups behind her mirror for special alone time. Unfortunately, the crittur doesn’t know this, so it needs to experiment.

Cue the sexy body horror. How do you feel about a mouth-encrusted torso? A hand with a tongue on it?* ** An armpit with a vagina in it?*** My book group loved it. Kinsey also likes it—and that’s weird, because Kinsey typically finds humans pretty meh. No capsids, you see. An insufficiency of flagella.

So is that her superpower? Does she escape infection by the power of being a microbosexual?

Hah, not a chance! This book is not about defeating the evil sex infection that wants to take over the world. This book is about owning your kink, communicating with your partner about what you want, learning what they want, listening to each other and figuring out what it will take to make a relationship work. As my book group remarked, “Guys, is this a romance?”

It’s certainly something. Gailey always takes the horrific and makes it weirdly wholesome. There’s the occasional nod to conventionality here— some very boring interstitial chapters that flash back to how the research team met and coalesced, providing backstory and character depth that in a horror book would lend poignancy to their eventual fates. But if this is a romance, then what do we need with backstory focusing on secondary characters, when all the interesting stuff is happening now, between Kinsey and her body-modding love interest/horrifying world-threatening parasitic infection?

This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it was for me. It definitely was for my book group, though. So pay attention to your AO3 tags, my friends: This is one of those Gailey books. Dead dove, do not eat. You have been warned.

* But a cold tongue, because there are no lungs or breath attached.
** Yes, I know that hands are warm whether or not they have tongues on them! But remember, the science of warm-blooded bodies is not the point here.
*** This was the point where I got on Bluesky and started yelling at Gailey directly, who responded with a polite series of emojis.

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable (for some!) experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Sexy body horror
• Owning one's kink
• An appreciation of the value of communication in partners

Reference: Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me [Tor Nightfire, 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.

Book Review: The Dungeon Book by Gareth Hanrahan

 Bagheera was never this much of a prick

  

 

Over the last few months, I have become irritated about the all-encompassing spread of "cozy". Not the genre of cozy fantasy itself, that's been around for decades in one form or another, and I find some of it very enjoyable. But "cozy" as a post-Legends & Lattes marketing trope from publishers and an expansive catch-all term for reviewers, used both positively and pejoritavely. Any book within touching distance, sharing just one element in common with the collection of things that make up cozy fantasy, now risks being forcibly agglomerated into the genre regardless of how well it in fact fits there. Aside from arbitrary personal irritation at the phenomenon, I think it's particularly unhelpful because in categorising everything within earshot as 'cozy', the distinctive and interesting elements of fantasy which is to a greater or lesser extent adjacent to it are lost.

 
The reason I am starting with this digression is because I have seen Gareth Hanrahan's The Dungeon Book repeatedly slapped with the label 'cozy', and in my view categorising it as such does indeed paper over most of what is most interesting about this fine book. 

Rather than being cozy, The Dungeon Book is a story which follows fairy tale logic but is pitched at adults (or at least not at children; one wouldn't be shocked to find this on YA shelf in some bookshops). Our protagonist is Bait, a young girl stolen from a castle and left to die in a wizard's dungeon, complete with goblins, monsters, slimes, and, of course, a dragon. She is raised (sort of), by a tribe of goblins and tutored by the book's narrator, Cornelius, formerly a sorcerer and con-man and currently a talking skull. The plot unfolds with Bait trying to make her place in the dungeon, venturing to explore the outside world, and eventually finding herself tangled in a larger, messier story. The whole setup give the impression of The Jungle Book meets Hans Christian Andersen, or some of the more macabre corners of Roald Dahl (or, for those of you Of A Particular Age from my part of the world, some of Paul Jennings' nastier stories). Yes, like The Jungle Book, it has elements you can read as found family, yes it has quirky humour, but Cornelius is much more of a prick than Bagheera and The Dungeon Book also has widespread, omnidirectional amoral violence and nothing remotely like a cozy ending. It follows the ultimately harsh logic of Andersen's The Red Shoes or Dahl's The Witches, not a cozy "all will be well". In fact, though I'm entirely unsure if Hanrahan had it in mind, a lot of the plot beats (with, you know, added manticores and disembowelments) make me think somewhat of an inversion of Matilda. 

This is a book where spoilers do somewhat matter and, as I'll discuss below, the plot is not the book's finest element in any event, so I don't want to venture too many more details on that comparison, but I'm reasonably convinced I could do a good pinboard-and-red-yarn diagram of the linkages between of the two. I'll just say the The Dungeon Book ends with a departure from the dungeon and an arrival, and it's not a stretch to read that as a departure to adulthood on one hand and a return to the womb on the other. This is a story, in part, about growing up - growing past - the certainties and black and white lines of childhood and grappling with the difficulties of the wide open adult world. But it's also about how a child's home should be a place of safety and nurturing, and that darkness can be that. The epigraph for the book (from a commencement speech given by Ursula K LeGuin) makes that very clear:

And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. [ . . . ] Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

The book's deployment of this fairy tale aesthetic, of stylised childhood - the black and white rules, the brutal consequences, the leaps in narrative logic that in other modes we'd object to - in the context of adult fiction is rhetorically unusual and in my view very effective. It put me in a mental space I don't often inhabit reading fantasy. Part of what put me there, and worth noting specifically, was the gorgeous header images which begun each chapter (drawn by Hanrahan's partner, Edel Ryder-Hanrahan), in the mode of the sketches you see in the classic C S Lewis books, or the illustrations done by Robin Jacques for the classic mid 20th century books of fairy stories by Ruth Manning-Sanders. 

The tonal and plot similarities to fairy tale are also buttressed by the narration. Cornelius is a very active narrator with a vibrant, occasionally (and effectively) comic voice, directed at an almost entirely unnamed "you". This is a story being told, complete with digressions into history which Cornelius has a shaky grasp of and events for which he wasn't present and may well be at least partially making up. This gives the impression of a frame story with nested narratives, but unlike the typical setup for such books, here the frame story is the main event and the nested stories digressions. The effect is to evoke someone relating a legend or fairy story to an audience, without outright pastiche of either than type of story or of oral storytelling.

All of this is put together in truly excellent prose. I've read and enjoyed Hanrahan's work before (which has previously been broadly grimdark-tinged political epic fantasy), but on a sentence level I think this is his best yet. This is true both of imagery - "Slow as grief and remorseless as famine, the dragon uncurled" is hugely evocative - and also of oft-neglected sentence structure and rhythm. The book describes a party of adventurers descending into the dungeon thus, heightening the tension of the basic action extraordinarily:

The heat sapping their strength, breathing an ordeal, panic rising, no way out, no way forward, heartbeats hammering in their ears like drums in the deep, the certain terrible knowledge, no way out, no way out, no way out, daylight a fleeting memory, an impossibility.

Only the Dungeon. Only the dark.

Excellent.

So far, so much undiluted praise. But if you glance to the bottom of the review, you'll see that I've scored this a seven, and given there's so much I like in here, I feel the need to explain why. First, Nerds of A Feather has a pretty firm policy about score inflation, and also doesn't do half points: the combination of those two things means that I don't quite think the book deserves an eight, and can't give it a 7 1/2, which I think it does (but just read the 7 as a 7 1/2). The reason I don't think this fine book quite merits and eight is due to something that is also a strength: Cornelius's meandering narration. The narrative voice is genuinely engaging in the way I discuss above, but it also means the thread of the plot is tangled and sometimes lost, leading action to sometimes feel slow in places and confused in others. That did materially (though not massively) impact my enjoyment of the novel. This is the sort of thing it's easy to look past from a debut author, but for an experienced, professional writer like Hanrahan, I'd ideally have expected just a bit more tightening and just a few darlings killed (which would fit nicely alongside the book's bodycount). That done, the The Dungeon Book would absolutely have tipped over to being truly excellent. As it is, this is still a very good, slightly unusual book (complimentary) with heart, brains, and a well-developed taste for the macabre and rather less for the cozy. More, please.

 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Engaging deployment of the macabre end of fairy tales
• An engaging if meandering narrator
• Brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference: Gareth Hanrahan, The Dungeon Book [Orbit, 2026].

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

Book Review: A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen

A mixture of whimsy, social commentary and magic.

Jules has a problem. A big problem. Ever since being returned to being a human, Jules has made a living at handling dangerous artifacts in a slightly alternate Victorian London. But when her friend Anthony comes with his own problem, it’s a doozy. Anthony has a whole suite of artifacts inherited from his great-aunt, and one of them has gotten agitated--a sword, a very potent sword that is unhappy with a pending law in Parliament that could affect a great many indeed. Worse, Jules’ old enemy is behind the law. Jules finds herself in need of allies, and her own fortitude, to stand up for those who have no voice. 

This is the story of Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor. 

The novella runs on some fascinating worldbuilding, but I want to talk first about its social relationship web. Even though we have a number of magicians (including Jules herself) in the novella, what this story really runs on is its social relationships and how those relationships can be leveraged and reinforced, built and be strengthened with mutual aid, and so ultimately shows the power of a small community. Jules has fascinating and sometimes prickly relationships all over the place and in some unexpected locations.. She’s friends with Claudie, whose brother Anthony had the troublesome sword. Jules knows a powerful voice and magic worker, Fru Lind. And Jules, when she was not human thanks to a curse, was a harpy. Jules still has a rather prickly relationship with her former lover, the harpy Wellspring. Wellspring is rather disappointed that Jules was returned to human form, after all. 

And as the novel progresses, as Jules forges and reforges connections and makes new ones, this social power is itself a form of magic and one that Jules learns to wield. In many ways, the point of this novel, and it is a theme that the author does not shy away from is that the power of collective action, of working together, of bringing together diverse voices, powers and skills, is more powerful than a thousand year old sword. 

And even to really make that sword usable, requires allies and help. It takes a village, and more, for Jules to decipher and confront the central problem of the sword. The sword is well over a millennium old, was forged by Weyland Smith, and is worst of all a “dubious” sword--a sword with a mind toward doubt and uncertainty. So when a bill and potential magic working in Parliament would remove that doubt and uncertainty at the cost of hurting millions, it's no wonder that a dubious sword that has been dormant for a long time would get itself rather agitated by such a potential working.

The worldbuiding is a light touch and in complete harmony with the rest of the book. Using a slightly alternate Victoriana does help in some of the heavy lifting of the book. I might have wanted a more alternate world, but I am satisfied with what the author works with, here. 

Sprinkling in some mentions of real life figures like Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) hones in a range when the book takes place, without tying it down to an exact day and date. The social customs of this world are more progressive than ours, but recognizably Victorian in many of the little details. Having Jules be from a Swedish immigrant community not only plays to the core theme of the book but also provides a new perspective on that Victoriana. The tropes and characters and stock dramatis personae of a novel set in the Victorian period is well worn even to readers who only have a passing familiarity with the period and works set within it. But having an immigrant community centered in Jules’ life and shared experience added complexity, nuance and the unexpected to that. The author proves that where and on who we point the “camera” of the narrative, particularly people and communities (especially marginalized ones) is vitally important. That has been an underlying theme of previous works of Horned Lark Press and its works, and A Dubious Clamor brings that theme into the forefront.

That is one last bit of the book that a reviewer other than I might appreciate even better. The title A Dubious Clamor is a reference on a couple of levels and directions, but fundamentally there is a strain of music and the power of music in this novella. The chapter numbers have a treble clef and musical stave, with notes on it. Music and singing are important to the harpies, and to Jules herself. This is a novella where the music infuses and is part of the magic that she can and does wield. 

The novella is trim and neat and conforms well to the form and length of the form. I listened recently to a T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon podcast where she talked about, at one point, the length and form and purpose of novellas. Novellas, in her view are not long novelettes or shorter versions of novel, they have a set of structures and forms that they not only fit into, but seem to thrive in. Novellas which are simply long novels cut off for length wind up being unsatisfactory to my reading, and novelettes padded out have the same problem. A Dubious Clamor has solid structural bones in its act structure, arrangement of the narrative, which helps propel the reader through it, and it goes down well. The novella does end with the possibility of further adventures for Jules; I’d be more than happy to read them. 

Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor forges an alloy of magic, enchanted swords, whimsy and social adventure. It brings a modern and cutting edge appreciation for the wild and broad diversity of life. This is a story that ultimately cuts to the quick against those who would simplify and categorize the world at the expense of the individual. Resonant with our own struggles today, A Dubious Clamor holds up a mirror to our own society’s struggles to find acceptance for those who do not fit into neat boxes. Marissa Lingen, in A Dubious Clamor, shows that fighting against the forces that would oppose diversity is not only possible, not only needed, but is also rewarding to the heart and the soul.

--

Highlights:

• Excellent and breezily written
• Musical hints and highlights--the power of music and voice
• Excellent on brand message for the press

Reference: Lingen, Marissa, A Dubious Clamor, Horned Lark Press, 2026

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

We Are Hugo Award Winners in 2026 for Best Fanzine -- Thank You!

 

As LA Con V came to a close with the presentation of the Hugo Awards, Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together found ourselves the grateful recipients of the 2026 Award for Best Fanzine. This is our third win out of eight nominations, and it may be the most trite sentiment in the world, but even being nominated is an honor, and winning...well, hearing our name called was just as thrilling as finding out we had won our first in 2021.

There was a special element to this one -- which two of our UK-based editors got to experience when we won in Glasgow in 2024 -- we got to win at home. Los Angeles was where The G and I began this project fourteen years ago, and to be able to accept the award together in person fills me with more wonder than I can possibly express. Talking Alfred Bester while grilling burgers in our shared apartment courtyard somehow led here. 

I am amazed.

The G, editor Paul Weimer, and myself were there in person to accept, and we each thanked our families. I am including here The G's and my prepared remarks, which we also delivered.

 The G:

Vance and I started Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together in a very different time - way back in 2012. Like many of you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of our community in this present, disorienting moment. So here goes…

Science fiction imagines futures but is ultimately a commentary on the present - extrapolating our hopes and fears into worlds we briefly inhabit. 

Now, things like agentic AI and autonomous weaponry have slipped from imagination into this world, posing open-ended sociological questions on the future of work, warfare and the organization of human societies. 

The role of a fanzine like Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, as I see it is not only to celebrate the art we all love, but to shine a light on those imagined worlds and how they contribute to our shared understanding of what it means to be human.

 

Vance K: 

I look at the world through a lens that was shaped by people like Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler, so I want to thank the people in this room who spend their time imagining worlds other than this. You both warn us of dark places ahead that we can find ourselves when we are not vigilant (like now), but also show us the promise of what we might yet become. Thank you.

The whole editorial team (The G, Joe Sherry, Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer, and myself) would like to thank the Hugo Award voters who saw fit to nominate, and then select us, as well as all of our readers. I am biased, but I believe we have the best team of writers out there, and that you return to this site to engage with their thoughtful commentary is a gift we don't take lightly. We have always tried to make this a welcoming space to anybody who finds joy or escape or belonging in the community of people who love the speculative and the fantastic. All these years on, as the team has grown, changed, evolved, and continues to do so, I remain ever proud of the work, and am grateful that so many of you are with us.    

Many, many thanks to our entire team of writers: Alex, Phoebe, Clara, Haley, Eddie, Stewart, Christine, Dean, Chris, Ann, Joe, and Gabrielle.

 -- Vance K