TV Review: Maul: Shadow Lord

A fun space opera crime story that sneaks in a bit of commentary

I think it’s telling that both the Legends continuity and the Disney continuity of the Star Wars franchise both saw it fit to bring Darth Maul back from the dead. He was undoubtedly an imposing character. His lines were generic, sure, but Ray Park provided him with some great physical acting. He also got great makeup, great choreography, and a cool lightsaber. In the new canon, there’s a fair bit of him, but it’s spread among different shows and is difficult to track the whole way through. Now, though, he gets his own show to shine in, that being Maul: Shadow Lord on Disney Plus.

It’s only natural, I think, that the way Disney figured out how to let Darth Maul survive was to make him a crime lord. It’s a way of living that is both obviously cruel as well as opposing the power structure under which he lives. He can be cruel, raspy, imposing as he was in his appearance in The Phantom Menace, but with no need to follow pre-established rules on the nature of the Sith, nor any involving potential service to either side of the Clone Wars. This setup lets him be his own agent, beholden to only himself, free to be as ruthless as he can to entertain us.

One of this show’s strengths is its visual design. You are treated to a story set mostly in a single city on a single planet. The city has clear inspiration from Blade Runner with more obvious departures from reality. For an episode or two, I wondered if it were the same city planet as seen on a moon in The Mandalorian and Grogu but that turned out not to be the case. But as so many cities in science fiction are seen only at nighttime, advertisements glowing like gemstones against the dark, you also get to see the city in the day. It reminded me of some of the older parts of New York I’ve been to. Even better, you get a sense what it is like for the normal people of this city to live here. It seems to have a certain car (or speeder) dependence that makes commuting a chore, but it’s still a thing people not involved in high politics or crime experience - something that the Star Wars franchise historically has not been great about showing.

This is a crime show, and about half of it is a cop show. Other than Maul and his organization, the other major group of characters (barring an important duo) is this planet’s local constabulary. The investigator we follow, played by a suitably weary, suitably gruff Wagner Moura, is in some ways the platonic ideal of a cop show protagonist - divorced, teenage son, throws himself into his work in order to stay sane, but nevertheless with a moral core that will not let him take the easy way out of a morally difficult situation. Another character in the station is Two-Boots, a protocol droid adapted to police use whose programmed imperatives conflict with his own sense of duty.

In this section of the show, it will bring up inevitable comparisons to Andor. This isn’t Andor, and it was never going to be the deep dive into the nature of fascism that Tony Gilroy blessed us with. This show does, however, have its own element of commentary on the nature of imperialism that is hidden in the background, probably not intentional, and manifests itself in a way that may have simply been clumsy writing: whenever the Empire is mentioned, it is mentioned as a foreign entity, a thing that the characters very much do not identify themselves with. They don’t refer to the ISB, or any other named agency in the way that American cops in a mundane police drama may refer to the FBI, they refer to ‘the Empire’ as if they were not its own reluctant citizens.

This plotline, then, is an extended discussion of the nature of a political community. To play on an old Chinese saying: the galaxy is vast, and the Emperor is far away. The Empire, being a fundamentally personalist regime, cannot micromanage every city on every planet in every system in every sector. As such, it is easy for those who avoid attracting Coruscant’s attention to get away with a lot. The great mistake Two-Boots makes is assuming that the Empire exists to help people (and no I am not considering the Yuuzhan Vong here), and contacts Coruscant for assistance. The new Imperial presence spends its time terrorizing the city, caring far more about its sense of order rather than any actual care for the rights and livelihoods of its people. The commentary on the nature of fascism is rather blunt: these people are only using what ills you to gain power and to satisfy their own lust for domination. It is a lesson learned the hard way, both in this show and in our own world.

Maul’s operation and entourage, on the other hand, are not as rich. They are entertaining, certainly, pleasingly ruthless when dealing with other criminals who have crossed them. But just among them, and not their interactions with others, is rote: they are your typical space opera crime syndicate doing typical criminal things. This is where the connections to the broader franchise lore are the thickest, particularly near the end. It’s fun, yes, but it’s not particularly substantial. This segment of the story is the part most purely what people love Star Wars for, and it works on that level.

The other set of characters are two Jedi, master and apprentice, who happened to be on this world when Order 66 was issued and their comrades in the Order were duly felled. They are refugees, homeless, dispossessed by the change in regime and stranded on a world they barely know. To go on about their plight would spoil too much of what makes this story work as well as it does, but they are worth watching, too. They serve to reveal the nature of characters around them, for they elicit positive change in police characters and pure ruthlessness from Maul’s enterprise and from the Imperial forces that have come to impose their own will.

So, ultimately, no - Maul: Shadow Lord is not fundamentally another incisive commentary on the dangers of democratic backsliding. What it is is a fun space opera show with some thematic depth if you decide to dig in a bit. It is, satisfyingly, just a bit more than what we expected it to be, and I think, ultimately, that was enough. As a longtime Star Wars fan, I had fun with this show, and I think that other fans of this franchise will also have fun with it.

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

Book Review: The Feywild Job by C. L. Polk

 A solid piece of D&D tie-in fiction; a missed chance for more

After the heights of 2nd- through 4th-edition Forgotten Realms tie-in fiction, where we got dozens of books across a quarter century, Wizards of the Coast seems to have gone into a bit of a lull in the setting over the decade since 5e bedded in (at least as far as characters not named Drizzt are concerned). That ‘90s TSR fiction is what I cut my fantasy nerd teeth on as a pre-teen and younger teenager; I have very fond memories of it. So I was pleased to see Wizards of the Coast return to tie-in fiction and return to a book set (at least partially) in the Realms. I was equally pleased to see they’ve tapped C. L. Polk, a writer with a great backlist, to write The Feywild Job.

The premise is that two pairs of adventurers are essentially blackmailed by a “client” into a reverse heist: steal a MacGuffin back from someone and return it to its proper place before anyone notices it’s gone. Each pair is led by half of an old duo of thieves—the warlock Saeldian and the bard Kell. That partnership fell apart a decade before the book started, when feelings started to develop between them. This was a problem for Saeldian’s warlock pact (the deal with an Archfey which gives him his powers), which requires him to never fall in love, so he walks out, and the next time he sees Kell is at the start of this heist. The two tagalongs are Kell’s orc druic companion Lorzok and Saeldian’s rogue companion Jubilee. This leads into a heist plot, a potential second-chance romance, and some very of-the-moment cozy-adjacent vibes.

A shift to cozy-adjacent romantasy might seem an odd choice for D&D tie-in fiction, but in a lot of ways I think it actually honours the tradition of the field. The heist-quest plot thread is absolutely classic TSR tie-in stuff. The point of tie-in fiction is at least in part to attract new audiences to the TTRPG product, and romantasy—and its audience—is a potential untapped market for WotC. And to dive into some deep lore, in fact one of the earliest examples of D&D tie-in was what we’d now call romantasy. A spinoff of the early ‘80s Endless Quest Choose Your Own Adventure books was 6 HeartQuest books. Before Drizzt, before the Dragonlance Chronicles, we had CYOA romantasy aimed at teenagers. So the choice of genre seems both perfectly judged for the current moment and a well judged nod to tradition.

And it all works quite well without being a total triumph. If I’d read this as a 13-year-old just realising he was queer at the height of TSR Forgotten Realms fiction, I’d have loved it. And it is a solid, largely well executed example of both a cozy romantasy and a piece of RPG tie-in fiction, but it isn’t more than that, either. I’d certainly put it in the top quartile of D&D fiction ever released, but with the greatest of respect, that isn’t the world’s most searching standard, and I don’t think it quite matches the absolute best of the old 2nd- to 4th-edition tie-ins (notably the best work of Erin Evans and Elaine Cunningham, for example). For the rest of the review I want to talk about why it reaches that upper quartile and why it also doesn’t, in my eyes, extend beyond solidly pretty good.

Polk is a technically excellent writer, and the prose in the book is very well done. A nice eye for imagery, a bit of personality to the narrative voice. One of the risks of D&D fiction is you can sometimes hear the dice rattling in the background, but the integration of spells, combat, and shared world elements is done seamlessly here—this may seem like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. It’s a key element of RPG tie-ins, and it is not often done as smoothly as Polk does it here. A number of the action set pieces are done very well, and the lick of horror imagery in the back half of the narrative is well judged and effective. Our non-binary lead in Saeldian is also written sympathetically and subtly. In a lot of ways The Feywild Job is a really good piece of writing in this genre.

But some of the bigger picture elements are not quite at the level of the sentence-by-sentence work. The major forward plot drive for the book is the heist element, and I really just wanted more of it: the planning, the traps, the complications. The first quarter of the book provides a bit of that, but for a book whose title creates an expectation for heist-heavy narrative, it was a little underdone. If you create the expectation, the reader (or I, at least), wants it to be fulfilled. What fills the narrative space not taken up by the heist is the second-chance romance plot between Saeldian and Kell, and unfortunately it doesn’t really compensate. For a romance of this type, understanding the nature of the first breakup, getting a good grasp on motivations and pining and missed opportunity is in my view essential to the whole thing working. And given the nature of that romance plot, the backstory is a little too thinly sketched to get the full effect. There are also a few misplaced details that just leave the break, and the level of bitterness being carried by both parties, feels a little contrived. Finally, for a book with four main cast members, the two leads’ companions are done a little dirty; both Lorzok and Jubilee have glimmers of real interest and very obvious possibility for more in Polk’s capable hands, but just don’t get the time or page space to be fully developed. The unrealised potential really does frustrate.

There is a place for 3-star fiction that doesn’t push—particularly when I was younger, I read a lot of it, I enjoyed a lot of it, and to a lesser degree I still do now. And The Feywild Job is firmly in that bracket. Perhaps because of the nature of tie-in fiction, perhaps because of the reasonably tropey cozy and romance elements, perhaps because of the combination between all of those and a moderately undercooked heist, it just doesn’t rise above it. It’s not a page count issue—it’s a reasonably typical length for this sort of book—but somehow it does seem to be trying to do a bit too much a bit too briefly.

Ultimately, if this is the quality of D&D tie-in we're going to get in the future, we should all be happy: it sets an enjoyable, highly competent standard. The Feywild Job is exactly what it needs to be. I just found myself the slightest bit disappointed it wasn’t more.

Highlights:

• Well crafted prose and engaging imagery
• Tie-in fiction which speaks to both tradition and the current moment
• Just a whiff of missed opportunity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Reference:  Polk, C. L. The Feywild Job [Random House Worlds, 2026].

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

Book Microreview: Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue

A contemporary horror/dark fantasy novella with a strong grounding in its setting

Riley is a Jersey Girl. She lives near the Shore, and has a season badge at Asbury Park. She has been drifting since before she graduated from high school, because her best friend Tara disappeared months ago. The last place she was seen was Thrill Park, a family-owned amusement park. And Riley is determined to find out what happened to her. Even if she has to become part of the staff of Thrill Park to do it.

This is Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue.

One of the book’s strongest points is the voice. We get a first-person point of view from Riley, full of her opinions, determinations, fears and doubts. She has been devastated by losing Tara, and trying to find her is what keeps her going. Even as strange things happen to her at the park, she keeps that drive, that internal voice, that forward momentum going. Riley feels authentic, and we get to understand her deal in a short space thanks to the author’s writing. It shows just how broken a person Riley has become since Tara’s disappearance.

Another strength is the grounded worldbuilding. The book is set in coastal New Jersey and expertly captures the feel of a place I didn’t grow up in, but visited often enough to find the sense of place to be in accord with my memories. There are a couple of comparisons and allusions to an infamous amusement park, Action Park. Having been to Action Park several times growing up in the area, this was an excellent reference point for me to really get a sense of how Thrill Park compares, or doesn’t. The horror and real life dangers of Action Park are different from the more supernatural ones of Thrill Park, although there is an attraction in the fictional Thrill Park that definitively evoked its Action Park counterpart.

That handling of the mundane elements is strong, perhaps almost too dominant a flavor in the novella. I think I would have liked more of the supernatural elements, which were applied with a lighter touch than most of the fantasy fiction I read. But perhaps that is part of the point this story. The mundanity of Riley coming to terms with Tara’s fate and processing her feelings about it has more narrative weight.

That said, I was darkly amused by what was for me the central supernatural element, that the penumbra of mundane space coincidentally leans into a hot topic in horror and fantasy: liminal spaces. And of course, the recent movie Backrooms. The worker and employee spaces in an amusement park are a backrooms-like liminal space if someone not of that public (or someone new to it, like Riley) should stumble into it. It’s a space that we don’t normally see, but logically they exist.¹

And that brings me to the title of the book and what the author focuses on, and what I focused on. The title of the book is Amusement Park Arcana, and there is a tarot reading as a centerpiece and a station on the Riley’s path to find out what happened to Tara. At the point it happens we’ve already had a weird/fantastic note. And the tarot reading leads Riley to get into the liminal space where she finds out what really happened to Tara. That reading, given the title, is a big sign.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of real knowledge of the tarot that I didn’t focus on the details when I was reading it, but looking back now, my focus on the liminal space, dictated by recent media, led me to not realizing that the tarot reading is the real focus of this story. Riley’s reading has her embody the card she represents: the Knight of Swords. This card, I am given to understand, is an energetic, driven figure, who wants to accomplish their goals at any and all costs. That certainly is Riley, who has responded to her best friend disappearing at an amusement park by charging in and signing up to be hired by the park so that she can investigate it herself. Rushing in where angels fear to tread is this archetype.

That, indeed, is Riley. Rushing and determined. Sort of like the story itself, come to think of it.

Thus, Amusement Park Arcana rushes by, in a similar manner, quickly. I am not sure about the ending; it felt a little underwhelming to me. But the story up to that part, for its relative balance of mundane versus supernatural, is solid. It flows well and quickly, and as I think about it in retrospect a week later, especially as noted above with the tarot implications, my initial hard feelings about the ending have softened. It’s not as much of a resolution as I might have liked, but for other readers, it might be enough.

Highlights:

• Great sense of place in New Jersey
• Good use of tarot as magic and central theme
• Strong first-person POV protagonist

Reference: Donohue, Jennifer R. Amusement Park Arcana [self-published, 2026].

¹ Now thinking back to my days of working in a supermarket, and not really realizing at the time how I was often in spaces that we would now consider liminal. I know the backrooms of Pathmark (rest in peace) and can walk them in my mind to this day. But a stranger thrust into that space would be at sea.

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

Film Review: OBEX

A charming tribute to the early era of video gaming

During cicada season in 1980s Baltimore, computing enthusiast and ASCII artist Conor, a loner who avoids leaving his house and whose only friend is his rescue dog, buys a new video game that promises an advanced immersive experience. After what seems at first to be a disappointing test run, it gradually becomes clear that the type of immersion he’s getting is of a rather extreme kind: the game’s villain starts invading his TV screens, his printer, his backyard and his dreams. The plot of the game blends into his life, capturing his neighbor, his dog, his childhood memories and his secret fears. Maybe it no longer matters whether he can make it back to reality, as long as he gets a happy ending?

Albert Birney’s independent film OBEX is full of what video game reviewer Aidan Moher affectionately likes to call “hot CRT action.” Conor’s life is experienced through screens, from the morning variety/news show that presides over his breakfasts to his home office computer to the karaoke list he uses to sing himself to sleep. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, we’re shown what he does for a living: he turns people’s family photos into ASCII art that he painstakingly types by hand with fearsomely timed precision. He digitizes dozens of people every day, not unlike what the video game will do to him.

In fact, there’s an even cleverer form of foreshadowing in the first act. The events in the movie coincide with the periodic emergence of adult cicadas from their years-long undergroun hibernation, and Conor watches on the TV a chef who suggests ways to cook cicadas. Conor notes the cosmic joke that it must be to spend that many years in quiet solitude and end up eaten on screen. That description, it turns out, also applies to Conor, who has set for himself a simple and steady routine of working at home until he gets trapped by a video game.

I was too young to know what it was like to live through the first years of the home computer, but OBEX succeeds at giving me the feeling that it captures that era faithfully and lovingly. The retro computer graphics are made with admirable attention to detail. Also, it’s a genius choice of sound design that the mating call of cicadas is echoed by the noise of TV static and the screech of a dot matrix printer. Writer/director Birney gives an endearing performance as Conor, establishing the character’s effortless likeability as a harmless weirdo. The choice to film in black and white brings to mind elements of Pi, another story of obsessive computing, as well as Pleasantville, another inexplicable journey into audiovisual media.

Inside the game, the quest is straightforward: there’s a demon lord terrorizing the kingdom, and the player is the chosen hero who shall slay him. To make matters more personal, the demon kidnaps Conor’s dog (or so it would seem; the ending retroactively blurs the line between the real world and the game world). What began as a paranoid psychological thriller becomes a horror chase, with human-sized cicadas, murderous skeletons and lots of squirting blood. The final battle between Conor and the demon is exactly as adorably cheesy as one might expect.

Alas, I preferred the first half of the movie, when the scenes are restricted to Conor’s house, to the second half, when he’s thrown into the world of the game and has to walk through a forest to find the villain’s lair. Birney displays far more expertise in camera placement and shot composition when he has to film in a set than in exterior shots. The causal sequence of events is also more solid during the first half as opposed to the almost freeform plotting of the fantasy quest. After Conor enters the game, he gains a sidekick who has a TV screen instead of a head, which means we never see the actor’s expressions. This forces Birney to carry the emotional weight of those scenes all on his own, which strains the enjoyability of the second half of the story.

OBEX manages to both push the right nostalgic buttons and have something to say about present-day computing. We think nothing of watching screens, but recently it’s the screens that are watching us. Are you on camera right now? Don’t take any risks. Smile.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Anime Review: Daemons of the Shadow Realm

Sibling strife and plenty of intrigue in the new anime from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist

Sibling bonds and sibling conflicts are frequent themes in popular anime. Powerful examples include Sasuske and Itachi in Naruto, Asta and Yuno in Black Clover, and Demon Slayer’s inseparable sister-brother duo Tanjiro and Nezuko. Sibling relations are often a side story in many adventures, adding emotional depth to the characters. In some stories like Fullmetal Alchemist, the sibling relationship is the primary story. Daemons of the Shadow Realm is a new fantasy anime from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist which brings sibling drama back to the center of the story, but with a twist. Kind, down-to-earth Yuru will do anything to protect his twin sister Asa until he finds out that Asa is not who she appears to be. Neither is his cozy medieval village what it appears to be. The new series is full of plot twists, family angst, lots of betrayal, and plenty of magical creatures who are invisible to the rest of society. In addition to the intriguing premise, the story keeps viewers engaged with its movement between adventure, humor, and very graphic violence. Holding the diverse cast and action-focused plot together is the primary protagonist Yuru, whose particular balance of pure-heartedness and clever, wise cynicism is a refreshing change of pace from the usual shonen heroes.

[SPOILERS for the first episode] Teenaged Yuru lives in a small medieval village with his twin sister Asa. Legend has it that twins born on opposite sides of midnight will have magical destructive power (the power to sunder day and night). This leads to a quiet power struggle by outside forces to control or destroy the children. After their parents disappear, the children are raised by the village. Yuru is mentored in hunting and fighting skills but, for unknown reasons, Asa is kept locked in a cell by the village elders, and Yuru won’t leave the village to search for his parents because he refuses to leave her behind. Despite the strange arrangement, Yuru has strong friendships and support in the village, and remains close to and protective of Asa. But things aren’t what they seem, and everything changes when outsider assassins attack the village and brutally massacre most of the adults. They are led by a dark-haired teen girl who looks somewhat familiar. Yuru and his mentor Ryu (also known as Dera) are able to skillfully defend themselves, but Ryu decides to take Yuru and flee the isolated village. Yuru refuses to leave his sister behind and vows vengeance against the lead killer. But the assassin shares some unexpected news: the little sister he’s been protecting is a fake designed to trap him in the village, and the brutal murderer in front of him is his real sister, who’s been searching for him for years. Then, as he and Ryu flee the magically protected village, Yuru is suddenly exposed to cars, cell phones, and skyscrapers. We learn that Higashi Village is trapped in time but surrounded by contemporary Japan. It’s a lot to take in, but Yuru is surprisingly level-headed as he navigates a completely new world. In the process, he forms a contract with a pair of powerful daemons who fight to protect him. As the world battles around him, he must navigate his powers and fight off those who seek the control him and his sister. All of this is mostly hidden from the rest of the world. Only certain people can see daemons; few people can reach Higashi village, which is hidden from the rest of the world by magic.

But are the people of Higashi Village trying to protect Yuru or use him? Asa has been raised by the powerful Kagemori clan, whose manipulative wealth and crime connections make their intentions suspect. The story is filled with lots of betrayals, plot twists, and power struggles that keep the story enjoyable. But there are also enough sentimental moments to keep the story emotionally anchored. Cynical Ryu becomes a reluctant father figure to Yuru in their modern urban apartment. There are some fun fish-out-of-water moments as Yuru and his giant shadow daemons discover the wonders of modern living. But, despite being mystified by seemingly magical gadgets, Yuru has been raised with strangeness as part of his life, so his humorous fascination is always moderated. The idea of something he can’t understand is already a part of his being. This element is a fun exploration of the wonder of magic versus the wonder of science. And his curiosity is balanced with his solid instincts and a healthy dose of cynicism. After being abandoned by his parents and lied to by those he trusts, and witnessing the massacre of his community, he is not easily fooled by the smooth-talking manipulators who are trying to access his power. Asa, on the other hand, is fierce, cutthroat, and brutal, but she unexpectedly loves intensely, and is completely devoted to the brother she lost. Yuru treats her with bitterness for killing his village, but also with suspicious curiosity, as she genuinely dotes on him and tries to connect with him. Although he won’t forgive her for what she’s done to try to find him, he understands that there are larger issues at play, since control over the combined power of the twins will affect the safety of the entire world.

The pairing of opposites working together is a consistent theme throughout the story. Yuru and other magic wielders have pacts with supernatural beings called daemons. The daemons exist in pairs with opposite identities. Yuru’s daemons are the strong, giant, ancient, male and female warriors named Left and Right, who are fun characters with gorgeous animation and character design. The central story focuses on the twin protagonists who symbolize Day and Night. Yuru represents night and the power of “seal,” locking things down or bringing closure. Asa represents day and the power of “break,” destruction or opening to freedom. The duality symbolism is fun, and many of the various magical characters have their own quirky personalities. Beyond the core characters, the story builds outward with a growing cast that includes the various factions fighting to control the twins. Fortunately, the characters are introduced gradually, which makes it easier to keep track of who everyone is. Other than Yuru, almost all of the characters are morally gray, including Asa, who has no remorse for slaughtering people to get to her brother. This dynamic keeps the tension strong because you never quite know when someone is going to suddenly betray a character. Fortunately, Yuru understands the realities and is clever enough when dealing with the various factions trying to get to him. His balance of youth, curiosity, cleverness, and cynicism makes the show highly watchable without falling into the more common protagonist tropes of either excessive optimism or grumpy bitterness. And the quirky relationship between the lethal siblings is a nice change of pace from the more common protective big brother themes.

So far in season one, Asa feels much less developed than Yuru, but neither of them have extended deep moments of introspection. Fortunately, the brief moments pack a lot of meaning and keep the story grounded. In one passing moment, Yuru realizes and comments out loud that his parents left him behind. There’s not a lot of drama, but viewers can feel the gravity of the hurt in that single sentence. Elements like this keep the show entertaining and engaging despite the growing cast of characters. The show’s premise feels typical, but the delivery is clever and unexpected, with plenty of early plot twists. Additionally, the story gives us a unique and intriguing sibling dynamic that differs from the usual setup of protection or rivalry. Both Asa’s and Yuru’s love for each other has been twisted, leaving the twins to navigate not only the forces battling to control them but also their own personal connection that was brutally damaged through the actions of others. That internal tension is a great way to balance an action-oriented plot in this unique fantasy setting.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Refreshing change of pace in the protagonist and relationship set up
• Complicated cast of morally gray characters
• Solid action with plenty of violence

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

Review: The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds

The world might be flat if you believe it hard enough

cover artist: Martin Simmonds

Imagine a world in which believing something made it true. Not simply magical thinking about winning the lottery, but the kind where gods can be made, the devil can be summoned in a high school, and the world can be made flat.

What if, when enough people believe it, Lee Harvey Oswald escaped death, Kennedy was killed by the government and every other conspiracy you can think of might just be true.

Except in this world only a very few know this power is true—and so people schooled in stability and predictability can be controlled.

The Department of Truth (TDOT) is up into the mid-thirties now and there are six collected editions following a new member, Cole Turner, brought into the eponymous department as he gets to grip with what his new job in this secret organisation entails. The thing is, he’s not alone, and nor is the department. Author James Tynion proposes that this power of belief is well understood by those who’ve been in charge of the world going back millennia, and that when empires collapse, it’s as much because their enemies controlled the narrative as it is because of force of arms.

As a result, every major power in the world has its own equivalent of the Department of Truth whose main mission is to ensure that their truths prevail. With the legacy of the Cold War hanging over their heads, both Russia and the US are stuck with ideas and beliefs that seemed powerful weapons just yesterday but now hang around their necks like lead tires threatening to drag them to disaster.

What starts out as a mission to control conspiracy theories before they become dangerous turns out to be a mission to control all truth, not just conspiracies. Tynion suggests that once you start to question the nature of truth, everything is up for grabs.

Most worrying for all concerned is a third party and rival to TDOT called Black Hat, which wants truth to be decidable by whoever comes along with the most sway and influence. This third party revolves around a “Woman in Red”—a grotesque who appears around disasters and seems to feed on these conspiracies.

The threat from a breakdown in the sense of what truth is and what it can be is the central theme of this series—tied in with how the powerful manipulate media, ideas and social structures to maintain the world that benefits them most. TDOT is a dark and deeply challenging story about how easily fooled we are, how easily we become willing members of mobs and how easy it is to hack and twist human beliefs.

Tynion’s writing is dry, sardonic and, most of all, bleak. The story, which is well into its run, is very dark and shows no signs of really revealing what’s going on under the surface. After spending time telling the reader that there’s a deeper layer yet beneath the idea of a fully malleable truth via the belief of crowds and even that there is a being who might just be the apotheosis of that state of affairs, Tynion has steered away from revelation, but that deliberate refusal to provide clear answers is very much a part of the overall style of not only the story but what Tynion’s saying with this comic.

With Tynion’s focus on truth as a construct and the perils of letting ourselves lose sight of what is true and what is deception comes Martin Simmonds’s art style, which is one part collage, one part impressionistic, and several parts scratchy painting that is reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream. It brings to Tynion’s writing a sense of saturated scenes that could reach out of the page and eat you whole. It’s a tremendous achievement that I’ve shared with my daughter (an animator) that deserves to by studied for how it lands the vibe of what Tynion’s writing about while elevating the story in the process.

This lack of respect for boundaries in the visual presentation, the overwhelming richness of the colours and the frequent ghost-like quality of how the cast appear calls into question everything you’re seeing, reminding you that this is a story that wants us to fear a world in which truth is radically unstable.

Spies, murder, psyops, propaganda and conspiracies that are true—demons and mothmen, flat earths and assassinated presidents. These are the tools in The Department of Truth, the levers the characters use, but they’re also the subject of its metanarrative that asks us to remember that we are all too susceptible to falling for scams and cons and believing liars when they lie.

We humans aren’t built for distrust—we’re built for community, and part of what makes The Department of Truth bleakly compelling is how it dives into these ideas and pulls them apart and in so doing pulls us apart too. It might be speculative fiction, but the truth (see what I did there?) is that we’re easily fooled, and most of the conspiracies appearing in this series have serious advocates who have built their lives around them in the real world of the reader.

The Department of Truth is a lengthy exploration of the very idea of consensus with the most stunning artwork. I really love it.

Highlights:

• Stunning art
• Proper weird SF
• Truth as malleable set in a world of sleazy spies

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, A great comic about truth with great art and with a long running story line you can really dig into.

Reference: Tynion, James IV (writer), Simmonds, Martin (illustrator). The Department of Truth [Image Comics, ongoing at time of writing].

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

6 Books with Ale Presser and K.B. Spangler

There are two of us for this Six Books Interview!

Artist and co-creator Ale Presser is a very tired Brazilian mom who lives in Portugal with her husband and son. She lives and breathes comics. According to K.B., she’s a border collie who has to be working on comics every hour of the day or she’ll start to eat the couch.

Author and co-creator K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and two completely awful dogs. She never stops writing novels, comics, and short stories. To hear Ale tell it, if left unattended, she’ll wander off and start another major writing project.

1. What book are you currently reading?

To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose, sequel to To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. I’m about a hundred pages in, and it’s got the same tone and pacing as the first book, so I’m really enjoying it. It’s one of those stories that operates on multiple levels, which I adore: the first level are the obvious challenges of the indigenous main character who is forced to operate in a white-dominated society; the second level are all of these baby living fusion engines just running around being adorable, with all the subtle implications of what it might mean that dragons can change physical matter at the elemental level; the third level is the folklore surrounding dragons and how each extremely different society claims they were saved from catastrophic climate crisis through forging bonds with these creatures. Blackgoose is building to something and I’m eager to learn how these themes are resolved.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This Machine Kills Billionaires by T.R. Napper. It’s a cyberpunk short story collection and Napper writes dark and hard, so basically it’ll be like consuming a little slice of fury whenever I’m in the mood for delicious hate cake.

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

I really love rereading The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. It’s another one of those multiple-level stories where I find something new each time I read it. There are the monsters and the capitalism metaphor, of course, but on my last reread I realized that the man character mentions many times that the monsters will go after non-magical humans once they’ve eaten all of the tasty magic-enriched stuff. So if you extend the metaphor a little, nobody is safe from the harms caused by capitalism even if they can’t participate in it themselves. Plus you get phrases like “all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair” and, I mean, never. Not on my best day.

4. Is there a book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Watership Down, obvs.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

Same answer. Those bunnies, man. How do you do that with bunnies? Fiver is constantly shivering in my head somewhere…you know, I should probably reread that book, too.

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

Well! That would be SideQuested, the first collected graphic novel of our webcomic of the same name. Here’s the cover copy:

Magic makes the world go round, but no one in Charlie Goldskin’s world knows precisely where magic comes from. This isn’t Charlie’s problem. She’s the adopted daughter of a woodcarver and is training to be a librarian. It’ll be a quiet life, but that’s fine with Charlie, as magic is summoned through conflict and she would like to avoid that, thank you very much!

Then her birth father shows up to take her from her village and bring her to the king’s court.

Prince Leopold is gifted in the noble arts of diplomacy and combat, but he’s never met anyone like Charlie. Falling in love with her wouldn’t be an issue, except he’s already engaged, and his fiancée is the daughter of a very powerful evil witch. Charlie, panicking, decides to break the news to Princess Robin...but then she finds love at first sight, too. To resolve this love triangle, the teens are sent on a quest to discover the source of magic! So much for Charlie’s plans for a quiet life...

I’m the author, and Ale Presser is the artist. Actually she’s the primary creator: she tells me what she wants to see in the story, and I slam words and plots into place, and then she illustrates my scripts. Ale is very firm about what I can and cannot do—she won’t let me kill off anyone!—and we’re both heavily influenced by Ranma ½ and other slapstick anime romcoms, so the story is constantly full steam ahead and beware of random giant mallets. Also, magical cults seeking to steal your life’s essence for their own nefarious purposes.

But the real joy is in the characters and how they interact. For example, Princess Robin and her mother, the all-powerful witch-queen Boopsie, know each other so well that it’s a joy to write their interactions. And they’re both very clever people so they’re constantly pushing each other’s buttons. Stack these characters with Ale’s amazing and expressive art, and it’s a wildly fun ride!

Thank you! 

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