Interview with K.V. Johansen

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.

Today she talks to Paul about her forthcoming sword and sorcery book, Breath and Bone.

NoaF: For readers unfamiliar with you, can you briefly tell us about yourself and your work?

KVJ: I’m Canadian, living in New Brunswick on the east coast. I have Master’s degrees in English and in Medieval Studies. My first book, long ago in 1997, was a children’s secondary-world fantasy, very sword and sorcery, a quest to slay a dragon. Since then I’ve written something like 26 books for children, teens, and adults, including two non-fiction works on the history of children’s fantasy and, under the name Kris Jamison, a contemporary novel, Love/Rock/Compost, which no one has heard of but of which I’m very proud. Prior to Breath and Bone, my fantasy for adults has been the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, beginning with Blackdog and ending with The Last Road, and the high fantasy duology that begins with The Wolf and the Wild King and will be concluded in The Raven and the Harper.

NoaF: Can you give us a brief précis on Breath and Bone?

KVJ: The very short version is: two women (Hedge the swordswoman and Pony, a shapeshifting godling), who’ve been partners through long, long years and figure they’ve served their time in the suffering and heroing and changing the world department (what with leading a civil war, destroying the empire, and cutting off the emperor’s head), are pulled out of peaceful retirement when a girl recruits them to help rescue her twin brother, who’s gotten himself ensnared by a life-draining witch, an old enemy of theirs. And there’s a ghost.

NoaF: You've tackled epic fantasy, and fantasy similar to sword and sorcery, but what drew you to make this a sword and sorcery novel?

KVJ: I’d had the character of Hedge—the wandering warrior with a sort of trickster partner—kicking around for a while; she’s someone who was cut from an earlier and rather different version of The Wolf and the Wild King, actually. Her partner then was male, and a fox—he became quite a lot younger, and a child, and turned into the fox-girl Sage, so there was Hedge, all ready to wander into adventures, with no partner and no story. I was working on part two of The Wolf and the Wild King when a discussion about sword and sorcery gave me this sudden hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, lighter on politics and gods and dark grim torments of the soul.

“What I feel like reading,” I said to myself, “is something like Torrie, but for grown-ups.” Torrie is the oldest of the Old Things of the Wild Forest and the narrator of my several Torrie books, which are old-fashioned fantasy adventures for younger readers. (A lot of adults like them too!) Pony, the narrator of Breath and Bone, sprang more or less fully formed from that desire, and the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.

NoaF: Geography and landscape are important in your books, and Breath and Bone is no exception. What inspired you for the landscapes we see in the book, from the lake all the way to the Under-Ice?

KVJ: I was thinking mostly of western Europe as the inspiration for this one, with Hedge and Pony living off in the northwestern corner of that, on the shores of a small lake, so I had in mind a sort of impressionistic sketch of a landscape that was inspired by Swallows and Amazons combined with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (about the Cairngorms in Scotland) along with various of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books set in the Lake District of England after Rome left Britain. Hedge and Pony’s travels take them down through lowlands and forests, along the valley of a great north-flowing river, to a suspiciously Alps-like mountain range and the ruins of Under-Ice, so you can picture that landscape as journeying south and east across something not utterly unlike a much more sparsely populated western Europe with more woodland, where primeval forest and megafauna can still be found. The marshes, Arrany’s homeland, came from the idea of Doggerland being above water, and part of that being a vast low-lying area at the mouth of a great river. It’s a place I’d like to explore and develop further.

NoaF: Rosemary Sutcliff—now there's a name drop. I read The Eagle of the Ninth after the movie came out. How did Sutcliff influence your development of this world?

KVJ: Rosemary Sutcliff was an author I read repeatedly as a child, someone who had a big influence on my style and on my fascination with history. Some of her books set in Britain after the withdrawal of Rome are among my favourites, The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind in particular. It’s natural that, with Breath and Bone being set in a world after the fall of a great empire, I found a Sutcliff sort of flavour creeping into how I thought about it. Dawn Wind, especially, contributed a mood to the world; it’s a book about two orphaned young people after the Anglo-Saxon invasions have begun and their communities have been destroyed. Searching for a place they can be safe, they wander through the ruins of Roman towns long abandoned and come across small isolated farms still surviving. Pony’s world took on that sort of colour, though hers is a more peaceful time with no Germanic invasions. In Pony’s world, there are old imperial ruins that have been taken over and given new purpose; the imperial highways still exist, though no one is maintaining them and they are slowly being overgrown by moss and engulfed in forest; and there are a variety of small, mostly human tribal territories and kingdoms, towns run by hereditary chieftains or councils of clan elders, a few surviving cities or towns that have become new centres of trade and are growing into independent cities run by councils or guildmasters or powerful families, and in a couple of cases, by universities that survived. Pony’s is a world that has lost a lot of its population, too, which is the feeling you get in Dawn Wind (though that’s not necessarily the actual historical situation), that the whole of the characters’ known world is in ruins.

I wanted, with Hedge’s and Pony’s travels, to show that their world was recovering, that something new for both humans and vhalgods was growing out of the ruins of the old—a ruin caused in part by their own actions, though the tyranny of the vhalgod emperor was itself a cause of ruin and misery and needed to be ended. Hedge and her brother were among the great captains in the civil war. There’s a background of places run by warlords or terrorized by bandits, of towns and villages that were destroyed in the civil war or have fallen into ruin after in all the chaos—there’s been a long period of lawlessness, banditry, disease, famine, the changing of trade routes. Set against that, however, are places like their own Smithsford, a village that’s grown up around them, because of them; there are also places run by universities that have survived the fall, settlements and single farms where people are making new lives and new communities for themselves, tribes and kingdoms and village councils weaving new networks of trade and mutual support.

Sutcliff created a post-Roman world that hits with a great emotional impact, and that emotion—it’s captured in the Old English poem The Ruin, actually, which is ironic as of course that was written by the people who were the invaders in Dawn Wind—is what coloured my thinking about Pony’s world: a landscape holding the bones of the past, something new growing out of that while the faint memories of the old still wrap around you. Ghedhaynor isn’t meant to be Rome, and Pony’s world isn’t meant to be post-Roman Britain, but if you want to put it in wine-tasting terms, there are underlying hints of Sutcliff’s interpretation of that world in its flavour.

NoaF: Information control and what the characters tell us, or each other, is unusually prominent in this book. What prompted you to make the characters, especially Arrany, so… twisty in that regard?

KVJ: Blame Pony—she’s the twisty one!

Writing a story told in the first person is always a challenge, and for one where it’s being told after the fact and not as a stream of consciousness unfolding as it happens (which can feel a bit artificial because how are you the reader then privy to this flow of thought?), the writer always has to choose what to have the narrator tell and when to have them tell it, and there has to be some justification within the story for what’s revealed and what’s for a time withheld or outright concealed. In Breath and Bone, there’s a framing narrative, an implied audience within the book, the “you” whom Pony is addressing.

You have to remember that everything you learn about Arrany, twisty though she may be, or even Hedge, is coming through Pony. She’s a minstrel, an entertainer. This is very much a story told by a storyteller, so even though she’s casting it into the first person, it’s not some window into her mind; it’s a very carefully controlled narrative shaped to keep her audience listening (and throwing a few coins into that awful squashy hat or buying her another mug of heather beer). She’s creating herself as a character within her own story, which every first-person narrator does, but she’s being very deliberate and open about it, as when she tells you about a very terrible and traumatic thing in her past, “Oh, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to talk about it, but now you need to know so you can understand why I reacted to such-and-such the way I did.” She tells you what she wants you to know when she wants you to know it, and, when telling other people’s parts of the story, she could be telling you what she believed she knew at that time, or what that person wanted at that point to present to the world as their own story, rather than what she may have found out later—unless she has decided it’s important to do otherwise, to give you a forewarning of something because that’s the more dramatic choice. You’re being made a part of the story, a participating part of the audience at that fireside, by her way of telling it; you-that-audience are startled or shocked at an action of hers, so she reveals more about herself than maybe she meant to, in trying to explain it; your anticipation delights her, shapes what she withholds or reveals next. Pony loves a good tale and she loves to tell one. She’s going to keep utter control of her narrative to set you up for the best journey she can give you.

NoaF: The vhalgods and vhalbairns (such wonderful use of language in this book) promise a whole possible host of stories in this landscape. And this novel really does feel thorny in the sense that there are others stories seemingly lurking everywhere in the landscape. Have any other stories niggled at you as you wrote this one?

KVJ: There are definitely more stories in this world. Just thinking of one seems to make others grow out of it, like branches from a vine, climbing and wandering over the map. Of course there are stories in the past, darker stories from the days of Pony’s captivity and the civil war, which she might allude to, but in this time, generations later, just this one story of Pony and Hedge and Jinn travelling south to the mountains with Arrany spun off at least two more in my mind. My Torrie books for children were like that: each was a standalone, but writing each one gave me an idea for another. Pony is very like Torrie in that regard: she goes wandering and tells stories; every story reminds her of another. It’s a format for a series that I think works really well for adult sword and sorcery. There’s so much past in this world and a big map to explore, so many things left mysterious, or broken and only roughly healed, or completely unfinished, after the fall of the empire, that Hedge and Pony can go on wandering through it and tangling themselves up in adventures for some time to come. And of course, as a vhalgod and a wild godling, they have a more than human lifespan to do that in. Breath and Bone is a standalone, but at the end, they're not heading home despite having finished the story off nicely and dealt with all the problems they set out to deal with; they've decided there's something they need to look into south of the mountains. Goodbrother Bessamy back home in Smithsford will have to go on looking after Hedge's flock of laying-ducks for another season.

NoaF: Thank you so much for answering these questions. Where can readers find you and find out more about you? (might as well get this question out of the way now)

KVJ: My website is at https://www.kvj.ca and I’m on Bluesky as @kvjohansen.bsky.social.

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

Interview with Erin M. Evans

I was delighted to catch up with Erin M. Evans, whose book Relics of Ruin won the 2025 Endeavour Award for distinguished science fiction/fantasy books written by Pacific Northwest authors.

Erin M. Evans is the author of the Books of the Usurper series, beginning with Empire of Exiles, and the award-winning Brimstone Angels saga, set in the Forgotten Realms. She is a co-host of the podcast Writing about Dragons & Shit, and a cast member of the actual play series Dungeon Scrawlers. Erin lives in the Seattle area with her husband and sons. She can be found online at her website and on Bluesky.

NoaF: Congratulations on winning the Endeavor Award! Where were you when you found out you'd been shortlisted, and what was your reaction?

Erin M. Evans: I think I was in the middle of texting with a friend about Worldcon plans when I got the email telling me that Relics of Ruin was a finalist for the Endeavour Award, and I was absolutely shocked. My publisher had submitted it, and I’d pretty much assumed that as a sequel it wasn’t likely to get far (which was my mistake—this isn’t the first time a mid-series book has won). Plus, when I went to look at the list of submitted works, there were so many really amazing books on there—it really was an honor to be nominated. But it’s a book I’m really proud of and I’m grateful the judges saw its strengths.

NoaF: What do you enjoy most about writing the Books of the Usurper series?

Erin M. Evans: I went into these books deciding to do everything I loved as much as I could. So I didn’t skimp on the setting: the empire in the first book’s title is a collection of ten protectorates in a kingdom sealed behind a wall of salt, iron, and dead sorcerers after a catastrophe involving shape-changing colonizers; fast-forward a hundred years (and one failed coup that wasn’t cleaned up as well as everyone thought) and now we have a murder. I put in a bunch of characters I loved—very smart people geeking out about things they love, while also having mental health issues, while solving murders. And mystery plots! Because I love making problems for myself. Relics of Ruin in particular centers on a misplaced skeleton in the archives, which meant for the first time ever, I got to put the bone facts part of my degree to work in a book.

NoaF: In addition to the Books of the Usurper series, you're also writing for RuneScape, and previously you've written Forgotten Realms novels. What are the different challenges with tie-in writing vs. writing “creator-owned” novels?

Erin M. Evans: With tie-in, I’ve always described it as “working around immovable pillars.” When it’s entirely your own creation, you get to change whatever you want, and while you develop a sense of what’s got to stay—what is “load-bearing,” so to speak—you really can tear the whole thing down and start again if it’s not right. When you’re working in an established setting, there are going to be things you’re allowed or even asked to change or contribute, but there are also these immovable pillars—pieces that you have to work with or around. 

This is especially evident when you’re working with an IP that wasn’t made primarily to tell a linear story. With very high-level monsters in D&D, they can have “legendary resistances” where if an effect should hit them, it just doesn’t. They have a limited number of these, and so finding out a monster has this means you know you have to get it to spend them. In a novel, this would be immensely unsatisfying—I would look at that and go, “Okay, in this fight scene, it’s going to avoid getting hit in some clever ways.”

That’s what that’s there to represent—a monster so tough and wily it doesn’t just take the beating. Immersion is better than clarity. But, on the other hand, when I’ve run games and tried to weave those legendary resistances in as a narrative element, my players didn’t understand what was happening until I told them flat out—they need clarity more than immersion there.

There are also things that are the way they are in D&D or RuneScape, because they are fun in a game or provide necessary clarity for players, but they feel odd and flat if you try to port them straight over to a novel. So you have to find a balance between not breaking the rules so badly it doesn’t feel like the same setting, and tweaking things so it feels like a plausible version of what the rules are meant to represent. RuneScape has a very simple one: the map is sized so you can feasibly run around it. But if you said, “Yes, you can sprint across the world in fifteen minutes,” that would feel very weird! So, okay, we don’t look at how far it actually is between these places; we look at how long it feels like it should take, and go from there.

NoaF: You're currently cohosting a podcast. Tell us a little about that.

Erin M. Evans:  Writing About Dragons & Shit is the podcast I co-host with B. Dave Walters and Treavor Bettis. We used to host a Twitch show called Champions of Lore, for Codename Entertainment, where we would talk about lore from Dungeons & Dragons, which was a ton of fun, and Treavor pitched us on the idea of having a writing podcast on the side. I always describe it to people as “the really fun conversation you have after a great panel.” I love talking about writing and I love hanging out with these guys, and it’s a ton of fun to have guests join in. Because we work in a bunch of different fields, we’ve had all sorts of people come on, from novelists like Patrick Rothfuss and Melissa Caruso, to game designers like Shanna Germain and Keith Baker, to comic book writers like Jim Zub and even psychologists like Ben Searle to talk about writing and burnout.

NoaF: I hear fans of the podcast have their own special nickname?

Erin M. Evans: So, when we did Champions of Lore, we would occasionally get notes from our producer that we needed to stop going on so many tangents. Stick to the source material! When we started WADS, we realized—literally in the middle of recording—that no one was going to stop us going on whatever tangent we thought was good for elucidating the topic and entertaining the audience. Or we just wanted to talk about! And early on, we had a listener question, and B. Dave said, “It’s gonna spawn a whole lot of tangerinos,” meaning tangents. But then we started getting letters from people declaring themselves to be “Tangerinos”—and that’s super caught on. So it did indeed spawn a lot of Tangerinos, I guess! (They’ve also developed this custom of opening their letters with more and more elaborate titles for us, which never fails to delight me.)

NoaF: How did you get started in publishing? Did you always see yourself becoming a writer?

Erin M. Evans: I started out interning at a small press called Per Aspera Press. I learned a lot about what goes into publishing a book. Then with that experience, I went to work for Wizards of the Coast as a novels editor. But I have to admit, I always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else—I just loved books and I wanted to do anything I could to work with them. So while I was working on my craft by writing, I was also learning a lot by editing. I wasn’t at it very long in the scheme of things, but I think it was good practice.

NoaF: For the last question, I’d like to give you a chance to plug your favorite authors. Who should Nerds of a Feather readers have on their radar?

Erin M. Evans: Some of my long-time favorites include people who are definitely on readers’ radars: Martha Wells, Susanna Clarke, Connie Willis. But some of my recent favorite reads have been Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan O’Keefe, the Echo Archives series by Melissa Caruso, The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, and Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan.

Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor, writer, and literary agent based in Southern California. She can be found at gabrielle-h.bsky.social or gabrielleharbowy.com

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

The Duffer brothers stick the landing, bringing a close to nine years of epic storytelling

Volume II of the Stranger Things final season dropped on Christmas day, and when we last left our heroes, we discovered that Will could tap into the hive mind and hijack its powers—Will the sorcerer, indeed! I've now watched these episodes twice,  and simultaneously so much and so little happens in them. The vibe is a little different from Volume I, as somehow there's even more exposition to get through. Rather than go through the plot, I thought I'd go through what really works, and why the epilogue to episode 8 was fantastic.

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

After discovering some of Dr. Brenner's notebooks in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, Dustin pieces together that everything they thought was wrong. The Upside Down is actually a wormhole to  Dimension X, the place Vecna was transported to by El. It was sort of a Chekhov's Wormhole, though, as the crew had discussed wormholes in Mr. Clarke's science class years before. We still don't learn exactly why the Upside Down is the way it is, all decaying matter and dark skies, but ultimately that's less important than just knowing it was never the ultimate bad place. It's just a tunnel to another dimension. On the other side of the gooey, fleshy wall surrounding the Upside Down is sheer space, as noted by Steve's BMW getting sucked into it and vanishing into the galaxy.

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

Everyone's favorite science teacher is recruited to help build a telemetry device so they can locate Dustin and company, and watching him finally join was absolutely heartwarming. Without him, the kids never would have succeeded in the prior seasons, and his reward is getting to witness all the insane things that have led to this point. It's a very sweet payoff, and he adds a lot to the team. Also, I love that Mr. Clarke is always sleeping with a different member of the Hawkins High School staff. 

Karen "Walk 'Em Down" Wheeler proves she's a badass once again

Still recovering from vicious demogorgon slash wounds in the hospital, Karen saves the day yet again when Lucas, Robyn, and Vicki are cornered by demodogs. After ripping her IV out, she deftly places oxygen tanks into huge commercial dryers, triggering an explosion that takes them all out. Moms in '80s movies are rarely given such agency, and watching her stagger down to the basement to take care of the kids is truly epic. In the epilogue, we see a fully recovered Karen at the kids' graduation, her huge scars visible but worn proudly on display in a V-neck dress.

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

When the team finally makes it to Dimension X, they're set to face off against the corporeal forms of the Mindflayer and Vecna. A lot of folks online complained that the battle was too short, but the team literally spent 5 seasons getting to this point. I thought it was awesome, as it actually felt like watching a D&D game in real time, from Steve and Dustin stabbing the Mindflayer's belly to Nancy leading them into the trap where Robin and Lucas and Will could rain down fire from above. Also, Joyce getting to hack off Vecna's head with an axe was a gift she truly deserved. I don't think anyone suffered more than her throughout every season, given her constant panic and stress.

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

The two needle drops of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" were not only incredibly appropriate, the Duffer brothers somehow managed to convince Prince's estate that their show was worth granting the green light—no doubt because of the viral success that seemed all but promised. Having the record literally be the detonation devices for the destruction of the Upside Down is a fantastic choice, and El and Mike's final conversation set to "Purple Rain" is absolutely heartbreaking.

Why I choose to believe El is alive

A lot has been said about El's fate, but I think the Duffer brothers did it exactly right. By leaving El's death open to a different interpretation—namely, that she survived thanks to one final illusion by Kali—it gives everybody what they need. Some people are fine with a final sacrifice by a hero, while others (like myself) can choose to believe Mike's ending, that she escaped and is living far away, safe. I choose to believe she's still alive because it's what her character deserves, and at heart, I'm an optimist. But more importantly, I like that we, as the audience, get to choose our ending. It's like D&D itself! I personally don't need a ton of deaths to make a finale more meaningful.

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

By season 5, we're dealing with upwards of a dozen folks that we have to check in on (somewhat) equally, and that starts to make things cumbersome. I wouldn't trade Robin and Steve for the world, but the subplot of Nancy and Jonathan's relationship was given way too much screen time for a duo that most folks couldn't care less about. (There's a reason no one was buying the Jonathan Byers Funko-Pop.) Will's coming out scene, meant to be a vulnerable and tender moment for his immediate family and ride-or-ride friends, ends up giving his speech to a room full of people, including his science teacher, his friend's girlfriend he's never met, and Murray, everyone's favorite mean weirdo.

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things was the little show that could, made by an unknown duo of brothers with a super small budget. As the fame of the show grew, so did its budget, and by season 5, we had something that felt visually and thematically more like X-Men or The Avengers. Superpowers, excessive CGI, different dimensions—it all feels a little too much. The grandiose nature of the final season, for the most part, felt light on the nostalgia (the show's bread and butter) and heavy on the special effects. To put it another way: light on the bowl cuts and heavy on the white-out eyes of Will Byers. Vecna is the big bad in Stranger Things, but his motivations aren't entirely clear to me. He was abused, clearly, but he feels more like a Thanos than anything else, unfortunately. By giving him such a broad impetus, I think the show really missed out on a meaningful villain.

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

A product of both the extraneous characters and the Marvelification is the fact that the plot was fairly thudding. In Volume II, nearly every other scene sees characters grabbing objects and telling us the plot, "Imagine this record is Will, and this one's Holly." Everything felt jam-packed, with no room for characters to just be. It's more than just a sense of urgency, though, because it felt like something was missing. I read that most of the episodes went through some pretty extensive scene-cutting, and I think it's definitely apparent. The only time characters really have heart-to-hearts is when they're on the way to a battle. Maybe it's because the show finally lost a bit of the childlike wonder that made it so special, because the kids are all in their 20s now.

Overall

Season 5 is definitely worth watching, and I think it's a fitting conclusion to the near-decade-long run of the show. It suffers from the issues I mentioned (and more), but if you really loved the characters and the story, I think the ending pays off. When I looked up after the epic battle in the finale and saw that there were still 45 minutes left, I wondered if there was going to be another stand-off with Dr. Kay and her army.

Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow, thoughtful ending and watching our kids graduate. The scene of everyone putting up their D&D books on the shelf was heart-wrenching as they literally were closing the book on their childhoods.

Show endings are hard, because not every show knows at the outset how long it's going to last. While not perfect, the Stranger Things finale sticks the landing and leaves the viewer with a tale well told and a happy ending. And that's all we can really ask for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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.

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology: Issue V

A unique collection of hauntingly engaging and imaginative stories

 

In addition to being entertaining, speculative fiction short stories can be an excellent way to process real life personal and societal issues through the prism of the fantastic. Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology: Issue V is an anthology of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror short stories, all by African writers. The collection, edited by Somto Ihezue and Olivia Kidula, varies from historical to contemporary, and includes a range of subtle nods or harshly direct commentary on society, religion, and politics. There are also thoughtful philosophical explorations, as well as straight, terrifying, wild adventures. All of stories are imaginative but also beautifully written and hauntingly engaging, incorporating elements of African culture, history, and spirituality.

At times, some of the selections raise an intriguing concept but then end abruptly, leaving the resolution to the reader’s imagination. Other stories dig deeply into complex situations offering interesting answers to philosophical questions. A standout in the collection is Kevin Rigathi’s twisty “If Memory Serves,” a story of science gone wrong in the commoditization of memory and culture. In this tale, a well-meaning scientist creates a way to extract traumatic memories from people but the result is not what he or society expects. In the vibe of the tv show Severance, the story explores the way good and bad memories shape our authentic selves and our defensive instincts. And it explores the way personal experiences can be exploited and cultures appropriated for dangerous purposes. “If Memory Serves” is an ideal companion piece to another story in the collection, the similarly haunting “The Market of Memories” by Azara Tswanya. “The Market of Memories” is the personal tale of a financially struggling woman who sells her memory of a beloved friend in exchange for money to feed her family. While wealthy people gorge on fetishized memories, the poor in her community lose more and more of themselves and their culture. 

That story is one of several that explore larger themes of colonization and cultural exploitation. “The Clans” by Tonny Ogwa is a tale of ancient clans blessed with superpowers from a powerful deity, however the arrival and ongoing influence of a European priest interferes with their powers and leads to unrest. For a more modern take on a similar theme, there is the uncomfortably relatable story “The Language We Have Learned to Carry in Our Skin” by Shingai Kagund. In this haunting story a young girl learns a disturbing secret about those in power and ponders this truth as she grows up to be a journalist and becomes exhausted by reporting on the never-ending violence and exploitation in our society. 

Some stories are more nihilistic such as Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s “Dinosaurs Once Lived Here” which offers a sharp, cynical overview of the end of Earth. Among the more hopeful stories is one of my favorites in the collection, “Ash Baby” by Andrew Dkalira which offers a clever reimagining of the Biblical story of Job but, in this version, things are not as they seem. Another tragic but hopeful tale is Rutendo Chidzodzo’s “I’m Home,” a brief, second person narrative of a girl stolen by water spirits and the mother who grieves silently and prays for her return. 

The opening story in the anthology is “The Sirangori Fey Market” by Ephraim N. Orji. The story follows a woman who enters a forbidden marketplace filled with dangerous magical creatures as she seeks both answers and revenge for the death of a child. In another of my favorite tales, "Something Cruel" by Gabrielle Emem Harry, a trio of cynical but professional spiritual enforcers compete with each other to exact punishments on humans and each other as part of their obligations. The prose in this tale is smooth and inviting although the ending of this magical story is, more or less, left to the readers imagination. 

On the philosophical side, “Mr. Original Swag” by Victor Forna is told in the form of an interview that we can only hear one side of. Through the conversations we have a parable on the seductive nature of evil and in particular, the way it preys on the poor and vulnerable. At the other end of the spectrum is the very metaphysical “Commensalism, or the Labyrinth’s Vessels” by Albert Nkereuwem. As people look around at the many bad things in our world, some question why an all-powerful deity wouldn’t just stop humans from hurting each other and stop death, exploitation, environmental toxins and diseases. Wouldn’t it be better to just control humanity’s toxic behavior so that the earth and everyone in it is safe? This story offers a thoughtful vision of what it might look like if human beings no longer had free will to make bad choices and were instead controlled in a Borg-style hive mind. The effect is clever, poignant, and full of irony. The collection also includes Alex Tamei’s post-apocalyptic “A Song of Ruin,” Lucille Sambo’s alien adventure “Scales and Arabesques,” Matseliso Motsoane’s quirky “Baby Potion,” and Khaya Maseko’s time-distortion tale, “Acceptance.”

The final story in the collection, “Why Donkeys Have 44 Teeth” by Peter Nena, is an example of intriguing narrative pacing. The tale starts out creepily and slowly as a little boy ponders an odd dream about a talking donkey. But the story picks up speed as a horrific murder mystery and more dreams accelerate the tale. Then, like wheels on a rollercoaster, the story soon descend into horrific mayhem. This is another tale that leaves the ultimate ending to the reader’s imagination but the accelerating pace will leave you breathless and terrified with its old fashioned horror intensity. 

Despite some tales with abrupt endings, the solid prose and strong African cultural influence makes the book a highly enjoyable read. “Will This Be a Problem” is a uniquely satisfying anthology of fantastical stories. The collection has a strong range of tales, each with gorgeous writing and twisted adventures that will leave you intrigued or terrified, or both. In the end, the collection is less of an escape, and more of a truly unique exploration.

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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Solid writing across a range of stories
• Some abrupt endings
• Mind bending exploration of philosophical and social issues

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 4: Blood of Dragons

 Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced

I don’t want to call Blood of Dragons a shallow book, but something about it reveals the structural skeleton of Hobb’s method more clearly than her other books. It is . . . gaunt, perhaps. Not quite as rich and lush as it might be. Some people like that kind of thing; but when you’ve been with Hobb for this many thousand pages, when you’ve grown to like the shapely, well-developed muscles of plot and callipygous curves of character overlaid on top of her structural skeleton, then it can be a bit disconcerting to see the bones underneath, no matter how beautifully articulated they might be. Oh dear, you think, I wish this poor half-starved creature had been fed a bit more before publication.

This impression comes through most strongly in the character arc of Selden, the youngest Vestrit child who became Tintaglia’s Elderling back in the Liveship Traders. He’s been popping up occasionally in between then and now, travelling around in an attempt to better the plight of these dragons. We saw him very briefly through Fitz’s eyes back in the Tawny Man trilogy, when he came with a delegation of Bingtowners to beg aid of the rumoured Six Duchies dragons. Fitz was impressed then at how Elderlingish he looked. Now, Selden's made his way to Chalced, and discovered to his misfortune that appearances which read ‘Elderling’ in other parts of the world read in Chalced as ‘all scaley and draconic’.

The thing, is, it is not safe to be scaley and draconic in this part of the world. Slave-keeping Chalced has a pretty permissive approach about putting people in cages, especially people who are weird looking. After all, if your caged prisoner looks weird you can charge a high admission price to gawp at them. But on top of that, recall that the Duke of Chalced is dying and will pay anything for dragon body parts to preserve his life. And since it’s proving difficult to harvest those body parts from real dragons, a scaley prisoner offers another revenue stream: cut off bits of him and sell them to the Duke. Sure, this guy is not a real dragon, but he’s dragonish! Just look at the scales! So Selden, already caged up as a carnival sideshow, gets sold to the Duke of Chalced. 

Throughout the rest of the book, set firmly in the Rain Wilds, we return intermittently for brief scenes surrounding Selden’s plight, which, in a return to Hobb’s form, goes from bad to worse. First, he’s in a cage, starved and deprived of clothes and blankets, the better to show off his scales to viewers. Then people start cutting bits off of him to feed to the Duke of Chalced. Before the end the Duke is drinking Selden’s blood direct from his veins, vampire-like. And to top it all off, he’s got some bronchitis-pneumonia-type illness, so he spends a lot of time feverish and coughing. 

It’s this last detail, the pneumonia, which, of all that Hobb inflicts upon her characters, feels gratuitous. Sure, Fitz was literally tortured to death in a Evil Prince Regal’s dungeon, but that revealed a lot of important detail about how the Wit operates. Sure, Kennit’s leg rotted off from gangrene following a sea-serpent bite, but it was also really important for his character arc, as well as the development of Wintrow and Etta. Sure, the Fool got flayed alive, but that was necessary to drive home the importance of his role as the White Prophet, Fitz as his catalyst, and the lore of the Rooster Crown. 

But Selden’s pneumonia? What the point of that, beyond just making him suffer? 

This pneumonia is the bony rib of Hobb’s gaunt story structure showing through. Hobb just plain likes whump. Usually she manages to connect these components to enough of the rest of the story/character/worldbuilding that it is well-clothed in narrative flesh. In contrast to his pneumonia, Selden’s cannibalistic dismemberment is one of those well-fleshed bits of whump. It’s all part of the Duke of Chalced’s attempt to ward off his death, which is the same motivation that caused him to send agents into the Rain Wilds in previous books, suborning Sedric into accompanying Alise, forcing Hest to follow her, thereby forcing a resolution of the whole domestic drama surrounding those three. The outrage of being hunted for their meat further serves as the motivation for the dragons to rise up and attack Chalced at the end of this book, rescuing Selden from the human version of that same fate. So the cannibalism component of Selden’s treatment is rock-solidly embedded in the rest of this series.

The pneumonia, though? That’s a bit of a harder sell. There’s a gesture at using it to connect Selden to the Duke’s daughter, Chassim, who’s been trying to carry off her own Chalced feminist revolution. Her attempts at writing seditious poetry and distributing it among the women of Chalced are uncovered, and she’s imprisoned by her father, and tasked with looking after Selden. So his pneumonia works as an excuse to put them in a room together. If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t need looking after. When the dragons come to burn everything down at the end, Chassim has earned his trust and as a result gets put in charge of the new transitional government. It’s tidy, I guess. But it’s thin. The connections are limited to the very proximate plot surrounding the events, rather than developing those far-reaching tendrils of interconnectedness that we see in the best parts of Hobb's work. 

Part of the limited interconnectedness problem springs from the simple fact that  Chalced itself is underdeveloped. I don’t have a sense of who Chassim is, what her life is, or what life in Chalced is under the dying Duke. Without this, I have no investment in removing (or preserving) the Duke, and no stake in who gets put in charge after the Duke is gone. And because I’ve spent so many thousands of pages in this world already, I know that it’s reasonable to expect to know these things. Throughout these series, we’ve seen the internal workings of the Six Duchies, the Mountain Kingdom, Jamaillia, Bingtown, the Pirate Isles, the Outislands, and the Rain Wilds, and we’ve been given a feel for them as real places. Even very brief sequences, such as the bit in the Mountain Kingdom at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, can be effective illustrations of the life and culture and people of these places. Done well, these sequences can reveal how the different nations work, both internally as nations, and internationally as networks, bound by ties of trade and allegiance and marriage and shared heritage and fiercely defended independence. 

But throughout all of this worldbuilding, Chalced has only ever been those assholes over there. The slave-trading assholes. They are the Nation of Hats. Sooner or later there is always war with Chalced, people intone, and that’s been enough to explain whatever Chalced does. So now, with a chunk of the plot taking place in Chalced proper, with narrative POVs encompassing key political actors, you’d think this would be the chance for this nation to get the same treatment that the rest of the nations have gotten.

And I think that’s Hobb’s intention here, in setting so much of the plot so far from the Rain Wilds. But in this particular case, it doesn’t work. It feels too stretched, like skin over bone. Yes, the Duke is brutal and court life is unsafe and precarious, full of backstabbings and betrayals. But that’s not new. We’ve already seen competent, intelligent agents of Chalced in action in the Rain Wilds, and we’ve learned that they behave as ruthlessly and cruelly as they do to protect his loved ones back home. That right there shows just as clearly – and more economically -- what the Duke is capable of than any number of on-page executions. Moving the narrative to Chalced down not show us more; it show us merely more of the same. Structurally, yes, it’s absolutely time for us to see Chalced from the inside. The skeleton of that narrative purpose is absolutely clear. But the skeleton is all that's clear, because the rest of it is not fleshed out.

Selden’s pneumonia is a rib. Chalced’s cruelty is a collarbone. Hobb has constructed a good story. But without the rest of the flesh of narrative and character and plot and theme and worldbuilding, the bones are showing through.

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Reference: Hobb, Robin. Blood of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2013].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: Eternity

Someone ought to speak to the manager

According to Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:35, when the Saducees asked Jesus about the eternal legal status of a widow who remarried, he replied that there was no marriage in the afterlife. That was a wise managerial decision; otherwise I suppose Henry VIII’s afterlife welcoming party would have been very awkward.

The movie Eternity illustrates the exact same problem that the Saducees presented before Jesus: a twice widow goes to heaven and meets her dead husbands, and her eternal fate depends on which one she chooses. Standard jealousy jokes ensue.

If this movie aims to convey any message about the nature of love and the value of the prosaic, quiet life, it’s lost amid the tension of its torturedly contrived premise. The version of the afterlife we see in Eternity is an extremely bureaucratized dystopia with rigid rules and arbitrary prohibitions. Our poor lady simply has to make a choice, and she has one week to do it, and after moving to a specific flavor of heaven, she can’t ever change her mind, and if she tries to undo her choice, she’ll be thrown into an eternal abyss of darkness. Because that’s what upper management has decreed. And no, despite all the trappings of corporate culture, you can’t file a complaint, because what passes for customer service makes one suspect that this place is actually hell.

Let’s go into a bit more detail. In the afterlife presented in Eternity, when you die, you’re assigned a handler who will guide you for a week until you pick a flavor of heaven to permanently move to. Competition is fierce: you’re inundated by every manner of advertisement trying to sell you the gardening heaven, the weightlifting heaven, the nail spa heaven, the mountain cabin heaven, the beach resort heaven, the ’70s cocaine party heaven, the aristocratic mansion heaven, the Parisian literary café heaven, and so on. But our lady’s problem isn’t so much which form of eternity to choose, but whom to spend it with.

Her first husband was, as we’re told endless times, perfect in every way (it doesn’t help that for this role they cast Callum Turner, who I can’t bring myself to believe is handsome at all, but the plot requires us to close our eyes and pretend he’s a 10). Alas, he was sent to war and died too soon, and those blissful young memories have stayed with her all this time. Her second husband was rather normal, and she stayed married to him until old age took them. She had a standard family life with him, having children and grandchildren, without much in the way of complaints. But the ghost of that vigorous first love stayed there, overshadowing the ordinary flow of everyday life. Now that they’re all dead and she has the opportunity to choose again, should she remain with the good but unexceptional guy who gave her 65 adequately unobjectionable years, or should she take her chances with the dreamy guy she never stopped missing?

The amount of tweaks that the plot has to make to its idea of heaven in order for the characters to even have this problem in the first place makes it difficult for the story to say anything meaningful to the viewers. If you squint, maybe you can glimpse a stance against naïve nostalgia, but the movie’s happy ending puts our lady in one of the afterlives that were taken out of circulation: the placid suburbia heaven. So it’s not clear how sincerely Eternity is warning us against taking refuge in rosy memories.

Because the afterlife is presented as a top-down system with unquestionable rules, the plot can’t let the characters consider pushing for the rules to be changed. A short line in the script alludes to a solution where our lady gets to live with her two husbands, but the husbands won’t have that. As a result, the completely unnecessary and unjustified constraints of the story lead to a way too narrow range of possible endings. It’s the least useful type of allegory, the one that only works if you accept a thousand artificial caveats.

What does work in this movie is the acting. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller have to speak and move like old people suddenly put in young bodies, and they succeed, with Olsen taking full advantage of the gorgeous ’50s hairstyles and dresses she’s put in, and Teller milking every drop of his naturally raspy voice. Meanwhile, Turner has a unique assignment: his character is a guy from the ’50s who never grew old, so his mannerisms and general outlook on life have to feel like they’re stuck in time, even though he has existed through the years since. We aren’t told whether dead people can learn and grow in this afterlife, but what Olsen’s character eventually discovers about her true desires reveals a maturity in accordance with her actual age.

Eternity seems to know what it wants to say, but it needs to resort to an absurd scenario for that message to begin to make sense. At least next time you’re forced to choose an irrevocable forever, you’ll know what to do.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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