Book Review: The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley

 A story of misdirection that refuses to be pinned down, even to the last

A young woman, Elize, stuck in a dreary fortress far from the front of the war, is given a strange task. It's a break in the monotony of her days, but one she doesn't fully understand, and that no one will really explain to her. Each day, she must sit in the tower room as a famous magician and escape artist is interrogated by an equally famous socialite. She herself must not speak, must not draw attention to herself in any way, only observe and report back to the commander of Crag what these two strange visitors discuss. Their conversations are cryptic and unfathomable, relying on a shared history she cannot access, but they all seem to circle around the city of Droad - destroyed by a likewise unfathomable weapon, leaving a ragged chasm and a poisoned earth to which no one can return. They're supposed to be ending the war. But are they?

The Misheard World, Aliya Whiteley's new novel, is a story of misdirections and subversions, where the unfolding of the story pivots the reader's understanding of the world again and again.

While the story begins in a vaguely described alternate world, one with elements that seem potentially fantastical - the magician whose tricks defy understanding, the giant cat of legend befriended by a socialite - as Elize listens to the stories of these two strange people and to the possibly mad pronouncements of her old tutor, it becomes clear that some power is operating on the world beyond her scope of understanding. Eventually, the story moves out of her observations into the world into several other characters narrations of their own perspectives, each of which shows the reader something about the world that upends their previous understanding of it, and its relationship with genre likewise. The story slips between the speculative and fantastical, and between worlds, as well as between points of view.

Those points of view - and how well they're captured - are for me what really sells this novel. The opening section, in Elize's viewpoint, has a clear, direct voice, of someone who knows her own mind but not her purpose. She's a keen observer but not knowledgeable about the wider context of the story. She presents little nuggets of information the reader can pause over because they think they can add something to it to make it make a little more sense - while Elize may not know about radiation, the blinding and sickening of the remains of Droad definitely give some hints to someone in our 21st century. Her life is episodic, constrained by timelines apart from her own, a rhythm of days and duties well captured in her short, to the point chapters.

This contrasts with the second POV, Mondegreen, the magician. His section has no breaks, forming one extremely long run on chapter. His voice too is easily distinguished, more self-assured, more charismatic, more meandering... and yet conversely more purposeful. Where he is now, he knows what he wants to achieve, and the whole of his story bends towards that purpose. It is also one with a much richer set of familiar details.

Well... familiar to the reader. When the narrative shifts back to Elize, we are once again confronted by the difference in levels of knowledge between her and us. And I loved this. It is not uncommon that I read a book in which a character fails to spot some critical piece of information, one that I myself have spotted any number of pages earlier, and find myself frustrated by the artificiality of it, and by the constraints of extra-narrative information weighing down on the plot. I know stories, and apply the metalogic I read into them, so of course I will make assumptions about the direction about the plot, of course I am willing to believe in aliens and magic as a solution easily - I know the parameters of the story and so can intuitively judge in a way the characters are constrained against. Whiteley takes that tension and makes a deliberate plaything of it. The POV shifts back to Elize and reflects on pieces of information provided by Mondegreen - things that are entirely unremarkable to the reader - and renders them once again incomprehensible. By opening a crack in the fourth wall in this way, the frisson of ignorance/knowledge becomes a shared game, rather than a source of frustration.

But it's also entirely the point of the story. The entire crux of it rests on - who correctly understands the parameters at work here? Who has the right meta framing for what's going on? And so by introducing that in the first two sections, Whiteley primes us for what will be one of the primary pillars of the story as a whole.

And then of course, by priming us in this way, she likewise sets us up to ourselves be unsettled, to have our own assumptions subverted. It is not only the characters who don't quite know what's going on, and the clarity of character voice can become a tool just as easily of confusion when deployed unexpectedly out of context. If Elize suddenly no longer sounds like Elize... what are we supposed to think about all the sections that came before, in which we relied on her obvious distinctiveness, her simple forthrightness?

Alongside all of this playing with perspective and framing, there's a parallel set of assumptions about technology, superiority and reality occurring, feeding into the question of exactly which viewpoint is the "real" one. Multiple characters offer their own viewpoint, framing their world, their understanding the be the default one, the one with power to enact upon the others in the story, with the secret knowledge that underlies the flawed understanding others have. First Mondegreen takes this role, viewing Elize as some pseudo-historical bumpkin - never saying it but clearly communicating it in how he narrates his own story to her. But then someone else comes along and sets forth their own stall on exactly who has the power to shape the story, and introduces their own contradictions. Mondegreen is just as ignorant as Elize? Maybe.

Nothing in this story is presented as unimpeachable fact, and that is quite possibly its greatest strength. Whiteley asks the reader to think around the gaps, to compare and contrast multiple flawed approaches to the events we have witnessed or been informed of, and create connection points of our own. The ending is the culmination of this, offering not one but three separate possibilities. Which, if any of them, is right? That is for the reader to decide, based on their own interpretation of the events as presented.

I don't always like ambiguously ended books, but Whiteley has done the groundwork throughout the story to reinforce that ambiguity is the point, at every stage, that it felt not only right but inevitable that it would continue right to the last page. The story is so heavily grounded in different people's telling of their stories - with their own agendas, points of view, prior knowledge and relationships - that to offer something absolute at the last would have been a betrayal of every page that went before. Every chapter asserts: "you do not know the whole story". Why would the story as a whole suggest any different?

It's skillfully done, reminiscent of the careful patience of her previous novel Three Eight One, which likewise used perspective to excellent effect.

But what is it all for? At one point, a character says: 

"When everyone has a story of loss to tell, nothing is worthy of the grand title of tragedy. Each tale contributes only to a mound of sadness: heaped, unclimbable, the stories slowly bleeding into each other until they are impossible to tell apart".

I would argue that this is also the crux of it - it is both an absolutely true statement about the story as a whole, and one that the novel seeks to refute. Because the tragedy of the stories - all of them, however much we choose to believe their narrators - never leaves. This is a story of a war going on for decades, manipulated by those who do not themselves suffer in it. It is a story of lives disrupted by tragedy and death, for a gain we never really see or fully understand. But it is also a story in which a myriad lives are lost off page, where tragedies are blurred together, and where narrators actively do confuse and manipulate the stories, making them harder to distinguish.

Somewhere, under the careful artifice of players who think they know the game, who think they set the rules, there is something deeply, powerless and human going on here. There are moments where we can connect with it. But it is just as human that it is buried deep, inaccessible even to those who are suffering the most in a war whose terms remain incomprehensible. Whiteley crafts a story precisely around this paradox. The argument occupies all levels of the storytelling, right down to chapter length and voice, right up to the title of the book itself, and it is from this totality that it finds its power. When you reach the end, all of them, it becomes clear how thoroughly this has been the point all along. No answers, of course, but a definitive question. Questions are sometimes more fun anyway.

The Misheard World feels, at every moment, intensely carefully crafted, and it is a delight to be left unsettled by it, all the way to the last.

--

The Math

Highlights: absolute mastery of differing character perspectives, superb unsettlement of reader comfort, productive ambiguity

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Aliya Whiteley, The Misheard World, [Solaris, 2026]

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

Film Review: The Bride!

A smart, visceral, unapologetic cry of rebellion

The rules of the game are ambiguous from the beginning. Speaking from beyond the grave, Mary Shelley addresses the audience directly, bored with the endless void of the afterlife where nothing ever happens, and frustrated at not having had enough time for telling the stories she still had in mind. This theme of a woman’s voice tragically silenced will reoccur through the film. What sets things in motion is Shelley’s impossible feat of self-necromancy, as if applying the forbidden arts of Victor Frankenstein to her own life’s spark to find a way back into the world of the living.

We’re brought to 1930s Chicago, with its blinding lights and its sordid dark corners, its charm and its promise and its disillusions. There Shelley has sensed a spirit that resonates with hers, another woman exhausted of playing appendage to a certain breed of men; and their joining, rather than a possession in the way we’re used to seeing in horror cinema, is a two-hour-long primal scream, a verborrheic burst of irrepressible wrath and ecstasy and dread and revulsion and despondency and grievance all at once. Through this new woman, whom death itself is powerless to silence, Shelley completes the story she confesses to us she’d been meaning to write for centuries: the tale of the Bride of Frankenstein.

A motif keeps playing on a loop across Western myths, a Freudian fixation we can’t seem to outgrow: in one iteration after another, the creation of Man is a worthy end in itself, but the creation of Woman has to satisfy an instrumental justification. When God builds Adam, it’s for his own sake (and my bifid usage of “his” here is fully intended), but when he builds Eve, it’s solely for Adam. So it goes with every artificial woman from Galatea to Alexa: she exists to be put in the service of someone else, to fulfill a function. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature’s curse is that no one is willing to love him, Frankenstein’s creature’s Bride’s curse is that her willingness to love is already assumed. That’s the whole point of her. Whatever she may want for herself isn’t part of the equation.

This Bride, however, won’t play along with the plan. After her death and reanimation, she may be a blank slate with no traces left of her former identity (and that’s exactly how Frankenstein’s Entitled Incel wants her), but she still has Mary Shelley whispering inside her head. Even more dangerously, she carries the names and stories of many other women that 1930s Chicago has killed. She’s bound to attract the wrong kind of attention soon.

The rules of the game are kept ambiguous. The setting of The Bride! never pretends to be our 1930s Chicago; it has the gangsters and the neon signs and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, but it also has clandestine clubs with strobes and modern beats. It’s a world where Mary Shelley lived, wrote and died, but somehow Victor Frankenstein existed too, and his masterwork is known to other researchers of fringe science. So Shelley’s ghost is aware of us in the audience, and on top of that she can access a world where her fictional creation really happened, and there she reenacts Bride of Frankenstein (to the point of adopting its gimmick of casting the same actress as both Shelley and the Bride), with a stint under the false name Penelope, the name of a mythical character whose whole deal consisted in putting her life in pause for a man (and to further highlight the point, The Bride! features a real-life actress by the name of Penélope in the role of a woman who has been denied a career of her own).

To this erudite pile of allusions The Bride! adds a side wink toward the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde plus explicit callbacks to the victim-turned-criminal-turned-revolutionary-symbol strain of social commentary that 2019’s incel hagiography Joker tripped over and fell on its face attempting—which has got to be a deliberate choice, given that writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal once played a woman murdered by the Joker, and then took the Batman from that same film and cast him here as the 120-Year-Old Virgin. The Bride! juggles a dozen flaming daggers of intertextual connections and metafictional layers while tap-dancing backwards in high heels.

Movies have always loved monsters. So it’s only appropriate that this time, the monsters love movies. This version of Frankenstein’s creature is infatuated with a star of musical cinema who has conquered the devotion of the masses despite living with a physical deformity. It’s easy to see how the creature takes the actor as an aspirational symbol, even though the nature of this affection is not appreciated in return. In another of the film’s many tricks that blur the boundaries between levels of fictiveness, we see the creature and his Bride superimposed on the screen within the screen, replacing the protagonists of whatever movie they’re watching. They see a glamorous world of conventionally beautiful people and dare to see themselves in it. The Bride! couldn’t be more unsubtle in its plea to the audience: this story is about you. Try seeing yourself in it. Try letting its spirit possess you.

The Bride! is a movie about the power of movies, and about the trope of the instrumentalized woman, and about the injustice of being robbed of your voice and the exhilaration of seizing it back. It’s the protest against heartless callousness that Joker wished it were. It’s the anthem to unhinged feminine power that Cruella wished it were. It’s supremely uninterested in pleasing everyone. It dances to its own rhythm.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Green and Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons

A standalone fantasy novel by Jenn Lyons, set in a new fantasy verse of necromancy, knights and old secrets and powers.

Mathaiik, as I like to say in many of these reviews, has a problem. He has several problems. First, he wants to be a knight, one of the Idallik Knights. But he has never been able to manifest a magical weapon, which has kept him from that rank. Also, he has a very strange and unique connection to plants, one that becomes even more intense when the nearby forest seems to be waking up, featuring a trio of plant-like queens. Even before the queens, he was on the outs and distrusted because of his nature. And, this is far different than the threats the knights were born to face. So what are these plant based threats? Are they the vanguard or allies of their hostile neighbors, the Kaliri? A sign of the necromancy that the knights have been fighting? Or something else?

Math doesn’t know the answers, but he does try and act when danger strikes. Math makes a deadly alliance and a bond with a magician buried in a magical tomb, and finds that most of the truths he knows about magic and the world are completely and utterly wrong. And that this is coming just as the world and the conflicts within it are set to turn to a new and deadly phase.

This is the story of Jenn Lyons’ standalone fantasy novel Green and Deadly Things.

Green and Deadly Things runs on a few rails. We start with Math as our point of view character throughout the book. As a result we get a character who is on the outs, but desperately wants to be a knight, to be a hero, to be a protector. This sort of duty and honor is not an abstract characteristic with Math, either. There are a group of children at the base where Math is struggling to become a knight, and their protection, throughout the book, is something always on Math’s mind and he takes action again and again in order to protect them. Math is not a perfect character, but Lyons time and again presents him in a heroic light, even if he doesn’t think he has the abilities of a hero. And it turns out that he’s wrong about that, too.

The worldbuilding and overarching world is a deep and interesting world, a feature of Lyons’ previous works here in full flower. Lyons has a real balancing act here for the reader and she manages it: she has to convey to a new reader what they think and how they think the world work, with necromancy, knights, and the wild and weird forest. And then, even as the book conveys the world, it also has to make the turn to show that what Math and most of the world thinks is absolutely wrong. And that is done by Kaiataris. Kaiataris is what Math thinks of as a Grim Lord, a necromancer from an earlier age that should all be dead and gone. So, in a desperate attempt to save himself and those he cares about in a forest gone into a rampage, Math manages to unlock the tomb where Kai has been sleeping, and wakes her up. And, accidentally, forms a magical bond with her. And Kai, being from the far past, a different age of the world, has a very different view of magic, and uses a very different magical paradigm. There is a real delight, in that Kai doesn’t understand how Math does magic even as Math is stunned by Kai’s abilities and nature¹.

And the rest of the worldbuilding is rich and deep as well. We do get a whistle-stop tour of the regions behind the forest where we start, and Lyons does enjoy enriching her world. There are trains (hence the whistle-stop reference), teleportation circles, and ancient secrets. We get dangerous adversarial nations, ancient ruins, intrigues within factions of the knights and much more. Its a complicated and rich world, and Lyons gives us enough information and pulls back the fog of war the world to provide a world that seems as rich as the Chorus of Dragons world, but in a more compact space. This is a world that I could see more novels and stories set in, but this story is a more distilled and concentrated presentation than the more luxurious, expansive series. And, this novel is written explicitly and directly as a standalone and one and done story that gives satisfactory endings to the characters and their relationships. The novel goes from a local problem, to, quite logically and in easy steps, the fate of the world, with the largest possible stakes.

Relationships and the connections between characters helps drive plot and action throughout the novel as those stakes rise. While the novel stays in the point of view of Math throughout, Lyons does a solid job in giving us characterization and development on both sides of his relationships. His affection and caring for the children of the fort. The love of his sister. The rivalries and personal antagonistic relationships with some of his fellow knights, too, get full character arcs and development. It’s a rich web and tapestry of characters and how they interact, and she does well in tying this to the major overarching plots.

Oh, and speaking of relationships, there is a very slow burn romance. As it turns out Kaiataris, as the novel unfolds, has a slow growth of her relationship with Math throughout the novel. The growth of their relationship, warts and all, is one of the chassis of the book, but it doesn’t feel tacked on or perfunctory, as they so often can be in an epic fantasy. Instead, Lyons has it as a natural avenue for character growth, for Math and Kai alike. They are very different people, a would-be knight, and a sorceress, put under pressure and trial and learning to care for each other. There are some very funny moments, and some very tender moments, and seeing Math and Kai trying to figure out their relationship, through and beyond the bond, is excellent and affective and effective writing.

The pacing and scales of the novel, finally, shows the deft hand of the author. We go from an incident in a forest border fort, range across the world, contract the action when needed to a small scale tight focus and expand out again. Lyons has a great affection for this world, be it a dangerous forest, one of the largest libraries in the world (and the fact that Math loves libraries is not lost on me as a reader), ancient ruins (such as the one that we find Kai), ballrooms, or expanses of deadly desert. Lyons loves to follow up quiet moments with furious, kinetic action. I was entertained at every stage and “one more chapter” sense is strong in her writing.

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Highlights

• rich epic fantasy in one volume
• interesting and dynamic character development and relationships
• page turning and enthralling writing.

Reference: Lyons, Jenn, Green and Deadly Things, [Tor Books, 2026]

¹ The paradigm and comparison I kept going to, although it is not exact, is the stories of Aahz and Skeeve by Robert Asprin (Another Fine Myth and sequels). This would make Kai as Aahz and Math as Skeeve. Skeeve didn’t know what he was doing, and needed Aahz’s help, who had lost his magic and had lots of knowledge, but not any power. 

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

Book Review: The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson

 Beware ghosts looking for a home

Cover art: Sam Gretton

The Salt Oracle is the second of Wilson’s books set in a world where the internet turned into ghosts. If you’ve not read her first (and stand alone) book in this setting, We Are All Ghosts In The Forest then I highly recommend you get out there and correct your error. 

 

This setting has it that something happened within living memory that effectively ended our online world with the consequence that all the digital data we created floats out there in the real world like electronic ghosts looking for people to haunt and places to dwell. Starkly, getting haunted is often terminal for the poor afflicted victim. I don’t think I’m doing it justice because this can sound like just another twist on a post-apocalyptic wasteland kind of story. However, Wilson comes at this with very different concerns on her mind. In some ways her themes are similar to Emily St John Mandel’s Station 11 which is more interested in a world that is very much not based on the grim toxic horror of Lord of the Flies (and so beloved of men writing in this space).

 

The Salt Oracle is about an old rig in the North Sea (so think the Scottish coastline) that, in the wake of the big crash, has been repurposed as a research facility that largely survives by providing weather forecasts to the surrounding communities. The crash has left the currents unpredictable, the sea full of ghosts and spirits who are capricious and with satellites and computers non-functional in this new world it’s effectively impossible for shipping to function otherwise. 

 

At the heart of the facility’s weather program is a young girl called the Salt Oracle for she appears to be uniquely connected to the ghosts of the sea and, as a result, able to predict the weather with enough accuracy that it saves lives and makes some small amount of trade and shipping possible. 

 

The rig is peopled with a host of characters, all of whom have histories, trauma and relationships both on and off the facility that inform their world. However, what fights to the top of every character’s priorities is their status on the rig – because it’s an open secret that the Salt Oracle is the cause for their success and many people would like to be in control of this young woman for their own benefit. The facility must satisfy or at least play these different factions off against one another if it wants to maintain its independence and its precarious existence where it is free to do what everyone on board wants to do – which is to eek out a bit of stability to think and research and explore. 

 

Wilson’s prose is superb – evocative, poetic and frequently beautiful. She evokes the sense of the sea and the wildness of sparsely inhabited places with an eye to their unpredictability, their untamed nature. If her prose is reckless it is in service to the places she is describing, the lives she is portraying and it’s that choice to zoom into people’s lives with the techniques of describing nature and big open skies that helps her stand out from the crowd (unique setting aside). 

 

Ostensibly a murder mystery set in a single location this too is simply a trapping for Wilson to explore what’s really interesting to her – building back after disaster. It’s not simply the apocalypse out there in the big wide world that’s examined here, but the traumas of everyday life, the trauma of surviving that are in focus. Wilson’s characters aren’t all fully abled. They aren’t brilliant heroes overcoming. Her people are those who would have struggled no matter the shape of the world. This lens is revelatory because it allows Wilson to suggest to us that we spend too much time trying to build worlds where trauma is absent and it is only the unlucky (or unworthy depending on your ideology) who have to wrestle with difficulty. That we spend too much time seeing struggle as aberration.

 

In the main character, Auli, a researcher who suddenly becomes head of her department when her beloved long-time mentor is found dead, we have a central character who is full of worn-down edges, difficult decisions and hard choices. She is a mess not in terms of bad decisions, but in terms of someone who’s tried to just live their life despite the vicissitudes of the world around her. Auli is competent (and if competency porn is your thing, the Salt Oracle has another thread to recommend it), but she is not a genius, she is good but not a saint, she is a hero but not on a hero’s journey.

 

Wilson gives us a world in which the people here are of age – they don’t need to discover themselves or the world – they need to face themselves because if they don’t they may just perish from that lack of emotional and practical flexibility. This can be hard for people who’ve only ever lived their lives in peace to understand or empathise with because Auli and her colleagues are people who’ve exercised their agency to survive. 

 

That might sound grand, and it is, sometimes survival is agency. Yet it’s the very least of things because wouldn’t we all rather be comfortable enough to say that we exercise our choices to choose the clothes we want to wear or the job we want to work or the place we want to go on holiday? The agency of the lucky stands in contrast to the agency of everyone else. 

 

And that would be enough – exploring interesting people’s lives in interesting times. What takes The Salt Oracle from well executed story with beautiful prose into the realms of the special is that Wilson also wants to ask us what healing looks like, what community looks like and how we build those things in the face of existential pressure and continuous challenge. 

 

Her answers are both interesting and, to me, convincing. She suggests through her characters that we focus on people sized problems that we can reach out and touch. I confess that I’ve spent much of my life trying to tackle big problems – unwilling as I have been to address symptoms (as I wrongly saw them) when the root problems remained unreformed. I have mellowed as I’ve grown older and the pattern in the Salt Oracle is one I recognise in myself. It’s not a shying away from the system and the problems built into its structure but a recognition that substance, significance, is built at the human level, not the level of grand gesture and sweeping policy. 

 

She’s also clear that healing occurs even when we’re taking on new injuries, that it doesn’t wait for stability or the right time – our hearts, our bodies, our minds are looking to right themselves regardless of what new things arrive. This too is often forgotten when we think about building, about community. We assume there are clean lines between now and then, between good times and bad. Wilson’s rig and Auli’s investigation and subsequent decisions are specifically about making choices when times remain tough but we have to keep on living. 

 

There was a gentle sense in We Are All Ghosts In The Forest of learning to live with what was lost, with the ghosts of what might have been if our lives hadn’t been upended, our trajectories trashed. The Salt Oracle runs along a different but parallel track. What does it look like to rebuild when nothing is certain, when life might fall apart all over again without warning? What is a world where the values you bring with you might be what break you again and again upon the rocks?

 

I appreciate the emotional heft of this question – it’s very personal to me as I enter my third year of suffering from ME brought on by Long Covid. Solvej Balle’s, On the Calculation of Volume, can be read as what it means to live inside chronic illness and in this The Salt Oracle is a companion work. Apocalypse as chronic illness, as persistent disadvantage. Not the end of the world but not one in which we can hope for grand success. You can see how for many people this is an intersection where the words chronic illness could for example be replaced by structural racism or sexism or classism or queer-phobia.

 

The apocalypse here functions very specifically to hem in our characters, to limit their possible successes because it is still unfolding, still finding its path through the world. More than that, Wilson’s apocalypse is still finding itself and its meaning. For so many renderings of the apocalypse it’s a pretext to something else or an end in itself. Wilson gives us apocalypse as agent seeking meaning and that overlay weaves itself into the choices the characters have before them. 

 

If all this sounds ponderous then Wilson’s tender regard for her characters in tough times ensures it’s anything but. We have a story about hope and as with all good stories about hope, hope means something when the outcome could and perhaps should, render hopefulness as wanton naivety. 

 

The Salt Oracle is beautiful, kind, hopeful and tenderly fragile.

I’m also delighted to discover that it’s been shortlisted for the 2025 BSFA award for best novel. It is well deserved.

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Highlights:

• Ghost whales
• Mysteries and science
• Hopefulness and community

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, a beautiful, haunting story about building back, community and hope with ghosts, mystery and thrilling action.

References: Wilson, Lorraine, The Salt Oracle, [Solaris 2025].

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 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.

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 2: Fool's Quest

Loose threads are tied off. Also, throuple.

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

This installation – the penultimate in the entire saga! – is the beginning of the wrapping-up. To be sure, there’s still a LOT of plot to get through when we reach the last page: little Bee is still lost, Fitz thinks she’s dead and is feeling pretty suicidal about it, and the Fool’s homeland of Clerres is about to get an almighty ass-kicking of a regime change, to be brought about by a (small) coalition of foreign powers.¹ And yet there’s a lot going on here that feels like it’s gathering in the loose ends of a dozen books to tie them all off.

First, we have Fitz’s reintroduction at court in Buckkeep as himself. Remember, he’s spent most of his adult life pretending that Fitzchivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, actually did die in Evil Prince Regal’s dungeons way back in Royal Assassin. Fitz? What Fitz? No Fitz here, no no, just Tom Badgerlock, one-time man-at-arms to Lord Golden, mentor to King Dutiful, and now the sort of master-caretaker of the estate at Withywoods. Not the Lord of Withywoods, let’s be clear, because that was given to Burrich, and upon Burrich’s death inherited by Molly. Fitz then married Molly, but upon her death the estate went to Nettle. Fitz was never entitled to any part of it, and remains there solely on Molly’s sufferance. 

Let me step aside here and mention how much I appreciated this detail about inheritance. It would be so easy to adopt a kind of knee-jerk assumption of male dominance in an otherwise entirely medieval-flavoured fantasy book, which would let Fitz remain the lord of Withywoods after Molly’s death. Or perhaps one of his stepsons might inherit the property. But no: Nettle is the oldest daughter, so Nettle inherits, which means that, as legal owner of Withywoods, she can kick Fitz out for any reason she pleases. And she’s not a jerk about it, but likewise she is willing to pull this string on him if it seems necessary. And when it comes to Bee, Nettle worries that it might be: Fitz is so paralysed by Molly’s death that she worries he is incapable of giving Nettle the care she needs. He does not want to give up custody of Bee to Nettle, and Nettle does not want to kick Fitz out of Withywoods, but if that’s the only way to force him to give her custody of Bee – even Fitz has the sense to recognize that he cannot look after a little girl if he has nowhere to live and no source of income – she will do it without hesitation. 

It’s more of that same trend I mentioned noticing in the previous book: the travails that assail our characters are exactly the same troubles that we see in modern life. A custody battle over a child is brutally common in our own world, and the shape of that looming conflict in this book invokes the identical stress points: neglect, income, and where the child will live. And Nettle has the power to hold her own. Indeed, it was pretty clear that she was going to win that battle before the Clerres people came, rampaged through Withywoods, and stole Bee away. It sucks for Fitz, and we know from Bee’s perspective that she does not want to go away, but it’s really hard not to see Nettle’s point. When we’re invited to view this custody battle between them from modern eyes – which it’s hard not to do, given how familiar the shape of the custody battle is – it’s hard not to notice that Fitz is neglecting Bee. Also don’t forget that he’s the kind of guy that will stab to death a dying beggar in the street for giving his daughter a hug. This kind of murderous impetuosity is not the behaviour of a well-regulated father.

So: Nettle’s exercise of female power introduces a bit of modern social sensibility into the Six Duchies. It would be a bit of a break from how that society worked in previous books, except that we've been seeing social change happening from the top, first through Kettricken's years of ruling as Dutiful's regent, which started back in the Farseer trilogy, and then from the introduction Elliania as Queen, which we got in Tawny Man. Elliania, recall, comes from the strictly matriarchal society of the Outislands. So far, she’s only had sons – fine for the Six Duchies, who inherit by the male line, but catastrophic for her family line back home. She needs a female child, and there isn’t any prospect of her creating one out of her own body. But Nettle is a Farseer, a relative of Elliania’s husband² and by extension now a member of her own family. And when Nettle becomes pregnant by her own lover, Elliania is thrilled! A possible female child borne into her line, to take up the responsibilities back in the Outislands! Except in order to take up those responsibilities, the child must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, Nettle must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, her relationship to Fitz must be acknowledged, which means Fitz can no longer be Tom Badgerlock, but must instead step into the light once more, and take up the role he has been denied for half a century. 

So Elliania makes it happen, entirely on her own authority. It’s a lovely scene. Court is assembled, Starling is summoned, and she tells Fitz’s story, his true story. Starling, who chafed so bitterly at being forced to keep silent all those decades ago, when her dearest wish as a professional minstrel was to bear witness to one of the most historic events ever to occur in the Six Duchies, is finally invited before the entire court to reveal what she knows. 

And thus the first loose thread is tied up. Fitz will not die in obscurity. Whatever happens in the next, last book, his story and identity are now known and acknowledged, his line will continue, and his life will be remembered for what he truly did, not the calumny that was the official story for half a century.

Of course, Hobb can’t give us any unalloyed joy, because on the heels of this celebration, news finally reaches Buckkeep about the raid on Withywoods and Bee’s abduction. But because Fitz is also finally learning to hold his goldang horses when it comes to tearing off in a rage to unleash some whoopass on people who have wronged him, he responds carefully. Methodically. He investigates. He asks questions. He gathers information. When the time comes to act fast, he springs into action – and indeed, the fact that he is only a couple of hours too late to intercept the kidnappers before they take Bee through a Skill portal is only bad luck. He almost made it. He is fast when he needs to be, and the rest of the time he makes the preparations that are needed. He has – dare I say it? – matured!

Not that this maturity does him much good, because he sees no sign of Bee on the other side of the portal, and so – in a bit of characteristic dumbassery (he does not grow out of that) – decides to forget all those hours and days and (in one case) weeks that he himself has lost in a Skill portal, and instead concludes immediately that Bee is lost forever. Dead. Gone. Alas! Nothing to do but join up with the Fool and bring vengeance marching down south to Clerres. It’s a great hook for Book 3. 

But first, on the way there, he must tie up another loose thread. Remember the Rain Wild Chronicles? Remember the very new baby Elderling city of Kelsingra that was just coming to life with the return of the dragons? Remember Malta and Reyn’s baby boy who was so sickly and ill-formed and needed Tintaglia’s touch to fix his heart and let his body grow? The path to Clerres leads through Kelsingra, and so Fitz and the Fool take us on a brief tour of that city to show us how it’s getting on. It’s always fun to meet familiar characters through someone else’s eyes. We see a city with a nominal King and Queen of the Elderlings (Malta and Reyn) being run like a Bingtown Trader’s council, because that’s who Malta and Reyn are: traders. We see that sweet, dopey Rapskal has entirely lost that portion of himself, and is now an absolute asshole of a General who is – nevertheless – extremely good at his job. 

And we see that baby Ephron, Malta and Reyn’s son, is a young man now, but still struggling with his health. All the Elderling children are. The whole city is struggling, because the physical changes wrought by dragons are not being properly overseen, and children are deformed and dying. Once upon a time, Elderlings could use the Skill. Once upon a time, the Skill was more widespread than just the Farseer line. Once upon a time, perhaps, the changes that dragons wrought in their Elderlings could be maintained, guided, adjusted, to mitigate the damage that would result from unsupervised changes. But now those lineages have split. Bingtown and Rain Wilders traders came from Jamaillia, not the Six Duchies, and had no tradition of the Skill. But they are the core of the reborn Elderlings, and they are suffering.

And then Fitz arrives. And he can heal their children. He can set right those meandering, damaging, wild changes that kill slowly and painfully. He – or the knowledge of Skill-healing that he can teach -- could be the salvation of Kelsingra. Another loose thread tied up!

I’d love to have a third loose end here, but I don’t just yet. Fitz teases us with the potential to bond to another animal with the Wit – a very nice horse and a raven are teased as potential partners – but can’t quite take the plunge. So for my third point here, I want to remark on parenthood. Fitz is constantly put in positions where he is almost but not quite a parent. Nettle is unmistakeably his child, but he never meets her until she has been claimed and raised by Burrich. Hod, the fosterling he takes in, could be an adoptive child to him, but actually Hod and Fitz’s relationship never does all that much in these books besides serve as a source of anxiety and responsibility. Dutiful, like Nettle, is the child of Fitz’s body, but there is never any hope of him being acknowledged as anything other than Verity’s son. And then we have Bee – lovely Bee, born the entirely legitimate, acknowledged daughter of Fitz and Molly.

Until, we learn here, that the Fool was somehow in on things too. Back at the end of Tawny Man, when Fitz and the Fool did their body swap, part of the Fool remained in Fitz, and so helped engender Bee.³

Poor Fitz. He just wants a kid to call his own. But when you are the Fool’s Catalyst, every relationship will always be some kind of a throuple.

¹Yes, I know, all right? I know. But this is fantasy. <sup>↩

2</sup>The precise nature of the relationship is complicated. If we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of King Verity, who was occupying Fitz’s body during Dutiful’s conception, then Nettle would be Elliania’s first cousin once removed by marriage. However, if we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of Fitz, since it was Fitz’s body that conceived him, then Nettle is Elliania’s half-sister-in-law. <sup>↩

3</sup>For those keeping track at home, that’s a full two third of Fitz’s biological children who are conceived during a magical body swap.^↩

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Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool's Quest [Del Ray, 2015]. 

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

Book Review: China Mountain Zhang

 A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written. 

We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.

McHugh is one of the consistently best science fiction writers of my lifetime, and it's a scandal that most of her work is not reliably in print in the 2020s. On this positive side, China Mountain Zhang probably is her best work (though both her short story collections and the very out of print Mission Child are also truly excellent), and it is available to us. China Mountain Zhang is a modern classic of Science Fiction. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and won the Otherwise and Lambda awards in 1993. It is currently in print both in North America (in a Tor Essentials edition) and outside it (in a Gateway SF Masterworks edition). Despite this, it isn’t really part of the conversation on the history of the genre in the way books from the fifties through seventies still do. There is probably a broader conversation to be had about how static and old the canon of SF is and how we could do with looping in some books from the 90s and 2000s which are now 25-35 years old (China Mountain Zhang is as old now as Starship Troopers was when CMZ was released). For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll focus on why this early 90s classic deserves a place in the pantheon.

This is a mosaic novel, a collection of nine vignettes ranging from short story to novelette length which tell the story of a China-dominated 22nd century. Five of these focus on our main character, Zhong Shan/Rafael Luis Zhang, a gay, biracial (Chinese/Latin) construction tech living – at least at the start of the novel – in New York. These are interleaved with four stories of people whose lives intersect with his, to a greater or lesser degree. Zhang is very much the focus, but the vignettes work well in adding depth and breadth to the society in which he lives, giving perspective on people, events, and places he has no access to (or is not in a position to understand). This is a very difficult structure to pull off; too much overlap and it’s just a poorly edited novel, too little and it’s simply a collection of disconnected shorts in a shared setting. But McHugh gets the balance right, and the result is a fascinating collage of a man and his world, vividly drawn.

Unlike much decades-old science fiction, it really is remarkable how much of McHugh’s 22nd seems plausible today. In the first half of the 21st century, the US economy goes down, bringing most of the world with it due to wide exposure to the US bond market. In the wake of this depression, the US government collapses, unable to provide basic services. China, less exposed than some of the other big players, is better placed to bounce back and becomes the leading technological, economic, and political power in the world. This leads to a proletariat revolution supported by China in the US, a civil war, and the eventual establishment of a socialist state. Living standards as between the two countries are inverted from what prevailed in the early 90s when McHugh was writing; a generally prosperous, advanced economy in China while the US in a backwater; not a terrible place to live but definitely a place Chinese citizens in good standing would look down their noses at. When the novel opens, the US has just come out of the ‘Great Cleansing Winds’ cultural revolution-style reactionary purge; things are only completely back to something approaching the pre-campaign normal about a year beforehand. Looking at the changes in geopolitics over the past 30 years, with the notable exception of a genuine proletariat revolution in the US, this medium term future is if anything a more likely path for the next century to follow than it was when the book was published.

In addition to the political speculation, it’s got a number of pieces of scientific speculation pretty nailed down as well (actually reasonably uncommon for books in a genre with “science” in the name). Climate change of ~4 degrees C has ravaged the planet, extreme drought making large swathes of territory –a wide corridor of the US just east of the Rockies, both sides of the Mediterranean, Northern China – close to uninhabitable. Mitigation efforts and decarbonisation are underway in the novel’s present, but after decades of work the climate curve is only just starting to even out, and bending it down further decades away. It also has widespread medical treatment based on RNA (which was just at the start of its development in the late 80s, certainly not in the deployable mRNA vaccine form we saw during Covid). And if the Martian colony two of the vignettes are set in is implausible on current scientific understanding, the fact that it’s marginally viable and exists only for ideological reasons (‘brave socialist workers conquer the frontier on another planet!’) is pretty consistent with the Mars-based fantasies of current tech bro oligarchs.

All of this well-judged speculation, impressive as it is, is not why you should read China Mountain Zhang in the year 2026, though. McHugh is writing a novel here, not prophecy (and she’d be somewhat lacking as a prophet; she missed the fall of the USSR by a year or two & it remains incongruously present in her worldbuilding). And the novel she wrote is a spectacularly good piece of fiction, written in a realist mode, that just happens to be set a couple of hundred years in the future. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Camus’ The Plague: “a simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.” This is exactly what McHugh sets out to do in the vignettes which follow.

Zhang loses his job, goes on assignment to the arctic, studies in China, loves and loses, and returns home. Two Martian settlers meet & carve out a precarious life. A ‘kite’ (biomechanical hang glider) pilot races. A young woman finds her dreams aren’t quite what she thought. None of these people have any agency whatsoever to change the world the low-key crappy world they live in. Early in the novel, Zhang bitterly observes “I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.” To the extent that change is achieved in the novel it is in our characters learning how to take sincere comfort in this observation. Pushing the cracks a little wider, realising that the “we” rather than an “I” can make that a bit easier. Each of the characters we follow succeed and fail at this to varying degrees, but even the most successful remains someone who is unable to meaningfully influencethe world outside the cracks. They just work in it, and not as starship captains or space cops or politicians. They have blue collar and office jobs, and McHugh does great work in showing the lived in reality of their working lives. As Jo Walton has noted, this serious focus on labour is an unusual thing in SFF writing. I would also add that a lot of attention – particularly in the sections focusing on Zhang and his gay friends – is paid to fashion, again in a way that most science fiction doesn’t. Not all of this is completely convincing (apparently the future will have a lot of stylish sweaters with mirrors or capes or various other bits stuck on) but it still serves as another rich source of pointillist world-building, building up a convincing picture of this future society via specks of authentic detail. 

This sort of low stakes storytelling in a speculative fiction space that typically expects power fantasies – or at least agency – is high risk. The failure state of this sort of writing, particularly for the audience it is marketed to, is dull and claustrophobic. And, look, go into this expecting high action or even drastic change you will be disappointed. But taken on its own terms China Mountain Zhang is a spectacular success. That is down to McHugh’s precise and unfussily excellent writing. She is not a flashy prose stylist, but the voices of each point of view character – the whole novel is first person narration – are brilliantly realised. 

To focus on the main character first, Zhang is a remarkably well drawn gay man, again as Walton notes sketched remarkably unromantically. He's been cruising for sex since he was fifteen, he has a wide but shallow circle of friends, for most of the novel having only one person he truly feels comfortable relying on. His ironic sense of humour and self-deprecation are a thread throughout each of his sections (sample internal monologue, drooling over cute blond guys in a bar: “Chinese always think westerners’ eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share.”), but within his relative lack of agency he has there is also growth. He’s an immature 26 at the start and a grown up almost 31 at the end. And McHugh makes it clear to the reader why his life up to the start of the novel made him immature and emotionally unavailable – it really isn’t uncommon amongst gay men in homophobic societies – and what it is about his experiences during it that helped him grow up. Other characters are similarly well-observed. Martine, a divorced retired soldier now homesteading on Mars, wryly observes of herself “I thought I’d start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went I’d still be there.” A page’s worth of character conveyed effortlessly in a sentence.

The effect of all of this – the plausible social and scientific speculation, the well-chosen background details, the superb character work, the overlapping vignettes of a world yet to exist – is to me incredibly moving in quite a specific way. The skill and humanity with which McHugh draws a line from her sitting at her desk in the early 90s, through to today to the vividly realised 22nd century of the novel is striking. The superpower of literature has always been to connect people separated by time and distance. Making it clear that while they’re not the same – and the differences do matter – people are people. Their hopes, their failures, their successes. The messy stuff of building a life. Feeling that continued struggle, sitting in the kinda shit present looking at Zhang’s life in his differently kinda shit future, is in many ways a feat of worldbuilding more impressive than the flashiest space opera or most lore-drenched secondary world fantasy could ever hope to be.  

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Highlights:

• A masterwork of mosaic storytelling.
• Compellingly mundane picture of people living their lives in the future.
• A surprisingly good hit rate of speculation for a novel from the 90s.  

Reference: Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang, [Tor, 1992]. In print in both Tor Essentials and Gateway SF Masterworks editions. 

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

Festival View: Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk

Life as a genre-nerd film programmer isn’t always easy, largely due to the number of genre-hating film programmers. One interaction I had, years ago, was a film programmer for a significantly large, and now very significantly larger, festival who said that there hadn’t been an intelligent science fiction fiction film since Blade Runner, and even attempts to bring the idea back, like Gattaca, failed because “science fiction is no longer about ideas other than what effects they can make flash across the screen.”

Needless to say, we haven’t spoken in a while. 

Every year, dozens of intelligent short genre films cross my desk programming for Cinequest, and many of them are beautiful without relying on effects to drive the storytelling. Some of them are call-backs to the kind of films that were being made in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Kubrick and Godard. Some years, there is something so fresh that it pushes those comparisons out of in. In 2026, the film that made me feel like intelligent and emotionally complex science fiction is alive and well was Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk.

The story is of a mother and her son. In the future, seemingly the near-ish future, people can chose to live forever, longer than the Earth if they can get off-planet. The mother, played with incredibly pointed emotional resonance by Kerry Bishé, has chosen to become an EverPerson. Her husband, stayed human and paid for that choice with death, leaving behind his wife and a son: Anwar. Anwar is a Muslim, his mother is not a woman of faith. Anwar longs for Heaven and his mother has chosen the certainty of eternal EverPerson life.

The story moves from Anwar at ages 8, 18, and 80. Mother remains the same age, but not the same person. The story deals with the path of choice between technology and faith, at the same time as dealing with the idea of a parent’s obligation and limitations. There are, or course, questions of faith, and not simply religious faith. 

How’s that for thinking science fiction? 

The film is not only intricate emotionally, but it is so very beautiful in nearly every aspect of production. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, stunningly so. The setting, the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains (where I happen to live) are some of the most beautiful vistas in America, and every shooting choice takes great advantage of it. The music, somewhere in the range of minimalism, is used as a salve for the moments of disharmony, a stab for moments of indecision. Silence, though, plays a significant role as well, and when we are left with the silence of emotional situations at their peak, we are forced to fill the air ourselves with thought. That is, without a doubt, the hardest kind of filmmaking; where you establish enough trust with your audience that you can be certain they’ll do the work. If anything can be said of Anwar, it is that Al-Matrouk has faith in his audience to take the effort determine whether a character’s choice is right or wrong, and what that means. We are given a full story, but we have to work through all that means ourselves. 

There is also a significant written science fiction pedigree to the film. Fawaz attended Clarion West, that legendary site for the creation of fine stories since a time called the past. He was mentored by Ted Chiang. You might remember him from such award-winning stories as “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Exhalation.” He also wrote the story “Story of Your Life” which was made into a movie called Arrival. If you’re gonna have a mentor, Ted is the one you wanna get. Fawaz developed the story there, and wrote his own adaptation into the short film. The story will be published in Autumn 2026 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can’t get more deeply tied to the history of science fiction than having a story published in F&SF.

And yet, this is one of the most modern of science fiction tales. The villain, if there is one, well, it could be the very concept of choice. Or maybe time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is technology’s siren call. Or the mind-body problem.  That thinking in the silence of the tensest moment I mentioned, that’s where that decision is made in the mind of each and every viewer. 

I’ve watched Anwar at least five times, and have had at least five different interpretations. It is not that it’s left open-ended, but there's no coda that tells us how to feel as we watch the credits roll. That alone plays so differently from much of the genre work of the last couple of decades. It is a complete story, but just like the stories of our lives, it is not answering any question. That’s a task left for those of us still here after it’s been told.

You can see Anwar as a part of the Unconventional Families program as a part of Cinequest at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, on March 15th and 17th at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, or as a part of Cinejoy (https://creatics.org/cinejoy) online from the 24th to the 31st.  

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous