Book Microreview: The Blossoming of the Big Tree by Dilman Dila

A hopeful tale of a fight against hopeless odds

You know the failure modes that democracy can fall into: the formation of cliques that don’t share information, the hoarding of resources facilitated by positions of high prestige, the avoidance of accountability after decisions are made in secret. It’s a massive challenge to devise a system of full and equal participation, and a no less daunting one to keep it in healthy functioning condition. Multiply that by a whole order of magnitude if the geographical neghbors of your egalitarian welfare society are puppets of a warmongering corporatocracy.

In the future described in Dilman Dila’s novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, while the great industrial and economic powers were busy fighting World Wars 3 and 4, a large portion of southern Africa has turned into a league of communitarian, decentralized polities with self-sufficient production thanks to an innovative technorganic method that involves hijacking a silkworm’s metabolism to turn it into a natural 3D printer.

In parallel with that invention, a blend of digital code and traditional divination has given rise to a whole new computing paradigm, which allows spiritual forces to be put into mechanical automata. With a horizontal model of governance, where via ubiquitous digital connection every single citizen is a member of Parliament with an equal voice, and every remote village acquires the productive capabilities to sustain a city-sized population, this new state has in-built mechanisms to make corruption all but impossible; and its technological development is quickly making it an indispensable provider of post-petroleum products to the world.

But things get complicated when an American weapons manufacturer, which operates as the de facto government of half the planet, orchestrates an invasion of this new state to steal the secret of its 3D printing process.

The unlikely hero upon whose shoulders it will fall to repel the invasion is Adita, an elderly peasant woman who would rather be left alone to keep growing her garden, but by a process similar to sortition she’s been given a position of leadership in her village, plus she’s the closest thing her country has to an actual Minister of Defense, so it’s up to her to lead the meetings and coordinate the efforts to save her nascent utopia.

One problem: by natural temperament, she has an intense dislike of social contact. So all the variables seem aligned against her mission: How do you get collective consensus when you can’t stand people? How do you win a war when you very deliberately refuse to have a weapons industry? And how do you protect national security when the structure of the state is designed to make official decisions open to all citizens?

There’s a sense in which The Blossoming of the Big Tree resembles classic hard SF, except this time it’s about finding a creative solution to a puzzle of political theory instead of rocket science. Just like in the pulp novels of old, we’re given the measure of the problem, the type of resources at hand, and the urgent stakes in pley, and then we watch smart characters reason their way out of an impossible scenario. So the plot proceeds almost like a thought experiment, a proof by example so cleverly constructed that its logical conclusion feels inevitable in hindsight.

To give only the tiniest of spoilers, it’s precisely the monolithic model of hyper-centralized power that turns out to be the enemy’s weak spot. The world that emerges afterwards is one where such large-scale military operations aren’t possible again. It may sound far-fetched to posit such an outcome in these times, but as the best of SF keeps reminding us, creating a future worth living in requires that we first dare to imagine it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

On Civilization (VII)

 I have to preference this whole review with a little (lot?) of backstory. I am by no means a 'gamer' - I play video games pretty casually, and as a certified Old Guy, I grew up when you bought a game on a series of discs that most people now only associate with the save icon. I certainly don't play enough to really enjoy a lot of online stuff - I lose immediately to people who spend far more time than I do (that's not judgement, just fact), nor do I have the time or inclination to keep up with tons of DLC, season passes or whatever. Red Dead Redemption 2 is pretty much my ideal game - I can play for as much as my time and ADHD allows, put it down for a while, and pick it up again and it's still the same game. 

All of that is to say - your milage may vary. But that's where I'm coming from.

Civilization - the first one - is the first video game I even remember playing. It hooked me instantly, countless empires rising and falling on that technicolor grid. Civilization II was even better. I missed III and IV mostly, as real life took over, and then I returned to put in literally thousands of hours in V (I prefer it to VI, overall, but VI definitely does several things better, but that's another story).

VII changes a lot - and that's pretty much the lens I have to write this review through. If you're new to Civilization, I don't know if VII is a good starting point - or not. It might be, but I can't speak to going into it with new eyes. On the off chance you're reading this and have never played it, my two cents is to grab a bundle of existing games and dive in that way. But don't shy away from VII, it has a ton of high points, but it doesn't exactly feel representative of the series. 

All that being said, I'm going to break this up into sections, again - assuming you're familiar with the game.

Behold the might of my (current) empire!

The Good:

The first thing I noticed is that this game is gorgeous. Civilization is not a game that really even needs great graphics, but some older versions don't really let you see your cities, or the terrain, and in this iteration, being able to zoom in and see, say, the Pyramids sitting in the middle of your city is pretty darn cool. Same goes for rivers, mountains, etc. Settlements now occupy more than a single tile, and expand as they grow, and you can see the improvements you've made on the map itself. It's just a pretty game. 

'Goody huts' and Barbarians are my favorite change, in that they don't actually exist. Goody huts are replaced with narrative choices - they don't just grant you something free, they can start quests or make you choose between things. Sometimes they involve sacrifice of production, gold, etc for something else, or choosing between them and a more immediate reward. Likewise, formerly simple, reductive 'barbarians' are replaced with independent powers (this simultaneously replaces city-states, in a way) - some hostile, some friendly, and you can spend 'influence' on them for a variety of reasons (including befriending, and eventually, incorporating them into your civilization). These are probably my favorite updates - it adds a ton of depth where it was severely lacking before. It's fun and engaging and educational. 

Navigable rivers is another brilliant addition - you can now sail inland on wide rivers, and build ports, harbors, etc on them, giving you flexibility with where you place your cities. There's not a whole lot to say about it, but it is definitely a fun addition.

But let's talk about the big change - Civ switching. In every previous Civ game, you picked your Civilization and that was it. If you picked Mongolia, Genghis Kahn was the leader, and that was it. Now, you pick your leader, and, separately, you pick your civilization. Each have distinct attributes, and choosing different leaders and civilizations will result in unique combinations. At the end of each age, depending on what you've done, different civilizations are unlocked. 

The idea is that 'history is built in layers'. For example, Britain was once a small outpost of the Roman empire - and then became an empire of its own, which in turn gave way to America. 

In my opinion, this is a very clever and deeper addition to the game. It makes for a more immersive game, and more reflective of actual history - while allowing for the 'what if' factor that makes the series so engaging.

The necessitated (I think?) a change in the Age structure - previously, you progressed at your own pace, driven by what technologies your civ has discovered. Now, each age ends after a certain number of turns - which is driven by several factors, like conquering other settlements or discovering new technologies or civics (more on that in a sec). Each Age has several paths you can follow - economic, militaristic, scientific etc. In all ages except the last, these grant you advantages in the next age (more on this in a sec as well, depending on how much you accomplished. In the final age, these are the victory conditions. I'm a pretty big fan of this, because despite the fact that I'm pretty pacifistic IRL, oftentimes Civilization just turns into Genocide Simulator for me, and in every previous installment, to achieve a military victory, you have to defeat everyone. But sometimes those other civs are my friends! So I don't want to hurt their feelings by committing wanton acts of bloodshed against them. Now you don't have to! You can keep your friends close while you mercilessly slaughter Napoleon and win the game. It's wonderful. 

Splitting off 'civics' from 'technologies' is another great move which deepens the game. Functionally, this just gives you two separate tech trees. Civics also comes with it's own additional (much smaller) tree that is unique to your civilization - this is very fun all on it's own, but can add a ton of flavor when you eventually switch civilizations and will result in very unique combinations. Most civics and technologies now also have the option to 'master' them - instead of researching a new tech or civic, you can 'master' an already discovered one for additional advantages. 

Your leader (the permanent part of the game) now has 'attribute points'. Most leaders start with a couple in the categories most suited to them (more on that below), and others can be earned with various narrative events. Depending on what you've accomplished along the previously mentioned 'legacy paths', you will frequently earn several at the beginning of each age. It adds a decent RPG- style element to the game, instead of your leader simply having static attributes, there is now some dynamism to what they can do. Coupled with the civ switching mechanic, it adds flavor and customization that previous games didn't have. It's a shock, to be sure, but after several games, I like it. 

But it's not without flaws.

The Bad:

One of the stated reasons for all these changes is because the developers looked at that data and saw that very few game of civilization were played to completion. While I enjoy a lot of these changes/new features, it doesn't solve that problem, because, well, it's not solvable, and frankly, it's not a problem. Pretty much anyone who plays any game in the series with any sort of regularity will know by about 60-70% of the way through a game if victory is likely, or even possible. Am I going for a science victory and left my western settlements unguarded when Napoleon launched a surprise war? Did I not claim enough land early on and now have no income and am surrounded by larger civs with more resources? Etc, etc, etc. So if victory is out of sight, the 'new game' button is right there. There still isn't motivation to play a losing game through to completion. Which is totally fine! So don't throw fixes at something that's not broken.

I talked about the Age system up there a bit, and overall it's... fine? I think? I don't think you  have to have everyone advance at the same time. and each age ends with a 'crisis', which makes for an interesting challenge, but is more of an annoyance, and it feels forced instead of organic like most of the narrative events in the game. 

I also understand that they're trying to make the game 'chunkable', so you can just play one age and feel like you've played an entire game -again, to try to get you to play all the way through - but when you're playing the whole timeline (which is the only way to play, don't @ me), it makes the game feel broken up, and actually provides a jumping off point where a player might not feel inclined to load a save that's at the beginning of an age, so it actually works against the stated goal. 

It also makes it super restrictive - for example, in the first age, you cannot, under any circumstances, cross oceans. That's fine, it's ancient. But part of the fun was racing ahead of your competition, via science, or military, or whatever, and getting advantages that way (or getting pissed off that Napoleon did that before you). So now if you've researched every tech/civic available, you're stuck researching 'future tech/civic', which grants you attribute points for the next age and hastens the end of the current age - the more I write, the less I like how ages are structured - which, sure, helps some in the next age, but I'd rather be able to settle in the 'distant lands' before everyone else. 

For a game that is stunningly beautiful, no longer having cutscene (or whatever) for great works of art or music is a massive oversight. We get a beautiful map, animations of wonders being built, but any great work is just a side note? Super weak. 

Oh, and having religion limited to one age is dumb and basically doesn't do anything outside of that? I feel like this should be its own victory path, or at least influential the way it was in V. 

Conclusion:

I refuse to spend money on any new edition of Madden or The Show. It comes out every year, with rudimentary updates, barely improved graphics, and just isn't very good. So kudos for not doing that here and not letting the series be stagnant and repetitive. The changes are certainly dramatic, and resulted in the predictable response from a lot of players about how horrible it is. I'm not in that camp; I like new and different things, especially in a series I've played my whole life. They're not all good by any means, but I don't think any of them are downright horrible. I've played several games all the way through (and bailed on a couple) and enjoyed them all. My only major complaint is that it feels... simpler? For all the layers which are added through leader attributes, having a separate leader and civ, separate civics and techs, as well as civ switching, it feels more simplistic than earlier iterations. 

I'm still gonna sink thousands of hours into it.

The Math:

Objective Assessment: 7/10. It's definitely on the 'good' side of average.

Bonuses:

+1 for being the prettiest Civilization to date

+1 for the leader/civ mechanic (sorry, I love it)

+1 for victory paths being better than before

Penalties:

-1 for trying to force players to play all the way through. Let me rage quit in peace

-1 for ages being simultaneous for all players

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Overall, I really like it. Apologies to all the people in my Haters Club. I'd be very curious to hear thoughts from anyone who has played it and never played any other Civilization games.

-DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

Video Game Review: Ghost of Yōtei by Sucker Punch Productions

Let the wind gently guide your hand to the purchase button

Whispering winds carry upon them the golden leaves of the gingko tree throughout the waving fields of grass and rice throughout Ezo. There is wisdom in the winds, and alongside them comes Atsu, a young woman intent on attaining retribution for her long-dead family. Ghost of Yōtei occurs hundreds of years after the much loved Ghost of Tsushima, and though the story and all its characters are new, there is much that has been shared.

To begin, this game is gorgeous. The intro is enough to let you know the developers have taken care to infuse the spirit of this historical timeframe in Japan with their own art style. From the snow-capped mountains of Teshio Ridge to the multi-colored flora and fauna in the Yōtei Grasslands that open their arms to the player upon booting up the game, every aspect of the world feels beautiful and well crafted. The art design is not focused on hyperrealism, instead going for a specific feeling, one that captures an almost painted artistic aesthetic of what Japan would have looked like in the early 1600s. The small villages and towns feel lived in, the roads feel traveled (yet dangerous), and the castles and prominent landmarks (like Mt. Yōtei) all take on a life of their own. Exploration in Ghost of Yōtei never suffers from a lack of beauty.

It’s odd; I remember enjoying Ghost of Tsushima, but have trouble remembering many of the specifics outside a bunch of the story beats. I think it may have something to do with the game being a better version of a “Ubisoft clone,” much like the Horizon series. Unlike some of the more contemporary games (like Elden Ring) that eschew this approach to exploration mechanics, Ghost of Yōtei embraces the classic format. And like Horizon, it takes said format and makes it its own. Instead of using some sort of tower to unveil playable areas, paying for maps from the cartographer or accepting bounties will place markers on the player’s map that create a more natural sense of exploration. On the way to a particular place, you may run into a golden bird that may lead you to a hidden area, some new charm, perhaps help a wold in trouble, or relax at a hot spring that you can use to increase your health. Like I mentioned earlier, the world is entrancing, and it never felt like a chore to go from one place to another. Fast travel is instantaneous, and nothing feels too far away.

The game throws you right into the thick of things. With Atsu back in Ezo for her revenge against Clan Saito and the Yōtei Six, Ghost of Yōtei immediately places the player in combat. Traditional of more modern action games, the player can use heavy and light attacks, block, parry, and dodge, among other moves. The gameplay feels great, and taking on multiple enemies, or even taking on one specifically challenging boss, feels appropriately climactic and cinematic. While the duel showdowns are not as flashy as in Ghost of Tsushima, the sentiment still resonates with each intro; a battle to the death feels like it (even if the gameplay loop does not support that narrative for the player).

Swordplay feels great. Though I suppose I should expand to say combat feels great, as multiple weapons become available over the course of the game. Though the general play style is still the same, knowing when to switch and use which weapons against which helps with breaking opponents’ stagger gauges, making the challenging fights much more manageable on higher difficulties. In combination with the quick-fire weapons (like smoke bombs) and ranged weapons (like bows), the combat is engaging throughout the entire experience. Even while I was going around finishing up the non-combat related collectibles at the end of the game, I would still engage in combat to enjoy a bit of that Sucker Punch fun. Knowing when to use your spirit to heal or disarm an enemy comes with hours of experience (that I still did not always get right).

I occasionally had some issues with visibility, specifically when facing many surrounding enemies. Especially ones with longer-range weapons like the yari and the kusarigama. The developers made some accommodations for the player by showing a light from the direction a bowman was about to fire from (and simultaneously, any enemies around the player will duck to avoid the arrows). But sometimes the number of enemies is overwhelming. It would not have irritated me as much if there were no mechanic that relies on not being hit. Trying to build up your howl only to get hit by an unseen enemy was a tad annoying. Not a huge issue, but something I ran into quite a few times.

I refuse to speak for everyone here, but I have to say, I think the map is a fantastic size. It felt explorable while not being overwhelming. Many games try to cram everything (plus the kitchen sink) into their game to pad it with more content. Ghost of Yōtei feels like just enough. After fifty hours, I feel like I have unlocked almost everything, and yet, I still feel like I explored a pretty large game world. The side content feels good, albeit with a few underwhelming quests. I enjoyed learning music on my shamisen and would play some songs when I was walking around. The bounties are fun and varied, many with a story of their own that end in surprising ways. Sucker Punch took care to ensure that the side content felt meaningful, even if there are a few missed opportunities.

The story is great. It may not win any awards, but the characters are solid and their motivations sincere (though I believe Atsu’s motivation shifts a little too quickly toward the end). Voice actors are believable, and the animations that accompany them are fantastic. The voice acting done for some of the younger characters is done by adults, and it sounds terrible. Aside from that, the adult performances are spot on. Traditional revenge tale cut up into segments. Atsu is after the Yōtei Six for the murder of her family; she intends to cross each name off her sash.

While the gameplay loop works well, sometimes the desire for player choice impacts the believability of the world and story. For instance, early in the game, you can choose which member of the Yōtei Six to go after; upon completing whichever sequence you choose, some cutscenes will mention only the first member that you killed (which is necessary to advance the story right away), while others will incorporate every member you have dispatched. There is no order to it, and it would sometimes remove me from the world and remind me of the illusion of choice so elegantly debated in the gaming scene over these last few decades. While the facial and gameplay animations are fantastic, there are some minor animation issues throughout the game that are stiff or clunky, but they rear their heads so infrequently that when they happen, you notice.

Ghost of Yōtei’s story, like the rest of the game, doesn’t shatter any boundaries, doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any means. What it does, however, it does very well. Set in Japan in 1603, the game can easily transport you through its beautiful world and complex characters if you let it. I never felt the game falter for very long whenever it did (a boring side mission here or there), and I never felt the need to put it down for long. Coming from the superhero-charged Infamous series, it’s impressive to see what Sucker Punch has done in representing the Edo period in Japan’s history. I have yet to try the Kurosawa mode because I feared missing out on the vibrancy provided by the developer’s aesthetic, but it is an option for those seeking a more authentic black-and-white samurai experience with Japanese voiceovers. While some of the supernatural side quests push the boundary a little more than I’d like, the game feels grounded overall, something I much appreciated.

Those who like samurai/shinobi style games with a good story are in for a treat. If you have not played Ghost of Tsushima, it is not a necessary experience. As I’ve mentioned, this game occurs three hundred years later. There are references to the past, but they aren’t anything significant and wouldn’t hinder one’s enjoyment of the title. For those of you who have played the original, I believe this title is superior to Tsushima in most ways. With Ghost of Yōtei: Legends (a free multiplayer addition) on the horizon, the game will offer even more bang for your buck.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 8.5/10.

Bonus: +1 for beautiful authentic aesthetic. +1 for focused content.

Penalties: −1 for occasional visibility issues. −1 for story layout/cutscene implementation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall

Horny and intellectual by turns, this sapphic, spacefaring adventure is Moby Dick for the digital age.

I'll freely admit that a lot of things in this book are jokes, because I have a very short attention span and like kid myself that facetiousness is the same as satire.

So says I, the cryptically-monikered narrator of Hell's Heart, a sapphic reimagining of the story of Moby Dick, set on a ship out to hunt leviathans in the roaring storms of Jupiter. And on one level, this is a perfectly accurate summation of the novel. It's absolutely jam-packed with jokes. They range from the subtle, the referential (if you can read Latin, there are a number of sometimes apt, sometimes rather less so quotations that you may recognise, more on this later), through a Muppets gag, all the way to a long-running repeated bit about "sperm" being a funny word. It would be very easy to read this book and read it light, to skim across it with the glib, flippant tone the narrator offers, and be content. The narrator, as characterised, often seems to want you to do exactly that. It would be a perfectly good reading, and a great time. And, yes, conceivably both facetious and satire.

But it would be an incomplete one. Because Alex Hall is doing a heck of a lot more in Hell's Heart, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

To be clear before I dig in too deep, I've never read the whole of Moby Dick, and even my partial encounter with it was a time ago best measured in decades. But I have the cultural awareness of it as a novel that many do, so my perspective on it comes from a place of rough familiarity, but without the detail for a full comparison.

To start with the weakness, it's quite a long book. Not as much as its inspiration, but my copy clocks in at 464 pages, which is still relatively chunky, and more to the point long enough to start feeling long. In that time, while Hall packs in a lot of content, a lot of themes, a lot of angles (and less sex than might be expected, but still plenty), by the end, it starts to feel like there are a small number of major pieces that are being proffered up to the reader on rotation. Around page 370 or so, all of these were feeling just that little bit too familiar, so I was very glad once Hall finally got around to the dramatic end piece. And think to some extent the length is a product of doing all those different things all together and at once - they have to keep circling around and getting their various turns to make sure they're all covered off before the big finale. And just for that little while, for a short span of pages... it did get a tiny bit stale. Everything just became that bit too familiar. They hadn't quuuuite paced it right.

Which is a real shame, because in nearly every other way, that packed in variety was what made the book so enjoyable.

Starting with the religion stuff, of which there was quite a lot. In the space future Hall envisages for the setting of Hell's Heart, there are three major and a number of minor churches, but the ones that figure most into the story are the Churches of Liberty and Prosperity, and a cult referred to as the Church of Starry Wisdom, or just Wisdom. The first two are clearly based on Christian textual traditions (based on quotes, names and various pieces of information dropped across the book) but with radically different intents, both to each other and to my (admittedly weak and very Anglican-focussed) understanding of modern Christianity. Living up to their names, they preach a doctrine of radical personal freedom and profit respectively, and how those tenets interact with life in a solar system of dispersed exocolonies and habitats is deeply threaded through much of the story. The protagonist herself is a semi-lapsed Prosperity disciple, and she keeps coming back to her personal upbringing and relationship to money, profit and belief throughout the story. Which makes sense on a voyage where a captain is going to start prioritising vengeance over bringing in the goods that everyone signed on to hunt to earn their pay.

Meanwhile the Church of Starry Wisdom has a very different theology - they believe we're all going to succumb to the great beast, devourer of worlds, but that some are destined to be devoured before others, and those last-to-be-eaten are the chosen. Great beast, you say? In a monster hunting book? Yes, exactly. You see where that's going.

On the one hand, all of the religions are inherently parodic. Not necessarily of real world faiths, but certainly of strands within modern belief. It is hard to read a section in which the rich man and the camel passing through the eye of the needle story of the Bible is canonically interpreted as a mandate to be rich, and not see that this is poking fun at capitalism as we know it right now. And when that sits alongside pay-to-pray church services... well, it's not subtle. But it's also actually quite effective, and a lot of that is because the main character is really ambivalent about the extent to which she believes it all. There's a fair amount of musing on what it means and how it figures into her life, and that doubt makes it more than just a funny poke at the real world.

Instead, it's part of how Hall is drawing a hypercapitalist space future hellscape, from which space-whale hunting is a legitimate escape for those with few means and debts to pay.

Part of this hellscape is a medical one - several characters throughout the book are shown to have biological amendments, upgrades or replacements in their bodies, and a number of them are in perpetual debt to Aphrodite Corp. because of it - healthcare being extremely proprietary. There's even a throwaway line about someone being punished for inheriting copyrighted genes. And yes, this too is obviously satire, but it sits in that good and fuzzy zone of obviously satirical while also real enough to be effective worldbuilding. Because I is one of those characters with debts - hers being for unspecified body mods that I was interpreting as something gender-related but which is never made wholly clear in text - and the way that that is emphasised by her, and by the world around her in text makes her decision to run off to this incredibly dangerous, gross and difficult career make a lot more sense than it might otherwise do.

Another part, and this is something that only comes up in a few small lines but which nontheless made a deep impression on me, is the way Hall envisages art in this horrible vision of the world. This is a world with a divide between human-produced and procedurally generated art, it seems, and that is such a horrible, biting window into a possible future that I had to pause for a minute when I got to it. I've read a number of stories about and full of AIs in the last couple of years, and yet this little tiny glimpse in a book about space whales somehow grasped it all the better.

I suppose it's because the book is very much about, among all the other things, inequality and desperation. And that is so real, so graspable, that all the SFnal trappings around it work all the more.

That desperation is also part of what makes the narrator work so well, because it undercuts and grounds her sometimes... well, as she says, facetious tone. In some ways, she reads very similarly to another Hall narrator, Puck from Mortal Follies and Confounding Oaths. Both of them are incredibly cagey about real names, for one thing. But where Puck starts and ends with that light, mischievous tone they share, that fey nature, I is just as much defined by her wants, her humanity and her seriousness as by her rejection of it. Over 464 pages, the lightness might have worn thin without something substantial to be glimpsed underneath it. It comes in fits and bursts, but it's there, and it turns the lightness into something darker than just a person with a certain approach to life. The humour becomes coping mechanism, tied up into the darkness to which it offers a contrast. I is simultaneously comedic and tragic.

Outside of I, most of the other characters don't get an awful lot of depth. There are short portraits of key figures, but they take something of a sidebar to her main interests - digressions and sex jokes. Some of them are, themselves, jokes. Many of the ones that aren't are obvious parallels to characters from Moby Dick, especially the mates, and the Ahab figure, genderbent and referred to only as A. Her madness - characterised in part by a wholly different register of speech than the rest of the crew, archaic and formal and itself calling back to the source text - is made compelling. We can see why I loves her, just as we can see why that adoration (possibly infatuation is a better word, given how one-sided it all is) is absolutely toxic to her.

The other part of her madness is another thing that made me do a big "oof" and put the book down for a little while, for that sudden face slap of too close, too real. The captain has in her quarters a "networked machine intelligence", a computer programmed to provide advice, data processing and predictions, but in a chatty, colloquial manner. A machine with which she develops an unhealthily codependent relationship as it gives her the information she wants and the answers that best reinforce her existing priorities and intentions. Horribly familiar, isn't it? It's a damnably good take on that kind of obsession, updated to the modern world, and I sort of hate how effective it is.

The other character who gets genuine page time and development is... less easy to sum up. Her name is Q, and she is obviously a reflex of Queequeg from the original. In this multiplanetary (and more) future, however, her home is old earth, rather than Queequeg's South Pacific Island origin. In this future, Terrans, with their strange tattoos, are seen as backwards and barbaric compared to those in the habitats and expoplanet colonies. They are strange, insular and possibly cannibals, and don't have the same religions or priorities as the "exodites".

Given the obvious racial dynamics of the original, this is an interesting choice of update. And one I'm still not entirely sure how to take. Because on the one hand, Hall has taken a number of the stereotypes included in the original text and just shifted them over wholesale, but on the other, he's given them some aspects and accoutrements that point in opposite directions. My understanding (as above, incomplete) of the original text is that Queequeg is heavily othered and given a strong desire to visit "Christendom" which... brings up a whole bunch of associations. So to pivot that othering into a character who is from the most familiar place in this setting for us as readers seems to me a very deliberate choice to engage with the problems of the original.

Likewise, while Q in Hell's Heart speaks mostly in a language none of the other characters understand... that language is Latin, which comes with a bunch of assumptions about prestige and worth for a lot of readers. And if you either can read Latin or fancy googling it as you go through the book, you discover that Hall has cheekily used this as a way to pull in quotations from a wide, wide pool of sources. Some of them are Biblical, which makes a lot of sense for this retelling and the direction they choose to take most of the story. But some are drawn from Classical authors like Cicero and Catullus. Indeed, there is a phenomenally effective sex scene early on where Q speaks to I only in quotes from Catullus' erotic poetry. So again, Hall is taking a racist portrayal and making some very deliberate choices about how to mess with it, how to hold it in conversation with the original.

Q is also one of the very few seemingly altruistic characters in the book. While all the exodites are busy being out for profit (or worshipping an embodiment of entropy that just so happens to have white supremacy baked into its hierarchy of the universe), Q operates on a moral compass more easily comprehensible to the reader (even as it's opaque to I). Which on the one hand reinforces that she is the familiar one, not the Other. But on the other plays into ideas of the noble savage.

Does it work? I'm honestly still not sure. The Latin does, and there are moments where they deploy it brilliantly, where the quotes are exactly perfect for that piece of dialogue, and where I's uncomprehending response is a humorous dissonance. But as a whole thing? Maybe?

Despite my above complaint about length, I think possibly Q needed more page space in order to fully work through her character and its relationship to Queequeg. It's a big thing to grapple with, and while it's clear Hall is grappling with it, I think it's not quite clear what the actual thesis of it all is. It's just sort of all... there, in a jumble, not quite sorted out. And for something so messy, there does need to be some sorting.

Even aside from the Latin, Hall does like to play with language and quotation quite a lot throughout. And that? That is successful.

I mostly speaks a very modern vernacular - and one that screams "excessively online millennial" to me, an excessively online millennial - which is extremely informal and irreverent. Most of the exodites speak a slightly less sex-joke-laden version of the same. But some characters are marked out by their dialogue, and every time Hall does this, it's interesting. In the Captain, it's a sign of increasing madness, as she slips past modern formal right into "hast thou". In one of the Wisdom followers - who suffers an accident that either is making him hallucinate or given him access to the voice of something numinous, depending who you ask - it is likewise a sign of madness, but of a different kind. He speaks in riddles, taken as prophecies, but I think every single one is a Shakespeare quotation. Certainly I spotted a lot of them in his dialogue. Given I's resonance with Puck in a previous Hall work, this felt like a slightly elaborate, subtle joke. But it also worked really well because he feels immediately distinct from all the other speakers, and from the self we met at the beginning of the book. In a sea (so to speak) of mostly indistinct background characters, it gives the reader an instant cue that this one needs attention and that this one is, now, different.

And indeed, offers a stark contrast to I's dick jokes. Because Hall didn't pick the dick jokes bits of Shakespeare.

It's those contrasts, more than anything, which are the heart of Hell's Heart. Between modes of speech, between humour and tragedy, between the old text and the new. So much of the story feels like a homage to or an argument with Moby Dick, even to someone not familiar with the original text. There are long digressions about whale physiology and the logistics of hunting, of the realities of a long journey spent cooped up together with a limited number of people in a small space, surrounded by an environment that wants to kill you, which is itself full of monsters. It feels, in those, stunningly close to its predecessor. And then up comes the irreverence, the absolute refusal to take some of the core premises seriously, and that contrast brings it to life. Just as in real-world whales, the resource being hunted in the gassy seas of Jupiter is "spermaceti", or "sperm" for short. And I did not count how many times I comes back to this, to teehee about it being a funny word, but if I did I would run out of fingers and probably toes as well. And yet it's also doing some serious thinking about capitalism and religion. Hall keeps you coming and going, never quite settled into one thing, one feeling, throughout the whole of the story. I is by turns a philosopher, a slut, a pilot, a girl, a problem - and those in her own words - and it is her effervescent changeability that sustains the story most. She speaks directly to the reader, always chatty, always lively, often metatextual, and creates a sense of conversation and relationship between herself and us for the duration of the story. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the ups and downs of her life and self.

She - this complex, quixotic, messy, terrible, excellent character - is what makes the story sing. And because she, and it, are so many different things, she makes it a rich text. Where I found myself focused on the capitalism, I'm sure someone else would linger elsewhere. That someone else might be me, on a future reread even. Yes, it's a long book, and yes, it might be overstuffed. Yes, that's even a problem. But it is also a strength, and one that makes this book worth reading, despite and because of its faults.

--

The Math

Highlights:

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Alexis Hall, Hell's Heart, [Tor Books 2026]

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

TV Review: One Piece Live Action – Season Two

Picking up the pace with more quirky characters, lots of fighting, and some tearjerker moments as Season 2 sails into the Grand Line.

After a long wait, the second season of Netflix’s One Piece live action series has finally arrived. Season One of One Piece was a hit with a range of fans as it explored the adventures of a pirate boy and his ragtag crew. Due to the quirky nature of anime in general, it’s normally a challenge to bring those fantastical stories and characters to life in a live action format. Fortunately, Season One managed to navigate the source material’s wild visuals and storytelling to create a show that appealed to everyone from complete newcomers to superfans. The show has strong diversity in its characters and great character chemistry which draws the audience in. In Season One we met the five original Straw Hat crew members, one at a time, with pacing that allowed for poignant backstories and the development of strong character chemistry in the midst of some big adventures. In Season Two, the slower pace is gone, and the show dives right into a dizzying array of new, outlandish characters along with lots of fight scenes brought on by the busy new antagonist, Baroque Works. While the new adventures lack the wonder of the first season, the characters are still charming and the adventures are still entertaining, particularly for long time fans.

Summary: Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) is an enthusiastic adolescent boy in pursuit of his dream to become a pirate and to ultimately become the “king” of the pirates. To do this he must find a hidden treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy gradually assembles a rag-tag but loyal crew to join him on his hunt for the One Piece which is hidden in a dangerous place known as the Grand Line. Among his crew are Zoro (Mackenyu), a fierce and cynical swordfighter; Nami (Emily Rudd), a cartographer and navigator; Usopp (Jacob Romero), a shipbuilder with a knack for exaggeration; and Sanji (Taz Skylar), a suave chef who is talented at both cooking and fighting. Luffy calls his crew the Straw Hat Pirates in honor of the straw hat he wears. Season 2 begins with Luffy and his crew finally entering the Grand Line and realizing how much they underestimated its wild nature and complicated politics. The primary antagonist for the second season is an assassin agency known as Baroque Works whose oddball killers target Luffy and his crew. But things get more complicated when Luffy comes to the aid of Vivi, an undercover princess, and meets a shapeshifting reindeer named Chopper. 

While the first season did a good job of entertaining a wide range of viewers, Season Two seems more targeted to established fans. Many of the new villains appear with little introduction and the plot moves fast as new obstacles and new adventures arrive. But, as in the first season, we are helped out by explanatory signs that fly onto the screen when a new character is introduced. The design and presentation are different from the first season, but it’s still a helpful tool, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve consumed the anime and don’t immediately catch the characters’ outlandish visual cues. The new adventure brings to life episodes of the anime’s early story arcs including the amusing giants of Little Garden and the tragic oppressed kingdom of Drum Island. As the plot and the pirate ship move along, several of the show-stealing characters from the live action’s first season are left behind, or only have brief moments on screen, including pirate captain Buggy the Clown, the pure-hearted Koby, and the stern marine commander Garp.

Fortunately, Season Two adds appealing new characters with particularly good acting. Among the best are the determined Princess Vivi, played by Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandan, and the stalwart, guilt-ridden Drum Island soldier Dalton (Ty Keough), the ultimate green flag hero who finds his true strength. But the most fun arrivals are the sweet and much awaited, Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover) and his gruff mentor Dr. Kureha (perfectly played by Katy Sagal). One Piece stands out in anime for its particularly fantastical characters in very outlandish costumes. The live action show does a good job of adapting the character designs, rather than just directly copying them, so they fit in a real-life setting. This is especially true for the adorable Chopper, an orphaned reindeer who gets turned into a human-reindeer hybrid after eating a magical devil fruit. Chopper is the kind of character who seems impossible to pull off in a live action but the show succeeds in making him believably real and endearing, rather than artificial and creepy. Like Golum in the Lord of the Rings movie, Chopper is presented via motion capture so the facial expressions are heartbreakingly engaging.

Some of the future main characters like Brook and Nico Robin appear briefly as set ups for future story arcs in future seasons. The main plot of Season Two is Baroque Works versus the Straw Hat Pirate. With so many Baroque Works agents the story focuses more on adventure and fights and less on the slow moments of character introspection that we saw in Season One. However, we do get some thoughtful and emotionally impactful intervals with the tragic stories of Chopper and his former mentor Dr. Hiruluk, and also with Dalton finding his voice and strength to deal with the despotic oppression of his people. There is even a rare quiet moment of Sanji recalling cooking for his sick mother when he was a child.

While Season Two doesn’t have the same magic of the first season, it is still a fun adventure that manages to capture some moments of emotional storytelling and manages to showcase some appealing new characters. The pacing is fast and the tale feels like it is over quickly, leaving viewers anticipating the next adventure in the Grand Line. But overall, long time fans will enjoy seeing more of the major characters come to life in this latest wild adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Faster pacing, more fighting
• Appealing new characters
• Emotional moments buried in the non-stop action

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

TV Review: The Beauty

Caution: Side effects include painful rolling of eyes and death from boredom

Through The Beauty’s clumsily structured first season, we follow cartoonishly greedy pharma bro Byron, whose only personality trait is a massive black hole where humanity is supposed to reside. In these times of corporate sociopathy elevated to aspirational fame, the problem with a character like Byron isn’t a lack of realism (hell knows the real world has more than its share of narcissistic buffoons), but the fact that his evil is played as a joke. As necessary as it is to counter the ego of the über-rich with relentless ridicule, The Beauty strikes the wrong tone: we should be laughing at this villain, but actor Ashton Kutcher’s contagious charisma invites the viewer to laugh with him.

Byron’s newest business plan is a drug that completely remakes the human body with some genetic technobabble. One injection cures all diseases, fixes the metabolism, stops natural aging, and—here’s the selling point—makes the patient look impossibly sexy. I marvel at the difficulties this show’s casting director must have had in selecting only the hottest of the hottest supermodels for the dozens of extras that showcase the wonders this drug produces. Just a little problem: the miracle beauty drug ends up raising your body temperature until you literally explode. Not that that’s going to deter Byron from his goal of squeezing the world out of a fortune.

(This gruesome detail has a distant basis in reality: in the 1930s, one of the first anti-obesity pills contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a molecule that interferes with the body’s ability to extract energy from its reserves. As a result, more and more fat needs to be burned in order to maintain basic biological functions, which of course reduces the amount of stored fat, but all that extra burning causes internal overheating that can easily get lethal. The molecule was banned.)

Watching The Beauty, it takes a while to piece together exactly how things started to go wrong for Byron’s company. In the season’s many ineptly misplaced flashbacks, we eventually discover that it was one of his lab technicians who leaked the miracle drug to the world before Byron was ready to start charging for it. It turns out that The Beauty^® is sexually transmissible, which creates a snowballing problem: each formerly normal, newly super-attractive person jumps at the chance to seduce lots of partners, each of which is in turn transformed and then proceeds to similarly propagate the molecule. So now lots of people are becoming beautiful without paying Byron, and also, lots of people are randomly exploding like Tetsuo from Akira all over the world, which threatens to bring a massive PR crisis at Byron’s doorstep.

What does Byron do to contain the epidemic of gorgeousness? Why, he hires a professional assassin, as you do. In fact, this is how we start the story: we follow two FBI agents who have been investigating a series of mysterious deaths of beautiful people across Europe. Things get complicated when one of the FBI agents has a one-night stand and is transformed into another sex bomb. Now she has to get to the bottom of this medical mystery before she blows up too.

It‘s strange that so much of this show happens in secret. We’re not shown how the press reacts to high-profile people exploding, or how the common people feel about the rumors that surely must circulate concerning an STD that makes you hot. It’s especially out of character for someone as egocentric as Byron to never give an interview about his vision for humanity.

The Beauty has the ingredients for a compelling story, but has no idea how to cook them. It has nothing to say about the social harms of lookism and the pharmaceutical exploitation of people’s insecurities that The Substance didn’t say better. Its embarrassingly preachy dialogues sound copy-pasted from incel forums. Each episode rehashes the same yucky sequence of a new victim receiving the molecule and being painfully transformed via convulsive contortionism. When the best character in the show, Byron’s delightfully vitriolic wife, is given the treatment against her will and then attempts suicide, Byron’s change of heart feels hollow because he had never shown any concern for her before. And his hired assassin turns a target into his apprentice for no comprehensible reason.

The Beauty is an uninspired The Substance wannabe with far less bite, a juvenile sense of humor and zero awareness of the times. Yes, we know that obsession with beauty is dangerous. The show doesn’t have any more points to make after that, and it gets tiresome to watch a string of tertiary characters frantically throw themselves at the walls for ten minutes while the drug works its Cronenberg-lite magic. One wishes they could skip the grimacing part and blow up already.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

6 Books with Aubrey Sitterson

Aubrey Sitterson is a comic book man. Based in Los Angeles, he is recognized for his ferociously idiosyncratic creator-owned work, blending literary aspirations with genre exploration. His best-known works of fiction include the geopolitical space opera Free Planet, fight comic character study No One Left to Fight, and populist superhero series BEEF BROS. Additionally, he is the writer of the exhaustively researched nonfiction tome The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling.

Today he tells us about his Six Books

1. What book are you currently reading?

Recognizing the importance of a balanced diet, in addition to contemporary comics and other periodicals, I try to always keep a nonfiction and a historical comics read going simultaneously. Right now, the former is Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, a detailed, personality-based exploration of the 19th century military and intelligence sparring undertaken by the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. In addition to being the beginning of a dynamic that would continue through the Cold War with significant impacts today, it's also a rollicking, imperialist adventure story.

On the comics front, I'm finally reading Elfquest, which has always been an embarrassing gap in my comics knowledge; it's as wonderful as everyone says it is. Wendy Pini's control of gesture and character design are unparalleled, functioning within a newspaper and European comic strips tradition that, because of its remove from most contemporary US comics, hits like a ton of bricks today; not to mention how outrageously sensual all the character interactions are, without ever feeling salacious. Plus, like The Great Game--I'm discovering a theme--it's also a ripping adventure story.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

The Daniel Freedman anthology Stimulus. Daniel sent me a PDF of it months and months ago and I adored it, despite being keenly aware that--because we share a similar comics philosophy--reading it digitally was a pale imitation of the real thing. Working with a murderer's row of artists, all chosen for their specific talents, Daniel presents a collection of sci-fi stories that reward slow, careful reading and deliberate thought, with interlocking and recursive themes. And, as evidenced by how stoked I am to get the physical edition, it also rewards rereading.

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

Dave Sim's sprawling, experimental, abrasive, and controversial Cerebus isn't just one of my favorite comics of all time, I think it's the best comic of all time and one of the best works of written English in any medium. Sim accomplished what I aspire to: A comic that achieves novelistic depth not despite the medium but through it, utilizing, dusting off and innovating formal approaches that are always tied to his overarching fixations and the work's byzantine thematic layering. I read the full thing in college and it blew the top clean off my skull; over the past few years, I've been going back through the collections and am even more impressed than I was as a younger man. After I finish this volume of Elfquest, I'm planning to tackle the acclaimed Jaka's Story volume.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

It took me at least three running starts, over the course of half a dozen years, to make it through Dune. Well before the movie, I knew it was something that--on paper--I should love; in addition, I wanted to love it; I wanted to be a Dune guy. Not just because of the high regard in which it was held but because it was this big, sprawling, uncompromising text, so deep and complex as to feel esoteric. But on the first few reads, I found it punishingly dry; I think it was down to two things: 1) Trying to read it like an essay that has to be fully digested as opposed to a work of art meant to wash over you, and 2) Reading it--like a fool--digitally.


Eventually, something clicked for me and I devoured all of the Frank Herbert books. While I'm still torn on my opinion of the individual volumes, I adore them all as part of a whole; it's the platonic ideal of a long-running series, reveling in the freedom to explore different approaches, settings, tones and characters, while remaining in disciplined service to the work's overarching themes, layering in depth and complexity along the way.

5 What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

My favorite author in high school was Aldous Huxley; he still ranks extremely highly. While I dug Brave New World and Island was probably my favorite, the one that stuck with me the most is Point Counterpoint. It's a stunning piece of work, with a sprawling cast generally freaking out about the convulsions of the early 20th century. The character work is flawless, with Huxley simultaneously constructing and deploying instantly relatable archetypes, such that it feels both prophetic and timeless. But the aspect I've never stopped thinking about is the interplay between the characters' lengthy conversations, the larger issues lurking around the edges, and their relationships with one another, including the romantic.

Point Counterpoint is big, messy soap opera but it's also about big, messy ideas; concepts and challenges so complex and complicated as to defy the simple explanations found in parable and direct metaphor. Instead, Huxley mirrors the complexities of these challenges--political, social, economic, and moral--with the characters' ardently held but often inconsistent worldviews. I've always aspired to create work this challenging, with this type of depth; work brave enough to admit that there aren't any simple answers to questions worth asking, with complexity and ambiguity that inspire rumination in readers.

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

My latest book is Free Planet, an ongoing series from the legendary Image Comics. Free Planet is space opera about what happens after the revolution is won. The Freedom Guard, a group of revolutionary heroes, is tasked with safeguarding the freedom of Lutheria from threats without and within. The problem, however, is that--just like in this great nation of ours--they all have completely different ideas about what complete freedom entails. It's informed by extensive research into real world revolutions and civil wars, with what Robert Kirkman calls "rich, intricate worldbuilding"; think "Cordwainer Smith meets Noam Chomsky" and "Sci-fi G.I. Joe defending space Venezuela" and you're partway there.

Throughout Free Planet's creation, cocreator/artist Jed Dougherty and I have aspired to utilize the comics medium to the utmost, attempting to match Huxley's depth and complexity through the use, not just of prose, but images, design, and their communication with one another on the page. It's a holistic approach to comics; rather than creating a story and breaking it into issues, panels, and pages, the book is ideated and written as an art object, built of overwhelming spreads featuring maps, graphs, charts, and infographics on top of all the sci-fi action and soap opera drama. It's not to be read quickly; it's a world you're meant to slow down and luxuriate within. And best of all? There's a full graphic novel waiting for you, with new issues landing at your local comic shop every single month.

--

Thank you, Aubrey!

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