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

 Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- 

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

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: Eternity

Someone ought to speak to the manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Review: Enchanting the Fae Queen by Stephanie Burgis

The second of the Queens of Villainy series

Second in her fantasy series “The Queens of Villainy,” Enchanting the Fae Queen continues Stephanie Burgis' series set in a world of magic and some technology. While I have read other works by her before, I decided to jump in feet first into book two of this series, although I do own, unread, book one, Wooing the Witch Queen.

After reading a rather dark book, I wanted to go for something lighter. And so I found myself picking up what is, in fact, a romantasy in name¹ as well. And I want to talk about that for a moment before I even get to the book itself. Romantasy has, retroactively, been seen to being going back at least to Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks², But as far as I can tell, Romantasy became a thing in the early 2010’s with authors like Sarah J Maas. But in recent years, especially it seems in the age of Covid, that it has been pushed and expanded as a comfort read, and authors either squeezed into it or marketed as such.

I’ve read a lot of fantasy in my life, and what is now being seen as Romantasy, ex post facto, and what I have seen is that Romantasy is the rising trend in fantasy. I've talked about Grimdark in the past, which was the reigning ruler of fantasy for quite a while. And even now, there is still a lot of Grimdark out there.  But the new but not so new hotness is Romantasy.  Many of the secondary world fantasy books I am offered these days are pitched as Romantasy. Right or wrong, Romantasy is perceived as the rising subgenre. I myself have tried a couple of Romantasy books and bounced off all of them. The irony is that Romantasy has been pitched and shown often as a comfortable subgenre, a subgenre one reads for pleasure and immersion in the story of a relationship. But I'd to this point failed to really enjoy it.

And so we come to Enchanting the Fae Queen.

In some ways, this was also a challenge as well as a reach for something lighter. What would jumping into book two of a Romantasy series be like? Could it hold up for me as a reader of fantasy? Could I actually "get" Romantasy as a subgenre? I decided to go deliberately outside my comfort zone, even if it is ostensibly to a "comfort subgenre".  I knew the basic setup of the Queens of Villainy verse but was scant on the details. Could a second novel in a Romantasy series hold me? And so, not well armed at all, I went in.

Enchanting the Fae Queen features one of the soi-disant Queens of Villainy, Queen Lorelei. Originally from Faerie, she rules one of the three realms that border a human and very dangerous empire run by Emperor Otto. Otto is a young and dangerous empire running an empire that, from context feels vaguely mid to late 19th century. There seems to be a mixture of both German and French influences to this Empire Trains are relatively new, there are gas lamps, but technology has not progressed any further. Otto himself feels like a Kaiser Wilhelm II, young, impetuous, expansionistic, with a helping of intolerance that is both medieval and, sadly, positively modern.

Lorelei herself is the Queen of a Kingdom on the borders of this hungry hungry Empire, but the novel’s focus, as a Romantasy is on the relationship between her and General de Moireul of the Empire. They’ve had entanglements for years, but, now, as the Empire is rearing up yet again to try and make war on the Queens, Lorelei proves impetuous. She kidnaps Gerard and in the process launches them into a tournament in Faerie. Faerie has changed since the time she was once there, and Lorelei and Gerard not only have to work together, but something else, not only to even possibly win the tournament, not even to stop a war neither want, but just to survive. And, find a connection, together.

And thus a story unfolds.

As mentioned above, Romantasy’s conventions and focus are on the development of relationships, particularly romantic ones. As a result, I was left with a lot of questions about the worldbuilding that I do not think that the first book, Wooing the Witch Queen, address, either. That’s not what the book really is focused on, or what the book is for.

I did try to read the book with the protocols of a fantasy novel, and I did find that to be a somewhat frustrating experience. Even given that I came into the middle of a series, I was left with a lot of questions about how the world works that seemed to be not answered, or at least not really the concern of the writer. The use of magic, especially Fae magic, mind, and a secondary fantasy world kept the novel firmly in the realm of being fantasy, even if the protocols didn’t always quite fit. To give one telling point: This is a secondary fantasy world, but one whose geography is rather vaguely described and there is, indeed, no map.³ Now, mind you, in a world where portal magic among the Queens is not uncommon, the Empire itself doesn’t seem to have much of this.

But how does it read, overall, protocols aside for a moment? Burgis has a warm and inviting style to her writing. Yes, it is character focused, more in a moment about that. Burgis has a number of speeds of her writing, directing the writing and its flow to keep the reader engaged and turning pages. She narrows down nicely into details, especially how the characters are feeling and acting, during some trials, and handwaves and telescopes others once we get the point of what is going on and how the trials are proceeding. She uses mainly Lorelei as our point of view, although she also briefly brings us into other points of view as well. Burgis has honed her style to be very readable. I hesitate to use the word light, because Burgis is serious about developing her characters and relationships. She has a softer touch on worldbuilding and plot, but when it comes to writing characters, this is where her writing truly shines.

But back to protocols and focusing on those characters and relationships. It is reading the book with the protocols of a romance novel that one can better judge the novel’s merits. And on those merits the novel succeeded for me on much stronger ground. The development of the Lorelei-Gerard relationship is the backbone and superstructure of the novel and the story proceeds on familiar lines, and executed excellently. It’s the classic enemies to lovers trope, although Lorelei has had a thing for Gerard, opponent as he might be, for quite some time. Both of them, though, have strongly guarded and hardened hearts. Lorelei is self-described as a rake, an enthusiastic lover, but one who does not give her own heart in the process. She has and does cut a swath across the landscape and is known to do so. Gerard on the other hand has never given his heart to anyone. He is so focused on his job, his duty, his honor, that he has never found the place in his heart for another. Especially not the Fae Queen who has tormented him with tricks and gambits for years.

But, in the course of the aforementioned Tournament that the two find themselves in, the two’s relationship slowly starts to develop. It follows a slowly pattern of the two falling for each other, despite themselves, in a rising and falling pattern, with setbacks, declarations, finally getting together, and of course, in the end, the setback and finally the HEA (Happily Ever After).

The innovation, such as it is with a Romantasy like the Queens of Villainy series is that this happens in a fantasy verse. And yes, while Romance is the better frame and protocol with which to understand most Romantasy novels such as this series, the protocol of fantasy and the overall fantastic plot still applies and has to be accounted for. The first book in the series, Wooing the Witch Queen, is an HEA, but the characters are still here in the second book, and are secondary characters to the overall plot. The fantasy world and its problems still go on, the Empire is still out there, and in this second book, Otto and his plans are, I gather, have darkened since the first book.

What this all means is that the third and final book, Melting the Ice Queen, is going to complete the trilogy and resolve the fantasy plot. But, like the first novel’s relationship is clearly in an HEA and remains so, this novel and the Lorelei-Gerard relationship will remain stable and be nurtured, even as the third novel focuses on a new one, with the third Queen of Villainy. That relationship promises to be a queer one. I do want to mention that while this world seems queer-friendly, it will only be in the third novel that we get a queer relationship forward and featured. From what I understand, in Romantasy, queer relationships are rather in the minority at present. Perhaps Burgis’ third novel and the culmination of the Queens of Villainy series will help balance that. Romantasy, I feel, like any genre or subgenre, should be diverse. It is important for it to be so.

One more point. The title. The title of this novel, and indeed the titles of all three novels, are focused on the MC woman partner. Wooing the Witch Queen. Enchanting the Fae Queen. Melting the Ice Queen. The woman-focused and female MC focused main character titling is showing the importance of providing such framing for female readers. This series would be very different in outward appearance if they were identical inside but rather they were titled Wooing the Archduke and Enchanting the General. Although, as noted above, the third novel’s retitling would be something like Melting the Ice Priestess.

It would appear I have much to learn about reading the protocols of Romantasy, and writers like Burgis, whom I have read before, but in this age of Romantasy, are finding a home and receptive audience for the stories they want to tell.

--

Highlights

• Romantasy, second in a series. 
• Strong character beats
• Well written, engaging and entertaining 

Reference: Burgis, Stephanie, Enchanting the Fae Queen (Bramble, 2026)

¹ It is pretty clear that although Romantasy is a new term, previous works by Stephanie Burgis, such as Snowspelled, are, retrospectively, definitely Romantasy as well.

² Of course, I had thought that War for the Oaks was a progenitor of modern Urban Fantasy, which goes to show that categories have overlap, as well as the fact that there are books that subgenres desperately want to “claim” for their own.

³ Yes, I realize not every fantasy world has a map or even needs a map. And there are Romantasy novels with gorgeous maps. But we get to the protocols again, and how to read this book. And I think, although it is coming here in a footnote, that to read Romantasy, one MUST read and accept the fusion of both protocols and that not all the check boxes are going to be checked.  Or perhaps Romantasy is a spectrum, with more or less elements of fantasy and romance between various novels, authors and series. Or is Romantasy, like I sometimes think of Horror, more of a mode or color and not a subgenre at all? Is it a polder, a boundary land?  I am sure people with far more credentials than I are going to explore this in coming years, and it should. 

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

Book Review: The Gryphon King by Sara Omer

A monster-filled secondary-world fantasy that takes its cues and worldbuilding inspirations from points east of the Bosporus Strait

In a world of Khans and khanates, opulent city states and dreaming complacent kingdoms, Sara Omer’s The Gryphon King revolves around the driven desires of Bataar, the man who would be the titular Gryphon King as his ambitions and desires run up against a kingdom and its formidable women. One of them, Nohra, has worked hard to be one of the Harpy Knights, given one of the powerful weapons of her kingdom; and she rides and cares for her carnivorous pegasus, Mercy. Quite frankly, Nohra would rather be flying and defending the throne. But when Bataar shockingly and suddenly conquers her kingdom of Dumakra as part of his very successful campaign for universal conquest of the continent, Nohra finds herself nearly a hostage in the palace, a Harpy Knight chained to the whims of the Steppe Conqueror. She is definitely interested in getting rid of Bataar and restoring her homeland. But in the midst of courtly politics, intrigue and trying to walk a fine line with Bataar, strange things have been happening in the Kingdom. Monsters are afoot… and not just the titular Gryphons, either. Nohra and Bataar find themselves the unlikeliest of reluctant allies.

This is how the novel thus unfolds:

We have an interesting set of flawed characters, with secrets, lies, and hidden agendas, drawn into uneasy alliances and conflicts. Bataar and Nohra are our sole point-of-view characters, except for a chapter at the end featuring a character about whom any talk is extremely spoilery, so I will leave them out of the discussion. In addition to the monsters, I wonder whether this character is more of a central axis of the novel and the trilogy than one might first expect. Bataar, despite being a capable warlord, a cunning strategist, and a clever ruler, is arrogant, and way too often puts himself right in the front line of danger. Nohra, despite being a Harpy Knight, has some rather large blind spots, and she is sometimes overfocused on her goals and misses the bigger picture. Qaira, Bataar’s wife and political right hand, seems to have scheming plans of her own that neither Bataar nor Nohra suspect. Other intrigues fill out the narrative. Having conquered Dumakra, Bataar has set himself a whole host of headaches. This provides plenty of drama for the reader in between the more bloody conflicts.

What I really want to talk about, of course, if you have read any of my reviews, is the worldbuilding and the structure of the book. This is epic fantasy, clear to the vein, but there are notes of grimdark and darker fantasy in here. One of the comps given in the promo kit is Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller, and I think that is a good book to tie this to. It’s not full-on grimdark, even if, as noted above, we have a whole raft of flawed characters whose motivations, secrets and desires leave us with no clear white and black hats. It’s definitely taking notes from grimdark, showing the influence of that subgenre on the main body of epic fantasy. The courtly intrigue and very rich worldbuilding put me in the mind of a more straightforward Jenn Lyons. No footnotes, and playing with reference and metafiction, but keep the very rich empire and complicated characters. Samantha Shannon, in The Priory of the Orange Tree mode, also feels like a book and author that has kinship with this one.

But the world itself is what fascinates me. Omer has described herself as taking notes from the Ottoman Empire, and there is definitely the courtly intrigue, including among wives and concubines, that you’d find in, say, Magnificent Century.¹ Also the decor, the social relations, the descriptions of palaces and spaces, all point to, as I said above, cultural and social touchstones east of the Bosporus, toward Anatolia, Armenia, Persia and Central Asia. The physiogeographic setup of the continent is varied, ranging from the steppe that Bataar comes from to the dry desert realm that dominates Dumakra, and high mountains as well. There is a map, but I admit that I have strong questions about the river setup on the map and the geology of the continent as a result.

But returning to the cultural worldbuilding: I think, especially with Bataar and his steppe origins, the feeling I kept getting was not the Ottomans at all, but rather Timur the Lame. Tamerlane was a Turkic-Mongol warlord of the 14th century. Born on the steppe, like Bataar, he was injured at a young age, again, like Bataar. Tamerlane got the steppe tribes to unite under him to go on campaign. Same with Bataar, although that part of his story gets skipped over; we go from his formative fight with a gryphon to him off conquering.

Tamerlane had a wide set of military victories against a variety of opponents. Bataar seems a little less cruel than Tamerlane (who was very cruel, so don’t be deceived here), but is no less ambitious and expansive, and clearly is “punching above his weight” in taking on polities that he really shouldn’t. Both men want to conquer the world, and Tamerlane did a pretty good job at it, and in the first few chapters until he reaches Dumakra, Bataar is doing an excellent job, and is eager to continue his conquest. Granted, in our world, Tamerlane didn’t have to deal with carnivorous pegasi and worse, but the military genius, the fluidity of his responses, and the determination are all things I see in Bataar.

But yes, going to the fantastic, this novel is full of monsters. The pegasi and gryphons in this world, besides being strong and ferocious with beak and claws, also carry a debilitating and sometimes deadly infection if you are scratched by them. There are aquatic monsters as well, and then there are the ghouls. The ghouls are nasty and dangerous, and remind me of the ghuls in Saladin Ahmed’s Tower of the Crescent Moon. And fittingly, like those, they are found in a set of ruins our main characters camp in—and really, really shouldn’t have. This goes back to the flawed characters, and how Omer effectively uses their weaknesses to help drive the plot, again and again. They might be competent, strong and talented, but they have feet of clay.

There is definitely magic and mayhem (and even a hint of Gunpowder Empire) to the magic and the weapons that the Harpy Knights wield, as well as other magical items that show up. Omer is tapping into cultural touchstones that have rarely gotten play as the center. Places like Dumakra and the Steppe of Bataar’s homeland have, if they have been shown on screen in fantasy novels, often been places visited rather than the focus. And when we do see Southwestern Asian fantasy, it’s often been hundreds of years before, in the Caliphate, rather than the Timurid and Ottoman Empires. The Mughals, a couple of centuries ahead, and some distance east, seem to be also finally getting their due as inspiration for cultures, societies, characters, and worldbuilding. There is a rich vein here that Omer is mining for plenty of untapped potential. I find it interesting that her “Europe” analogue, Aglea, is off screen to the far north of the map. Omer is exactly inverting the tropes of the Great Wall of Europe by having the “Europeans” be the area only seen on a map and of much lesser importance.

There is one other thing I want to mention about The Gryphon King, which you may have picked up on already. The book is neither marketed as, nor actually is, the hot new invented category of romantasy. It’s firmly and apologetically widescreen secondary-world fantasy, and while there are all sorts of dynastic and court politics, schemes of succession and ownership based on marriage alliances, concubinages and the like, this novel does not fit in the romantasy category in the least. Just to make sure, since I seem to see every fantasy novel written by a woman labeled as “romantasy” these days, I looked back at the publicity for the book. It is, in fact, not. That is not to say that there isn’t a loving and clever marriage in here, as well as characters plotting for such marriages, and various characters finding each other attractive. But the focus of the novel is on more sociopolitical relationships, and sibling relationships, and, of course, the monsters.

If you want courtly intrigue, adventure, politics, and a large helping of man-eating monsters, based on Medieval Southwestern Asian motifs and cultural touchstones, The Gryphon King is definitely for you. It’s the first book in a series, and it only comes to a stopping point, but with a very appropriate hinge. I look forward to more in Omer’s world and characters.

Highlights:

• #teamgryphon
• Strong use of Southwest Asia as inspiration for setting and character detail
• NOT romantasy: epic fantasy with notes of grimdark and plenty of intrigue
• Richly written, with an excellent eye for detail

Reference: Omer, Sara. The Gryphon King [Titan Books, 2025].

¹ A Turkish TV historical drama that tells the story of Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman ruler, and his wife Hurrem, former slave girl. I came across this show last year by complete accident (someone in a seat in a plane in front of me was watching it, I took a screenshot and eventually figured it out). It's hugely popular in the Middle East but much less well known here. Which, frankly, if Netflix or the like got wind of it, an American version would come out, yesterday. Complicated, crafty and fascinating.  Think of it as I, Claudius, except for Suleiman, and you're there.

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

Book Review: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite

Cozy noir-style space mystery featuring a gender-bending detective and lots of queer characters

You are aboard the HMS Fairweather, a spaceship that has been travelling from Old Earth for 350 years in search of a new home. The approximately ten thousand people on board regularly back up their memories in their own personal memory book so that, when they die, their new bodies will have access to their full memories. When someone dies, they are “reborn” at approximately twenty years old. There are no children on board and people are not supposed to be able to reproduce on ship.

So where did this baby come from?

Enter Dorothy “Dot” Gentleman, ship detective.

Her nephew Ruthie (short for Rutherford) and his partner, John, have found a baby in a basket on their doorstep. Dot quickly finds the baby’s parents, but the real mystery is that no one remembers having a baby at all! So now we have a memory crime, where people’s memories have been tampered with. Memory crimes are Dot's specialty.

If you are looking for a cozy sci-fi mystery with noir vibes that has mild gender bending and queer characters, look no further. Nobody’s Baby is the second book in the Dorothy Gentleman series by Olivia Waite. In book one, Murder by Memory (2025), Dot found herself awakened inside another passenger’s body and had to solve the mystery of how several memory books had been destroyed.

For me, the fun of this series is in the society that Waite creates abroad the Fairweather: no one should be able to die, and people’s needs are provided for, but they’re still incentivized to have jobs or run businesses to entertain themselves or to make a bit of money for their future.

Book one introduced a set of jobs related to the curation and protection of memories. Dot’s nephew works as a librarian who helps protect the memory books of the Fairweather’s passengers. His partner, John, is a memory bartender: he can mix you a drink that will bring back memories of a summer storm or fall in New York. He works at the Antikythera Club, the by-membership-only hideout for the ship's artists and literati.

In book two, we learn about “flickers,” movie-like stories crafted by a single projectionist wearing a “skimmer,” a device that lets them project a story from their brain onto a screen. We are introduced to an entire set of society that makes these movies, the devices that make them possible, and their fans. There are also more prosaic jobs: for example, Dot has a crush on a woman named Violet who runs a cozy yarn store.

So, come for the mystery, but stay for larger theories on how this future society works. In a society like the Fairweather, where everyone can live multiple lives aboard a generation ship looking for a new planet, how do people relate to each other? What rules do they create to keep their society healthy? What happens when you find yourself in a situation where the rules don't fit?

Peregrine, the foundling, falls into a gap in the ship’s laws. The ship has no procedure for creating a new identity onboard. They have written laws for once they reach a planet, but planetary identity does not come with a memory book or a right to new embodiments. Dot firmly believes in the Fairweather’s system, but can also see where the system needs to be bent to prevent a greater wrong. She tells us that “Paperwork is law and order. The papers are what make us a society and not just a gaggle of desperate people sharing a geography. We set up a system because a system can be permanent, where human beings are not.” Not everyone agrees: the system doesn't always serve people, and there are some who begin to think that the system is more important than the people. So what does this mean for Peregrine?

On Peregrine’s behalf, Dot must petition the Fairweather’s Board of Directors to officially grant the baby a right to a memory book and new embodiments. She must also convince them, since Peregrine’s birth parents do not remember having him and do not want a child, that Ruthie and John should get parental rights. And she must get justice for Peregrine’s mother, who was robbed of her memories of the baby.

The Fairweather may be a society where where you can live forever and you want for nothing, but people are still people: they are greedy and jealous and, sadly, will look for ways to hurt each other. But we can enjoy Dot's expertise in unravelling the mysteries.

You could probably read this book without first reading Murder by Memory. But the first book is novella length (103 pages) and the second not much longer (144 pages), so why would you deny yourself the pleasure of more Dorothy Gentleman?

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. An absolutely enjoyable experience.

Highlights: 

• Cozy mystery with a likeable detective
• Lots of queer characters
• Fun space-noir vibes
• Interesting questions about memory and society building 

Reference: Waite, Olivia. Nobody's Baby [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Video Game Review: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Exploring a capitalist wasteland one kindness at a time

Artist: Guillaume Singelin

I'm a lover of roleplaying games—especially ones that give you a chance to live a life and inhabit a personality. Sure, linear stories with lots of action are fine, but for me the real joy is in finding something where you feel like the world is alive, lives are precious, and decisions mean something. In other words, I don't have time for games where I'm asked to shoot a hundred goons in the face and then care about the big bad's moral quandary—the moral contradictions are just too jarring.

I had not come across Fellow Traveller as a publisher before, and the only reason I got into Citizen Sleeper 2 (having not played the first) was because it was included in my Playstation subscription. I say this to give you context for what comes next.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is about a character, a Sleeper, whom you play. The entire story is narrated in the second person. It’s set in a small part of a solar system not our own, which is now several decades if not longer after the collapse of a grand empire. That empire, a corporate behemoth that spanned multiple star systems, is gone, and in its wake so is interstellar travel.

All that’s left to the people living on the shore as the tide went out to never come back is an asteroid-filled star system in which they cling to the vestiges of what came before and try to make a life while they can. It’s clear that corporations still exist in this world—they occupy the fertile and rich inner system, but this game takes place entirely within an asteroid belt at the edge of their reach while they fight one another. The people here expect the war to reach them eventually but hope it won’t. In the end there’s nothing they can do about it, so they carry on with their lives.

You, as a Sleeper without a name, are an artificial being—a body made to house a partial personality someone sold to the corporation who made you so that the body you’re in could work as a slave.

The story starts with you on the run from your current master, who is quickly established as a pretty evil dude. From there you have a reasonably free hand on where you go and who you talk to within the scope of the game.

This isn’t an open-world RPG. In many ways it’s more of an interactive story with RPG elements. That’s an important distinction to make because the game has a story to tell, and although your choices make for a unique experience, the scope here is small.

Small is not an insult; it’s to set your expectations. I want to call out Disco Elysium as a companion game in its vibes. Not that you can die of a heart attack during character creation or be a destitute drunk; those are surface ornaments. Where the two games are similar and why Citizen Sleeper 2 works so well for me is that they’re concerned with telling a story and allowing you just enough freedom to build that tale yourself.

I would encourage you to experiment with its mechanics, because it doesn’t explain them beyond the most cursory help screens. I started this three times before I worked out how to navigate the systems in such a way that I didn’t choose myself into a frustrating dead end early in the game.

A lot of the game’s story is delivered one of two ways, through a series of dice rolls or through text that arrives in response to conversations and choices you make as a Sleeper.

This means there’s a lot of text on the screen. That wasn’t a problem for me because the narrative is well written, the text meaningful, and the game deeply immersive, but be warned: this isn’t an RPG where you’re moving people around the screen and getting into fights. All that could lead to a mediocre game that covers a lot of the ground anyone who’s been around the block is going to be familiar with. However, in an example of taking something familiar and executing it brilliantly, Citizen Sleeper 2 takes its elements and delivers a banger: a story involving the development of self, the essential nature of collective action, the plight of slaves and refugees, the need (or otherwise) to determine your own fate and how to build community when everything is objectively getting worse.

There are a good number of side characters, including some that arrive and depart after a couple of missions. Not everyone can be pulled together, but at the same time, there are only a few places where I think you can rupture your relationship with them once they’re on board. I note, though that your companions interact with you but not really with one another, and even then you can't just initiate conversations—the game dishes them out in response to events.

Citizen Sleeper does a good job of hiding the seams of the story, but they do occasionally show through—most often when you’ve botched a job or chosen a route that should break a relationship but doesn’t. I don’t mind this too much, because I found the process of exploration and of helping people to be extremely emotionally rewarding.

Most of all, just like Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper 2 doesn’t change the world—morally ambiguous people continue on after you’re done; others rise and some fall. The Sleeper’s arc feels complete but not finished, and the same is true of those around them. I like this kind of story because it remembers well that it’s never the case that the world revolves around an individual, no matter what we are told.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a deeply satisfying storytelling experience and roleplaying game. I felt love and sadness, urges towards kindness, and anger throughout. The game made me feel things. On top of that, it managed to make the stakes feel pressing and urgent, both via its mechanics that don’t let you sleep on making choices and also through its story.

It's not a game that wants you to rush, whether that’s in the delivery of a lot of text or in giving you free time on different stations to just potter about making friends and earning credits. Indeed, it rewards such patience.

The influences here are clear enough: from Saga, Descender, Cyberpunk and Bladerunner to Firefly and Silent Running. Citizen Sleeper 2 feels like the kind of thoughtful RPG you’re delighted to discover after playing D&D your entire life.

A last word on the characters. Each character gets some time to develop and interact with you as the Sleeper. Some are looking at their identities, some are trying to establish themselves. Some are on their own quests and some just want connection. Each of them feels like they matter, and it’s your intersection with their values and desires that brings the best out of the game.

Highlights:

• Miners unionising to defeat exploitative bosses
• All kinds of different intelligences
• Loneliness at the end of the universe

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, a patient piece of storytelling that takes the familiar and executes it almost perfectly.

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.