Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Tawny Man, Book 1: Fools' Errand

 In which love is complicated

Jacket illustration by John Howe

I was at a book event a month or two ago, in which Amal El-Mohtar described how her new book, The River Has Roots, is based in part on her own family. “There is nothing complicated about my love for my sister,” she said, so sweetly and earnestly that I found myself jealous of a woman I've never met.

This is the polar opposite of FitzChivalry Farseer, who will never, ever enjoy a love with anyone that is uncomplicated. Poor guy. Let’s poke him with a stick and see why.

Fool’s Errand opens with Fitz in his mid-thirties, living peacefully in secluded retirement under the assumed name of Tom Badgerlock. He’s got a cottage, some crops, some chickens, an ageing Nighteyes, and a teenage boy he’s adopted, Hap. This is the Fitz who was looking back on his past and writing his history in the first Farseer trilogy. We’ve caught up with him, and you can almost feel the dread collect around him, as he slowly realizes that Robin Hobb’s ruthless eye has, Sauron-like, turned towards him once again. (Or maybe that was just me projecting.)

There's not a huge amount of plot in this book. Fitz gets pulled back into Farseer service because Kettricken's son, Prince Dutiful, has gone missing. There's a bit of political kerfuffle among people who have the Wit, who have split into two groups: the Old Blood, who just want to live their own lives; and the Piebalds, who name themselves after a historical figure named the Piebald Prince, and use as their figurehead the memory of FitzChivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, who was murdered for who he was. They are, to put it mildly, an angry bunch, and because Hobb disdains simplicity, she takes their justifiable rage and turns them into absolute terrorist assholes. The whole Piebald/Old Blood conflict will be more important later in the series, but for this book, all the Piebalds do is connive a bit to get Prince Dutiful in their power, and Fitz and the Fool work together to stop them. That's it. The end.

So instead of discussing the plot, I want to get back to poking at Fitz with a stick, because that is absolutely what everyone else is doing in this series, and I want to join the club.

Over the first several chapters, Fitz gets a few visits from the old characters. Chade comes quite early, to ask Fitz to become Skillmaster at Buckkeep, now that Verity and Kettricken’s son, Dutiful, is coming into his own Skill. Fitz immediately says no, and as quickly as that, the visit is over. Remember, all of Fitz’s youth was an exercise in missed opportunities for connections, because service to the Farseer line does not allow for individuals to develop loyalties and affections that are not in service to the throne. Chade and Fitz became as close as two people so shackled to the Farseers can ever be, but it’s hard to miss the fact that, after a decade and a half, Chade’s visit lasts a single day, and ends when Fitz refuses to return to the yoke of royal service. There is love between them, but there is also obligation, and Chade will not let Fitz enjoy the one without the other. And, indeed, it’s not clear that Chade himself even knows what that looks like, having served the Farseers himself for many more years than Fitz has been alive.

Starling comes next. She visits Fitz regularly, sleeps with him too, but Fitz is well aware that their relationship is not anything to do with love. It’s convenient, it’s easy. Starling brings news and stories, and her presence offers some novelty into Hap’s otherwise quite constrained life. Her visits are also how Kettricken keeps tabs on Fitz, because no one ever lets a Farseer escape. Fitz is under no illusions that they share anything real, and so when Hap returns from an excursion with Starling to Buckkeep to reveal that Starling is now married, Fitz has no difficulties breaking off their sexual liaison.

I need to jump ahead to the next book at this point, which isn’t fully fair, but which I think is important to allow me to make the point I want to make here. Later, in Golden Fool, Starling is still grumpy at Fitz for breaking off their liaison, and Chade tells Fitz that it’s not just about hurt pride and sex. It’s also about Starling’s professional pride in her job as a minstrel. She has been a first-hand witness to one of the most monumental events in her lifetime—the reawakening of the dragons that drove off the Red Ship Raiders at the end of the Farseer trilogy. She is one of the very few people alive who knows what happened to Verity, and that FitzChivalry Farseer didn’t die in Prince Regal’s dungeon. She is a minstrel—and what’s more, she is a woman who is barren. Her sole chance of leaving a mark on the world is with her work, her songs, her histories. At her fingertips she has intimate access to the grandest story she will every encounter. And she must keep it secret. It is maddening, infuriating, stifling. At least while she was sleeping with Fitz she felt like she was still connected with this tale. When he calls things off, he shuts her out of this one thing that connects her to the sweep of history which will be forever out of her grasp.

So what we see with Chade and Starling is the mingling of what could be love with professional complications. Chade offers one kind of love, of a mentor, an uncle, a teacher—but it is conditional on Fitz’s service to the Farseers. Starling offers something that resembles another kind of love—but it is linked not to Fitz, but to the historical figure that Fitz will be remembered as. In both cases, whatever kind of love, affection, or connection that Fitz is offered is complicated by Chade’s and Starling’s professional concerns, which always come before simple human connection.

And then the Fool arrives. He’s changed color now; he’s no longer stark white, as he was in Farseer. He’s turned golden (hence the trilogy’s name, Tawny Man), he’s built lives and identities and an astonishing amount of wealth. He was Amber back in the Liveship Traders, and he knows a heckuva lot more now about dragons than he did two trilogies ago. But all of those identities are secondary to his primary self: He is the White Prophet, and he needs his Catalyst to help bring dragons back to the world, and so he comes to Fitz.

So here, too, Fitz’s oldest, truest, dearest friend offers him a love that is connected to professional concerns. The Fool loves Fitz, but the White Prophet also needs his Catalyst.

But here’s the difference: these two loves are not connected. As we’re going to see throughout the trilogy, there is everything complicated about the Fool’s love for Fitz, and vice versa, but the one thing that is not present in all those complications is the sense of a necessary connection between the Fool and Fitz’s relationship on the one hand, and their respective statuses as White Prophet and Catalyst on the other. The two things coexist, but they are not as fundamentally linked.

And this, I think, is what makes the Fool different from everyone else in this series. Everyone wants something from Fitz, not out of respect or concern for him as a person, but out of an awareness of the role he can play in their lives. Only the Fool is able to separate what he wants from Fitz as his Catalyst from what he wants from Fitz as a person. As the White Prophet, he knows that he must keep his Catalyst alive through the trials ahead in the next two books; but as the Fool, he grieves at what he knows Fitz must endure. (Really, the Fool is the only character in the whole Realm of the Elderlings who is aware that he's in a Robin Hobb book.) Throughout the whole series we're going to see Fitz waver and wibble about which version of the Fool's identity is the real one. But it's always clear to me, the reader, that the truest version of the Fool is the version Fitz knows. The version that loves him, uncomplicatedly, truly, as a person, not a Catalyst.

And Fitz, being a complete dumbass, can’t see it, can’t accept the Fool's love for what it is. Or he does see it, and absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. Nowhere is this clearer than when Fitz asks the Fool his name—not ‘Fool,’ not ‘Lord Golden’ or whatever name he uses for his current schemes, but his real name, the name his mother called him when he was born. And the Fool grins widely, makes Fitz promise to use that name, and then reveals, “Beloved. She called me only ‘Beloved’.” And when Fitz balks at this (because, I repeat, he is a massive dumbass), the Fool says only, “then I shall call you Beloved… Good night, Beloved. We have been apart far too long” (p. 119).

And how does Fitz react? He thinks, “Conversation was hopeless when he got in these moods” (p. 120). Blind! Wilfully unseeing! The one source of love that is offered to him, uncomplicatedly, and he pretends it doesn't exist—or worse, actively rejects it. We’ll see how that goes down in Golden Fool, next month. To preview the gist, however, just remember that Golden Fool is book 2 of a Robin Hobb trilogy, so, in short, it won't go well.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool’s Errand [Voyager, 2001].

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: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: 28 Years Later

The third entry in the series is a breathtaking glimpse at brutality, humanity, and hope

The week prior to seeing 28 Years Later I reactivated my long-dormant account my local video rental store to catch up on the series, since 28 Days Later isn't streaming anywhere. I reacquainted myself with the rage virus (it's important to remember that the infected in these movies are NOT living dead zombies, but deeply ill human beings with a horrible disease) and remembered that the focus in the series (like all good post-apocalyptic media) isn't on the monsters but on the people left behind. I think some folks forget this key part of dystopian storytelling.

If you want just a run-of-the-mill shoot 'em up of infected, play Call of Duty: Zombies with unlimited ammo. The nuance is in the horrible reality and choices that human must live with in a post-apocalyptic society, and the thrill and terror comes in knowing that we're only a failed power grid away from having to make similar choices.

I loved this movie, and was in awe of its intellect, direction, acting, and storytelling. It takes the traditional zombie film and adds so much lore expansion that it ends up surpassing the genre entirely.

28 Years Later opens with a throwback to outbreak day as a young British boy named Jimmy watches The Teletubbies as a horde of infected break into his house. He manages to escape to the local church where his father is welcoming judgment day, allowing himself to be killed while Jimmy escapes yet again. (This is the first part of a bookend that we'll revisit later.)

Flash-forward 28 years and we're in what appears to be a thriving small community that's separated from the mainland by a tidal causeway. Things seem nice, if a bit old-timey. Spike, a 12-year-old boy, is being taken to the shore to go hunting with his father Jamie in a sort of rite of passage, and the two embark on their voyage to raucous celebration and cheer. Spike's father sees the voyage as a sort of respite from his ailing wife, Isla, played by Jodie Comer, who is suffering from a disease that the local population cannot name nor cure.

Hunters and searchers are free to go visit the mainland, but one rule of their society is that you do at your own risk—no rescue parties will ever be launched. When Jamie and Spike make landfall, the countryside, which is England untouched by industry, pollution, or commerce, is a vibrant green. They're out for only a short while before they come across the first new evolved form of infected appear—the slow and lows, which are large, slow-moving, and consuming enough calories from the ground to survive on non-human protein like worms. (This reminded me of the bloaters and shamblers from the Last of Us, and it's fascinating to ponder how these two IPs have influenced each other by leapfrogging around various installments over the years.)

This is such an important point, since in prior films the infected died after around 7 months due to starvation. The existence of the slow and lows means that the virus is evolving and mutating. Once again, you have to keep remembering that the infected are not dead—it's so easy to forget and just think things don't make sense.

Seeing the feral groups of rage-infected human is fascinating because they're living together in what appears to be harmony—a sort of society, almost. Humans, no matter what, are still social creatures. And their depiction in 28 Years Later is far different from the brain-thirsty, mindless hordes of zombies in other movies.

Okay, back to the plot: Spike hesitatingly makes his first kill on one of the slow and lows, and he and his father continue on their journey. They next encounter an Alpha version of an infected—enormous, smarter, and more cunning. Also, he's possessed of a comically large phallus that's impossible to ignore in every single shot it's in.

The existence of an Alpha infected is not only incredibly cool, but also makes total sense given its place in the grand scheme of humanity. Maybe he's just the examplar of an evolutionary new type of human—homo sapiens ira, ira being the Latin word for 'rage.'

The Alpha hunts in such a menacing way that Spike and Jamie are forced to sprint back to the island over a half-flooded causeway, cutting it close to the wire before making it in.

This scene is my absolute favorite in the movie, as it's visually stunning to watch, the panicked running kicking up saltwater as the northern lights and bioluminescence in the waves throw colorful shadows all over the scene—all while the looming Alpha bears down on them with cruel efficiency.

Fun fact: 28 Years Later was filmed with hundreds of iPhones. Contrast this with the fact that the original 28 Days Later was also filmed on a portable camera, and it's fun to see just how much video technology has changed in three decades.

Back on the island, the town celebrates Spike's victory as Jamie lies about how courageous Spike was. The scene is very Wicker Man-esque—in fact, the entire vibe of the isolated and strangely violent island society is very folk horror. The town seems frozen in time because it is, as society is regressing to hunter-gatherer-type activities along with very clear gender roles.

In this isolated island world, Queen Elizabeth II will forever be the monarch hanging in frames upon their walls. Underscoring this thematically is director Boyle's decision to splice in footage from Henry V films, along with the incredibly creepy recitation of the poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling.

Later on that evening, Spike sees his father cheat on his mother with a townswoman, which disillusions him as to his father's god-like status. While on their mainland sojourn, Jamie told Spike about a doctor that lives alone and isolated on shore, but mentions that he's crazy and anti-social.

Spike, stewing in his anger and disillusionment, takes Isla the next day and escapes to the mainland in search of this doctor, hoping to help his mother heal from the disease that's affecting her mind and body.

On their search for the doctor, they meet up with a Swedish soldier who was shipwrecked, and he's the sole survivor after members of his team were killed by the infected. There's a fascinating scene where the soldier discusses everyday normal things like online delivery and smartphones, which Spike has absolutely no knowledge of. Another thing it's important to remember about this universe is that only the UK is ravaged and quarantined—everywhere else in the world it's the modern day with all of its conveniences and technology.

The trio comes across an abandoned train that's echoing with shouts of pain and investigate it. An infected woman, feral after years of living with the rage virus, is alone and in the process of giving birth. From start to finish, this scene is absolutely WILD and moving and shocking. Isla, an empathetic mother, approaches gently and actually assists in the birthing process.

For a brief moment, it's just one woman helping another, as has been happening throughout all of human history. The infected woman delivers a regular infant (though most definitely a carrier like the mother in 28 Weeks Later). As the mother begins raging again, the soldier shoots her, and Isla grabs the baby and keeps moving as an Alpha then in turn kills the soldier. Isla and Spike, a new baby in tow, continue on their journey to find the doctor.

This point is where people begin to either start loving or hating 28 Years Later. Up until now, it's been a straightforward look into a new civilization and a raucous infected bow-and-arrow turkey shoot. Pretty standard.

But once Isla and Spike encounter Dr. Kelson, the film turns into an incredibly moving treatise on family, loss, and grief. Meeting Dr. Kelson is a delight, as it's a bald Ralph Fiennes-covered-in-iodine jump scare (a very welcome one, of course!).

Kelson has been living alone and coexisting amongst the infected, in a sort of Jane Goodall-type way. When he saves Isla and Spike in their first meeting, he blows a morphine dart at the Alpha rather than shooting an arrow at his heart. This is the first time I can recall in a "zombie" type movie that someone is approaching them with a nonlethal motive. Again, this could be because they're not zombies, and as a doctor, Kelson appreciates a person's humanity, however little of it there may seem to be.

Kelson is not crazy, despite Jamie's insistence, and over the past 30 years has been building an elaborate Bone Temple as a monument to the countless dead in the UK. He bleaches and sterilizes bones for this process, and the result is towering pillars of femurs, arm bones, and skulls, and it's very reminiscent of catacombs in Europe.

Kelson evaluates Isla and realizes it's metastatic cancer. With her wishes, he euthanizes her while Spike is slightly sedated, returning with her cleaned skull so that he can place it atop the piles of skulls.

This scene is wild, to be fair, but it works for a number of reasons. Isla is finally no longer suffering. Spike is learning first-hand how cruel and horrible and indiscriminate death is. He also is realizing that in this world, no matter grief-struck you are, you cannot stop—you have to keep moving, keep evading, and keep trying to live.

He returns to the island and drops off the infected child, whom he's named Isla, and leaves a note saying that he's going to off on his own for a while. The island that had raised him, he has realized, is not the only way forward.

The movie could have ended here, and it would be completely fine. But we get a few minutes of Spike wandering through the green countryside before being overrun by infected. Then, a posse of jumpsuit-clad long-haired blonde men jump to his rescue—it's Jimmy from the beginning of the movie all grown up! And he and his gang kick butt Power Rangers-style and save Spike.

Now, as a non-British person, I neither knew this was a strange allusion to British entertainer Jimmy Savile nor do I feel qualified to really speak as to how jarring this was for British people to watch. Savile worked with children and was a known predator and abuser, but I didn't know any of this until watching TikToks later about it. For a more in-depth discussion of it, check out this article.

I thought this bizarre ending was truly surreal and definitely very different tone-wise, but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the movie. I've not been able to stop thinking so many different parts, and I can't wait to watch it again.

And good news for fans—28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is set to release January 16, 2026 as the first installment in a new trilogy. And yes: that is roughly 28 weeks later from now. We see what you did there, Danny Boyle.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E9

In episode nine, “Welcome to the Rebellion,” Mon Mothma begins to understand the cost of what she has been supporting financially for years

The episode opens with the Ghorman ambassador being arrested in the wake of the Ghorman massacre. Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt) and Mon Mothma know now is the time for action, especially since the Imperial news is continuing the propaganda machine. As Organa says, “The winner writes the story.” To which Mothma responds, “Well, they haven’t won yet.”

It’s Mon Mothma’s moment to use her power in the Senate to attempt to make a difference. Organa decides to stay to buy more time for Yavin to develop, but after her speech, Mothma will flee to Yavin and join their leadership.

While prepping for her speech, her assistant, Erskin (Pierro Niel-Mee), finds a listening device, which Mothma destroys, alerting the ISB that something may be happening in her office. She goes to the plaza to practice her speech, where Luthen finds her. Perhaps unsurprisingly to viewers, her assistant works for Luthen and was recruited at the wedding of Mothma’s daughter. Mothma sees it as a betrayal that neither Luthen nor Erskin told her about the connection, but Luthen sees it as her assistant protecting her. Even so, feeling betrayed by Luthen, she struggles to trust his next piece of intel—that the extraction team Bail Organa has prepped to take her to Yavin has been infiltrated.

Meanwhile, Cassian is exhausted and shaken after escaping the Ghorman massacre. He meets with Kleya to receive what he claims will be his last mission with Luthen. She confronts him: “You’re tired. It’s too much, it’s too hard. You were a witness to the Ghorman massacre; one would think there’d be no stopping you.” He emphasizes he needs to “start making my own decisions,” but Kleya has a response for that, too: “I thought that’s what we were fighting for.”

Even so, he agrees to help rescue Mothma and enters the Senate as a reporter, at the same time as Organa’s compromised team also enters with an ISB agent in their group. Cassian connects with Erskin, using the now iconic line, “I have friends everywhere.” Even though Mothma immediately dismissed Erskin, he continues to help make sure she escapes.

In the senate, Mothma waits for Organa to create an opening for her. Earlier in the episode, an ISB agent had made clear that no pro-Ghorman senators would be allowed to speak, and the glimpses of the Senate narrative throughout the episode continue the Imperial line that the Imperial soldiers are “martyrs,” and that the Ghormans were not massacred but causing an insurrection. With some political maneuvering, Organa is able to break through the blockade of voices and yield the floor to Mothma. When his ploy works by invoking a specific Senate rule about emergencies, the ISB immediately orders the shutdown of the feed.

I often comment on the brilliant monologues and speeches throughout the show, but Mothma’s speech is perhaps the most important and moving in our current moment. Since I heard her speech, I have not been able to stop thinking about the line, “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.” Immediately after the episode ended, I had to look up when the episode had been filmed, because it felt impossible that Gilroy and his team had written this speech with such prescience, but in interviews, Gilroy has discussed they had wanted the speech to feel as timeless as possible, which they achieved. With rising fascism and the violence of empire globally, there are certain patterns, and the pertinence of Mothma’s speech comes from recognizing those patterns and exploring them in Andor.

Rewatching this episode, the “death of truth” shook me even more as the U.S. enters yet another war on the lie of weapons of mass destruction, as more of my neighbors are disappeared off the streets of my rural hometown under the lie of being “illegal” or a “criminal,” of watching the lie that Palestinians are receiving “aid” when they are instead being murdered while world governments do nothing. Mothma counters the death of truth by speaking the truth aloud, which is when the Senate reacts to her speech: she calls the Ghorman massacre “unprovoked genocide.” Saying the word at that moment is what causes the Senate to react, and is part of claiming that truth. Words like “genocide” and “fascism” are brushed aside as extreme, as incendiary, but Mothma’s speech shows the power of using the word in the right moment, of calling something what it is.

Interestingly, Andor sets up this as being one of the most important moments in Mothma’s career. In the Senate, we see moments of her advocating for different ideas—especially for the Ghormans throughout  both seasons—but we don’t necessarily see her as being impactful in the Senate. Rather, in season 1, she is useful to Luthen because she funds his actions. In season 2, her attempt to help the Ghormans with a petition is ineffective, and even she knows that. Instead, her disruption of the Senate and her speech being aired is demonstrated as being impactful as opposed to her political power. I’ve been curious about what tactics of resistance Andor shows as working versus failing. For example, Ghorman’s plaza protest fails, but Mothma’s speech scares the Empire into frantically cutting it off.

Importantly, the only reason the Empire doesn’t succeed in immediately silencing Mothma is because of two unnamed technicians. These two technicians have maliciously followed the rules in order to slow down operations by locking out their supervisor. The exchange is worth repeating:

Supervisor: “It’s locked. Why is it locked?”

Technician: “It’s supposed to be.”

Supervisor: “It hasn’t been all year.”

Technician: “We know. We fixed it.”

Supervisor: “What?”

Technician: “We checked the protocol.”

Supervisor: “Open it.”

Technician: “You need the sequence key.”

Supervisor: “So let’s have it.”

Technician: “We took it up to the security office yesterday…”

The technician even speaks slowly compared to the frantic supervisor, who runs off to find the key, while the technicians smile to each other. Much like the hotel clerk Thela, this example of how to commit malicious compliance—a way to gum up the Empire without breaking any rules—is yet another example of praxis in this show that anyone can do off the screen.

At the very end, Mothma’s speech is cut off, but she’s successfully delivered her message to the galaxy, and finds Cassian standing outside. With the help of Erskine, Cassian kills the ISB agent on Organa’s team, then they escape to her ship. The titular moment of this episode comes as they are hurrying away from the dead body of the ISB agent and Mothma is struggling with the moment of violence, getting her hands dirty in a different way than she’s used to: “I’m not sure I can do this.” Cassian responds: “Welcome to the rebellion.” 

Cassian brings Mothma to the safehouse where he and Bix used to live, and he’s informed by Kleya and Erskine that Yavin will take over Mothma’s travel, and Cassian will essentially be written out of the story in order to make a grander narrative for Yavin. Cassian takes this in stride, but it mirrors how Mothma’s very public moments, like her speech, can only happen because of the work of Luthen, Cassian, and Kleya, which they receive little to no credit for.

These types of moments undermine the larger hero’s journey that Star Wars is so known for. The only reason these heroic moments happen—like Mothma’s speech or blowing up the Death Star—is because of the unsung work of people like Cassian, Bix, Wilmon, the hotel clerk, and the technicians, and all the other large and small acts of defiance.

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

Book Review: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Bringing a new found family perspective to the story of the greatest Greco-Roman mythology superhero.

When I wrote my review of Stephen Fry’s Troy in 2022, I had imagined it to be an endpoint to a boomlet of books interpreting and reinterpreting Greek mythology from a variety of perspectives. Little did I know that Fry himself has a new book in his series, but more importantly, and germane to this review, John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) would step up to the plate of tackling and interpreting Greek mythology. And, what's more, take the biggest of swings to the most famous hero of Greek mythology in the process.

And so we come to his second novel, Wearing the Lion.

If you are at all familiar with anyone in Greek mythology, you probably know something about Heracles (or, if you want to go Roman, Hercules). Having a TV series devoted to him in the 1990’s certainly helped. His labors come up (even if why he had to do the labors sometimes is fuzzy in the minds of many people). His prodigious strength, certainly is the stuff of legend. He is really is the OG superhero of Classical western literature.

 
And then there is of course the monsters in Heracles' story, where Wiswell comes in.

In many stories of his even before his breakout novel, John Wiswell has been writing and thinking about monsters¹. Monsters are one of his core themes and ideas and exploring monsters, from the inside as well as out, is one of his strongest power chords. And Heracles’ story, let’s face it, is positively littered with monsters. Nearly all of his labors are capturing or killing something monstrous. Probably, the most famous of these is the Nemean Lion, the one whose hide is impenetrable to weapons. How do you defeat a monstrous carnivore you can’t hurt with a spear or a sword? In the main line of the myth, Heracles wrestles it to defeat, uses its own claws and teeth to cut the hide, and then wears it for the rest of his life as some rather good light armor.

 
Wiswell comes up with a rather different idea, and hence the book’s title and the throughline for the book. Why would Heracles, himself a monster in some ways, not seek to befriend monsters rather than to slay them? And what does that do to his myth and story? The Nemean Lion is the first, but far from the only monster that Heracles meets and befriends in the course of the narrative. Heracles is not afraid of a fight, or of war, but this is a Heracles that would rather make a friend. Again, and again. Wearing the Lion is not an act of violence... it is an act of love.

The book alternates point of view between Heracles and Hera. You might be familiar that in most myths, Hera hates Heracles and from birth tries to kill or weaken him². Wiswell plays on the fact that while Hera hates Heracles (for being a bastard son of her philandering husband Zeus), Heracles himself is for most of the book absolutely and positively devoted to “Auntie Hera”. He takes the “Hera’s Glory” of his name (that is what his name means) and hits that theme again and again. This imbalance between a Heracles who is always trying to live up to his divine stepmother and be worthy of her, not knowing she is seeking his downfall, drives a lot of the plot, and some of the more mordant humor of the book. There is the damoclean sword hanging over the narrative--what happens when Heracles finds out what Hera really thinks of him?

 
But the book begins lightly and sprightly enough, in a style that I’ve come to associate with Wiswell’s writing. It almost, I think, strays over to being twee. The conversational tone of the chapters contributes to this, as we often have Heracles, or Hera, talking to (or even more often addressing ) another character in the chapter. The second person point of view gets a workout in this novel and uses it frequently

For all of that rather light tone at the beginning, though, Wiswell is willing to go dark, and in fact to tell his story has to go dark.. I should not have been entirely surprised given his short fiction but there is definitely a gear shift in this book, before and after the death of his children. I had wondered, being relatively familiar with the Heracles story, how Wiswell was going to go there, since he changes a lot of the rest of his labors and background. But indeed, Heracles does in fact kill his three children thanks to a bout of divine madness. What had started as a relatively light Heracles and the monsters story shifts into a more serious and somber tone with less humor and more drama. Heracles of course wants to know why this happened, convinced some god must have done this, and so the rest of his narrative shifts to the quest to find that out.

There is also good work on the theme of identity and who you are. The fact that one of Heracles’ early names Alcides is used again and again, and Heracles reverts to that name when he feels no longer worthy of the name Heracles. This reminds me of Doctor Who’s The War Doctor, stripping himself of the title Doctor, and having in his own mind to re-earn and regain the right to use that name. Lots of Wiswell’s characters at some point have crises or have to come to terms with who they are and their nature. His take on Heracles is another in that spirit and mode.

Meantime, on the other side, Hera has reconsiderations of the fallout of what she has done. A strong beat Wiswell hits again and again is that Hera is Goddess of the Family. Families, especially pregnant mothers but all families in general, are her divine mandate. And instead of killing Heracles with the madness, she wound up killing his family instead³. Coming to terms with all that and what happens next, along with Heracles’ own quests, makes up the back portion of the book. And as Heracles befriends more monsters and completes more quests, the eventual conflict of Hera’s plans and Heracles’ own quest head toward inexorable conflict.

 
So the novel is really in the end about Heracles and his found family of monsters and how they intersect with Hera and her family of gods and goddesses. There is a lot of lovely bits set on Olympus with Hera and the parts of the Olympian pantheon we see--in particular Ares and Athena, although a couple of others come in as well. A criticism I might have for the book is that a few opportunities were definitely missed on this side of the equation, especially with Hera given the divine mandate of motherhood and family being an important theme of the novel. Demeter and Persephone for instance, aren’t even named. The wrangling between the deities we do get and see, however is gold, and their squabbling never gets old⁴. The novel really is, from Hera’s perspective, the slow realization that Heracles’ group of monsters with him are, in fact, a family. Heracles’ story is the slow realization of his own nature, what he did, and coming to terms with himself. And, not to bury the lede, learning to actually accept his family for and what they are.

 
Wearing the Lion shows off John Wiswell’s talents for humanizing and making monsters into people and again, like his first novel, showing that people can often be the real monsters of society. This book doesn’t quite hit that theme as hard as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, this novel though is much more about building and creating a found family...and accepting them and accepting them and their love into you, as much as you loving them. Heracles gets the latter part right off... but he (and Hera) need to learn the first half of that equation matters, too.

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Highlights:

• Interesting take on the Heracles myth exploring his relationship with Hera in a new way
• Strong theme of found family of monsters
• At turns funny, mordant, and without warning, will tear your heart out (a John Wiswell book in other words)

Reference: Wiswell, John, Wearing the Lion, [DAW 2025]

¹Dream conversation at a con or literary event ? Get John Wiswell to talk to Surekha Davies (author of Humans A Monstrous History) about monsters. That’s box office gold. 

²As Fry notes in his books, though, there are a multiplicity of varieties and variants to Greek mythology. Heracles' story is no exception and in fact, he was enormously popular across the Mediterranean. Heracles is actually Hera’s chosen champion in Etruscan mythology and we get none of the “try and kill him” business.

³In this version of the myth, Hercules kills his children but not his wife, who remains loyal to him and important to his redemption. Is that “correct” to the myth? See footnote 2.

⁴Allow me once again to lament the cancellation of KAOS, with Greek Gods set in the Modern Day. 

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

Film Review: Ballerina

Change the accoutrements and this movie would be low fantasy - prove me wrong

Ballerina is, on some level, a blatant cash grab, more so than the other John Wick movies, by virtue of being an interquel. It is an interquel because it needs to be set at a time when John Wick, the man you hire to kill the boogeyman, is alive, and by the end of the fourth movie John Wick is dead (spoilers for a movie from 2023, sorry). Trying to slot in a film between two other films in a sequence is ungainly at the best of times (the good people over at TVTropes have discerned a rather thorny continuity issue with this movie vis-a-vis the other movies in the series). But, for this movie, I choose to look at its continuity in the way I look at James Bond movie continuity, where the whole thing is malleable and something of a mess, and as such I will care about continuity about as much as the films will.

Ballerina contains within itself another iteration of the John Wick series’ spectacular worldbuilding. This series has the best worldbuilding I have ever seen that has not a single obvious supernatural element to it. By virtue of being set in a criminal underworld, there is room for all sorts of weird micro-societies and cultures, some of them bordering on a religion. The one that takes pride of place in this film is the one in which our protagonist is immersed. It is an all-female organization of assassins and bodyguards who, in addition to all their combat training, also have to learn to be first-class ballerinas. You see your main character, played by Ana de Armas, be grilled in her ballet technique intercut with her more obviously violent education, and by the end of it the stage on which she practices is covered in blood. Ballet as an art form is brutal on the body, as shown in previous John Wick movies as well as 2018’s Red Sparrow, and for that reason is so often juxtaposed with more violent endeavors. On an aesthetic level, it works as a juxtaposition between beauty and death, and the whole thing feels like something out of a fantasy novel, or even a Greek myth about the Amazons.

The Ruska Roma, the ballet/homicide organization that our protagonist, Eve Macarro, joins in the beginning of the film is confronted with an enemy that likewise feels like something out of a fantasy novel. This organization is a religious/homicidal cult whose raison d'être is shrouded in mystery (which is a polite way of saying somewhat vague, but it works) that has existed for centuries, and based in a town in the Austrian alps. In some ways, they are the perfect mirror of the Ruska Roma, also being fanatical and cold-blooded. Every little bit of world-building you get here is through character actions, rather than ham-handed exposition or hackneyed dialogue. You are finding out who these people are right alongside Eve, and the strangely impassioned but always scary behavior makes for a compelling villain.

An aside - there is a bit where the head of this cult in the Alps mentions that a leader of said cult has not had to flee in two hundred years - I would read the shit out of fan-fiction about this cult’s involvement in the Tyrolean Rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, because I am a fucking nerd.

The action here, as in all the other John Wick films, is spellbinding. There is the obligatory shoot-out in a nightclub, this time in New York. As familiar as such scenes are in this series, the film still justifies its presence by virtue of the use of the bright, contrasting colors used decoratively. You also get a good deal of mileage out of that town in Austria run by the cult; there is a well-done fight in a kitchen with use of kitchen utensils (in a manner far more creative than this year’s Novocaine). You will also get the most off-the-wall usage of flamethrowers I have ever seen in any film ever, as well as the most creative use of a hose I have ever seen in any film ever. The series has, fortunately, not devolved into cliché.

Ana de Armas brings a strong presence to her leading role as Eve Macarro. Eve is what I would imagine John Wick himself was like as a young assassin learning the ropes (and how to hang people with them) of the homicide business, but of course gender-swapped. Eve has to build up a tolerance of killing, something John Wick has had the entire run of his namesake series, so there is a trepidation here that has to be overcome. Her gender, of course, changes a lot. The most spectacular, and most poignant, of these is during her training in the Ruska Roma, where her superior tells her that she will be weaker and smaller than any man she fights, and she must always remember that. This immediately cuts to Eve fighting a man in a spar; to make up for the difference in size, she attacks his groin repeatedly, and he is clearly in incredible pain. Throughout the movie, you see a woman turning from someone relatively normal, albeit having gone through a tremendous loss, into an amazon who can dance.

Only a few days after I saw this movie, I read David Foster Wallace’s (no known relation to the author of this piece) essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, whose namesake essay is about his time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He finds a brochure aboard the ship with an essay-cum-advertisement by the acclaimed writer Frank Conroy. Wallace is quite perturbed by this essay, not because it isn’t good (on a craft level, he says, it is superb), but that nowhere it is disclosed that Conroy was paid for it. This essay, argues Wallace, is an advertisement pretending to be art:

“In the case of Frank Conroy's ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

This is an argument that I think is worth thinking about in relation to big media franchises, of which John Wick has most certainly become in recent years. The purpose of a media franchise is to be enjoyed first, and then to advertise future works in the franchise for the ultimate financial gain of the franchise owner. John Wick, the man, the character portrayed by Keanu Reeves, is something of a modern folk hero, in what Henry Jenkins described as “a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” The question, then, are franchise films art? Is Ballerina art?

I would argue yes. So many great works of painting and sculpture are here in this world for us to appreciate because of the patronage of the wealthy; hell, the art on the Sistine Chapel is a prominent example. It bears mentioning here that Ballerina started out as an original project before being retrofitted into the John Wick universe. Like the great works of the Renaissance, Ballerina owes its existence to men of great wealth, but ultimately it has enough substance, enough meat on the bone, to be enjoyable.

(also the song at the credits is extremely catchy)

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