Review: The Photonic Effect by Mike Chen

 Mike Chen’s The Photonic Effect wears its twin inspirations on its sleeve, and boldly launches Chen’s work into the subgenre of Space Opera and makes it so.

These are the voyages of the GCF Horizon. It’s mission was to establish and map a new trade route for the Cluster. Instead, it spent ten years in a gravity well with a host of other trapped ships. Upon escape and return to Cluster space, they had found that in the decade since, a civil war had broken out. Now, with the experimental photonic drive that allowed them to escape the gravity well, the Horizon is seen as a tool, or a weapon, by both sides. And it turns out they have unfinished business with the Lumersians in the gravity well. Although the costs of pursuing that might be high indeed for the crew, and perhaps far beyond, as well.


This is the story of Mike Chen’s turn into Space Opera, The Photonic Effect.


Star Trek, in several of its incarnations, particularly TNG and Voyager are two of the clear antecedents and inspirations for Chen’s Horizon. This is in terms of the ship, the multi-species nature of the crew, the Federation like Cluster. In terms of characters, our focus is primarily on the bridge and engineer crew of the Horizon, just like a typical Star Trek episode or series. Our Captain, Demora Kim, even has a Star Trek catchphrase, “Take us there”. Like any Star Trek series, we have a multi species crew. In addition to the humans, including a human from another universe (thanks to that gravity well), the Horizon also has a Dwyen, a humanoid species with a pack based hierarchical structure and outlook. And then there is Chuck...who is rather unusual and not really an active member of the crew at present, although he was crucial to the Horizon’s return to normal space. Given that Chen has written a DS9 comic, it’s clear and easy to see how he is channeling Star Trek into his unique world.


The other inspiration is a somewhat more complicated and in some aspects, darker one to draw from on occasion. And that would be the videogame series Mass Effect. Mass Effect, for those who have never played the games, takes place in a galaxy where Humans are the new kids on the block and eager to prove themselves. The game can turn dark and complicated, with various forces and factions striving in a cutthroat galaxy, including secret factions and powers that the player character are engaged with. And to be truthful, the Horizon does feel much more like the Normandy from Mass Effect than most of the mainline Star Trek series central ships, except maybe Voyager. The ship is not all that large, and it is not even built well for war,¹ which makes people coveting it all the more perilous for the crew of the Horizon. They cannot shoot their way ot of situations, even if they would consider doing so.


With these two powerful influences, Chen has the tools to tell his own tale and develop his own story and verse. Chen relies on a core set of characters and is interested in telling a story of how this flawed found family has to deal with the challenges of return, their own limitations, flaws and failures, and how to forge and come together to face threats. From Kim on down, we get a set of complicated and multi-sided characters much more DS9 in some ways in terms of characters than other Star Trek characters. Or, again, see Mass Effect. The fail points and weaknesses of each of the characters makes each of them real, and engaging to read and follow.


Chen keeps his points of view on three characters:


Kim, the Captain, as our primary character, and the framing device at the front tells us this is her retirement interview and debriefing of her last mission. Kim went through a lot to try and get crew back home, and paid a price herself in seemingly losing her chance at romance with the aforementioned Chuck. Kim is interestingly flawed, is often caught in bad decisions or situations and has to strive to regain her crew’s trust, and to do better.


Another primary point of view is Tanav. Tanav isn’t part of the crew, not exactly, he’s an entertainer from another universe whose ship got caught in the gravity well. Circumstances forced him, along with other ships, to get on board the Horizon. He’s not crew, but he acts in a capacity of an entertainer. Tanav is conflicted--he misses his home universe, although his relations with his parents was rather complicated. And in a ship full of officers and engineers, he does wind up being a bit of an odd-man out. Tanav’s story is one of growth, in the face of conflict and fire, and it shows you don’t have to be the Captain or Chief Engineer to be a hero.


Third, Neera is the aforementioned Chief Engineer on board the Horizon and is the aforementioned Dwyen, which allows Chen to play with humanoid but not quite human. Chen does a great job not only in appearances, but going further and giving Neera a distinctive verbal cadence. I will bet that when I listen to the audiobook, I will be able to tell when Neera is speaking by the way she constructs her sentences, distinctive from all others. Like Kim, she’s imperfect, and her choices in trying to get the Photonic Drive to work wind up with major consequences for everyone.


The whole situation, seen in flashback and recollection, of that last mission that had the Horizon in the gravity well for ten years is an excellent bit of writing, dribbling out details from their ten year ordeal and how they had to make sacrifices and paid costs in order to stay alive. In this way, it feels a lot more like a darker Voyager and much more into Mass Effect territory in that regard. And all of that provides backstory and ballast to the core crew of the Horizon, including the characters who don’t get viewpoints.²


Chen does have two crucial characters who are not from the original mission, and since they don’t have the ballast of the backstory of having gone to the well and having that connection to the crew, or to the world, they don’t come off quite as well. Commander Matthews, foisted onto the Horizon upon their return to the Cluster, definitely has an agenda of his own, and his antagonistic relationship with the crew definitely provides tension. He also provides a more classic sort of square jaw hero, and one, in roleplaying terms, has gone on the heavy side of combat and physical skills that most of the rest of the characters cannot begin to match. The other character I will not mention, as they become the ultimate antagonist of the book. The slow reveal of their true plans and intentions is an excellent bit of craft on the part of the author.


The aforementioned unusual nature of Matthews vis a vis the rest of the crew makes it clear that this is a much more late Star Trek than early Star Trek in terms of the characters approach to problems. The relatively weaponless nature of the Horizon and the lack of skills in weapons and tactics (Matthews excepted) means that the problems faced and solved usually fall to cleverness, or engineering, or science, as opposed to high grade weaponry and battle tactics.


And the book is a lot of fun to read. If you are a fan of Star Trek, or Mass Effect, this book is relevant to your interests in creating a familiar, yet unique, space opera world. And if you ever wondered what you would get by mixing that peanut butter and chocolate, this book, like it was for me, will entirely be your jam. It’s entertaining, deep, philosophical, reflective, and when the action beats need to happen, Chen delivers. And the world portrayed is a rich space opera verse, giving enough detail beyond the bounds of the Horizon itself to invite the playground of the imagination.


The book closes off Kim’s story, but given that this is a retirement debriefing on page one, a reader must surely guess that this is the end of her career anyway. The adventure may continue with the Horizon, and with other members of the crew, but as primary point of view and this being Kim’s story, the novel is not, as you might be worried, first in an endless series. Like the rest of Chen’s oeuvre to date, it is a stand alone novel that provides an excellent story, flawed and memorable characters, strong worldbuilding and much more for the reader to discover.

 

Highlights:

• Mass Effect X Star Trek = Entertaining Space Opera

• Strong set of flawed and interesting characters

• Rich and interesting world. 

Reference:

Chen, Mike, The Photonic Effect, (Saga Press 2026)

¹ A reference point for me that Chen probably did not intend comes from the board game Star Fleet Battles, which is set in a version of the Star Trek universe. In that game, there is a design for a Federation cruiser that is very much defanged for war but has high capabilities for science and long range reconnaissance ---the Galactic Survey Cruiser.  The Horizon feels a lot more like a Galactic Survey Cruiser than a regular Federation ship.

² There is a tuckerization from Star Trek, too. Watch for it!

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

Graphic Novel Review: The Power Fantasy vol. 3 by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes

This comic about superheroes continues to pack a punch. Intellectually. But also fist...ly.

I like allegory books. Not always in the execution of every single instance, but in general, I’m predisposed towards a bit of “this is actually about daddy issues” (what isn’t?). But the thing is the thing is. When someone does it right, when they go all the way with it, when they say to your face what they’re doing, then do it so hard, so well, that it somehow loops round to surprise you with its sheer commitment to the bit? That shit’s magic.

And so, The Power Fantasy Volume 3: The End of History.

These (see here and here for reviews of volumes 1 and 2) have never been books to be shy about their ethical focus, their use of humans with superpowers to embody the problem of nuclear weapons and the idea of the nuclear deterrent. There’s no sneaky sneaky going on. And yet, this volume has managed to smack me in the face with that stated premise nonetheless.

As a quick recap, the premise of the story as a whole is that superheroes exist, and have done so visibly since the beginning of nuclear testing. Some of them have powers of equivalent capability (or significantly more) to nuclear weaponry, and pose a danger of concomitant level to humanity. But the people who wield them are still... predominantly... human, and prone to the emotional and interpersonal struggles that define us all. What happens when those mix with nuclear-level destructive capabilities? Well, Europe doesn't exist anymore. The story explores the interpersonal drama of a group of the strongest extant atomics, as they are called, and how they navigate their relationships with each other, their powers, their moral philosophies and the fate of the world. Whether that's Etienne trolley-probleming through increasingly horrible decisions, Valentina coming from literal heaven and trying her best to keep everyone together, Eliza with her hell-given powers and a lot of Catholicism, Masumi trying her best not to become a Tokyo-destroying kaiju, Heavy and his inclination to punch his way out of problems or Jacky and his swaggering English MLM cult trying to get in bed with the US government, there are a lot of angles through which the problems are being approached.

It helps that all of those characters, however outlandish their powers and backgrounds, remain well enough drawn, both visually but also in their behaviour, their individual voices and mannerisms, their backgrounds and morals and contexts, that they are intensely comprehensible, even as their stories take them to stranger and remoter places from our understanding. There's a lot of great work happening in grounding the outlandish in the real at just the right moments, and it forms the necessary foundation for the moments when things go to those far, strange places. They've done the work in the previous two volumes to make them believable, and it is absolutely paying off now.

It's also an intensely thoughtful story so far, with a heavy dose of utilitarian philosophy and not a small amount of theology sitting alongside the more usual approach to superpowered people. The writing leans heavily on exploring those intellectual underpinnings, using it as a scaffold to direct the wider story, as these difficult people hurtle through an increasingly fraught world.

Which all gives the story an interesting narrative progression. Volume 2 already chose to go with a character death (spoilers on that incoming, just go read the whole series first, you'll thank me for it) that felt both entirely inevitable and an absolute gut-punch, so I wasn't necessarily expecting the kind of escalation we've been given in volume 3. I am, perhaps, a bit too used to the slow and tidal pacing of long comic series, where dramatic revelations are often followed by period of downtime, to allow new events to settle into the context before stepping forward into the next drama. I had assumed The Power Fantasy would do something similar, letting us assimilate the consequences of Etienne's death and the revelation to the reader and Valentina that this... was not actually the case, and consider how the various shifting factions of the story would react to the change in the fundamental dynamic.

It... does not.

Instead, this volume, which encompasses issues 12-16 of the comic, is a steady progression of increasing crescendo's, leading to an ending that I could simply never have predicted. This upending of the typical flow of pacing feels deliberate - it's unsettling, and we should be unsettled! It all feeds back into that same commitment to the analogy. When you are handling fundamentally scary ideas, ones that think about the possibility of the deaths of millions... of course you want the reader to be uncomfortable, on edge, unsure what to expect. And also, that kind of rapid, almost uncontrolled sense of escalation feels... well, it feels exactly how the kind of world-ending scenario these books have always been about would feel. It's analogy all the way down, right to its bones. That commitment to theme just fills every single part of this story, and makes it better for it.

The art remains, as it was in the first two volumes, gorgeous, and is by no means exempt from that commitment. What I think bears extra consideration in this one is how well it is used to illustrate the moments of enormous horror - world-threatening events, city-damaging catastrophes and individual human violence - in a way that both makes an impact visually, but also keeps close the genuine sadness and violence inherent within the moment. It is incredibly necessary, in a book like this, to never let the glory of the spectacle overwhelm the image's role in conveying tone and story, and it never, ever does. Caspar Wijngaard is doing great work here.

If I sound hyperbolic, that's on purpose - I truly think the team behind The Power Fantasy are doing amazing work here, and that needs to be celebrated. It's not fun and happy, but it is challenging, committed and thoughtful, never losing sight of its goals or its core idea and feeling tight and perfectly constructed because of it.

When I reviewed volume 2, I said:

"I struggle to envisage where this goes, to have narrative closure that truly encompasses it all. But I have faith."

Having finished volume 3... there are several ironies in that conclusion. But also, however much I could not see it, however much I could not have expected where the plot would go, the faith I had has been entirely rewarded. The Power Fantasy Volume 3: The End of History is absolutely the best volume so far - and my god I hope we get more of this story, if this gets cancelled midway through I will weep - and promises that wherever they choose to continue going, there is much yet to be delivered from this world, these characters and, fundamentally, the analogy. It is an absolutely stunning (I was stunned) addition to the series, and if you like superhero stories, one I would urge you with the greatest insistence to read.

--

The Math

Highlights: absolute commitment to the analogy, gorgeous art of terrible events, believable characters with unbelievable power

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 3: The End of History, [Image, 2026].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 3: Assassin's Fate

Why couldn’t the dragons just fly the ring to Clerres?

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

OK, I’m going to confess something. I’ve been calling this whole project a “reread,” but in fact, I’ve never actually read this last trilogy. So I didn’t know what was coming when I wrote the last two posts, and I feel VERY SILLY now that I’ve gotten to the end about my ignorant comments blithely asserting that Hobb was mellowing in her cruelty, softening her blows, pulling her punches.

She wasn’t. She was just taking a deep breath before this last book. Be aware: I'm going to abuse italics. I'm very worked up about this.

And although I’ve seen the kinds of blows she can land, still—this book seems the worst, because it was all unnecessary. In the Farseer trilogy, Fitz getting tortured to death in Regal’s dungeons was part of the path to extract himself from his identity as a Farseer bastard, freeing him up to do things like find Verity and help him build his Skill-dragon to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ship raiders. In the Liveship trilogy, Vivacia had to become a slaver so that she’d get taken by Kennit, which would send her (and Paragon) on the path to recovering their draconic roots, thereby enabling them to guide the serpents to their spawning grounds and start a new nest of dragons. In Tawny Man, the Fool getting flayed alive in the Pale Lady’s ice cave was necessary to bring the other dragons back from extinction. These were horrible things that happened, yes, but they served a purpose. They made the world better.

What did we accomplish here in this book? Yes, we rescued Bee (although, honestly, she was doing a pretty awesome job of rescuing herself), but that’s personal. The Farseer line is doing just fine without her: Nettle’s got a baby, Elliania’s got a baby. On the large scale, rescuing Bee is a good thing for Fitz to do as a father, but it’s a very small story for a Robin Hobb trilogy.

But wait! you might say. What about the destruction of Clerres? you might say. That’s a huge thing! That’s incredible! That’s an amazing improvement in the world at large! you might say.

Yes. But Fitz and the Fool didn’t do it. First of all, it was Bee who burned the archives, and second of all, it was the dragons who finished the job. Fitz and the Fool didn’t even need to go to Clerres! For that matter, the Fool didn’t even need to go to Fitz! He could have sicced the dragons on Clerres, left poor Fitz out of it, and everything could have ended happily. Properly happily. Not whatever this together-forever White Prophet and Catalyst nonsense is. Clerres would be rubble, Fitz would be Tom Badgerlock, raising his little daughter Bee and meeting his grandbaby, and the Fool would be…

Well, probably dead. But as I consult my feelings about this book, I find that I don’t really care about the Fool as a character on his own. We have a good few chapters at the end when he’s trying to be a father to Bee, because they both think Fitz is dead and he’s all she has left, and everything about that attempted relationship just falls flat. The Fool on his own is not an interesting person. He only works with Fitz.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s actually a masterful bit of character work. By seeing how grim and lonely and empty the Fool’s life will be without Fitz—denied even by his own child (for a given value of “his own”), bereft of purpose—it is satisfying to see him come to his end, united forever with Fitz (and Nighteyes) in the Skill-wolf.

But I still don’t like him. I cannot forgive him for the misery he brought. The unnecessary misery. In the previous sub-serieses of this saga, it was possible to argue that there was no other way to bring about the events that had to happen.  But here, after all we’ve endured, the dragons rock up and just… tweet it out destroy Clerres to the bedrock, and it’s hard to ignore that big smoking sign trumpeting THIS WAS THE OTHER WAY.

Yes, fine, we’ve had 15 books so far establishing that Fitz will do whatever the Fool asks him, and the Fool loves Fitz and their relationship is complicated and deep and there are layers, and I get it. And also, yes, fine, the Fool was desperate and dying and going to the only person who could help him, the person who knew more of him than he had ever revealed to anyone else who breathed. He wasn’t thinking straight, so it’s understandable he wouldn’t think to ask why the eagles dragons couldn’t just fly the ring their vengeance to Mordor Clerres.

And, yes, we’ve had 15 books in which these sorts of character motivations have been key supporting elements of the plot, resulting in a united, coherent through-line of motivation to justify the troubles. But notice my phrasing there: the character arcs supported the plot. They united with the plot to produce motivation. They were not the sole load-bearing components. Until now.

It’s a cruel author who gives us dragons, shows how the dragons can easily right the most hideous wrongs—and then chucks Fitz into the meatgrinder anyway.

All throughout the book, I was taking notes for a very different write-up. I had all sorts of thoughts about the differences between identities that are assigned to you versus identities you take on yourself. Gender, of course: Fitz trusts the Fool, but not Amber. But also not just gender. Is Bee the Destroyer or the Unexpected Son? Is Beloved or the Pale Lady the true White Prophet? Are liveships liveships, or dragons?

But I don’t have the heart. I am disheartened. Hobb has stolen my heart, enchanted my heart, and then crushed it in her claws. I knew she had it in her. I just didn’t think she would do it to me.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Fate [Del Rey, 2017].

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

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

Season 1 of the Hulu post-apocalyptic mystery show Paradise left me with rather tepid expectations for whichever continuation the story would have. The recently released season 2 has been a happy surprise with deeper characterization, tighter worldbuilding and more cohesive plotting.

A big part of the reason for this improvement is the change in focus toward life outside of the city-sized survival bunker where season 1 was set. Now that our protagonist Xavier has found evidence that his wife survived the fall of civilization, we follow his quest to the coordinates she sent from a makeshift radio transmitter. On the way there, his small airplane crashes, but he’s rescued by Annie, a former medical student who happened to be working as a tour guide at Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis when the world-ending disaster happened. Annie’s presence on screen is brief, but she turns out to indirectly play a major role in subsequent events.

It’s impressive how well delineated Annie’s character gets to be during the short time we spend with her. The neglectful way she was raised left her avid for structure, which makes her a good fit for a job where she has to recite the same script in the same order every day. This personal history equips her well for the boring routine of surviving alone, but after a few years without human contact, its resumption takes huge effort and patience.

Which brings us to Link, another character newly introduced in this season. He leads a loose band of survivalists who want to invade the titular Paradise bunker, but first he has a short encounter with Annie that results in pregnancy. The flashbacks about Link reveal that he used to research advanced quantum physics, which is connected to the vaguely alarming weirdness that starts to gradually creep over the story. I won’t spoil the details, but if you thought that Samantha, the over-prepared creator of the bunker, was a bit too paranoid about securing every avenue of survival, in this season we discover that those measures were nowhere near paranoid enough—she has backup plans inside backup plans, and the flashbacks about those preparations fill the gaps about how she became the ruthless control freak we know her as.

As you can surmise by now, the show continues its tradition, firmly established in the previous season, of delivering half the story via flashbacks. This is a story about saving the future, but its version of the future is never free from the pervasive, life-defining influence of the past. In fact, this time the flashbacks are used more effectively, with a more solid connection to the themes of each episode. Whereas they sometimes intruded in the flow of narration in season 1, here they serve a more intentional function.

The main plot threads of this season have to do with Samantha finding her way back to a dominant position in the bunker microcosmos state after the political shocks that ended season 1, Xavier making it alive to the remote place where his wife has been living after the disaster, and the common people in the bunker coming up with clandestine ways to oppose the authoritarian turn in their government. A theme that unifies much of the plot is motherhood: just as Annie, as well as our favorite psycho murderer Jane, were shaped by the destructive parenting style of their respective mothers, the survival bunker is an incarnation of the extreme opposite: Samantha’s obsessive urge to protect her children at literally any cost. The healthy equilibrium is to be found in Annie herself, whose wish to protect her daughter has to be coupled to her need to trust that Xavier will be a good caretaker for her; and in Xavier’s wife Teri, who unexpectedly finds herself in the position of a substitute mother to a lost child, and whose judgment of character with regard to motherly tasks gives Xavier an accurate hint about someone’s secret sinister side.

The emphasis on motherhood is related to a persistent argument made through the season: the end of the world will not be survived by rough macho warriors, but by compassionate caretakers.

Sadly, a few key characters from season 1 are greatly diminished this time, in particular Xavier’s children, Secret Service agent Nicole Robinson, and former First Son Jeremy Bradford, who get basically no inner development and are reduced to plot levers. Even Jane Driscoll, the fascinating secondary antagonist of season 1, ceases to be interesting in season 2 after all the mystery about her is lost.

The story ends with another cliffhanger: a new mission for Xavier to try to fix the world permanently with the help of the quantum weirdness that the season slowly develops. This means that season 3 will, once again, focus away from the bunker, which has already proved to be the right choice. The future trajectory of this show seems bound to eschew political drama in favor of world-breaking technobabble, certainly a tough target to aim for, but if the writing of season 2 is any indication, we can trust that this story is in good hands.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Interview: Peadar Ó Guilín

In September 2007, Irish writer Peadar Ó Guilín published his first novel, The Inferior, which the Times Educational Supplement called "a stark, dark tale, written with great energy and confidence and some arresting reflections on human nature." Foreign editors liked it too, and over the following year it was translated into eight languages, including Japanese and Korean. His fantasy and SF short stories have appeared in numerous venues, including Black Gate magazine and an anthology celebrating the best of the iconic Weird Tales. He also writes for George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards series. His latest novel, The Sword Garden, is set to release in April, 2026 from Wizard's Tower Press.

NoaF: Congratulations on the release of your latest book! What was the seed of the idea that led to The Sword Garden?

Peadar: I'm always interested in the idea of two worlds overlapping. It happens quite a lot in Irish legends, and I've enjoyed the cool ways the concept has been dealt with before in works by Jack Vance, China Miéville and others. The Sword Garden is just one of several stories of mine where I've squeezed it for fun and profit.

NoaF: Your YA duology The Call is also making a resurgence. Can you tell us a little about the paths those books have taken? What's the wildest thing that's happened for you as a result of their success?

Peadar: The Call duology was about the biggest success I've ever had at anything in my life.

That book brought me all over the world. I had a small tour of the States. I was flown to Australia. I was a guest in Poland. It was an amazing time.

About the wildest thing that happened, though, was this: a friend of mine loved The Call when it first came out. She brought a copy with her when she was visiting a friend in Australia and she gifted it to his teenaged daughter. The daughter, it turned out, was a very talented screenwriter, who went on to win an award for one of her first scripts. Then, she pitched The Call so enthusiastically that it was picked up by a major streamer. They paid for a writers room. They paid for a season full of scripts… And that's where the adventure came to a halt. But it was very exciting while it lasted.

I'm really thrilled that new people are still finding the book, having never heard of it. That never gets old.

NoaF: You've been published by large presses and small. What have been the differences in the big/small press experience for you?

Peadar: Big presses do everything for you. Shops are way more receptive to the idea of trying to sell your book if it comes from a big publisher, and individual hard copies of the novel cost less, so more people can afford them. Media outlets will take you more seriously if a big-time publicist is standing behind you.

A small press, on the other hand, just feels more personal. You are part of the team, rather than the product. It's cozy.

NoaF: You've also self-published. Do you think it's valuable for an author to experience all three paths?

Peadar: Experience is rarely wasted. However, I do think that most writers just want to write their books, send them off to a team that will do everything else, and move on to the next idea. I would prefer that myself, to be honest.

NoaF: Do you have any talks or convention appearances coming up where people might find you?

Peadar: I'll be at EasterCon in the UK (Birmingham) from 3-6 April. That's where we will be launching The Sword Garden. Two weeks later, I'll be in Luxembourg—always a good time. On 8-9 of May, I'll be in Belfast for NornCon—come and say "how's about ye."

NoaF: What are you reading for fun these days? Who else should Nerds of a Feather readers put on their TBR list?

Peadar: I always love Adrian Tchaikovsky's work, but his recent, ongoing fantasy series, The Tyrant Philosophers, is a thing of real beauty. I also had a great time recently with a book called There Is No Anti-Memetic Division, which is a huge recommendation.

6 Books with John Chu

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator by night. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" and won the Best Novelette Nebula for "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You." The Subtle Art of Folding Space is his first novel.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Matching Minds with Sondheim by Barry Joseph. Stephen Sondheim, of course, is one of greatest writers of musical theater of all time. He was also a great creator of games and puzzles. This book explores this aspect of his work to give us more insight into his creative process. Also, it has some of the puzzles and games he created. As you read the book you are, in fact, also matching minds with Sondheim.

 2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed, the author who wrote The Fortunate Fall. It’s a bit lengthy, but I absolutely devoured it. The novel is unabashedly and unapologetically queer. It is an unflinching exploration of gender that takes place on a world whose native living beings have a genuinely alien lifecycle that defy our implicit categorization of living beings. ((I apologize for the awkward wording of that last sentence. I’m trying to avoid spoilers.) All of this takes place in an epically far-future milieu. There is so much to unpack with this novel and it is all fascinating.

I believe both Cameron Reed’s novel and mine have the same release date [April 7th]. Buy both!

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

I don’t generally re-read books. I’m not the world’s fastest reader. Also, the day job and writing doesn’t leave much time for reading. So, I prioritize works that I haven’t read over works I have. At this point, my (virtual) to-be-read pile is so large that I don’t know whether I will ever make my way through. And yet, I keep adding to it.

That said, there are books like The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola that are so far outside my lived experience, I feel like perhaps I need to read it again before I can claim with a straight face that I have read it. In grad school, I rushed through The Book of the New Sun in my spare moments and I would love to experience those novels again at a more leisurely pace. While I’m at it, by sheer coincidence, I read A Fire Upon the Deep while I was studying network architecture. (A novel computer network is a tangential part of my PhD dissertation.) So much of that book referenced what I was also learning about and researching at that moment. It might be nice to revisit that book in a context where that is not the case.

 4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

I read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and was instantly smitten. It is a gorgeously written novel and very much the novel about assimilation that I wanted to write. The book is trenchant about the effects of imperialism and the contradictions it inevitably creates. Mahit is so true to life in that she both admires the culture of the empire, seeing its value, and understands viscerally the cost of that culture. She does this through, in part, the context of language, which is a topic near and dear to my heart.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

I’m going to mention two because I can’t decide. 

The first is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster. Malka Older, who read it recently, posted about it on social media and from that I have to conclude, sadly, that the Suck Fairy has gotten to it. Fear of this is one reason why I never revisited or passed it on to my nieces when they were the right age for it. I gave them more contemporary books. The Phantom Tollbooth, I should note, was already pretty old when I read it. So, maybe the right time to read it was when both you and the world was young enough not to know better.

That said, baby me was absolutely delighted by the sheer invention of all the places Milo visited. I ate up all the absurdity and wordplay. 

That brings me to the second book, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It’s another book that I’m afraid to revisit, lest I find out the Suck Fairy has gotten to that, too. This book almost sparked the love mysteries and sheer wordplay that I still have today. Again, tiny me eeked and gasped at every revelation. Tiny me reveled in the clever way Ellen Raskin manipulated words. 

There is a Chinese translation. One day, I may have to get my hands on it just to see how the translators navigated some potentially thorny issues as the wordplay is very much part of the mystery. (Again, I’m being vague so as to avoid spoilers for a novel that’s nearly 50 years old.) Maybe I should have mentioned this as a novel that I’m itching to re-read. (It depends on whether you call reading it in a different language re-reading.)

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

My latest (read: first) book is called The Subtle Art of Folding Space and it comes out on April 7th from Tor Books. To reference question 4b, this is, to some extent, the book about assimilation that I did write. Right off the bat, the main character, Ellie, is accused of being insufficiently Taiwanese by her sister and, throughout the book, Ellie finds herself navigating the expectations of not just her family but multiple cultures. 

That, however, is the context for a story about the sometimes thankless job of making sure the world keeps working. Ellie is sent off by her sister Chris to the skunkworks, the machinery that generates the physics of the university, to replace a worn part. Chris can’t do it as she insist on being the one and only person to take care of their comatose mother. However, her cousin Daniel shows her that physics has been deliberately modified to keep her mother alive. It’s also causing spurious errors all over the universe. Right at the start, she is forced to make a decision no one should ever be forced to make: the life of her mother or the proper functioning of the universe.

The novel deals with family, assimilation, and the responsibility to make the world work, but it’s also a lot fun. It has both a secret cabal that threatens to topple the order of the universe and a man who makes food appear out of thin air on command. It has both a library with too many physical dimensions and a librarian who is a giant tree trunk mounted on top of a giant spider. It encompasses both the messy aftermath of a death and a car that spontaneously turns into a rhinoceros. I hope the novel captures the absurdity and joy of life and I hope people have as much fun reading it as I have writing it.

Thank you!

Thank YOU, John. 

You can also read a review of The Subtle Art of Folding Space here.

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

Video Game Review: Cocoon by Geometric Interactive

A world within a world within a world...

You may or may not have heard of Matryoshka dolls, those stackable dolls that can be nested within one another. What Geometric Interactive did with Cocoon was take that concept and turn it into an adventure puzzler, but instead of dolls, you stack worlds. That’s right, worlds (or, levels represented as worlds, to be more precise). Hard to imagine, but bear with me here.

Part of Cocoon’s beauty is its simplicity. You use the left stick to maneuver and the X button (on PlayStation) for everything else. That’s it. Want to pick something up? X. Want to activate something? Hold X. In doing this, Cocoon begins with no tutorial. You start the game and get to work. But what are we doing exactly?

Cocoon is a clever adventure/puzzle game, novel in its approach. The protagonist is a little bug with wings exploring a weird set of worlds. It uses orbs to activate different events and solve puzzle mechanics to discover more about the universe. These orbs, when placed on a proper pedestal, can be accessed, a level within a level. The puzzles range from rudimentary to moderate. There were a few times I found myself stuck on a puzzle for more than a few minutes, and those were the moments where the game shone. They made me consider the game, the world, and the mechanics. I’d overcomplicate the solution and find myself running around with orbs for no reason, putting them everywhere and anywhere I could. When it clicked, the game was satisfying, and using the stacking mechanic set the game apart.

Besides the stacking, the game continues to introduce new mechanics throughout its short runtime. By keeping the game brief (maybe five hours), the game stays fresh, pushing the player forward. The new mechanics themselves are not anything earth-shattering, but within the evolution of the game’s progress, they help to maintain curiosity. Once you advance past a puzzle, the game locks off any unnecessary areas so you don’t waste time unnecessarily backtracking. That Geometric Interactive thought of the player in this regard is a significant treat. Even the music, which is serviceable for the needs of the game, tells the player when they’re on the right track to solving the next puzzle.

The worlds themselves are intriguing, if typical. A sci-fi desert world, a world with shifting phases of matter, and a biological world that looks like the anatomical innards of some creature comprise the main playable areas. The brilliance comes into play when you hop between these worlds to move forward, sometimes using one world to activate puzzles in another. Difficult to explain until you see it in action. Cocoon’s puzzles become even more enjoyable toward the end when the player has to juggle multiple orbs and moving components to proceed.

My primary issue boils down to the lack of narrative depth each of these worlds provides. Besides paring down the complexity, the game also completely shuns any sort of narrative above the base-level gameplay and discovery. As I mentioned, you play as an insect exploring the world. But why should I care? What is the purpose? Is this some kind of rite of passage for this insect’s species? The closest thing the game has to lore exists in the “side content”. Small puzzles in not so hidden areas that allow you to release a trapped entity. But there is no information about them, why they were trapped, or how freeing them impacts the world as a whole. It’s just something else to do, and doesn’t provide any challenge.

I am uncertain whether this was the intent of the developer. The game doesn’t provide any true challenge, and is interesting enough to keep you hooked through the gameplay and environment alone. Sure, backtracking can sometimes be a bore, but overall the game moves at a steady pace. There is no story here to intrigue, but there’s also not enough challenge to make someone quit. Is this the perfect balance for an adventure/puzzle game that does not want to include any story elements? Honestly, I think it is.

Depth does not guarantee fun. Sometimes maintaining someone’s interest for a short time is enough. Cocoon does just that. It’s a game that doesn’t impose. It doesn’t ask too much of the player and, in return, it provides an enjoyable experience that allows its novelty to pull you through to the end. Would I have liked more story? Sure. Was it necessary? Not at all. In fact, when I think of the term palate cleanser (regarding video games), Cocoon is an apt example. I may not come back to Geometric Interactive's darling in the future, but I still think it’s worth a play through. For those seeking a game that won’t eat all of your time, something a little different without too much of a challenge, an intriguing (if not deep) world, and some clever puzzles, Cocoon is a perfect fit.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10

Bonus: +1 for world stacking mechanic. +1 for staying fresh.

Penalties: -1 for no lore. -1 for over simplicity at times.

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10

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