Graphic Novel Review: The One Hand and The Six Fingers, by V, Campbell, Watters, Kumar, Loughridge, Bidikar and Muller

 The Left hand can't know what the Right hand is doing

Cover Artist: Anand Radhakkrishnan

I don't read many graphic novels - mainly because I'm a latecomer to the field. I love stories - I read, I listen, I watch. Akira, which I first discovered as an imported graphic novel as teenager cemented a love of visual media. However I haven't ever really had the time for or interest in reading about superheroes. 

In a confession of my own ignorance I discovered only very late that western graphic novels were much broader than simply Marvel and DC. My exploration of what they do have to offer has led to me developing a bit of a habit which I’m sure keeps my local comic book shop happy. 

A recommendation for The One Hand and the Six Fingers came to me through a friend after he sold me on another of Ram V’s standalone stories – Rare Flavours. The One Hand and the Six Fingers has a central premise that’s outside of the story; that Ram V collaborated with two different other writers on the story to bring together essentially what is two stories about the same subject into one intertwining experiment in storytelling.

To understand how that works we have to explore the story itself a little (although no spoilers). The One Hand and the Six Fingers is a tale about a set of murders happening in a city that could be any big American city but mostly reads as New York or Chicago. We learn in the first chapter that the murders are serial murders and have been solved not once, but twice before by the same cop and now they’re back for a third spree it’s all falling apart.

The thing is the people locked up for the first and second set of murders each obviously did those murders. The cases against them were watertight. So what is going on and how is someone replicating the cases exactly, including elements that were never released to the public?

As it turns out the two sides of the story were planned as a complete arc but then the different people involved in each side got on with producing their pieces separately (with Ram V being the common writer across both sides). This is an audacious piece of plotting and artistic creativity because it means the telling has contextual divergence built into its fabric even if the meta-narrative is coherent.

There are the classic set of tropes – the cop due to retire, the maverick nature of their obsession with the murderer. We also have a murderer who’s not entirely sure if or why he’s doing what he’s doing. We have black police lieutenants ready to suspend the cop, we have accidentally caught up love interests who may or may not support the murderer.

Across the top of this we have the setting which is neo-noir but also cyberpunkish in a very Bladerunner 2049 sense. The detective has a long term relationship with a synthetic human, called here a Cog. The entire thing is at once familiar.

What is interesting to me though is what V and his collaborators do with the story. There are two extremely pertinent references beyond Bladerunner – Dark City, the 1998 film directed by Alex Proyas and the Matrix, the 1999 film written and directed by the Wachowskis. In that sense, The One Hand and the Six Fingers is treading well worn ground for people as old as I am. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun or interesting both from a dramatic and a philosophical point of view, just that it’s standing on the shoulders of giants.

The themes here, hidden behind gory murders and lush, economically structured panels and vistas are about meaning, information, the lives we perform for ourselves and how we create coherence in the worlds we build.

When I talk about world building I mean that in the personal sense of how I construct the world I encounter each day, the meaning in my experiences and what baggage I bring to it as well as grander ideas about how meaning is constructed.

V et al are very interested in deconstructing how we consider the world is put together. From Gerard 't Hooft’s holographic principle to Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis we are asked to question whether the world we encounter with our senses, while the ‘us’ exists somewhere internally, can be considered real. If the world is not ‘real’ then what does that imply for both our sense of self but also our sense of self through instantiation?

This is the kind of thing that you might think is a bit sophomore in nature – to be discussed at three am at a house party with strangers but the narrative here handles it pretty well. Certainly the framing device of the killer and the detective wrestling with the same crimes adds more flair and nuance than the simple contemplation of everything being constructed (i.e. the classic antirealist stance). 

Not that V tackles it here, but if the world is one that’s entirely constructed whether by our social consensus or through the illusionary constructs of our sense data then building racism, sexism and other prejudices into it becomes a deeply weird position to take.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers doesn’t offer a definitive answer – its characters are in one specific iteration of the nexus of these ideas (which I am being careful not to spoil!) and in true story telling style it follows them to the end of that idea, to a position that is very definitely reductio ad absurdum. 

This is where it fell a little short for me. It may well be because I’ve come across these ideas a lot in my own reading/studying/writing but the main characters are, in the end, sitting in the well of fatalism. They are most concerned with identifying that they’re in the well and when they do? At that point they stop fighting and that was kinda disappointing to me. 

That’s a me thing – I want existential puzzles to have meaning, to be an impetus to changing the world. Ram V’s story presents a different epistemology – in that the limits of knowledge are both emotional as well as physical and intellectual. For his characters the weltanschauung they dwell within is one that starts and ends in despair and the discoveries along the way being transformative are decidedly not transformative of the fundamental meaninglessness of existence.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers suggests that learning the truth might only offer us an escape from these limits through non-existence because only by non-being can we counter the futility of being. It’s bleak when you write it out longhand.

--

Highlights:

• Serial killers
• Cyberpunk, noir, hard bitten detectives
• Weird as fuck world building

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, a familiar set of tropes given new life with a brilliantly structured, drawn and coloured story about meaning wrapped up in a serial killer mystery.

References: V, Ram. The One Hand and the Six Fingers [Image Comics 2024].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he co-owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Stranger Things Season 5: Part One

Hawkins residents assemble! The final season's first part starts off slow but delivers the goods in the form of more needle drops, more character transformations, and more killer '80s vibes. (Spoilers abound below.)

A lot has changed since Stranger Things first premiered back in 2016. America has had three different presidents. A worldwide pandemic happened. And all of these children have grown up. Before I dive into the details of this new season, I'll acknowledge that these kids are all in their early 20s and they look grown as hell. But hey! That's not their fault. And it's not entirely the Duffer brothers' fault either, given the complexities of scheduling shows in the modern age of pandemics, writers' strikes, and other obstacles. I personally think the age thing is easy to overlook if you love the show. If you can believe in demogorgons, you can believe that these grown folks are juniors in high school. 

A brief recap of where we left off in Hawkins in Season 4: Joyce and Murray have rescued Hopper from the Siberian prison, Max is in a coma after fighting Vecna, Eleven got her powers back, and Mike, Dustin and the gang are all back together in Hawkins, which is currently quarantined off from the world after being devastated by Vecna's final attack. 

Season 5 picks up a year later in November of 1987, and our team is still hunting Vecna, who seems to have gone dark. Hopper, with the help of everyone, ventures out occasionally into the Upside Down on military recon "crawls," but nothing seems to be turning up. Things are set into motion when a demogorgon breaks into the Wheeler's house and kidnaps Mike and Nancy's little sister, Holly. 

The first few episodes start off pretty slow, but the time spent with the characters isn't wasted. I'm a true believer in this season, and I've loved it so much. Here's what I think really works. 

The power of radio nostalgia via WSQK

Robin and Steve are working at the local radio station, and in between pop songs they're using a secret code to communicate to the others troop movements and scheduling crawls in the Upside Down. It's extremely clever, and as a former college radio DJ, it sparks all kinds of feels. The station is essentially a character this season, and it plays an important part in both the plots of episodes 1-4 and most likely in the final episodes that air later this year. 

Music and needle drops have always been a core part of Stranger Things, and having the characters literally take the helm at WSQK just feels right. It's hard to explain to younger people, but terrestrial radio used to play an important part in people's lives, and everyone listened to it. Having it be the lifeline for our heroes as well as a cultural touchstone just makes sense. Playing Diana Ross' "Upside Down" as part of their code is just brilliant, too.

As part of the promotion for Season 5, I've been listening to the online version of WSQK, not only for the '80s tunes but also because they have in-world ads for Scoops Ahoy, Palace arcade, and more. It's immersive, fun, and a great way to keep vibing in the ST world. Have I also bought a WSQK t-shirt? Absolutely. (This review has not been sponsored by Netflix, I'm just a real big nerd.)

The big reveal of Will's powers

I will admit that Noah Schnapp's acting hasn't been wonderful this season, but I think that's more a function of having a grown man say lines like "We have to stop Vecna!" over and over again. But I think what people forget (especially after how emo and laid by the wayside he was last season) is that Will is the heart of this show. It started with his abduction in Season 1, and ever since, he's been the emotional core of everything. So yeah, I'm willing to ignore some clunkily spoken lines. 

In the last ten minutes of episode 4, everything comes together truly magnificently for Will. He's been seeing through the eyes of Vecna and various demogorgons, paralyzed by fear and horror at what he's witnessing. Having him finally(!) get some agency and be able to fight back was so invigorating. I was jumping up and down and screaming at the screen. The Duffer brothers' decision to make Will the equal of Eleven, powers-wise, is a twist I didn't see coming, and honestly, the gang is going to need it if they're going to defeat Vecna. I'm so glad Will gets to take part instead of just cowering.

Rewriting queer representation in '80s film settings

As an avid fan of '80s teen movies who happens to be queer, watching them can be a little dicey. On the one hand, they're awesome, but on the other, the frequency with which gay slurs are used is mindblowing. The homophobia was rampant back then. To give you an example, in Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox's best friend is more worried that he's gay than being a werewolf. Yeah.

The world is different today, thank God. And having fully fleshed out queer characters in the form of Robin and Will help rewrite that narrative in the modern age. Robin's speech in episode 4 to Will is a tear-jerker in the best possible way, allowing Will to know that he's okay just as he is. For five seasons he's been tortured, coddled, disregarded, and underestimated. Allowing him to come into his own is super powerful, and the Duffers have done something wonderful for a whole new generation of queer kids looking for representation in the media they love.

The Home Alone-inspired Demogorgon trap

This whole scene is just classic Stranger Things, and it's a perfect example of how they can bring levity to an objectively frightening situation. In order to implant the tracker in the demogorgon, the team sets up an elaborate scheme involving swing-down traps, a rug over a hole in the floor, and our gal Nancy Walk 'Em Down Wheeler doing what she does best — shoot baddies. 

The introduction of A Wrinkle in Time

The entirety of Stranger Things has revolved around metaphors from D&D, the game that Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas were obsessed with. When weird things started happening, it was that vernacular that helped them make sense of the world(s). With the introduction of Holly as a plot-important character, we're also getting language and ideas cribbed from her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. Even though we're just learning about Henry/Vecna as Mr. What's it, I think time travel is going to play a large role in the upcoming episodes. The Duffer brothers listed The Terminator and Back to the Future among the movies they recommend folks watch to prep for the finale.

Unanswered questions:

• What is Vecna’s end goal with Holly?
• Did Nancy graduate? Is she working? Robin?
• What is the wall of goo/demogorgon flesh?
• Why is Vecna afraid of the rocks?
• Will Robin get to go on that date with Vicki?

Overall, I think this first part of the last season did a good job of setting up what's promising to be an epic conclusion. Every season of Stranger Things improves upon a rewatch, and I watched these four episodes twice. It's different, in many ways, but it also holds up really well. Everyone's forecasting a major death (or even two!) toward the end but I'm hoping that doesn't end up happening. I love all these kids so dang much, and they all deserve the world.

Also, Linda Hamilton as Major General Kay was the icing on the cake these episodes —nobody cocks like a gun quite like her, even after all these years.

--

The Math

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.

Review: Bloodtide by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s Bloodtide continues the Ex Romana trilogy started in Sargassa, peeling back more the story of Selah, her companions and rivals, and of the city of Sargassa herself

Sidewise Award-winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham provided us with a setting and a vision of a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Part of the story of Selah, new Imperial Historian and the rest of her rivals, adversaries and contemporaries in the novel is finding out that the truth of history is somewhat more complicated than they believed, in the midst of a twisty conspiracy of imperial ambitions, secrets, plots and lies.

Bloodtide continues the story of Selah and the others in her orbit, in the fantastically imagined world of Sargassa.

From a plot perspective, in looking at Bloodtide I am going to skirt the big reveal of Sargassa, since it would not be fair to readers who have not read the first book in the series. Readers who have read the first book and are looking to see how Burnham can possibly follow up that big reveal don’t need to be reminded of what it was. So instead we will carry forward into the second novel and what it tries to do without referencing it.

Having assembled its characters as a rough and contentious group in Sargassa, Bloodtide for the most part scatters them to the winds. This second novel focuses less on Selah than the first novel, instead providing a lot of screentime to the other members of her somewhat contentious circle of colleagues and associates. Darius is in exile in the badlands, giving us a view of some of the rest of the continent and the price of his Javert-like obsessions for his investigations from the first novel. Arran and Theo, on the other hand, with the growing revelation that there is a lot more of the old solaric tech lying around than anyone ever suspected, go off to try and resurrect the power and communications arrays from long ago.

We get a greater sense of the scale of the revolutionaries and their opposition to Roman rule. Theo and Arran’s mission is predicated on a slow but smart bit of strategy—they realize that Sargassa casting off control by the Romans is a doomed enterprise, destined to be squashed quickly by the rest of the empire. But if they could coordinate across cities and towns by means of the solaric technology, then all the cities and settlements could rise up at the same time and make stopping the revolution much more difficult, if not impossible. It’s an excellent recognition of the tactics and necessity of coordination of a revolution. This puts me in mind of a Silverberg story where a revolution fails, and the revolters recognize, in hindsight, that they needed uprisings in more than just one city in order to have a prayer of success.

So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’s plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as do Tair and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the spoilery revelations it contains. This means the often thorny relationship between Selah and Tair gets less play than, say, the budding relationship between Theo and Arran. Still, this is a novel with interesting and fascinating queer relationships, and a preponderance of characters who are not straight men. We get character development, growth and an intense look at these characters, just like in the first novel.

Like Sargassa, Bloodtide is not just queer-friendly; it is queer-forward. These are the queer-forward alternate history/future history SF novels you may not have known you wanted, but are here for you.

And then there is the titular Bloodtide, which is a large set piece of a flood in the city of Sargassa. All the characters who are in the city at the time confront what turns out to be a quite catastrophic storm for the city. Rain and flooding, and the inevitable stresses to civilized behavior that occurs afterwards. It’s a challenge for Selah and the others, not only for them to survive, but to help as much of the underclass as they can. (The Patricians, of course, are doing fine. Same as it ever was.) While the first novel made the social divide in Sargassa stark, here, in the midst of the storm that hits the city, the haves and have-nots, in the wake of a disaster, are even more starkly defined. I was reminded, and I believe the author intended it, of the wake of the utter disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Burnham does not pull her punches in depicting the devastation, which of course plays merry hell with the plans of our protagonists. It is a black swan event that none of them prepared for, and that they have to struggle to survive.

The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa we got the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. In the first novel we have descriptions of lower-class areas of the city, Sinktown, that are prone to flooding in the best of times. And so we get not just tidal flooding, but a full-on hurricane and storm surge.

So is there another big reveal in Bloodtide? In a way, there is an extension of that big reveal, as in the final portion of this book we get a sense of more about it. While the novel has danced around the consequences of the world as it is now, a thing deliberately engineered to be misunderstood, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa aren’t really explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. At the end of Bloodtide, however, we get a bifurcation of character knowledge and reader knowledge. Selah and the others come across information that they cannot quite decipher or understand, but the reader can definitely put the pieces together and come to a conclusion and a revelation that broadens and further extends the revelation in Sargassa. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire backstory is not clear, however; there are still questions as to the state of affairs, in addition to the unresolved character beats. But once again, the book remains relatively unique in its approach to worldbuilding.¹

My hope is that this sets up the final book in the trilogy and a broader set of revelations and things coming to a head. I’ve been quite entertained both by the characters and the fascinating and clever worldbuilding in the Ex Romana series, and I have high hopes for the third and final volume to stick the landing.

Highlights:

• Fantastic depiction of the set-piece disaster as the heart of the book.
• Excellent character beats.
• Deepens the worldbuilding of the first book and provides more context to the surprise of the first book.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie. Bloodtide [Daw, 2025].

¹ This makes it hard to compare this book to others as is my wont, because the books I can think of that tie into Ex Romana might inadvertently give a hint to the twist in the series and worldbuilding.

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

TV Review: Talamasca

The world’s most clueless spy, working for the world’s most ineffective spy agency… what could go wrong?

Our guy has a problem: his name is Guy. This show’s lack of imagination only gets worse from there.

Guy has another problem: he can hear other people’s thoughts, but the universe conspires to put him in the presence of either so many people that telepathy is too painful to use, or one person who is specially trained or magically gifted to resist it, so he’s that supremely irritating type of protagonist who has an awesome superpower that is of no use ever.

As it turns out, Guy’s life has been watched and orchestrated by the secret order of the Talamasca, who recruit people like him to keep tabs on the hidden supernatural world. The theory is that collecting data on vampires, witches, ghosts and demons (the series is set in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches) will help normal humans keep a reasonably peaceful life alongside so many warring superhuman factions. The reality is that the magical police is incapable of keeping its own house in order and its hierarchy is a tangled mess of betrayal and backstabbing enabled by jaw-dropping incompetence.

Welcome to the worst spy agency I’ve seen since Get Smart.

Our guy Guy is played by a too distracting Nicholas Denton, who, in fairness, isn’t to blame for looking so much like the spitting image of Eddie Redmayne that one forgets to listen to what he’s saying—not that he has much to comment on, what with the absurd level of secrecy his boss likes to maintain. Said boss, who goes by Helen, is a veteran spy and a master of the art of posing dramatically and giving a knowing smile as a substitute for having anything useful to say.

Helen has been the one in charge of steering Guy’s life from behind the scenes, preparing him for the right time to recruit his psychic talents in the neverending mission of keeping humankind safe. Nevermind that she never does anything to earn Guy’s trust; every one of his questions gets slammed down with the promise that all will be revealed in due time, which I guess is intended to be in the middle of season 4.

Because there’s apparently an urgent crisis going on, Helen gives Guy a crash course in spycraft (inexplicably, the course doesn’t include a lesson on “Don’t Read Your Spy Textbook in Public Transportation”), and sends him on his own across the pond to listen to the thoughts of a powerful vampire who has infiltrated the British branch of the Talamasca. On his first day in London, Guy fails at basic spying and hooks up with the first woman who makes eyes at him. One has to wonder why the spy textbook didn’t cover this kind of scenario.

Guy is supposed to be provided with a mentor/handler, who is alarmingly absent during most of the mission, and when it’s finally time to go looking for the big bad vampire, Helen refuses to make any plan. She basically tells him, “You’re smarter than any plan I could give you. You’ll think of something.” With this dismal neglect from his superiors, it’s no wonder that he turns against the Talamasca at the first opportunity.

Even before that, he seems to devote more effort to spying on his boss than on the vampire. He has valid reasons to resent the ways the Talamasca has meddled in his life since childhood, and when he discovers that his mother was also some form of spy, and that she and the agency parted ways in bad terms, any hope of retaining his loyalty is lost. But the side he chooses instead cares even less for his personal gripes, his lack of experience, or his continued existence. At times I wondered whether this series was supposed to be a comedy, because Guy speedruns through one disastrously bad choice after another, somehow making it way past the point where he should have already been dismembered by vampires several times.

The show’s aim appears pointed at feeling mysterious rather than narrating a mystery. We’re told that the magic police has vast resources, but when they task a complete noob with undoing a vampire conspiracy, they don’t equip him with as much as a cove of garlic. We’re told that the world has vampires, witches, ghosts and demons, but we only ever see vampires, and in the rare scenes that feature a witch coven, they don’t do anything particularly witchy, so they may as well be a hippie commune. We’re told that the order is ancient and has tentacles everywhere, but across the season we meet at most the same half dozen top operatives, which gives the impression that we’re watching a school play with zero budget.

As for the mystery of the season, it’s admittedly a clever one, but getting there is an ordeal, even with just six episodes. Someone has destroyed the centuries-old archives of the Dutch branch of the Talamasca, which should severely cripple the order’s ability to keep tabs on the supernatural world, but we don’t see any serious consequence. Out of earshot of her colleagues, Helen has been searching for something called The 752, which sounds like the name of a chemical weapon, or a model of missile, or a limited edition comic book. Whatever it is, it has immense power, so it must not fall into the wrong yadda yadda, or else the world will yadda yadda. And it just so happens that the person closest to finding it is the same vampire our guy Guy has to follow. Neat!

Oh, have I already mentioned that the season’s two-part premiere has not one but two fridged women? You know, for extra drama.

I haven’t watched the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but the praise I’ve heard about it has been consistently enthusiastic. This spinoff, on top of being mediocre on its own merits, does a shameful disservice to a beloved story.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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

Contributor Profile: Gabrielle Harbowy

NAME: Gabrielle Harbowy

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: East of Los Angeles, West of the Moon

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): Interviewer, tattoo fanatic, TTRPGer, Team Star Wars. Totally normal about Baldur's Gate 3.

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: many and varied. How much time do you have?

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Astarion Ancunín specifically. In this essay I will...

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A House Between Sea and Sky by Beth Cato, A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith ... and some fantastic books by clients (I'm a literary agent) that I can't talk about yet, but believe me I'll be crowing proudly about them when you can read them!

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Final Orbit by Chris Hadfield, Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... Curled up under a homemade blanket with a book and a mug of tea. No...I'll be at my desk reading queries.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO: Does Dana Scully count?

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Regulating the air temperature around me. Always comfortable in all situations!

THE BEST / WORST COMIC FILMS OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: I think it's been longer than that since I've seen one. I'm happy that other people enjoy them! I get my nerd-fix elsewhere.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Del Toro's Frankenstein

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE: the nightly news

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: the aurora borealis (or aurora australis), with their own eyes.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: Severance and Mrs Davis both hit me right in the feels.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): I need a movie of Aether's Pawn by Gabrielle Harbowy so that I can retire comfortably.

Welcome Gabrielle!

Film Review: Zootopia 2

The city of talking animals reveals a wider world in its past and its future

Some movie premises, like “How did Han Solo get his last name?”, can be classified as “Nobody asked for this.” Others, like “How did the rebels get the Death Star schematics?”, are in the smaller category of “Nobody asked for this, but now that you went ahead and made it, it turns out it’s really good.” Zootopia 2 belongs in that latter category. There was no need to explore why we didn’t see reptiles in the first movie, because the class of mammals sufficed for its predator/prey allegory (also, the vast majority of reptiles are predators, so their presence would only have overcomplicated the plot).

(Also also, the talking animals eat fish. Are the fish sentient? Don’t ask.)

The worldbuilding of the first Zootopia was only as detailed as it needed to be, and that’s OK; that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. But now that Disney has decided to answer an unnecessary question, we’re lucky that the result is as good as it is. Zootopia 2 takes the first movie’s points about exclusion and prejudice and weaves a bigger mystery that involves racism, real estate encroachment, and the erasure of the history of marginalized communities.

Our protagonist duo is back: Judy, the overachiever rabbit with a compulsive need to prove herself caused by the mother of all impostor syndromes; and Nick, the socially isolated fox who only became Judy’s coworker because he literally has no other friends. (This is not me roasting them; the script has them explicitly saying this.) So, after a spectacularly disastrous unauthorized mission, they’re quickly ordered to get support group therapy to address the rough edges between them.

As it happens, this is a tense moment for the police department: the city of Zootopia is celebrating the centennial of its climate control walls that allow camels and polar bears to coexist. This is the pivotal invention that makes Zootopia and its marvelous diversity possible, and to highlight their importance, the exclusive gala that commemorates their creation also has a priceless historical document in display: the design notes of the engineer who designed the walls. The notebook has been preserved by a distinguished lynx family that for some reason is hostile to one of its descendants, Pawbert, who seems to not measure up to the patriarch’s expectations.

The plot kicks into gear when a viper crashes the party, steals the notebook, rapidly delivers a speech that convinces Judy of his good intentions, and ends up accidentally envenoming the police chief in a comically contrived set of circumstances that make it look like Judy and Nick were the attackers. So now our heroes have to go on the run from their own colleagues while they try to solve the mystery of why a reptile has showed up in Zootopia after a century of absence, why the lynx family is so suspiciously hostile to him, and what the design notes have to do with it all.

As police investigations go, this one doesn’t rely on brilliant deduction as much as miraculous convenience. For our heroes, clues fall from the sky as needed; the only doubt is whether they’ll survive the next slapstick chase through a swamp or a water pipe or a collapsing house or a Gazelle concert in the desert.

A handful of characters from the first movie make an appearance in the sequel: your favorite criminal sheep, donut-loving cheetah, car racing sloth, hyperanxious rabbit parents, and mobster shrew return for brief yet memorable scenes. The new characters are no less vivid: the new mayor of Zootopia is a former action movie actor horse with a hilarious catchphrase, one of the key informers in the investigation is a plumed basilisk with a perverse sense of humor, and one unlikely ally our heroes meet is a tomboyish beaver with a conspiracy podcast. And of course, the star that steals the show is Gary the viper, voiced with endearing sweetness by a perfectly cast Ke Huy Quan.

The day is saved by generous emotive oversharing, multi-species cooperation, rusty electrical equipment, the magic of snake antivenom, and… the Zootopia patent office? OK, a bit bureaucratic, but I’ll take it. The reveal of why reptiles left Zootopia and why mammals have such a low opinion of them has echoes in the real-world history of forced displacement and the insidious normalization of racism. It’s heartening to learn the true extent of reptile contributions to animal society, but it may deliver a mixed message to have a plot where reptiles are only welcomed back into Zootopia because they contributed to animal society. As a matter of principle, a group of people shouldn’t have to show proof of noble deeds before getting basic dignity and equality.

Zootopia 2 shows us a more complex side of its society, a deeper manifestation of the disguised prejudices that were already evident in the first movie. Even if the specifics of the story could have been planned better, the basic message of joy in diversity resonates loud and clear.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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