Book Review: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer

Traumatized but healing mechas and humans building community in a ‘cozy’ post-apocalyptic setting

Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half Broken is, somehow, a cozy post-apocalypse near-future science fiction story about a former military mecha. And, unlike some extremely valid recent critiques of the ‘cozy’ genre in general, Palmer manages to take seriously the traumatic events in the past of her characters as well as what might be required for them to heal.

The story begins with the former military mecha, our protagonist [1], injured and awakening alone in a “highly degraded urban interior space”. It quickly becomes clear that they were attacked by mysterious assailants. A cyberdog named Atticus, who is an organic-mecha hybrid, becomes their sidekick and helps our protagonist begin to acclimate to actually talking to other beings, which they have not willingly done in nearly 20 years.

As we are introduced to the world, we learn that things are not great. Through flashbacks and some past Global News Feed alerts, we are shown glimpses of how most of the planet was destroyed: proto-fascist paramilitaries with nuclear weapons; storms with radioactive, toxic airborne particulates; misinformation tearing people apart; global pandemics, some of them human produced; and engineers creating sapient mechas which are being used on the battlefield. 

Some humans do survive, but the mechas created by humans thrive in various types of bodies: from trains to carts to gravedigger bots to humanoids like our military mecha protagonist. There are also a lot of single purpose ‘internet of things’ bots that are not necessarily intelligent, but have at least a basic sense of self, like, for example, a smart toaster. At some point in the past, the mecha declared their independence. Now, some live independently and some live cooperatively with humans. But something seems to be going wrong: there are reports of antisocial behaviour from some mecha and rumours of shadowy forces gathering in old abandoned shopping malls.

The plot of the book follows our protagonist, with their cyberdog friend, looking for repairs and finding out who attacked them. They are also looking for some long-lost sibling bots: other mecha that were built, along with the protagonist, by a past engineer named Dr. Milton. The plot is fun! Our protagonist is joined by excellent supporting characters, like a human mechanic named Murphy; a drone called Teal-A3-Charp (“Charp” for short), and eventually a train mind named 44-Mongoose that gets transplanted into the body of a vintage 1966 Volkswagen van that was retrofit with a steam engine.

I think this book falls pretty neatly into the cozy sci-fi subgenre. There has been some recent debate about cozy sci-fi. What even is cozy sci-fi? On a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast [2], Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe traced the origins of the term back to the 1950s and British science fiction author Brian Aldiss. Aldiss described works like John Wyndham’s Midwich Cookoos, as “cozy catastrophe” because they portrayed a disasters in a small village. Cozy fiction tends to focus on a small group of people, a manageable scale, not the whole world. On Coode Street, they contrasted this with “large management fiction,” like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

There seems to be part of a bigger movement towards ‘cozy’ as a reaction to The Times We Live In. John Rogers, well-known producer of the tv show Leverage, recently commented on Bluesky that, right now, “the biggest movie is about science bros and the power of friendship and sacrifice[;] the biggest TV show is about good people doing their best under impossible circumstances to help suffering people[;] even under our culture’s institutionalized greed and cynicism, people are desperate for fellowship.” I agree with this.

Cozy is not limited to science fiction, of course. It was probably a reaction to the popularity of cozy mysteries. But the focus on building community in the face of larger disasters makes a good story engine for sci-fi. I very much enjoy cozy fiction and I want people to be able to enjoy things! But I have also been convinced by some excellent critiques that I need to ask for my cozy fiction to do a bit more. If nothing else, it needs to take seriously the trauma done to the characters within the world.

Palmer absolutely does this. What might look like simply a fun story about some robots and humans working together also tells a deeper story about trauma, building community, and resisting the desire to demonize the other. Our protagonist mecha was so traumatized by events in their past that they literally hid out for twenty years doing research on insects and speaking to no one. Then, of course, they were forced out of their hiding because they were violently attacked. This is not a recipe for having a great relationship with the world! But we get them see them figuring out how to reenter the world. How to build trust. How to enjoy companionship. And how to heal. But Palmer also shows us that not all trauma victims can do this. We also get to see characters who are absolutely too traumatized to forge a new path.

In the acknowledgements, Palmer notes that she wrote this book during a period of personal grief. She wanted to tell the story of a near-future apocalypse, but needed that story "to still communicate hope and friendship, have humor, allow for light, without being crassly slapstick or flippantly dismissive of the days we are all now currently living in.” I think she succeeds in this; and it’s an approach where she’s excelled in the past. I am a longtime fan of her Finder Chronicles, which follows a character named Fergus Ferguson who travels the galaxy finding lost things. If you liked Finder, you will absolutely like Ode to the Half Broken. If you've never tried tried her other work, Ode is a good place to start.

[1] I am going to be referring to the main character as the protagonist throughout this review because, well, they declined to provide a name for themselves until nearly the end of the book. 

[2] Episode 716: Dystopias, Cozy Fiction, and Other Dilemmas

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The Math 

Highlights: 

• Found family with mechas and humans building community
• Dealing with trauma and loss in a world of technological change
• Sarcastic cyberdog sidekick for comic relief

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10 Well worth your time and attention edging towards very high quality/standout in its category.

Reference: Ode to the Half Broken. Suzanne Palmer. [DAW Books, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes

 Dirty, low down, corrupt and lush in the best possible way

Cover Art: Deb JJ Lee

Weird is a category that exists for marketeers but because of that has come to mean some specific things. Personally I think that’s a huge shame because it seems to suggest that only stories with these tropes qualify as weird and, let’s be real for a moment, reading about elves and spaceships and enchantment and massive battles is absolutely weird. Perhaps it’s just me wanting to qualify as weird for being a run of the mill nerd. 

 

Hiron Ennes’ The Works of Vermin is studiously in the marketing brochure as ‘weird’, probably even ‘New Weird’. It has a maddeningly bizarre city named Tiliard, protagonists that are overwhelmed by said city and its workings, branching stories, odd unexplained events, multiple factions all grappling with one another and the city itself, and a use of language that is the literary equivalent of a finely tailored silk shirt. In paisley.

 

Its closest comparators are probably Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Vandermeer’s Finch with a side order of Noon’s Chronicles of Ludwich. As with each of those books, Ennes explains nothing, expecting the reader to pick up what they need to know from the story and its characters. A kind of ritual osmosis that, if your mental membranes are imporous, is going to leave you cold. 

 

I hit the end of the first twenty pages both excited but also quite suspicious. In some ways it’s so consciously inspired by those comparisons that I was worried it was simply trying too hard, but I was excited because I love New Weird with all of my bones. If I could read New Weird every other book I would. That either makes me the wrong person to review this or exactly the right one. 

 

This isn’t going to be for everyone – alongside the ‘catch up you dunce’ approach to exposition and context provision, Ennes’ writing is flowery and pretentious and consciously overwrought. These two facts, even and perhaps especially in the opening, are a hill the text demands you climb, an investment it’s asking you to make. All weird fic makes that demand (I’m thinking of Feersum Endjinns by Banks for example that does NO explaining at all) in a way that is, essentially, part of this micro-genre. It is its own gatekeeper. 

 

However, there are reasons for this that I think Ennes largely succeeds in making work on the page and in the structure. The first of them is the language. It is gothic, full of neologisms and frequently full of the fantasy equivalent of milsim’s obsession with make and model of gun. Except here it’s about fungus and spores. And yet it works because of the nature of Ennes’ world which is one in which performance – opera, music, drama, dance and more are an essential part of the expression both of Tiliard as a city and Ennes’ world as a whole. 

 

For example – when an opera demands a character dies in a duel? Well in Tiliard you’ll be looking for a new actor for that part after the show. When it calls for an orgy or a battle? You better believe that the boundary between performance and reality is blurred intentionally by Ennes but also by his characters. Everyone is an artisan. Everyone has a view about fashion and art and trends and acceptability based upon your artistry. That artistry might be drenched in violence but without poetry it is nothing and you are nobody.

 

It is a remarkable achievement to weave the concept of performance into the text and the world so thoroughly. It saturates not just the story but the structure and the world building too. More than that, it saturates the language. Coming back full circle – Ennes’ language is of his world; it is drenched in the performative flourishes that are in the DNA of his characters and the lives they’re leading. It’s a brilliant approach and this book would be something altogether more mundane without this commitment to gilding every leaf and illuminating every letter. At times it’s like a drug addled medieval monk has got his hands on the Voynich manuscript and I mean that in a good way. 

 

It doesn’t always work – such ambition never lands consistently – but I’d rather this ambition than something more staid. In particular there’s a structural sleight of hand with the novel that is both incredibly ambitious and doesn’t quite stick the landing. When I say ambitious, it had me stop and put the book down to think through what it meant when the nature of the story is finally revealed. That’s immensely satisfying in conception but it’s not quite so good in execution. It’s pulling a rabbit out of a hat only for the rabbit to bite you and run away. 

 

Regardless, Ennes’ work here is exciting and strangely comforting. It’s world in which people are strangely wrought but familiar enough we can follow along with their longings, their passions and their tragedies. And make no mistake, despite it all, this book is very much Shawshank with precious little Redemption although what it does offer is gratefully received. 

 

Among it all is a world which, despite its despotism and casual disregard for human dignity is nevertheless sex positive in a way I really appreciated not simply with regard to the act itself but in regards to sexuality more broadly and gender specifically. There are some beautiful moments on this front and here Ennes is faultless in showing that love and passion do not discriminate.

 

The Works of Vermin is a story about performance, about the luxury of choosing to be someone, about the struggle of making that stick when the world wants something very different from you and how performance can be the making of not only us but the world too. It’s a literary opera that knows how to wield tragedy and triumph and sets it all within a deliciously weird and fecund world. I am very excited to see what Ennes does next.

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Highlights:

• Theatre and fungus
• Revolution, cults, monsters and the weirdest tech immaginable
• A mythic cycle that is built around performance and decadence

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, an exceptionally ambitious novel with an eye on the weird and its heart in the right place.

References: Ennes, Hiron, The Works of Vermin [Tor Nightfire, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA 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.

Anime Review: Sentenced to Be a Hero

An intriguing fantasy premise that would benefit from deeper character development

The Winter 2026 Anime season was loaded with the return of major heavy hitters from the past including Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieren, Fire Force, and Hell’s Paradise. This powerhouse lineup made it hard for new shows to stand out. But, Sentenced to Be a Hero arrived as a debut anime with lots of promise, in both its premise and its animation style. The initial concept was unique and the character design was appealing. While the show is entertaining, it’s hard to say why this promising story doesn’t land as a mega-hit the way one would expect, especially since it seems to check the boxes for a fantasy adventure anime.

Sentenced to Be a Hero is set in a magic medieval like world where knights (soldiers), under the direction of the local military and religious leaders, battle hordes of monstrous creatures (demons) to protect civilians from destruction. The knights are periodically helped by magical creatures known as “goddesses” who have special powers. The series is primarily the story of Xylo Forbartz, a heroic knight who falls into disgrace when he is betrayed in battle and falsely accused of murdering his partner goddess. He tries to explain the circumstances of the goddess’s death but it’s clear the trial is rigged. Instead of being simply executed, he is sentenced to serve as a “hero.” In this culture, “heroes” are executed convicted criminals who are magically brought back to life and forced to protect the kingdom. Since they are convicted criminals, they are looked down on by other knights and by the local people. Each hero is sealed by a spell that grants them miserable immortality. In the event that they are killed they are brought back to life to continue fighting and suffering. However, each reanimation strips them of memories and their humanity.

Xylo is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to an eternity of servitude basically doing the kind of work he was doing when he was a holy knight. However, the heroes have minimal resources and are given the most dangerous assignments including suicide missions. Although they can move around and still exist as seemingly normal humans, they are controlled by seals around their necks and must comply with orders or face a painful death and reanimation. Xylo heads a ragtag team of other convicted heroes, including the fearful thief Dotta, the con-artist Venetim, the slightly unhinged killer Tsav, and the mentally unstable Tatsuya. There is also, Norgalle a strong, older fighter, who lives under a delusion that he is a benevolent king. Dotta stumbles upon and steals a box containing a new immature goddess Teoritta. Teoritta insists on forging a pact with Xylo despite his reluctance due to his prior bad experience with his previous goddess. However, when an attack by swarms of demons puts hundreds of military lives at risk, he capitulates and accepts her help. He and his ragtag team of enslaved heroes are forced to assist a squad of knights under the leadership of Captain Kivia, a woman who initially distrusts Xylo but eventually becomes a grudging ally. The rest of the series focuses on various battles and rescue missions involving the growing demon horde and the search for the various demon lords who control them. Along the way we are introduced to more members of Xylo’s team who apparently don’t always fight together, including dragon rider, Jayce and creepy, overly polite soldier Rhyno. Eventually, we learn the story of how several members of team became trapped as heroes. In almost all of the cases, the heroes are sentenced unjustly as part of a corrupt government cover up. Manipulating all of this drama are shady religious leaders, undercover demons, and local demon sympathizers who are happy to betray humanity.

Although each member of Xylo’s team has a distinct name and an overtly referenced personality type (thief, con-artist, killer, dragon-rider), I often found myself double checking who was being referred  when a name was mentioned. The supporting characters were conceptually interesting, but in the execution of the story, they seemed underdeveloped and not fully emotionally engaging. Unlike other anime where the side characters are essential to understanding the main protagonist, these supporting characters are mostly limited in terms of evoking emotions from the viewers. Even Xylo himself doesn’t reveal much about his backstory (family, upbringing, childhood trauma) and doesn’t meaningfully evolve over the very short season. Xylo is grumpy, understandably cynical, and pragmatic. He is paired with the newly birthed “goddess” Teoritta who is sunshiny, childlike, and egotistically optimistic. Even though she is called a goddess, Teoritta is basically still a person and vulnerable to being killed despite her magical powers. Teoritta is distinctly portrayed as childlike and not as a romantic interest. She is similar to Sylph, Yuno’s bossy, possessive, sprite-like wind spirit companion in Black Clover. Her personality is a contrast to the general serious vibe of the other characters. Teoritta and the other goddesses rely on praise to bring meaning to their lives and she is constantly asking praise from Xylo who is initially belligerent to her in a classic grumpy-sunshine trope. Xylo and the supporting characters are likeable but underdeveloped and the series relies more on the political plot than the interpersonal relationships to tell the story

Battling demons to save humanity is a story that has been done often, including in shows like Black Clover, Fire Force, Frieren, and even Bleach. Sentenced to Be a Hero revisits this popular story concept with a fresh premise of the forced sentenced heroes. But once the story gets rolling, the ultimate execution still feels like something we’ve seen before. As such, it is reasonably entertaining but not as innovative and uniquely engaging as it could be. Most major and popular anime have a moment that builds a surprising emotional connection with the viewers through a poignant moment, a tearjerker scene, a stunning moment of battle, a unique character introspection, or at least powerful and inspiring character camaraderie. Those elements are mostly missing from Sentenced to be a Hero. Fortunately, towards the end of this very short season, there are some big revelations and surprising developments that help make up for the intervening flat moments. Ironically, the person with the biggest character arc is the initially antagonistic Kivia, as she experiences a major shift in her worldview. Xylo primarily only evolves onscreen in terms of his treatment of Teoritta, as he gradually grows more protective of her when he realizes how many people want to hurt her. Surprisingly, one of the other best characters, is Frenci, Xylo’s former fiancé who is clever, cynical, and loyal to Xylo. Her status as fiancé also indirectly provides some abstract insight into Xylo’s prior life.

Beyond these small insights, Xylo, remains mainly stoic, vacillating mostly from annoyance to irritation. It’s not until around the seventh episode that we see him actually smiling. His perpetual baseline of irritation makes sense given the premise that the heroes are generally like inmates, not friends, and are not very emotionally connected to each other. That kind of emotionless presentation may make sense for the story concept, but it is hard to pull off without risking disconnect. Frieren is an example of a show with an initially stoic protagonist. However, over time she became a much more complex character. Solo Leveling is another series with little emotional content or fleshed out characters, but it still manages to be entertaining due to the intense and creative video game inspired action. The battles and victories in Sentenced to be a Hero are often overshadowed by the pervasive sense of injustice that are an inherent part of the corruption story. Fortunately, there are a few positive moments of inspiration where the townspeople show appreciation and even Xylo has a moment of surprise at being shown gratitude. 

Overall, Sentenced to be a Hero is a reasonably entertaining show that has a unique initial premise. But the overall plot feels familiar and the characters are underdeveloped in a way that risks disengagement, despite some dramatic moments in the series. Diving deeper into the characters in the future would be a risk that could be worth the payoff, especially given the short season.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Unique and intriguing premise
• Little character development or story energy
• Complicated list of characters navigating a familiar plot structure in short season

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

Graphic Novel Review: Free Planet #1

A wildly inventive comic/graphic novel by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty

The planet of Lutheria has been through a lot. However, after much strife and struggle, they have gained independence from a tyrannical interstellar polity that has exploited them and their resources for a long time. They have struggled mightily against great odds and have achieved a precarious peace and stability. But it is what happens now that freedom is won that is the real story of Free Planet, a comic by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty.

Graphic novels and manga are not my usual medium to read and review. And I am not the usual person here at Nerds of a Feather to review such work. But, in the spirit of spreading my oeuvre and skills, I decided to give it a try. And I am glad that I did. I was drawn immediately to the complexity of the art style. The creators take full advantage of the medium they are working in and push the boundaries of the form in telling their story. How? Graphic novels and comics are a visual medium; they tell the story by using imagery to do the heavy lifting alongside the dialogue and text, but it is imagery that they rely upon to tell the story. Comics have a structure that is recognizable: issues, pages, panels. If you’ve read some comics, you know precisely what to expect. And while that superstructure is here in the physical sense, the authors do much more with it, and create a visual language and a graphical vocabulary.

This first panel is a traditional comic panel, easily recognizable to anyone who has read a comic:

But many pages go much further. Look at this second image and the information density here:

We have a tense standoff between forces of the revolution and a mercenary outfit. But look on the left and you also see the story behind the story, the consequence of the revolution on grain prices as well as orchaleum production (orchaleum is a material needed for FTL travel; Lutheria has an abundance of it). Many pages of Free Planet use infographics like this to enhance and enrich the story.

This is a story about how fragile a revolution can be, and how the aftermath of success can affect the characters and the world itself. Using the visual vocabulary, we get a full sense of just what the costs of victory have been. The infographics, maps, and charts such as the one seen above do the heavy lifting of worldbuilding that would be difficult to replicate in prose.¹ We get a sense of a revolution, a planet, and the characters who are all on the edge, all of them under stress in the aftermath of the revolution. The novel focuses on the disappearance of one of the leaders of that revolution, and in the process gives us a “tour” of the revolution, both in the present and in key moments leading up to its success. Free Planet is entirely effective in using its sui generis approach to tell its story.

As a result, for me, Free Planet did not seem like a traditional comic, and I did not read it like a traditional comic. This was a deep and immersive reading experience that I took slowly and carefully, lingering on details in the graphics and visual vocabulary. It was like reading a dense space opera novel, once you don’t batter through with speed to flip pages, but rather linger on, thinking about the word choice and the scene being set. And for all of its graphical use, Free Planet has as much in common with that dense space opera novel as it does more traditional comics. I can’t imagine the amount of effort and resources it took to create Free Planet; it has to be an order of magnitude harder to accomplish. The fact that it is done so well is a testament to the work that the creators have put into it.

Thus, Free Planet has immersed me and engaged me deeply into its story, characters, backstory and worldbuilding. There is something hopeful and scary and unflinching about the story here—revolution and change are possible—but there is no happily ever after, and it takes work, a lot of work, to handle what comes next. The story of what comes after the revolution is as complicated and messy and interesting as the story of the revolution. Through the imagery, characters, and graphics of Free Planet, I was able to get my head around the costs of that revolution. And to be clear, those costs are high. And we do see bits and pieces in flashbacks of the struggle, but just enough for context, for understanding what the characters and the world of Lutheria are in for, now. But the point and focus of the graphic novel, always, is “what now?” And of course, what the revolution means. Each of the characters wants freedom… but what that actually means is not a single thing. And those definitions of freedom can and do clash.

The comic itself proclaims touchstones to Saga, and to Dune, and those are good reference points to those wondering just what kind of world this is and whether you might like to immerse yourself into this story and its characters. Other touchstones connected for me as I read the story. One in particular I want to bring up is Andor, the series as well as Rogue One. The series and the movie are at their core about getting the revolution off the ground, about how resistance is not futile, and how opposing tyranny can have high costs. So it is set “earlier” in a cycle of resistance and revolution than Free Planet is. But what the Andor saga shows, as Free Planet does, and what the main line of the Star Wars movies do NOT, is the often uneasy and prickly alliances and pieces of that revolution. Luthen, in Andor, is trying to put together a whole host of different factions into the Rebel Alliance.² And those factions are often at odds with each other as with the Empire and have very different ideas on what freedom from the Empire’s tyranny would be like. Free Planet shows that those contradictions and tensions are still there after the revolution. Readers of history (or listeners of, say, The Revolutions podcast) see this dynamic again and again.

One final note. As you could see from the panels above, the cast and society and world of Free Planet is diverse along a variety of axes, ranging from a mostly POC cast to a wide range of genders and sexualities. Lutheria and its inhabitants are a world and a people trying to find itself among a riot of diversity, and trying to find those commonalities and find strength in that diversity is part of the story of the comic. There is a definite Spanish/Brazilian flavor to Lutheria, and we see that not only in the cast, but in the use of language as well.³

I look forward to reading more issues of Free Planet, and continuing this fascinating and engaging story.

NB: The work of Aubrey Sitterson has previously been covered at Nerds of a Feather in some of the Thursday Morning Superhero columns.

NB: Although I do not do a lot of Hugo Award Nominations for the category Best Graphic Story or Comic, Free Planet #1 is going on my nomination ballot.

Highlights:

• Unique, enthralling and engaging format for visually telling the story
• An important story: what happens after the revolution wins.
• A diverse,queer and rich set of characters.

Reference: Sitterson, Aubrey and Dougherty, Joe. Free Planet Vol. I (Issues 1-6) [Image Comics, 2025].

¹ Ideas that come to mind include the use of footnotes, or perhaps the Dos Passos method of conveying information via metatexts, that has been since appropriated, adapted and evolved by authors like John Brunner and Kim Stanley Robinson. ² That is a bit of nice worldbuilding in Andor and Rogue One, isn’t it?  The core movies have the rebellion as a unified thing, with a unified command… but the name of the group is the Rebel alliance. Alliance of *what* is a detail that had to wait to be explicated. ³ And that, of course, makes me think of the Viagens Interplanetarias novels of L. Sprague de Camp.

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

On Civilization (VII)

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

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

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

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

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

Behold the might of my (current) empire!

The Good:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it's not without flaws.

The Bad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion:

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

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

The Math:

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

Bonuses:

+1 for being the prettiest Civilization to date
+1 for the leader/civ mechanic (sorry, I love it)
+1 for victory paths being better than before

Penalties:

−1 for trying to force players to play all the way through. Let me rage quit in peace
−1 for ages being simultaneous for all players

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

-DESR

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

Project Hail Mary pulls off a disturbing misdirection trick

Ryan Gosling’s pretty face and inoffensive goofiness will keep your mind off the billions of deaths happening offscreen

It’s the kind of clever switcheroo you only notice in hindsight. After leaving the theater with a spring in your step, feeling uplifted about the survival of a faceless rocky alien spider (a flawless masterpiece of puppetry that should get its own Oscar category), you start piecing together the plot pieces that Project Hail Mary frustratingly left scattered between flashbacks, and it finally dawns on you: Hey, the buddy comedy was fine, and Ryan Gosling is always a delight, but wasn’t the human species supposed to be facing extinction while we were having wholesome, family-friendly fun in space? Didn’t that mysterious German lady talk of losing something like a quarter of the world’s population in the best case scenario?

When the movie starts and our hero Ryan Gosling Ryland Grace wakes up with amnesia, his ship has already been traveling for several years since the discovery that the Sun was losing brightness; the wars over food must have devastated Earth in the meantime. The script merely alludes to the stakes and promptly shifts its attention to Grace teaching his new alien pal to dance and bump fists. The quick pacing of the scenes in space doesn’t give us time to reflect on the mass panic and the disintegration of society that must be going on while, a dozen light-years away, Grace sings karaoke. The movie is very effective at what it’s doing. It’s its choice of what things to do that lands as strange.

The problem Grace is trying to solve is that some strange microbes are eating the Sun, and with the diminished energy output, human agriculture is doomed to collapse. It turns out that other stars within the visible portion of the universe are being consumed too, except, for unknown reasons, the star Tau Ceti, which still keeps its normal brightness. The only hope (the titular “Hail Mary”) for the survival of life on Earth is to send a ship to Tau Ceti to figure out how it’s avoiding the plague of star-killing microbes. But while the ship gets there, which even with a miraculous superpotent fuel is going to take some years, Earth is left to fend for itself as best it can. This is a profoundly intense drama that the movie inexplicably insists on looking away from. Don’t think of the entire nations fractured by starvation—hey, isn’t this spider alien cute?

For roughly half of the runtime, we watch Grace deal with his amnesia and the unexpected presence of a second ship sent from a planet facing the same problem. Here we have potential elements for great character work, but the movie is so obsessed with making us feel good that we don’t see the full impact of the situation on Grace’s psyche. We eventually learn he was forced to come on this trip without enough fuel to return to Earth, effectively killing him in the hope that he’ll find a way to save the whole species. This could have provided a prime opportunity to explore important questions, like the universal human experience of disorientation at our state of thrownness into the world, and the comfort it brings us to find fellow travelers to figure out this mystery with, but this movie is too afraid of thinking sad thoughts. The unmissable allegory for the human condition (i.e. we open our eyes without any instructions, destined already for death) is swept aside for the good old art of visual spectacle.

On that front there’s nothing to complain about: Project Hail Mary looks breathtaking. But there’s a noticeable disconnect between the parts of the plot that desperately pull in opposite directions, the background tragedy of a world falling to pieces and the foreground coziness of a likeable guy learning to make a friend. There’s a bare outline of character growth, going from an initial state in which Grace was against going on the mission because he didn’t feel goodhearted enough to sacrifice his life for anyone, to a culmination state in which Grace has met someone he’s willing to sacrifice himself for. But the magnitude of that growth gets lost amid the movie’s anxious hyperfocus on vibes.

Project Hail Mary ought to carry itself with more weight, be more aware of the complex themes it has on its hands. But every time it starts getting too close to seriousness, it runs back to the reassurance of just having a good time at the movies. You’re not here to think too deeply about the obvious implications of the story; you’re here to watch the impossibly handsome Ryan Gosling give you one of his trademark comforting smiles. Here, have another joke. Forget about the hard truths of cosmic loneliness. Just gape at how gorgeous the stars look. Are you not entertained?

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

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

A hopeful tale of a fight against hopeless odds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Dila, Dilman. The Blossoming of the Big Tree [Ododo Press, 2026].

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