Let's hear it for The People's Joker

This is the rude shakeup that today's pathologically risk-averse studios need

It's often been said that superhero comics are this generation's mythology, to which it's often been replied that classical mythology wasn't constrained by copyright law and didn't have to obey corporate mandates. To fulfill the cultural function of myths, superhero comics would have to be freely usable by anyone. That's the approach that comedian Vera Drew has followed with the building blocks of the Batman mythos: to borrow a well-worn phrase, she's seized the means of narration, making them her own, resignifying them as milestones in her personal coming-of-age story and creating the first interesting live-action portrayal of the Joker since 2008.

Take note, Zaslav. You might learn something.

Drew's artistically and legally adventurous exploration of her life's journey, The People's Joker, is a nonstop riot of queer joy transmuted into queer pride sublimated into queer wrath. Via multiple formats (cartoon animation, action figures, glitch art, superposition of live actors onto handdrawn backgrounds, the occasional callback to actual DC movies), The People's Joker breathes new life into the plot of 2019's insufferably pretentious Joker movie.

In this version of Gotham City, Batman is a closeted child predator, the Daily Planet is a far-right conspiracist podcast, Arkham Asylum provides conversion therapy, and the deadly laughing gas that has for decades been the Joker's signature weapon is a common medication prescribed to suppress bad feelings. Our protagonist, an aspiring comedian who moves to Gotham City to escape her transphobic and outrageously narcissistic mother, founds a clandestine "anti-comedy" club with fellow members of Batman's rogue gallery to oppose the city's violent monopoly on comedy. While she strives to bring the power of laughter back to the people, she also has to navigate toxic romance, the surveillance state, institutional discrimination, overmedicalization, transgenerational trauma, and her own issues with self-acceptance.

It's hard to do justice to the explosion of art styles with which this movie is put together. Outdoor and action scenes feature material from dozens of artists, each with their unique take on character design, palette, and degree of detail. Yet somehow the incompatible parts build a harmonious pastiche where any search for uniformity matters less than playfulness, experimentation, and sincerity. Underneath the neverending mockery of Batman lore, a very personal truth can be perceived. This isn't the type of art that results from executive producers trimming the rough edges off a piece of soulless cashgrab. This is a scream from the depths of a generous heart that has been wounded and betrayed but still holds on to the promise of human goodness that can be found in comic book tales. Where official DC productions such as Aquaman 2 or Shazam 2 or Flash 1 flailed about in futile search of something genuine to say, The People's Joker lolsobs openly, with a vulnerable earnestness that authorized house style would never risk. Sure, there are tons of irony here, but the movie never wields it as a cushion against its own feelings.

The People's Joker looks at societal cruelty in the eyes and responds by baring its soul, making the incisive statements 2019's Joker wishes it had the audacity to attempt. Joker's facile edginess is left looking like the juvenile posturing it truly is next to Drew's carefree irreverence and raw intensity. In a year that has already given us pleasant surprises from independent queer SFF filmmakers, The People's Joker takes a wry look at a corporate media ecosystem saturated by too much content carrying too little meaning, and loudly, fearlessly, effortlessly gets the last laugh.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Close your eyes and enter Dream Productions

Turns out you can give yourself an epiphany without being quite sure how you did it

Dreams aren't stories in the strict sense: they don't proceed from an authorial choice, don't follow an ordered causal progression, and don't express a deliberate stance on their theme. Only the most surreal category of stories would include the semi-random free association carnival our unconscious minds are capable of spitting out. But dreams do have some sort of secret logic, a symbolic language that is unique to each of us. Because they're generated from our own thoughts, they can never tell us something we don't already know. It's just that sometimes we need to be reminded of an obvious truth.

The world of Inside Out is the perfect venue for that kind of exploration. In the limited TV series Dream Productions, a school dance approaches, and our girl Riley is going through the messy balancing act between her childish whimsy and her drive toward maturity. Unsurprisingly, the forces inside her head are working full-time to process those complicated feelings. The surprising part is how neatly the dreams-as-stories metaphor corresponds to the inner conflict.

In the abstract mindspace of Inside Out, dreams are made in a movie studio with a limited repertoire of plots and an unlimited VFX budget. We meet scripwriters, actors, directors, stunt performers, camera operators—but let's not forget these homunculi are actually fragments of Riley's mind. The cutthroat rivalries and artistic disagreements that drive this series are meant to represent unconscious urges that are channeled into dream imagery. The question troubling Riley is whether she has enough social competence for teenage activities; she loves fun, but she's terrified of being perceived as uncool. Her mother's less-than-ideal choice of dress for the upcoming occasion triggers a whole week of disturbing nightmares she needs to sort out on her own.

What adds a level of meta awesomeness to this premise is that it lets us witness (albeit very indirectly) the creative process at Pixar. Since its foundation, the studio has been praised by its strong grasp of emotional stakes; when you go to the movies for a Pixar production, you know you're going to end up crying, and you're looking forward to it. You love how Pixar makes you cry. You love how it seems to understand you so well. That is the degree of insight that Riley's inner movie studio has about her.

The use of dreams as a catalyst for self-knowledge and growth will be immediately recognizable to viewers familiar with The Cell, Paprika or Inception. Where Dream Productions sets itself apart is in the argument that we can learn from our dreams even if we don't remember them. And here the connection between dreams and stories is especially relevant. Maybe you grew up watching Pixar movies, but do you remember everything that happens in them? What Pixar seems to be telling us in Dream Productions is that what matters in their stories isn't their plot, but the emotional imprint they leave upon us. What stories do for us is something deeper than provide models to follow or cautionary tales. They suggest ways of feeling we hadn't considered. They test our stated values. They teach us to be human.

As if that weren't enough substance, Dream Productions adds yet another meta level: the series is told as a mockumentary where Riley's homunculi talk to the camera. Who is supposed to be filming this and interviewing Riley's unconscious? Who are these characters addressing? Go figure. Like in Diego Velásquez's painting Las Meninas, you're invited to put yourself at the center of this piece of art. You're meant to participate as a character in the story, but the world of the story is a slice of you. You're watching yourself watch yourself.

And here Dream Productions finally reveals the ace up its sleeve. I won't spoil how this plays out, but if you connect the idea of dreams as an improvisational form of storytelling with the idea of deliberate introspection turning its gaze on itself, you'll probably guess what I'm talking about. As I've said a thousand times on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And Dream Productions draws you into an infinite page of potential plot, the text of which comes from a pen your hand is holding.

That is the hidden lesson of every story about dreams: you need to become aware that you are their only author, and you have always been.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Last Stop by Django Wexler

A fun and high-octane dieselpunk adventure set in a world where life is precariously clinging to high mountains... because the lowlands are dominated by giant insects

Zham Sa-Yool has a problem. Several problems, actually. He is a reprobate, a cad, a rake and an excellent pilot. He also really can’t pay his bar bills, which means when he goes to town on behalf of his sister, he often winds up in one bad situation or another. His latest visit to a bar winds up with a potential recruit for his sister’s mercenary company, and a whole lot of trouble. And, it seems, a lead to a job that will take the Last Stop and its air wing to the lowlands for a payday that could make their money problems go away... if the competition, and the giant insects, don’t get them first.

This is the world, and the story of Django Wexler’s Last Stop.

Zham’s world is not quite our own, or it is not recognizably our own, although it feels like a dieselpunk 1930s-era level of technology. Airplanes, tommy guns, sky pirates, two-fisted action and adventure, a lot of the trappings one might find in, say, an Indiana Jones movie, or the Phantom movie from the 1990s, or TV series such as Bring 'Em Back Alive and Tales of the Golden Monkey. The emphasis is on high-octane action and adventure, narrow escapes, daredevil escapes, twists and turns of the plot, and of course deadly enemies.

Wexler takes this well-worn chassis, freshens it up, and makes it his own with a couple of innovations. First off, the novel has a modern sensibility and representation as far as gender and queerness. The stock characters often found in this sort of fiction are here, somewhat, but even in the names such as Zham’s (and his physical description), Wexler reaches for more and broader models of characters. Also, the novel is unapologetic in having queer characters, and women who break, and are far more diverse than, the stereotypes they are often relegated to in works of this type. So we get a modern, diverse cast of characters for Wexler’s setup.

Next, the world. Human civilization has retreated to mountaintops and high places because of the bugs below “The layer”. What has happened to cause this is not clear (it is not clear whether an event happened to do this; reading between the lines, I get the sense that it did), but below a certain altitude, giant insects (defying laws of physics) dominate the landscape. These bugs are mindless and deadly. But they are also useful, since certain species of bug can be harvested for fuel to provide a magical lift for airplanes. Humans have to stay high and stay flying in order for civilization to continue, and occasionally delve down to get more bug blood. But no one can LIVE down there, surely.

Or can they? The Last Stop team (led by Quendra, Zham’s sister and apparently once a military hero), who are deep in debt and on their last legs, take a commission to transport a scientist to what appears to be a base below the layer, in a hidden valley. If such a place exists, a place the bugs can’t get to, it would be a boon and a treasure beyond price. What the crew of the Last Stop find, however, is a nest of intrigue and conflict, instead... and of course, as you might expect, bugs.

As interesting as the hints of culture and society that we get are, the real focus, again, is on fun action and adventure in a world constructed by Wexler to allow dogfighting, raucous action against hordes of insects, intrigue, adventure, twists and turns, and a dieselpunk aesthetic without much of the baggage that books set in the actual era on Earth would suffer. The substitution of the bugs for some of the usual tropes of the era (which often involve some rather unpleasant colonial and third-world settings, opponents and situations) also helps remove some of the sting out of such works. The bugs are, to all appearances and effects, a faceless and inhuman menace, but they are an environmental opponent. The real conflict is between factions of people seeking power and control, with the Last Stop crew caught in the middle of it.

Last Stop ends with the end of a mission, and with the crew in a place where they can have more adventures, continue to untangle the mystery, and deal with the fallout of what they found underneath the layer. I listened to this book in audio, and the production is top notch. What’s more, this sort of action adventure in an audiobook format harkens a bit back to old radio serials. It’s not written explicitly in that format and style, but it feels adjacent to it.

To be clear, look again at the cover. Airplanes and giant insects. This IS a novel where you get exactly what it says on the tin. If that cover interests you, then you want to read or listen to this book.

Besides the pulp adventures mentioned above, Last Stop puts me in mind of a number of works where traveling the skies is the only way to get around. The RPG Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies, for instance, relies on islands floating in the sky, where going too low can be absolutely deadly. Curtis Craddock’s Risen Kingdoms series, starting with An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, focuses on a similar science fantasy, with more emphasis on the fantasy approach, with islands in an endless sky. Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year is a straight near-future SF novel where the surviving human population has to live on mountains because a deadly nanotech plague exists at elevations below ten thousand feet. And of course, the ultimate pulp RPG world of Crimson Skies. There is a lot that has been done in this space, but I do think that Last Stop shows how to go forward with this aesthetic and chassis of a world in a new, inclusive way that keeps up the fun, pulse-pounding adventure. In a world and time where a brief sojourn from reality is on the menu, a trip to the world of Last Stop, be it in ebook or audio, seems to me perfectly suited to that.

Highlights:

• Diverse and rich cast of characters
• Fun and fresh Dieselpunk adventure without the baggage
• You get exactly what the cover promises

Reference: Wexler, Django. Last Stop [Podium Publishing, 2024].

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

One Hundred Years of Solitude, or how to film the unfilmable

For a massively revered classic, a faithful rendering may not suffice

As nation states go, these we have here in Latin America are rather young. The Westernized portion of our history only covers a few centuries, and the much longer Native portion barely survives in mutilated fragments. Unlike the Greek or Chinese or Icelandic peoples, who long ago developed a solid sense of who they are, we're still in the middle of figuring ourselves out. It would seem pointless to attempt to write a national epic about us when "us" still has many blank spaces awaiting definition.

And yet, the multigenerational saga One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez succeeds at both transmitting and creating a portrait of the Colombian nation. Like Don Quixote, it narrates the chaos that follows men when possessed by an idea. Like the Iliad, it laments the escalating destruction that can result from an unyielding sense of honor. Like War and Peace, it traces the ways individual lives intersect with big history. Like the Divine Comedy, it creates its own cosmology and makes the reader take it as true. Like Macbeth, it dissects the forces that lure men toward excessive ambition. Like the Old Testament, it bridges the passage from mythic origins to known history. It's an ostentatious book, the kind that requires a writer to err on the side of overconfidence. Such a bet is risky, but that's the price of admission in this game: you simply can't pull off something of the monumental scope of One Hundred Years of Solitude if you have any humility left in you. You must think yourself worthy of it.

The Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, released just this month in a first batch of eight episodes out of a planned total of sixteen, faced a comparable challenge. And on the technical level, the challenge is met with the highest excellence: period-accurate costumes, meticulously researched set design, authentic 19th-century furniture, handcrafted props, true-sounding accents, and multiple full-sized versions of the entire town of Macondo. The production's stratospheric budget is noticeable in every scene: in exquisite cinematography, in pitch-perfect casting, in brutally honest war scenes, in taking every opportunity to boast Colombia's gorgeous geography. If the series can be said to commit any fault at all, it's only in its absolute reverence for the source text, precisely the kind of humility with which it couldn't have been composed in the first place.

This degree of allegiance to the source text is understandable given the impossibly high expectations placed on the project. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a sacred cow of our literary canon, so there would have been a loud backlash had the scriptwriters and directors hired by Netflix dared introduce a more personal touch into the story. So what we get is an almost word-for-word translation of the novel, to the point that a voiceover narrator is used (in fact, overused) to explain the plot to the audience.

Now, before someone accuses me of being inconsistent: I'm aware that I praised the film adaptation of Pedro Páramo for staying strictly faithful to the book. So why do I see the same choice as a defect this time? The difference is that, despite being much shorter, Pedro Páramo is a far more experimental book than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The disorienting effect of hearing so many voices at the same time already gave Pedro Páramo (the book) some of the qualities of the audiovisual medium, which made the task easier for Pedro Páramo (the movie). With One Hundred Years of Solitude there's a bigger maneuvering margin to build upon the book, but the directors don't take advantage of it. To rely heavily on a voiceover narrator isn't as jarring in Pedro Páramo (the movie) because Pedro Páramo (the book) is composed as a continuous conversation: the protagonist is being told his father's story in the voices of the dead. So it makes sense for the movie to also be composed as a conversation. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a more traditional formula (omniscient third-person narrator who is not part of the plot). Giving the narrator such a prominent position in the adaptation feels like an intrusion, almost an admission that the directors didn't trust the images' ability to tell the story. Watching a dramatized adaptation of a book shouldn't feel like a read-along of the book.

This deferential attitude toward our canon has already been defied in literature; audiovisual media shouldn't have to recapitulate the whole progression that went from the generation of writers who prayed at the altar of García Márquez to the generation of writers who spat in the face of García Márquez to today's generation of writers who are neither for nor against García Márquez and are just focused on doing their own thing. For example, in the Anglo world, iconoclastic reinterpretations of Shakespeare are a long-established and respected tradition. García Márquez himself was no stranger to that kind of transformative creation: he wrote the screenplay of a retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the violent 1990s of rural Colombia. It shouldn't be seen as blasphemy to do a less than faithful adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as long as the core theme is treated with respect.

And what is that core theme? The same as in every national epic: This Is What It Feels Like To Be Us. However, García Márquez wasn't merely reporting on an already existing sense of nationhood; he was codifying it. The earliest Colombian novels were meant to serve as almost ethnographic descriptions of social customs, but the generation of writers to which García Márquez belonged had a much clearer idea of that task. By reading him, we learn to be Colombian. We learn to pay attention to what is at stake in our embarrassing saga of repeated errors. Particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we learn about the folly of putting abstract allegiances above universal human needs, about the dangers of forgetting basic truths, about the poisonous consequences of imposing artificial obstacles to love. Above all, we learn that the one thing you should never be afraid of is love.

One isn't required to 100% agree with the guy's ideas about love, though. His oeuvre was uniformly influenced by outdated and sometimes very harmful views on gender dynamics. In his interviews he blamed women for the problems of sexism. The last book he published before his death is a romanticized account of child prostitution. When approaching his writings, one must keep in mind both his exceptional talents and his abhorrent opinions. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that got him the Nobel Prize, is replete with instances of unchallenged, as in authorially endorsed, sexual misconduct that can't be easily removed in an adaptation without unraveling the rest of the plot.

So what can be salvaged from One Hundred Years of Solitude? What justifies its continued place of honor in world literature and the undeniably beautiful adaptation Netflix threw bucketfuls of money at? I've already mentioned how it conveys the general feeling of what it's like to be Colombian. Let me give a more concrete example: a few years ago, when I reviewed Encanto, I briefly considered mentioning a factoid that existed in parallel with the announcement of the movie but was completely unrelated. What happened was that, on the same day that the first trailer for Encanto was released, it was reported in the news that the murderers of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse were Colombian ex-army mercenaries. I didn't include that bit of news in the review because it was already long enough, but it's relevant here: Encanto was offering me a rare occasion to feel good about my country, but it was instantly ruined by the revelation about the murderers. That whiplash of incompatible emotions, that corrosive question in my head (Why did I bother getting excited?), that millionth refusal by history to let us feel proud of anything, that abrupt cold shower of pointlessness—that is what it feels like, every day, to be Colombian. And the biggest artistic merit of One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in capturing that infernally complicated feeling and exploring how we live with it and through it, and how we stubbornly keep looking for a way to someday live past it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: The Return

A visually stunning retelling of the final chapters of Odysseus' return home to Ithaca that is brutal, quiet, and an exploration of the traumas of war—but it's missing the supernatural

When I heard Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche were going to be in a new retelling of the Odyssey (focusing on just the final chapters following our hero's return back to Ithaca), I was stoked. This marks these two fantastic actors' first film together since 1996's The English Patient.

I'm also a long-time Odyssey stan, having fallen in love with the story upon my first read way back in 10th grade. Since then, I've revisited it over the years, especially the Emily Wilson translation that came out in 2018. And honestly, there hasn't been a good depiction of the story in quite a while. In the '90s, we had Armand Assante playing Odysseus in a TV movie (with a perfectly cast Isabella Rossellini playing the grey-eyed goddess Athena), which while entertaining wasn't quite classic cinema. You could also count 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, though that's more of a loose adaptation updated to the 20th century.

With The Return, we pick up on the story nearly 20 years after Odysseus left his home to take up arms and join his fellow Greeks to fight against the Trojans across the sea. The war itself lasted for a decade, before our wily hero thought up the Trojan horse, which would turn the tide of the battle and end in Troy's destruction. While everyone else headed home, Odysseus spent another 10 years wandering the Greek isles, cursed by the sea god Poseidon.

When he finally makes it to the shore of Ithaca, he's battered, bruised, naked, distraught, and not even sure of where is until Eumaeus, a slave, tells him. This version of Odysseus, however, isn't the resilient hero (at least not yet)—he's a broken man filled with the horrors of war and PTSD.

His family, for whom he has so long fought to make it back to see, has their own issues too. Penelope is cornered by rapacious suitors that demand her hand in marriage while also ruining the island. Telemachus, their son, is man-child angry at both his mother and long-vanished father. Only Penelope, it seems, holds out hope.

For those familiar with the Odyssey (and I can't imagine someone seeing this movie who's not at least a little familiar with the age-old epic), you know the beats and the tropes, but the film takes its time with delivering some of them. With others, you get them ad nauseam. At times, I felt acutely Penelope's frustration as we watched her each evening unravel her shroud work on the loom, the bright red twine coiling away her progress. The camera lingers on many scenes on the island, and it feels at times like you're right there living on the craggy shores of Ithaca.

What this movie is missing, however, is the magic and the gods of the original source. Without Athena's constant guiding hand (and often appearing in disguise), Poseidon's unearthly rage, or Zeus' kingly machinations, the story misses something.

I know that the director chose to do this on purpose, to create a tale about humans and human destruction, but it doesn't exactly work for me. There's a majesty and grandeur to the Greek gods, and dare I say it a level of pettiness and fun that makes the story less about trauma and more about adventure.

Trauma is an important part of the human experience, and to be fair, one that's been overlooked in storytelling for much of history. The rise of A24 has given us many films that expertly explore trauma, and The Return follows the same sort of path. For me, though, it was a bit of a slog to watch, and as I left the theater, I was in a kind of numb place for a few hours. I don't think I saw Odysseus smile once in the entire movie, and the only time he expresses he gratitude for finally making it home, he literally stuffs his mouth with soil.

I'm glad I saw it—Fiennes' portrayal is excellent, and the production design is immaculate—but this one's for only hardcore Homer fans, I'm afraid.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new 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.

Book Review: Sargassa by Sophie Burnham

A queer and fearless novel of love, duty, and rebellion in a Rome that never quite fell.

Selah Kelios is the new Imperial Historian in the distant colony city of Sargassa, far from the center of the Roman Empire but high in pride and strength. Her father has just died (honestly, assassinated) and so she has been thrust into his role as Imperial Historian at a young age. Her father has left some secrets (as well as the secret of who assassinated him and why) and as Selah tries to uncover them, it’s the social bonds, and the bonds of love and relationships that tangle Selah and those around her, that are all the more important.

All this is the story of Sargassa, by Sophie Burnham.

Longtime readers of me know that, in the tradition of the meme of “men thinking about the Roman Empire”, I resemble that remark. I’ve thought about the Roman Empire since I first heard about it, more than 40 years ago. So, novels, fantasy and otherwise set in the Roman Empire, or Roman Empires than didn’t fall, et cetera, are catnip to me. It has been a few years, though, since I’ve read one that has satisfied me. “Roman Empire never fell” books often feel like pantomimes or pallid continuations of ancient society without any real growth, change, evolution or development. This really goes even against the spirit of Rome itself. Rome of 250 BC, before the Punic Wars, is a very different place than 146 BC, at the fall of Carthage and of Corinth, different than 45 BC, with Julius Caesar at his height, 5 AD, at Augustus’ high point before the disaster in Germany, 110 AD, Hadrian and building the wall in Britain, and so on. Writing, speaking, army composition, society, all the details of Roman life changed over the centuries. And that doesn’t even get into what 9th century A.D. Byzantium might look like to a Roman from 100 BC.

Happily, Sargassa avoids that trap. Sargassa is a major Roman city that by contextual clues appears to be somewhere in North America. There is some digging one can do in the book to piece together the world situation, but that’s not the worldbuilding Burnham really is interested in--there is no map, and a map would be beside the point. Instead Burnham is interested in what Roman society, in a city far from Rome, is like after rising from a dark age (the mysterious “Quiet” that gets mentioned a lot in the book). Some things are still the same. There are patricians and plebs, client-patron relationships. Sargassa is ruled by a Consul. But then there are differences. Evolutions from the Rome of textbooks and historical novels. There are a class of people called Verna, which sit in a very precarious social relationship with plebs, patricians and the rest of society. Religion is focused on a mother goddess figure (Christianity apparently exists, but never became the state religion in this world). Selah, although a woman, gets to be a paterfamilias in the wake of her father’s death, which would never fly back in the time of the ancient Roman Empire. So we get a built up web of a world in Sargassa, as a Roman society building back from a dark age, trying to recapture things that were lost, but going forward. Selah’s role as Imperial Historian is to try and help preserve some of the lost and glorious past.

And while the book is about Selah and a MacGuffin from that glorious past, and the question of who killed her father and why, it is also really much more about the relationships in the book. Selah’s very complicated relationship with her lover Tair, at first in flashback and then Tair's unexpected return. Selah’s half brother Arran. Arran's role and status as being Selah's half-brother is complicated from the get go and his drifting for meaning and life draws him into contact with another POV character, Theodora, who goes by Theo. Arran’s complicated is-this-a-romance with the nonbinary Theo is further complicated by the fact that Theo works for a revolutionary underground. Thus, these four are four of our five main points of view (Selah being primary), coming from very different social castes and situations in Sargassa society, the evolution of Roman society (as seen above). How they all eventually converge and interact really is the matter of the book. How these four deal with what is happening, to their city and to each other, is the reason to keep turning pages. Burham does an excellent job in point of view in showing the strata and roles of Roman society The relationships, brotherly, sisterly, queer, and otherwise really make this book what it is and give it its potency. Secrets, lies, the secrets of the heart, both confessed and otherwise, all under the slow burning of the aftermath of Selah’s father’s death.

Our fifth point of view is a bit different and is somewhat off the map compared to the others, and that is Darius. Darius provides us the “interior government role” as a law enforcement officer. Darius fits in as our “straight man” to the quartet of the primary POV characters (which is an apt pun, come to think of it). He utterly represents the establishment, the old guard of this new Roman society. He also fills in the “last incorruptible man” slot in the murder mystery strand of the book. He has been told by the powers that be to investigate the death of the Imperial Historian in a very specific way...but Darius wants to, bless his heart, actually find out the truth. It doesn’t really spoil anything to tell you that this approach doesn’t go that well for Darius.

At the three quarter mark, however, the novel changes. I know the conflicting theories and opinions about the nature, use and validity of spoilers are a thing, but I think in the case of this novel, the less I say about the last quarter of the book, the better. It reframes the entire previous book to that point, and to what Burham is doing here. It doesn’t make any of her ideas and her explorations of revolution, class warfare, society and the costs, personally and otherwise, of repression any less valid. If anything, those ideas she explores get turbocharged by the turn at the three quarter mark and to its conclusion. We spend three quarters of the book with a murder mystery, a character web, and a building of a world and society and conflicts, social and societal for them...and then, well, that would be telling.

This does make giving references to books that are similar difficult--because the books I am thinking of that resonate really strongly with Sargassa also rhyme with that three quarter mark turn that I am really trying to not spoil here. I think that telling you it is there does better than to leave it a complete surprise, you’ll watch for it now, and it will be an interesting extra fillip for you to watch out for as the rest of the pleasures of the book unfold.

The book is the start of a series and there really isn’t a good offramp here. I think it would be amazingly difficult to even try, given the last quarter of the book. There is a lot of the world, and the implications of the world left to explore in the projected next two books. I really want to see where Burham goes with this. I know for a lot of people waiting for a trilogy to complete before buying the first book is their power move (as bad as it is for sales of the original book). Thus, if my review has moved you, I do hope you will give Sargassa a try...be it by borrowing it from the local library, audio, or what have you. Burham has something interesting and wondrous going on here and I hope she gets the chance to continue to explore it.

--

Highlights:

• Rich and detailed worldbuilding on a social and societal focus

• Excellent set of protagonists and points of view 

• The three quarter turn in this book...watch for it.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie, Sargassa [Daw, 2024]

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

Book Review: Metal from Heaven by august clarke

This industrial fantasy tackles how to overthrow corporations while protecting friends and family, all while dripping in vivid prose.

Marney is born into revolution because she’s lustertouched. Her family works for Yann Chauncey in his ichorite mines and production centers. Because she has spent her childhood around the stuff, she can control it, though it sends her into a “fit.” Due to the lustertouched children and the working conditions, her family strikes at the production center, but the strike is broken—more than broken. Marney is the only survivor and runs away.

On the run, she meets Mors Brandegor the Rancid and her group of bandits that rob from the rich. Marney is immediately taken with the group and pledges to help them. Her ability to control ichorite has helped her out of a few scrapes, and she wins the bandits over when she is able to seal a door and help them escape—all because ichorite is being incorporated into more and more products as Chauncey’s industrial empire grows.

The bandits accept Marney into their group and take her to the Fingerbluffs, where she lives out the rest of her childhood before truly becoming a bandit and working toward her ultimate goal of killing Chauncey. The Fingerbluffs is the home of all the bandits that steal from the rich to redistribute their wealth. Everyone who lives there is rich and it means nothing. All eat, all are clothed, all are fed. The place is utopic even though hidden away in a world beholden to ichorite and war. Marney is awed by her first sighting: “Into the Fingerbluffs we rode, the gorgeous, heaving Fingerbluffs, whose dingy narrow mews peeled out from the brick streets and held children who played there in the darkness, chasing each other and shouting, twisting, braids floating behind them in deference to their speed, not working, not governed, unafraid.” This childhood is so different than Marney’s upbringing, but she discovers the Fingerbluffs can exist because the servants overthrew the baron, but did not let the rest of the world know. Instead, they plead his insanity and were able to keep the larger public away from the isolated area. From there, the bandits assist other revolutionaries like the hereafterists, who work toward a utopia that they know they will never see. 

Marney grows and develops her skills as a bandit until the Fingerbluffs is at risk of discovery, and she must strike at Chauncey in order to save her new family. Aiding the Fingerbluffs also puts her one step closer to her ultimate goal of taking revenge against Chauncey and destroying his ichorite-fueled empire.

At its heart, this novel is a revenge story, but clarke is able to pack a surprising amount of worldbuilding into this very character-focused novel. The first person point of view of Marney is dense—a few steps removed from stream of consciousness. This closeness of the character makes the politics easier to weave into the fantasy. Marney is not radicalized by ideas but by her trauma and the physical impacts of being lustertouched. This impact changes how she sees the world, and when she uses her ability to control ichorite, the world turns shimmery, almost like an oil-slick (and reminiscent of the gorgeous purple-toned cover art by Richard Anderson). Like the best fantasy, clarke doesn’t give the reader an easy one-to-one for ichorite. It’s perhaps closest to oil but the mining process and physical impacts on the people bring to mind the coal mining (and strikes) of the 1900s. Because ichorite isn’t a one-to-one allegory, the novel has more depth. Like C. S. Lewis argues of the best fantasy, it isn’t a metaphor for our usage of fossil fuels but certainly comments on real world industrialization through Marney’s struggle. 

While the revenge plot pulls the reader through the pages, the most captivating part of the book for me was the worldbuilding, particularly around the Fingerbluffs. The first time Marney rides into the Fingerbluffs on a lurcher (close to a motorcycle), it felt like the first time reading about Le Guin’s anarchist utopia Anarres. The sense of home that Marney finds there as a child and teenager comes through strongly due to the close point of view and draws in the reader. But the Fingerbluffs is only one portion of the worldbuilding. clarke gives the reader a rich world outside of that, with different cultures, religions, approaches to sex and gender, and so on. The world clarke creates is big enough for a trilogy, let alone this standalone book and left me wanting more in the best way possible. 

What sets this novel apart from other bandit or heist books is the careful approach to gender. Unsurprisingly, the people of the Fingerbluffs are pretty queer-normative, but much of the world isn’t. There are still slurs, religious abstinence, forced heteronormativity, but also cultures where multiple genders exist and are determined by sex acts. Sex and gender aren’t simplified into utopic relationships among the bandits and and hate crimes among everyone else, but there’s a real nuance here to the depiction via the worldbuilding. This nuance is evidenced by clarke’s reading list included in the acknowledgements. I love when authors talk about their inspirations, and it was fun to see the wide ranging list that inspired clarke, including writers like José Esteban Muñoz, Leslie Feinberg, and Silvia Federici. 

Metal from Heaven won’t be for everyone due to the density of the prose, but for readers looking for the found family of Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora or Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows or the politics of Le Guin’s best work, there’s so much to enjoy here. clarke manages to combine the fun and violence of a bandit seeking revenge with working class politics in this sexy, action-packed book. I know I’ll be thinking about the Fingerbluffs for a long time to come.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

Reference: clarke, august, Metal from Heaven [Erewhon Books, 2024].

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.